October 08 2023, 06:08
The Exorcist III (1990)
Director: William Peter Blatty
It took me a long time to track a copy of this down. Fifteen years after Father Damien Karras’s exorcism of Regan McNeil, a serial killer sets out on a series of brutal murders that is reminiscent of the long-dead Gemini Killer. Each death is a meticulous obscenity that is wisely more spoken of than shown. Lieutenant Bill Kinderman (the ever wonderful George C. Scott) is a seasoned but good humoured detective trying to connect the dots.
Kinderman has a tender relationship with Father Dyer, played by Ed Flanders, because they both knew the dead Father Karras. I’d heard Mark Kermode talk about George C Scott’s improvised story about carp that makes Ed Flanders giggle, so it was a joy to see it in context. The two men bond over cinema and banter like an old married couple. This gives the midpoint plot development an extra emotional kick.
The whole film is more of an existential downer than I expected. It’s about a demon bringing hell to earth after all. It’s flawed but also filled with wonders, and it must have been an influence on David Fincher’s Seven. Brad Dourif has to say some awful dialogue but gives such a great performance you almost buy it (souls drifting after death so that demons can slip them into other people’s bodies?). The final act is a bit of a mess, but portrayals of hell are tricky, especially with 1990 special effects. The now-famous hospital jump scare is truly one for the ages.
October 07 2023, 06:07
Survival of the Dead (2009)
Director: George Romero
I’ll say up front that this was not for me. On a remote island, a long-running feud between the O’Flynns and Muldoons becomes violent over whether the walking dead should be culled or chained up in case a cure is found. Patriarch Patrick O'Flynn is exiled to the mainland where he holes up in a harbour and uses the internet to lure people to rob them. Four mercenary soldiers are tempted by O’Flynn’s message (an island where the zombie outbreak is under control!), and seeing an opportunity to usurp the Muldoons, O’Flynn seizes it.
This is a dud, plain and simple. The tone is all wrong, a zombie western with off-kilter comedy (a zombie riding a horse around the island ffs) mixed with gunfights and attempts to get the zombies to eat horses instead of people (?!). Left to their own devices, these zombies do unthinkingly whatever they naturally did while alive. There’s a cool set piece at a harbour where the soldiers have to get across the water to a ferry with zombies reaching up from the bottom. However, there’s no escaping the bad dialogue and clichéd family drama.
Looking for the positives, Romero’s social theme to chew on is unthinking feuds, and the zombie-like fighting that goes on between tribes. It also touches on religion, misogyny and entitlement, but it’s too silly to make much of a mark.
October 06 2023, 06:06
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Director: George Romero
The final few George Romero zombie films went under my radar. Even though this had mixed reviews, I didn’t believe Romero could make a complete dud. This one starts with film students making a horror movie in the woods who hear on the radio reports of the dead coming back to life. Director and cameraman Jason decides he will film the zombie apocalypse in as much detail as he can, putting pressure on relationships within the group in his desire to meticulously record everything that happens.
The found footage style, with the conceit of it being edited later, works well, and the zombies are slow, bordering on comical, until they get hold of someone. In one fun twist, an alcoholic old thespian turns out to be a highly skilled archer, but the other characters are a pretty standard bunch.
There’s lots of commentary on what it means to film something, how screens are a barrier to reality, and the toxic pull of hits and likes when Jason’s film goes viral (as viral as something could go in 2007). Romero made this before the iPhone was released. Now we all record and share online without a thought. And I’d forgotten that Romero’s zombies are not infected — anyone who dies with their brain intact comes back. That’s dark. This isn’t a plague, it’s hell on earth.
October 05 2023, 06:05
Eye in the Labyrinth (1972)
Director: Mario Caiano
I’m always surfing the edges of horror in October. I have to pace myself and mix things up to stay engaged. Giallo films bring thriller and mystery elements alongside gruesome murders, but Eye of the Labyrinth saves its horror to the final few minutes. Until then, it’s a whodunnit, or a didanybodydoit, or a whydidsomonemaybedoit.
Julie is looking for her missing psychiatrist (hard relate) and travels to a remote Greek island to search for him. Once there she finds herself at a villa on a clifftop with a commune of artists all acting suspiciously. The location has Glass Onion vibes, and the people are similarly kooky, but these residents are painters, actors and composers, all working under the patronage of Gerta, the terse older woman who runs the place.
Julie doesn’t make much progress until she begins to have flashbacks to a painting — an eye at the centre of a labyrinth. The twists and turns kept me hooked, and I have a soft spot for these seventies euro mysteries, especially when the people and locations are attractive. The horror at the end is good fun and Julie gets to have her revengeful moment in the sun.
October 04 2023, 06:04
Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)
Director: Andrea Bianchi
A hard left turn down an alleyway into a softcore giallo. This might be a spoiler, but the killer did not require anyone to “strip nude”, although there is a tremendous amount of sleazy sex, admirably straightforward nudity, and comically leering men. Sometimes the algorithm wears you down, and the familiar cover art catches you in a vulnerable moment, and you choose a film that you know will be bad... except it’s good!
God, the men are awful in this film, but the characters all work for a seventies fashion agency, so this was probably not far from reality. A woman dies of a heart attack while having an illegal abortion and two men make it look like she died in her bath at home. That night a killer in black motorcycle leathers and helmet kills the doctor, then begins to systematically dispatch everyone at the agency where the dead woman worked.
Each character gets some time to shine, and much comeuppance is had alongside the sex. The male protagonist is a dreadful human being, and I kept asking the beautiful, smart woman working with him (the luminescent Edwige Fenech) why she found him so attractive, but it was probably the same reason I kept watching this film — it’s never dull, there’s always an interesting angle, and it’s endless eye candy.
October 03 2023, 06:03
The Broken (2007)
Director: Sean Ellis
Doubles and clones are endlessly interesting. But as exquisite as the cinematography is in The Broken, and as electric as Lena Headey is in the lead role — I could watch her walk moodily around dark London apartments all day — the pacing tested my patience.
The McVey family have a birthday gathering for widower patriarch John at his London apartment. After he tells a grim story involving swapping lubricant for superglue, he gives an end-of-meal toast, and a mirror falls off the wall smashing on the floor. Over the coming days each person at the party is visited by a cold-hearted döppelganger that breaks through a mirror in their home to replace them.
It has an interesting premise that doesn’t feel fully developed, but there are some excellent kill scenes. Dark versions murder the real. X-rays reveal the reverse of what should be. Intimacy is in short supply. The camera pans slowly around empty spaces, shadows are left in the frame after characters have left it, and there are startling moments as the doppelgängers step into the light.
I can’t quite figure out what the story is supposed to mean. John is a US ambassador, lonely, misses his dead wife, and seems traumatised by his children surprising him for his birthday. The lubricant-superglue anecdote brings laughs to the table, but is seriously unpleasant and is the inciting incident to the whole film. Is it to illustrate their darkness and make them worthy of the mirror people’s arrival? Maybe. He seems broken, but most of the others aren’t, so is he visiting his brokenness on them? Who knows?
October 02 2023, 06:02
The Cursed (2021)
Director: Sean Ellis
I thought I recognised the face of the mother in A Haunting in Venice, but I didn’t expect it to be Kelly Reilly from Eden Lake, which is (terrifyingly for me) fifteen years old. She’s the link to The Cursed, where a Venice palazzo is replaced by a remote estate in nineteenth-century rural England, and her children are now haunted by a twitching scarecrow and a flying crone.
It opens with a land dispute between rich gentry and a group of travelling Roma families. The gentry hire mercenaries to massacre the Roma, which is beautifully and grimly shown in a single shot from a distant hill. Expecting trouble, the Roma matriarch has prepared a curse involving a set of silver teeth which she then puts on the land. Over the coming weeks, everyone in the nearby village has the same dream, and a creature begins to pick people off. There’s a bite-spread virus and some interesting twists on the werewolf legend.
A visiting pathologist brings some outsider energy to things, but it’s a slow, artfully shot, occasionally visceral and violent pseudo-slasher with excellent acting and impeccable period costumes. There’s lots of time to look at the actors faces. I’m terrible with faces. It seems to take me more time than most to embed a face in my memory. Actors are the worst because they deliberately look different every time. I lose myself in films, so I’m saying to the person next to them, oh look, it’s x from y. The characters are the characters, and I’m IN IT WITH THEM. Anyway, now I know Kelly Reilly’s face.
October 01 2023, 06:01
A Haunting in Venice (2023)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
I ummed and ahhed about this year’s #31DaysofHorror because life is particularly hectic this year, but as frivolous as it might seem, the project is one of the few that is just for me, so I’m going in again. I started with a classic whodunnit, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en_Party, which Branagh has shot through a horror genre lens. It’s set in 1947, so the characters are still traumatised from the Second World War. Hercule Poirot has retired to Vienna. It’s playfully shot, with fish eye lenses, hand-held cameras, spooky children and Viennese masks all building a distinctive mood.
This was my third visit to Venice in three months: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning in July, Saving Venice in August (a BBC documentary about saving Venice from the damage of rising tides), and now this. Venice’s buildings and bridges and alleyways scream history, and the labyrinthine walkways and squares, overlooked by windows, balconies and rooftops, suggest someone always watching. The water, dirty water from the sewers, regularly floods the streets. Venice is old, filthy and rich.
A Haunting in Venice opens with Poirot being harassed in a quiet, opulent city, then pivots to a single palazzo, an old orphanage, on a stormy night, sealed off from the world. It’s fun, and a mystery, so I’ll say no more.
September 17 2023, 10:31
Envy
Picked up Brother of the More Famous Jack. Barbara Trapido is an incredible writer. Nagging envy made me put it down after the first five pages. I’m a reader, thank God, but the writer in me takes a toll from everything I read. Reading is a solace; films too. Writing is torture.
Don’t edit the first draft. That’s the story told, and it might work for some, but it’s never worked for me. The advice is a mirage. When you are thirsty in a desert you are desperate for the oasis. Don’t censor—I agree with that. But don’t edit? Editing is where the work happens. For me. If you can bash out a solid first draft, I’m ragingly envious, but good for you. Enjoy. But editing is the activity that allows my unconscious to do its work. I don’t trust simple answers to complex questions. I know what has worked in writing a novel, and it was a difficult, draining path. But then, it could be I am a difficult and draining person.
I wish I enjoyed it more, that’s all. I wish that I believed more forcefully that writing was worth the effort and agonies. To write again I would have to put aside duties and comforts. The thing that hurts is that I don’t feel like I have a choice in whether I write or not. Turning away from the fight doesn’t mean the fighting stops, it prolongs it and lets it get meaner and dirtier. A writer not writing is carrying an infection of the soul. But I’ve said all this before with different words. I don’t want to be that writer who writes about a writer who doesn’t write. Christ, I exhaust myself.
September 10 2023, 13:01
Worth and work
I’ve been reading more this month. I decided to read a novel for thirty minutes uninterrupted at least once every day. I had to dig around to find the motivation to do that because I’d fallen out of love with reading (again). I wanted to break the cycle. I wondered (again) if reading was a waste of time. This is a terrible trap for a writer to find himself in. My head was already full of coding, podcasts, films, and catastrophising (of course). Eventually I decided (this took quite a bit of thought!) that reading was something that lifted my whole experience of living, and luxuriating in literature gave me far more felt experiences than I could have in my physical life, so why wouldn't I drink deeply from the well, as long as it was balanced with being active in the external world?
Today I was asking myself why I kept struggling with sticking to the habits that keep me physically healthy. My right glute flared up at the end of last week, and I struggled walking for an hour on Saturday. I’ve gained weight because I’m emotional eating again. Looking for ways to eat more healthily, I wrote:
... It needs organisation and discipline. Like writing. Like making anything with complexity that’s of worth. Worth. Work. Worth work worthwork wrthwrk
The worth lifts the work. Knowing the reason makes the task more than just an item on a list. Understanding the purpose, feeling the importance of it, makes me engage creatively, and forgetting the reasons why I read led me to stop reading. The same with writing, eating healthily, and exercise.
I can be aggressive in asking why I’m doing something. I talk myself out of all sorts of potentially valuable things. Creative engagement is an elusive mindset. I’m terrible at taking orders, especially from myself, and after one too many compromises, or if I lack clarity of purpose, my unconscious swiftly calls on the gods of mutiny and self-sabotage.
All I can do to find my way through these defences is to keep doing the slow, thorough work of bringing the defences into the light, and as the saying goes, to ‘give them a good listening to’, with kindness and respect. The forces at play deep under the surface of my conscious mind are powerful and can work for me as well as against. The trick is to realise when I’m using ‘the work’ to avoid action. I want to change, but I have to bring my shadows with me, because they are the ones who will make the changed life worth living.