The Facebook Reviews! Part 2

Beyond the Door 2 aka Shock (Italy 1977: Dir Mario Bava) First time for re-viewing this since I saw it at the cinema in 1980 twinned with a heavily snipped version of Vicente Aranda's The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), under its original title Shock. Although it's Bava's last feature directing credit it's much better than I remember and is very creative on a slim budget. Its urban setting pre-empted most of the 'haunted semi' movies of the late 70s/early 80s (it reminded me of an extended Thriller TV episode with added gore, and Bava's son Lamberto, who worked on it, said that his father was very influenced by Stephen King's writing at the time). Poor old Daria Nicolodi goes through it in a way that reminded me of Jennifer Lawrence in mother! (co-incidentally both actors were 27 years old at the time of filming their respective movies). And for those who haven't seen it, there's a sleight of hand trick at the end that's incredibly effective.

Madhouse (Italy 1981: Dir Ovidio Assonitis) The third in Assonitis' run of horror movies as director (preceded by Beyond the Door and Tentacles), Madhouse is slow to start but, as the title suggests, works up a bonkers head of steam. Trish Everly plays Julia whose ten tons o' crazy twin sister Mary is confined to hospital after contracting a wasting disease. Pretty Julia is a teacher at a school for deaf children (there are some sweet scenes with the kids) but her life is in peril not just from her sister, who has escaped from hospital and is hellbent on revenge, but other members of the family too. Madhouse is all about the last half hour really but on the way you get a demonic (ok just angry) mutt, some slow motion running and a soundtrack whose instrumentation largely comprises double bass and syndrum (you know, like the one in the 1980 Kelly Marie song 'Feels Like I'm in Love'). The movie's working title was Happy Birthday and even if you've not seen it you don't have to be a genius to work out how the film's big set piece might be set up. Filmed in the freezing cold in Savannah, Georgia in a rambling old house, Madhouse has just enough going for it to sustain the attention; it's infinitely better than Beyond the Door, that's for sure.

The Party (UK 2017: Dir Sally Potter) Saw this yesterday. I am afraid it left me completely cold, which wasn't the case for the rest of the audience, who collectively found it a hoot. The script had the opportunity to be acidic but Patricia Clarkson's one liners were all undercooked, and Timothy Spall, who I have a lot of time for, overacted for England.

The only vaguely interesting character was played by the gorgeous Cillian Murphy - the rest of it was just an arch chamber piece rattling around in search of a decent one act play. Funniest bit was the audience who presumably didn't know it was only 71 minutes long (perfect for me as I had somewhere to go afterwards) and were audibly shocked when it ended abruptly. I did like the house's walled garden though. Always wanted a walled garden.

Aenigma (Italy 1987: Dir Lucio Fulci) Not nearly as dire as many have made out, this shows a rather restrained Fulci at work in a film which despite its indebtedness to movies like Carrie (revenge on girls who play a near fatal prank - actually the 1978 Carrie ripoff Jennifer is closer to the mark) and the 1978 Aussie movie Patrick (said revenge carried out by comatose patient in a hospital bed) has enough originality to make it watchable. 20 year old Lara Lamberti is pretty good as Eva, a newcomer to a Boston school (actually Sarajevo) where a bunch of girls have previously played a trick on one of their classmates, Kathy (Mijlijana Zirojevic). The prank goes wrong and Kathy is rendered comatose, but the wronged student uses newly arrived sex mad Eva as a vessel to wreak revenge on the girls that put her in her vegetative state.

There's death by snails (which, if you're interested, takes ages), aerobics, and a weird menage a trois involving the doctor taking care of Kathy, Eva (and by default Kathy too). Working with reduced budgets and ill health, it's perhaps a marvel that Fulci's film turned out as well as it did. Best seen as one of the director's many attempts in the 1980s to branch out into different territories, and certainly better than many of his other 'experiments' in the same decade (Conquest, I'm looking at you).

Far from the Madding Crowd (UK 2015: Dir Thomas Vinterberg) Vintenberg's reworking of the Thomas Hardy novel is so polite and anxious not to offend it almost asks for your permission before showing itself to you. Although some of the turns are good - Michael Sheen as the increasingly unhinged William Boldwood steals the show - Carey Mulligan doesn't yet have the range of emotions needed for Bathsheba Everdene so merely comes across as a backs to the land proto feminist, and Matthias Schoenaerts - complete with Mittel European accent - misreads the complex and brooding Gabriel Oak character as requiring the 'strong and silent' treatment. To be honest I wilted a bit when the first title card read 'Dorset - 200 miles from London' and it didn't really pick up from there. This is Sunday tea time stuff and no more, with all the depth of the source material removed in favour of lots of profound turn-of-the-seasons shots and just one more close up of Miss Mulligan framed by the magic hour west country landscape. Disappointing.

Begin Again (USA 2013: Dir John Carney) Call me uncharitable (and I am aware that Begin Again has its fans), but I found this film both uninteresting and faintly nauseating - a movie for those who believe in the ultimate truth and beauty of car advertisements. Mark Ruffalo is a vaguely alcoholic record company mogul who seems to have been responsible for most of the key musical happenings in the western world, but has become disillusioned with his firm's obsessions about getting songs onto adverts and putting media teams behind every signing. His delight at seeing winsome Keira Knightley, singing one of her breathy compositions in a bar, makes the scales fall from his eyes as he realises that he's been missing the essential truth of good honest from the heart music. What's baffling is that Knightley seems to be the first 'singer/songwriter' he's come across - where has he been for the past five years?

If the set up sounds interesting (and it takes 45 minutes to get this far using the old cinematic standby of showing three different perspectives leading to one moment), the remaining hour focusing on Ruffalo and Knightley recording their album alfresco on the streets of New York City definitely isn't. This is essentially a retread of let's-do-the-show-right-here wish fulfillment movies of the past, but lacks any of the grit that underlies the film's message about keeping it real - it's as manufactured as the music it sets out to rally against. Director John Carney should have watched Alan Parker's 1980 movie Fame to get an idea of how to combine urban settings with the euphoria of artistic creation, but this just had me thinking of that advert with the guy hanging out of his impossibly expensive loft apartment to the strains of 'Easy Like a Sunday Morning'. Atrocious.

The Facebook reviews! Part 1

Over the last few years as well as running this site I've posted up on social media a number of micro reviews for a range of films across many genres, but mainly focusing on horror and sci-fi. In an irregular feature I'll be posting them up, six reviews at a time, on DEoL. So pull up a coffin, snap open a can of AB Negative and have a read!

Hell Night (USA 1981: Dir Tom DeSimone) Apparently the power of a very jittery MPAA severely impacted on the amount of explicit gore on show in Hell Night. But the relative lack of the red stuff actually helps this movie along. Marti (Linda Blair) is one of a gang of freshmen students who have to spend the night in a house with a macabre history as part of a hazing ritual. The grim legends turn out to be true, with one of the deformed children of the original occupant remaining hidden in the mansion, ready to prey on unsuspecting students.

The first part of the movie provides the usual studenty hi jinks as actors way beyond school years fool around fairly annoyingly. It then settles into something a lot more interesting when it's basically Blair and her BF running around the basement of the house pursued by a giant misshapen killer who in close up seems to be facially modelled on the subliminal demon glimpsed in The Exorcist.

Of particular interest is the presence of Suki Goodwin, playing Marti's friend Denise. Goodwin's English accent sounds rather odd against the rest of the US cast, and a little research shows that she is the daughter of the late Denis Goodwin, one time scriptwriter with Bob Monkhouse, who took his own life at the age of 45. Apparently Goodwin was happy to do nudity in the film, but was acting as the girlfriend of the rather more reserved Vincent Van Patten, who insisted they both kept their clothes on in the spirit of decency.

The Mutilator aka Fall Break (USA 1984: Dir Buddy Cooper) Somebody asked me why I would rewatch terrible films? Just subjected myself to what I think is the fourth viewing of this movie. It's a difficult one to answer because, well, this film is dreadful. Firstly you know who's doing all the slaying and mutilating so that fun is taken away from the viewer. And then there's the acting, which improves as the body count rises (less terrible acting to deal with) but in the opening scenes is excruciating. 

But look a little closer. This is good old fashioned independent film making, supposedly shot in 29 days, with lots of local colour (and local people fleshing out the cast). There are some terrific old school effects on display courtesy of then fledgling Mark (From Beyond, Evil Dead II) Shostrom. It's got an at times faux musique concrete soundtrack and an ace theme song. And the killer looks like a mentally disturbed Rock Hudson! An indefensible waste of 90 minutes of my life? No, no and indeed no.

Beyond Skyline (UK/China/Canada/Indonesia/Singapore/USA 2017: Dir Liam O’Donnell) For those who don't remember, Skyline was a 2010 aerial alien invasion movie directed by brothers Colin and Greg Strause. The film delivered top notch effects but bottom notch drama, an uneasy mix with much of the human cast trapped in an LA apartment building watching the CGI carnage through a telescope. The brothers Strause haven't directed anything since, preferring to fall back on their SFX skills (they also did the visuals for Skyline) for movies like Into the Storm (2014) and Geostorm (2017). Liam O'Donnell, the producer of the first film, has chosen to move into the director's seat, for the first time, for a belated and not particularly needed sequel - actually, it's more of a big budget reboot.

At the end of the first movie, the tentacled aliens had asserted their hold on New York City as well as LA, and had just perfected the art of transferring the brains of their victims into ambulatory alien but human shaped bodies, presumably to extend their invasion from airborne attack to ground combat. Beyond Skyline develops the ground combat idea, and chucks everything into the mix, including martial arts, kaiju creatures, exotic locations, a baby who grows up in two days, and some effective CGI work. It's pretty dumb but looks good, and O'Donnell leaves room for a third movie, which if it's anything like this might be worth catching.

The Possessed aka Demon Witch Child aka La endemoniada (Spain 1975: Dir Amando de Ossorio) This one sometimes gets left out of the discussions on post The Exorcist euro cash ins, but is a demented classic from Mr 'Blind Dead' himself, Amando de Ossorio. Veteran actress Tota Alba looks extraordinary as sweary old Mother Gautère, who is persecuted for her crimes of witchcraft, killing herself before she can be dealt with by the authorities. Her coven arrange for Gautère to possess the body of the police commissioner's young daughter Susan, and before you can talk about somebody sucking something in hell, the young girl gives local sailors a run for their money in the cussing stakes.

Marián Salgado as Susan (who dubbed Linda Blair in the Spanish version of The Exorcist) is as game as her American progenitor and particularly vile looking when she transforms into a pint size Mother Gautère, all wispy hair and challenging dentistry, with a side order of castration and random cackling. de Ossorio takes his usual side swipes at organised religion and the nature of good and evil, and the soapy and often wildly theological plot goes off in all directions before the final showdown. This is great value film making from a director never afraid to show his influences, but who rarely turns in a boring film.

Beyond The Door aka The Devil Within Her (Italy/USA 1974: Dir Ovidio Assonitis) The second The Exorcist knock off this week, and by no means as entertaining as Demon Witch Child. I remember this one getting blanket coverage on commercial radio back in 1975 under its UK title The Devil Within Her (much as Suspiria did a year later), which was an indication even then that it wasn't exactly box office gold. Juliet Mills, who had thus far made her fortune in rather wholesome TV roles, plays Jessica, pregnant and undergoing all kinds of disturbances both at home and in her own mind. Her husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia) seems powerless to help, and only former flame Dimitri (Richard Johnson) has the necessary credentials to battle Jessica's possessed soul and stop the creamed spinach exiting from her mouth.

This is a long, drawn out movie with very little narrative tension and some terrible performances. Assonitis' first directorial outing did not bode well for future outings - he would continue to bore with mutated Octopus vehicle Tentacles (1977) and the equally baffling Madhouse (1981) - his lumbering exposition giving way to a frankly silly climax and incomprehensible denouement. Mills is quite game and looks the part, and the San Francisco locations are pretty (all interiors were shot in Italy though) but it's unintentionally funny in places (Mills's wonky eye effects and a scene where a harassed Richard gets hassled by some serenading buskers stand out) and it's all a far cry from the movie that started it all. A sequel of sorts followed with Mario Bava's 1977 movie Shock being retitled Beyond the Door II because of its possessed child storyline, but I wouldn't recommend a double bill.

The Cloverfield Paradox (USA 2018: Dir Julius Onah) I was considering a single DEoL entry for this one but in the end couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to write more than a few sentences. Directed with hod carrying finesse (apologies to brickies) by newcomer Julius Onah, this finds a space station full of scientists from around the globe testing out a solution to a worldwide energy crisis, who all descend into stereotype when faced with an on board catastrophe, rather like an interstellar version of Mind Your Language.

Of course things go wrong (and the going wrong provides a kind of Lovecraftian 'why' to the events in the first movie). Chris O'Dowd as the Irishman of the group gets all the gags, including some limp one liners when his arm, which has been severed in an accident, takes on a life of its own. I will admit that some of the FX look rather good (thanks to what looks like the entire eastern branch of IL&M judging by the credits) and it's a blessing not to have any on board robots, but it's all really silly with a script that is more than unusually sucky for this type of thing.