Dark Eyes Retrovision #18: Don't Look Now (UK 1973: Dir Nicolas Roeg)

Nic Roeg's 1973 film, just a few years shy of its 50th anniversary, is these days popularly seen as a) the most straightforward of the director's features and b) a pivotal film in marking the transition of British cinema from its more linear storytelling roots to something temporally experimental, aligning its narrative more to the psychology of memory than to the accepted beginning-middle-end story format.

Studiocanal's 4K and Ultra HD restoration of Don't Look Now is a chance to re-evaluate a movie which, since its initial theatrical release (poorly publicised and put out on a double bill with a rather truncated early version of The Wicker Man), has slowly gained in critical stature, and which now regularly features in 'Best of' British' film lists.

Adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier published in 1971, Roeg's film, from a script by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, opens out the original text considerably, using it as a jumping off point for a complex narrative and visual story where the supernatural is often glimpsed but never fully brought into focus, and whose themes are suffused in a masterclass of interlocking edits.

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) have travelled to Venice following an appalling tragedy whereby their daughter Christine has drowned in a pond outside their English country home. John has been asked to oversee the rebuilding of one of the City's churches, and the couple hope that the change of scene will help them overcome their grief. Laura's chance meeting with a pair of English women, one of whom is a blind psychic, sows the seeds of a belief that Christine is still with her parents in spirit: John, initially sceptical of this revelation, questions his own lack of faith when he glimpses a small figure, dressed in a red raincoat (similar to the outfit that Christine was wearing when she drowned) walking at a distance in the Venetian alleyways. Against a backdrop of a series of murders in the city, and the subsequent attentions of the police who believe that John could be a suspect, he continues to track down the mysterious figure and in turn presages his own doom.

Watching the movie after a gap of quite a few years, what's even more apparent now is the whiff (actually more than that) of Oedipal Greek tragedy to the piece, with its almost inevitable conclusion, and its causative circularity of events drawing the central male character to his own fate. From the opening scene, with John poring over slides of the church he is to renovate and seeing (or not seeing) a hooded red figure sitting in one of the pews, his destiny is set. The ending may seem a little jarring in relation to the lyrical tone of the rest of the film, but Roeg was no stranger to such juxtapositions: the suicide of the father and the death of the indigenous young man in Walkabout (1970); Newton's reveal of his alien self in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); or the witches peeling off their human coverings in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches (1990).

In one of the disc's extras, it's learned that Roeg and Anthony Richmond, Don't Look Now's director of photography, roomed together during the making of the film, and talked of little else during their stay. This close relationship plays out in the harmony of narrative and visuals, the camera adopting an almost reportage-y style, picking out incidences of everyday Venetian life that Sutherland, in his role of John Baxter, would have glimpsed through his constantly darting eyes, as if always just sensing something out of the corner of his vision.

Sutherland and Christie are of course perfect in their roles, a contrast of characters and belief systems, united in grief and brought together as much by the hope engendered by the psychic as the city itself, whose decaying beauty frames the couple's air of tragedy. Don't Look Now may be a film more to admire than love (and maybe that's just me) but it's as jarring today as on first release, and well worth another view in this superb restoration.

Don't Look Now is out on 29 July 2019. Extras include an audio commentary with Nicolas Roeg, two new documentaries on the history of the film and its colour palette, and a host of interviews from a previous release of the movie including composer Pino Donaggio, screenwriter/producer Allan Scott, director of cinematography Tony Richmond and Donald Sutherland.

The Moon on screen - an appreciation

This is a slightly different version of an introduction to Duncan Jones' Moon (2009) prepared for Screen 25 on 10 July 2019, and published on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

The unique properties of earth’s only natural satellite the moon (the word is derived from the old English ‘mona’ meaning both ‘month’ and ‘measurement’) have aroused interest ever since it was visible to the naked eye; whether from a technical perspective via the the Babylonian scientists of the 5th century BC, the ancient Greeks or early Chinese astronomers, or a literary one, from the anonymous medieval poem ‘The Man in the Moon’ via the romantic odes by Shelley and even the more prosaic offerings of Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath.

But tonight the moon on film is our mission, so, for the next few minutes, sit back and get ready for a whistle stop tour of ‘la lune’ in the movies, with a few illustrations along the way. So here goes:

The moon first properly appeared as subject matter in the cinema in 1902, with the French director Georges Méliès' Le Voyage de La Lune aka A Trip to the Moon. Méliès in part based the events in his film on the aspirational 1865 novel by Jules Verne ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ which would have to wait until 1958 to get a more faithful adaptation, directed by Byron Haskin, who three years earlier would make The War of the Worlds, itself based on a novel by HG Wells. Wells wrote another of the literary influences for Méliès’ movie in the shape of the equally prescient ‘First Men in the Moon,’ published in 1901, which informed the lunar sequences of A Trip to the Moon, and introduced the concept of the alien lunar dwellers, the Selenites.

Not to be outdone, in 1908 Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon made an almost identical film to Méliès' cleverly entitled Excursion to the Moon (and if you think copycat films are a new problem for the movies, silent cinema made whole careers of directors stealing each other’s ideas). For the next decade the moon featured in any number of romantic fantasies, often in title only, including When the Man in the Moon Seeks a Wife, A Message from the Moon and The Valley of the Moon. The sadly lost film, 1919’s The First Men in the Moon, was a UK adaptation of the Wells novel which at 50 minutes running time was the first science fiction feature ever made. This still shows you what we’ve been missing.

The presumed lost 1919 UK feature The First Men in the Moon

In 1929 German director Fritz (Metropolis) Lang made the stunning and ambitious Frau in Mond aka Woman on the Moon, incidentally the first film to include a countdown to a rocket launch, now an everyday thing in sci fi and action movies. The 1934 British sci fi film Once in a New Moon was a rather bizarre satirical fantasy involving an entire seaside town being dragged out into space by the force of a 'dead star' passing Earth, only for the townsfolk to enter into conflict with the local aristocracy.

In 1936 the Russian film Cosmic Journey depicted an earth just ten years into the then future. In it, the Soviets fight amongst themselves over their choice of an astronaut to go to the moon, deeming the person picked as being too old. But he gets there anyway. This is one of a handful of films depicting the Russians winning ‘the space race,’ a term which wouldn't officially be coined until 1955, and even then the 'race' was confined to getting a human into orbit rather than on another planet.

The Mexican movie Boom in the Moon, made in 1946, involves a couple of imprisoned thugs who are offered a chance for liberation if they pilot a rocket to the moon, but the mission goes wrong, and the spacecraft, unbeknown to its occupants, crash lands in Mexico rather than on the lunar surface. Seven years later this plot was re-used for the 1953 movie Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, where Bud and Lou stow aboard a rocket destined for Mars which actually crash lands in the middle of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The 1950 Irving Pichel directed Destination Moon

The race to get a man into space between the Russians and the Americans kicked off in the middle of the 1950s and it was this decade that saw a period of intense moon-based sci fi filmmaking activity, anticipating the next leg of the battle. Actor turned director Irving Pichel saw the decade in with his 1950 mini epic Destination Moon, which, anticipating what’s to come, tells of American efforts to be the first to get a man on the moon. This one has some amazing miniature effects and was shot in stunning Technicolor. Its technical details were so accurate at the time that authors Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov both gave it the official thumbs up.

But as well as realism, filmmakers also continued to exploit the moon more fantastically. 1952 saw Republic Pictures churning out one of their last serials, a 12 parter called Radar Men from the Moon, which was actually filmed in Los Angeles and pitted regular serial star Commander Cody against Krog the Moon man, who fires an atomic ray from the lunar surface to hit strategic earth targets.

1953's Cat Women of the Moon, a patently ludicrous adventure movie, is best summed up by the imdb synopsis which reads “Astronauts travel to the moon where they discover it is inhabited by attractive young women in black tights.” The UK would respond to this one with the equally dotty Fire Maidens of Outer Space in 1956.

The sets from Cat Women were reused in another film made the same year; Project Moon Base. Set in the far future of 1970 (although no flares feature) the famous sci fi writer Robert Heinlein was brought on board to script the film, but was unable to save a dreary story of a foreign spy infiltrating a plan to locate a series of bases on the lunar surface.

Some Cat Women of the Moon (1953)

In 1957, one month after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 (the world’s first artificial satellite) into the skies, the Soviet Union made a documentary Doroga k zvezdam aka Road to the Stars. Incorporating a lot of detailed miniature model work for verisimilitude, it was basically a propaganda piece showing – again - how the Russians were going to be first to get to the moon.

The rather dreary 1958 adaptation of the Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon spearheaded a whole gaggle of moon-based films at the end of the decade. In 1958 Missile to the Moon was released to a space hungry public, with a story featuring escaped convicts, a moon man, a gigantic spider, genetically modified food and 8 international beauty contestant winners. Egypt produced 1959’s Journey to the Moon, with a stowaway activating a rocket ship, accidentally landing on the moon and meeting a moon man and some space ladies. And finally, right at the end of the decade, we have 12 to the Moon, with an international and, surprisingly for the time, inter-racial crew embarking on an expedition to the moon and encountering a faceless alien intelligence who concludes that the human race is too immature and dangerous and must be destroyed.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, things were hotting up: in April 1961 Russian pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, to which the US responded by launching astronaut Alan Shepard into space just a month after. And in September 1962 President John F Kennedy made his famous speech in which he threw down the gauntlet to the Russians and proclaimed “we choose to go to the moon.” Had the seed of the idea been implanted by the constant stream of movies depicting the race to the lunar surface?

So how did the movie world respond to these momentous events? Why they made Nude on the Moon, of course: co-directed by mistress of sleaze Doris Wishman, this 1961 nudie quickie has a rocket scientist planning a trip to the moon which, as the title suggests, is inhabited by women without clothes.

1962 saw Tom Tryon, who four years earlier played the alien controlled husband in the brilliant low budget movie I Married a Monster from Outer Space, as a NASA scientist who is kidnapped while planning to circuit the moon in the comedy Moon Pilot.

A year later future director of Beatles movies A Hard Days Night and Help!, Richard Lester, made The Mouse in the Moon, a rather unfunny British comedy with an all star cast including Dame Margaret Rutherford, in which the US and Russia enter a space race with the tiny country of Grand Fenwick to get the first person on the moon – spoiler alert, Grand Fenwick gets there first, in the shape of astronaut Bernard Cribbins.

We’re off to Romania for our next moon based film, Steps to the Moon, directed by Ion Popescu-Gopo, although as very few people have seen this story of an accident prone astronaut I have no idea whether he got to the moon or not.

1964’s First Men in the Moon, adapted from HG Wells' novel, was more on point. Featuring stop motion effects by FX genius Ray Harryhausen, this is a spirited affair in which a group of modern astronauts, believing they’re the first people to step foot on the moon, discover a British flag and a document declaring the satellite in the name of Queen Victoria. First Men in the Moon then tells the story of the first Victorian moon project in flashback.

Yoshio Kuroda directed the 1965 animated Japanese fantasy Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon, featuring the literary character Lemuel Gulliver who, as the title suggests, pilots a rocket that actually doesn’t touch down on the lunar surface, and 1967’s Those Fantastic Flying Fools, aka Jules Verne's Rocket to Moon, a UK adaptation of Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ but way less successful than Méliès' trip 65 years earlier, is another Victorians-go-to-the-moon romp, with diminutive comedian Jimmy Clitheroe as the lucky astronaut.

The same year the first movie to use a threat from the moon came in the form of US flick Mutiny in Outer Space, in which a lunar fungus starts killing off astronauts on their journey back from the moon.

Robert Altman’s 1967 movie Countdown, re-edited by the studio to remove much of the director’s trademark overlapping dialogue, was the rather talky story of a US astronaut desperate to reach the moon in a race against the Soviets. Another spoiler alert – when the Americans get there they discover some dead Russians.

But no coverage of the moon in cinema would be complete without mention of arguably the best science fiction film ever made. 2001 was a US/UK co-production directed by Stanley Kubrick, released in May 1968. With its hyper-real hardware and software (so convincing it would have had those Russian directors weeping into their vodka) and its mix of the technical and the metaphysical, it sounded the death knell for the science fiction film, which wouldn’t recover as a genre until the release of Star Wars nearly ten years later.

2001 (1968)

In the movie the moon was the second of the locations for the imposing monolith, in reality a communication beacon installed by, well we’re never really sure who, to monitor the development of the race and broadcast their progress beyond the stars. And of all the films mentioned tonight 2001 is probably the closest thematically to our main feature, Duncan Jones’ Moon.

However, we’re not done with the 60s yet. Not to miss out on the lunar action, Britain’s Hammer Films, who had won the Queen’s Award for Industry the year before and were riding high, made the pop art nightmare space western Moon Zero Two in 1969, for a budget that would just about cover a week’s catering on 2001, and featuring an odd cast including Bernard Bresslaw and Warren Mitchell aka Alf Garnett. Released to cinemas just three months after the moon landing in July 1969, Moon Zero Two’s story had a space salvage expert involved with a group of criminals intent on hijacking a small asteroid.

But its dayglo sets and ‘with it’ costumes failed to dazzle audiences, and Moon Zero Two tanked at the box office. The cinema going public had now experienced the thrill of man’s first steps on the lunar surface, and from the comfort of their own home to boot. Their interest in seeing representations of the moon waned considerably, and filmmakers responded accordingly.

Poster for Hammer's Moon Zero Two (1969)

The moon may have gone missing from cinema screens in the aftermath of the events of July 1969, but it was left to TV to pick up the slack with series like UFO, Moonbase 3, Space 1999 and the bizarre faux documentary Alternative 3, which were all lunar themed and broadcast in the 1970s. This trend continued in the 1980s with shows like 1985’s Space, a 780 minute adaptation of the James A Michener doorstop novel, which recounted the space race of the 1950s and 60s with more than a tinge of nostalgia, something achieved two years earlier on the big screen with Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff.

But despite the space fantasy of Star Wars, the aspirational sci fi movies of the 1950s and 1960s would never return. Moon based films occasionally surfaced over the next couple of decades: the 1987 spoof Amazon Women of the Moon, for example (although the moon link is very tenuous); the 1988 Phillipine film Fly Me to the Moon (which no-one seems to have has seen); 1989’s Moontrap, where a robotic alien organism discovered on the moon is brought back to earth, developing itself into a killing machine by cannibalising mechanical parts; the UK TV movie Murder by Moonlight starring Brigitte Nielsen, where a murder occurs on a lunar outpost shared by US and Soviet communities; The Dark Side of the Moon, a 1990 movie about a crew stranded on the dark side of the moon, rescued by a passing NASA space shuttle that may be possessed by the devil; and 1997’s Moonbase, in which a gang of criminals break out of a lunar penal colony and access some nuclear warheads.

Moving into the 21st century, moon based movies continued to be thin on the ground. 2008’s animated Fly Me to the Moon sees three young houseflies stowing away on the Apollo 11 mission. But it was 2009 that saw a return to proper, serious sci fi with a lunar theme. As well as 2001, which I referenced earlier, Duncan Jones' Moon also nods to 1972’s Silent Running and 1974’s Dark Star (not the first time I’ve mentioned that film at Screen 25) as well as 1981’s Outland. These influences were readily acknowledged by director Duncan Jones when the film was first released.

Jones also acknowledged that space had brought him to the public’s attention in the same way as it did for his dad, David Bowie, back in 1969, via the single ‘Space Oddity.’

I won’t say too much about the film in case people haven’t seen it, but what I would ask is that you consider how creative Jones and his team must have been on an estimated budget of $5million in creating the look of the film and its environments. At the time of release, Jones mentioned that the themes of isolation and separation in the film were partly inspired by his long distance relationship with his partner (they were often on different continents). 

Moving into the second decade of the 21st century the moon still sporadically inspires. 2011 saw three such films: Michael Bay’s third ‘Transformers’ movie, the subtle and elegiac Transformers: Dark of the Moon, takes the interminable battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons to the lunar surface, where the US and the Russians are in a race to locate and claim a spacecraft found on the moon; Apollo 18 was a 'found footage' movie which saw a team of astronauts travelling to the moon to discover the reasons why the last Apollo mission, number 18, was abandoned; and Attack of the Moon Zombies was a low budget black and white spoof of 1950s sci fi movies.

In 2012, the frankly bizarre Finland, Germany and Australia funded co-production of Iron Sky hooved into view, which saw a Nazi space project decamp to the moon at the end of World War II to evade destruction, only to be discovered 70 years later by a US astronaut team who prompt the lunar Nazis to consider world domination again. Despite its rather tasteless setup, it was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Iron Sky: the Coming Race which came out this year. 2014’s sci fi spoof Slave Girls on the Moon was set in the year 8888 on a moon prison, and 2017’s Moon Rock City, which combined rock’n' roll with a story about the discovery of the destruction of mankind’s first colony on the moon, was a film whose main boast was that it was shot entirely on synthetic sets in Michagan.

It is perhaps fitting that the most recent moon based movie is one of the classiest: First Man, Damien Chazelle's 2018 biopic of Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, is a return to the classic astronaut as flawed hero approach taken by The Right Stuff in 1983 and Space in 1985.

So there we have it - over one hundred years of the moon on film. It's interesting that although there have been films about voyages to other parts of our Solar System, the moon has been most often favoured as subject matter, both before and after 1969's events. But with the revival of interest (and funding) in interstellar travel, over the next hundred years will the subject matter for sci fi movies change to Mars...or beyond?

Charlie Says (USA 2018: Dir Mary Harron)

In all the excitement of celebrating the 50th anniversary of man's first walk on the moon, it's easy to forget that another, darker 50th anniversary should also be marked this year: the killings by members of Charles Manson's 'family', initially of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Steven Parent, and the following night Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

And while the world awaits the release of Quentin Tarantino's Manson referencing movie Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (and attempts to wipe from memory the pitiful The Haunting of Sharon Tate) here's Mary American Psycho Harron's take on the subject, an adaptation of Ed Sanders' 1969 book 'The Family.'

Eschewing any whiff of exploitation, Charlie Says focuses on three members of the family, Patricia 'Katie' Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon), Susan 'Sadie' Atkins (Marianne Rendón) and Leslie 'Lulu' Van Houten (Hannah Murray). Incarcerated following guilty verdicts in the Tate/LaBianca murder trials, their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in the state of California in 1972. However the inmates were considered too dangerous to be integrated into the wider prison community (all three remained unrepentant and still psychologically firmly in Manson's grip), and so as we meet them the women remain separated in the facility's Special Security Unit, with the authorities at a loss how to handle the situation.

As a solution they introduce the prisoners to Karlene Faith (Merritt Wever) a graduate student who has successfully been hosting creative writing classes in the prison, and who the powers that be hope may encourage some reflection and even repentance on behalf of Krenwinkel, Atkins and Van Houten. "Are we going to study shit like Women's Lib?" they ask, as Faith introduces them to feminist texts, and examinations of the psychology of domestic violence. Through flashbacks we learn about the brainwashing process practised at Manson's Spahn Ranch in California, particularly as it impacts on Van Houten, the last of the three prisoners to be indoctrinated into the family. And as the women begin to trust Faith more, the chinks in their own allegiance to Manson start to appear.

Cleverly, where most other films about the Manson family have concentrated on Charlie himself, in Harron's film the supporting cast of acolytes, freaks and hangers on get equal, if not greater screen time. Charlie Says is balanced in its attempts to understand the process of inculcation rather than condemn it. The film also wisely dwells very briefly on the actual murders: it opens powerfully, with the three women plus Tex Watson, seen in the aftermath of the deaths of the LaBiancas, visibly shocked but with no details glimpsed apart from some spots of blood on their clothes and 'Helter Skelter' briefly glimpsed daubed on a fridge door.

Faith's gentle coaching of the prisoners, using feminist concepts to help them reflect on Manson's bullying and misogynistic tactics - women not being able to carry money, the supposed equality of 'free' sex - and her insistence on addressing them by their birth names, not the ones given by Manson, are made more powerful by her refusal to moralise or judge. In other directors' hands, the see sawing between past and present may have been distracting, but Harron maintains tension while never once being exploitational.

Bacon, Rendón and Murray are all excellent as the determined, passionate but ultimately lost members of 'the Family' whose allegiance to Manson stems from a need to be loved. Murray in particular turns in a supremely nuanced performance as Van Houten; she alone occasionally questions Manson's motives and the incongruities of his teachings, and her briefly glimpsed moments of doubt make her involvement in the final acts all the more heartbreaking because of this knowledge. As Karlene Faith, Merritt Wever is calm and professional, equally determined, and on occasion totally overwhelmed by her task. And behind the beard and the wild eyes, Matt (Doctor Who) Smith as Charles Manson inhabits the role perfectly, never over melodramatic, but with a sense of violent menace barely kept below surface: the transition of Manson from beatific leader to psychotic gang leader following record producer Terry Melcher's refusal to record his songs is both believable and quite terrifying.

Charlie Says is out in the UK on Digital from 22nd July and DVD from 29th July.

The Dead Don't Die (USA 2019: Dir Jim Jarmusch)

In the quiet town of Centerville, USA - 'A real nice place' reads the sign on entering - things move very sleepily. At the local police precinct, officer in charge Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) is laconic and, frankly, bored, facing but not wanting retirement. His two officers, fatalistic Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and nervous Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) don’t have a whole lot to do. Their only slight concern in the otherwise regular town is the strange presence of new funeral home mortician, zen mistress Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton),

But things are about to change. Firstly, it's taking ages to get dark. Watches and phones stop working. There’s talk on the radio about the earth being slightly tipped off its axis due to widespread fracking. Secondly, at the local diner two staff have been savagely murdered, their bodies ripped apart and eaten by what the police think might have been one, possibly several animals. Actually the real culprits are two locals (Iggy Pop and Jarmusch regular Sara Driver), newly risen from the dead - one assumes because of the whole earth axis thing - and desirous of both human flesh and coffee – hence hitting the diner.

Robertson, Peterson and Morrison investigate and become aware that the local cemetery is indeed giving up its dead to roam the streets and attack at will. These zombies, rather like the ones in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), hold on to some vestiges of their former life and are driven to revisit the places they knew when alive (the undead shambling outside a drugstore muttering ‘Xanax’ amuses, and there's a strangely tragic sequence with kids wandering around the detritus of a candy store looking lost and vulnerable).

The police of course have never seen anything like this. Morrison breaks down, Robertson just feels powerless, but Peterson acquires some inner strength: it is he who works out that the only way to kill the undead is through a ‘head shot’ and subsequently becomes rather proficient at this, much to the distaste of Morrison, who may have a certain attraction to the gawky police officer.

Sabre wielding oddball Zelda, briefly surprised when two of her dead charges wake up while on the morticians table, seems to have anticipated the return of the dead and takes on the mantle of chief zombie despatcher. And when a group of kids drive into town, described as 'hipsters' by the locals and surely cannon fodder for the zombies - in line with a million other undead films you’ve ever seen - the stage is set for a massive zombie slayathon.

I’ve probably made The Dead Don't Die sound more fun than it is. The first hour is well set up. There are the usual quirky characters found in Jim Jarmusch’s previous movies: Steve Buscemi plays the town bigot, complete with 'Make America White Again' baseball cap; Adam Driver as officer Peterson is suitably and typically awkward (his arrival on the scene in a Smart car, scrunched up inside in a vehicle clearly too small for him, may be the funniest shot in the film); Tom Waits as the almost feral woodlands dwelling Hermit Bob – who gets to narrate some of the film – looks very much like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz (1939); Rosie Perez as the ‘say what you see’ TV reporter Posie Juarez is good value; but the star of the piece is flaxen haired be-robed Swinton (her character name, like that of Perez, a kind of mangling of her real one). Zelda’s Scottish brogue contrasting with her glacial features, stilted, sudden movements and odd speech (seeing Peterson’s Star Wars key ring she comments “Ah. Excellent fiction” and describing herself as an "accumulator of local information") makes one suspect she might not be entirely human.

But sadly Jarmusch’s film, once set up, does not know where to go. The zombie attack scenes are initially well staged (the despatched undead break into a shower of black dust rather like the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but there's an increasing sense of purposelessness, and the realisation that Jarmusch's movie is maybe just him having fun with some friends (in contrast to his more substantial 2013 take on the vampire movie in Only Lovers Left Alive). There's nothing wrong in that of course, but the director's reheating of themes previously visited by others and liberally referencing those movies within the script (a car which looks like Johnny's vehicle in the first scene of Night of the Living Dead is described as "very George Romero") gradually turns The Dead Don't Die into an increasingly inert homage to some much better movies. I mean, Romero offered us the conclusion that the zombies in Dawn of the Dead are basically us in a different form, but he made that point over 40 years ago. There's some fourth wall breaking along the way which assures the audience that the whole thing is probably a meta directorial in joke, but by then we've wearied of the lack of pace, the plodding set pieces and, well, the point of the thing. Disappointing.

Styx (2018 Germany/Austria; Dir Wolfgang Fischer)

Here's a stripped down, powerful if occasionally polemical drama with some blistering performances and a rising sense of justifiable anger.

Rike (a stunning performance of considerable physicality by Susanne Wolff) is a crash team medic living in Gibraltar who we first meet attempting to carefully extricate a man from a mangled car. If Rike looks a little distracted it's perhaps no wonder: she's about to embark on a gruelling one woman boat trip to the remote Ascension Island off the coast of Africa (the place where Charles Darwin created a green oasis in 1836); a bold and treacherous journey. Armed with Darwin's guide to the island, 'The Creation of Paradise,' and enough provisions to suggest a very long trip, super organised Rike sets off on her long solo voyage, coping admirably with storms and high winds, and confidently navigating her chosen route.

But a chance encounter at sea with an upturned and slowly sinking fishing vessel changes the whole nature of her trip. The listing ship is full of refugees, presumably intent on leaving the African continent for safety: many of the occupants cannot swim but have no choice but to jump from the sinking ship. Rike radios for help but the coastguard service warns her off - there are clearly some complex politics at work here. But her medical ethics mean that she cannot turn her back on the situation. Despite strict instructions not to get involved she rescues one young boy from the water: Kingsley (a brilliant debut performance from Gedion Odour Wekesa), first seen wearing a football shirt with 'Ronaldo' on the back, adding an extra poignancy to his situation, is nursed back to health by Rike, then promptly scolds her for not returning to the ship for the others. Rike is caught in a dilemma: with no sign of any rescue craft, and haunted by the cries of the refugees coming from the doomed boat, does she defy the authorities and attempt a rescue, or sail away with at least one survivor?

That there is no easy resolution to this dilemma is at the heart of Fischer's film. While the movie posits the question 'what would you do?' in relation to Rike's problem, at the same time it asks a more profound one, when considering the plight of the refugees, caught up in a maze of international politics: namely 'How has this been allowed to happen?'

Styx begins on Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory which itself has had more than its fair share of territorial claims, and ends literally and metaphorically at sea, with a traumatised Rike trying to make sense of what has happened.

As Rike (and is that name supposed to remind us of the German philosopher Rilke?) Wolff creates a fascinating and often inscrutable character. What is it that drives someone to undertake such a hazardous solo journey, even though she is clearly experienced - and comfortable - at sea (there is a scene where she leaves the boat to swim, which in many films would portend disaster or threat - for her it's shorthand for happiness)? We don't know, but the aim of reaching the 'artificial jungle' of Ascension Island hints at the need to escape, or achieve a level of spirituality, and this may account for her reaction when faced with the enormity of the refugees' situation. The film's shorthand hints at her change of priorities - for example, when Rike uses the ship's log not as a record of the journey but as a medical record plotting Kingsley's recovery.

Styx's symbolism occasionally errs towards the clunky: the title, with its literary connotations (in Greek mythology, 'Styx' is the river that forms the boundary between earth and the underworld); the link between Rike's quest for the paradise of Ascension Island and the same state aspired to by the fleeing refugees; the famous Gibraltar Barbary macaque monkeys, which appear at the start of the movie, claiming their right to roam freely on the Rock. But there's no questioning the sincerity at the heart of this film; it's a powerful story, crisply and hauntingly photographed by Benedict Neuenfels, lean and taught where it could have been overly melodramatic, and one which will leave you both stunned and, hopefully, very very angry.

Dark Eyes Retrovision #15, #16 and #17: American Horror Project Volume 2 - Reviews of Dark August (USA 1977), The Child (USA 1977) and Dream No Evil (USA 1970)

Arrow Video have at last released the second of their collections of rare and/or overlooked independent US horror films in their ongoing 'American Horror Project' series curated by Stephen Thrower. DEoL checked out Volume 2.

Dark August (USA 1976: Dir Martin Goldman) Goldman's film seems almost tailor made for the AHP series. It's cheap, downbeat but weird fare, with solid production values and a decent cast.

Essentially a study of guilt, it's the story of illustrator Sal (JJ Barry), recently moved to Vermont following a divorce, who accidentally knocks over and kills a girl while driving his truck. Naturally he's full of grief and remorse, but his mental fragility is pushed further by constant glimpses of both a hooded stranger and an old man outside his house. While the former may be a phantasm, the latter is the very real grandfather of the dead girl. Encouraged by his art gallery worker girlfriend Jackie (Carole Shelyne, Barry's wife in real life) to visit a local witch, Adrianna (Kim Hunter), he discovers that a curse has been placed on him by the aggrieved grandfather, and must employ his own magic to fight the spell.

Dark August is a brooding, slow but never boring study of a man in crisis. The almost prosaic use of magic is unusual - Goldman makes you feel that every small town in Vermont must have its own practitioners of secret arts. It was clearly quite a coup casting Kim (Planet of the Apes, A Streetcar Named Desire) Hunter in the role of white witch Adrianna, but JJ Barry - who went on to a role as a caveman in Mel Brooks' 1981 movie History of the World: Part 1 - is equally convincing as the tortured artist Sal. A word too for the atmospheric David Axelrod like soundtrack burblings from jazz session musician William Fischer.

The Child (USA 1977: Dir Robert Voskanian) More sensational soundtrack music courtesy of Rob Wallace (his first feature score) awaits in a movie which, if memory serves, has been circulating in a dodgy public domain format for a while now: it's good to finally see a cleaned up copy of Voskanian's only film.

Alicianne (Laurel Barnett, who strangely played roles with the same character name in two films about Marilyn Monroe, thirteen years apart) is returning to the area where she grew up, to be the paid companion of little Rosalie (Rosalie Cole in her only screen credit). On the way she meets kindly but nosy Mrs Whitfield (Ruth Ballan) who brings her up to speed on the oddness of Rosalie's family. And indeed they are an unusual bunch, but no more so than Rosalie herself, who seems to have telekinetic abilities and an unhealthy obsession with visiting her late mother's grave in the middle of the night. She also has a number of zombie 'friends' who help her out in times of trouble. And Rosalie's trouble is that she wants the people she thinks caused the death of her mother to suffer. Which they do.

As is to be expected by virtue of its inclusion in the AHP box, The Child is one strange movie, clearly the work of a first time director, and produced by sexploitationer Harry Novak. The zombies, and the film's odd sense of time and location, anticipates the rash of Italian horror movies a few years later with titles like 1981's The House by the Cemetery and The Beyond (it was also the cinematographer Mori Alvi's only screen credit, a shame as he creates great mood in this). For a film of this budget, the gore, when it arrives, is pretty impressive (I'm guessing someone learned how to do 'gouged eye sockets' because the effect is used repeatedly - still effective though). The whole thing moves rather sluggishly but is such an interesting mish mash of styles that it remains fascinating.

Dream No Evil (USA 1970: Dir John Hayes) The box set's oldest feature, and for my money its weakest, was directed by the guy who went on to make 1973's Grave of the Vampire, also a film of which I'm not a big fan. Hayes oscillated between making low budget horrors and adult movies, and Dream No Evil has some of the feel of both.

The heavily narrated story (apparently the voice over was inserted after filming at the insistence of the producers) revolves around Grace, brought up in an orphanage, who grows up to be a high diving assistant to her foster brother, a travelling preacher. Grace is on a constant quest to find her father, and finally locates him in a local mortuary. Presumed dead, dad rises from the slab, celebrating with a quick turn on the squeezebox while his daughter dances exuberantly. A rash of murders occurs. Is her father responsible, or is it Grace?

From its odd, TV movie-esque opening credits to its Psycho style ending, Dream No Evil is a fascinating curio which holds back from being too over the top, which is a great shame. Its murder scenes are decidedly PG and some brief nudity has been masked on screen so as not to offend. There's still a lot to like, particularly Brooke Mills' spirited performance as the decidedly cuckoo Grace. There are some very odd touches - Grace's slo mo dancing, for example, or the scene where she carves a bird at the dining table which may well have been an inspiration for David Lynch (a similar scene occurs in Eraserhead) - but on the whole, despite this being another excellent set, Dream No Evil didn't grab me.

American Horror Project 2 Special Features include:

American Horror Project Journal Vol. II – limited edition 60-page booklet featuring new writing on the films by Stephen R. Bissette, Travis Crawford and Amanda Reyes

Dark August

• Filmed appreciation by Stephen Thrower
• Brand new audio commentary with writer-director Martin Goldman
• Brand new on-camera interview with Martin Goldman
• Brand new on-camera interview with producer Marianne Kanter
• The Hills Are Alive: Dark August and Vermont Folk Horror – author and artist Stephen R. Bissette on Dark August and its context within the wider realm of genre filmmaking out of Vermont
• Original Press Book

The Child

• 1.37:1 and 1.85:1 presentations of the feature
• Filmed appreciation by Stephen Thrower
• Brand new audio commentary with director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashian, moderated by Stephen Thrower
• Brand new on-camera interviews with Robert Voskanian and Robert Dadashian
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Original Press Book

Dream No Evil

• Filmed appreciation by Stephen Thrower
• Brand new audio commentary with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan
• Hollywood After Dark: The Early Films of John Hayes, 1959-1971 – brand new video essay by Stephen Thrower looking at Hayes’ filmography leading up to Dream No Evil
• Writer Chris Poggiali on the prodigious career of celebrated character actor Edmond O’Brien
• Excerpts from an audio interview with actress Rue McClanahan (The Golden Girls) discussing her many cinematic collaborations with director John Hayes

Supermarket Sweep #8: Reviews of Ravenswood Asylum (Australia 2017), Heretiks (UK 2018), The Sanctuary (Germany 2018), Curse of the Scarecrow (UK 2018), Demon (USA 2017) and The Siren (USA 2019)

Ravenswood Asylum aka Ravenswood (Australia 2017: Dir Jon Cohen) We start the latest 'Supermarket Sweep' in fine style, with a hideous load of old toss from Down Under (don't worry, we finish on a much stronger note).

Four Americans, newly arrived in Sydney, are persuaded to join a ghost hunt around an old abandoned medical facility that was infamous for conducting electro shock therapy experiments back in the 1950s ("the history here is amazing - it goes back 130 years," says one character). But the spirits of the crazy doctor responsible for the tests, and his last patient/victim still haunt the building, waiting for new young hosts so they can occupy their bodies and, well, continue having arguments. And you can tell that our youthful charges are being possessed because a blue tint appears over their eyes, a bit like when an engaged toilet goes from green to red. And on the subject of toilets, check out the Aussie actors doing American accents, y'know, so that the five or so production companies responsible for this can get some of their money back flogging the movie to a Stateside audience.

The 'kids' featuring in the flick look way out of their depth, and also in terms of characterisation like they've been handed the script to learn page by page. There is of course a lot of walking round the asylum corridors (or rather I think single corridor re-dressed for different shots); some half-assed gore is thrown in towards the end but it's too little, too late.

Now I would never stoop to offer a comment like 'that's an hour and a half of my life I'll never get back.' Not only is that mean, but I know what I'm getting into when I write these articles. Hell this is the eighth 'Supermarket Sweep,' so that makes this the 43rd film I've sat through under the SS umbrella. But it might also be the worst; a relative term I know (look out - there's actually worse to come). It's clearly aimed at a teen audience, what with the lack of f-bombs, nudity, content, coherence etc etc. Teens should all be royally insulted. Atrocious.

Heretiks (UK 2018: Dir Paul Hyett)* Well what’s going on here then? I confess I was a bit wary about returning to make up artist turned director Paul Hyett’s work after the powerful but extremely distressing The Seasoning House back in 2012, a movie that delivered the final nail in the coffin for this reviewer in terms of enduring ‘torture porn’ flicks. Happily Hyett redeemed himself with the impressive and distinctly less bleak Howl in 2015. And, a few scenes of gore aside, Heretiks is rather a different animal again, part of a re-emerging trend I didn’t think we’d witness in the 21st century – nunsploitation!

Essentially a group of actors playing dress up in wimples, Heretiks, set in the 17th century, is a tale of witchcraft. It’s also a kind of a love letter to certain ‘draughty castle’ British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s. The story? Persephone (Hannah Arterton, Gemma’s younger sister) is tried for being a witch, but spared her fate by being swept up by the Reverend Mother (Clare Higgins, relishing her role and surely a Sheila Keith for our times?) into a nunnery complete with other similarly charged women, and with such a rigid and borderline sadistic regime that it may have been preferable for our (demonstrably psychic) heroine to have chosen the other route.

Predictably the Reverend Mother is hiding a big secret, but there’s a lot of fairly inconsequential stuff before we get to the last reel pyrotechnics, although they’re pretty impressive on a small budget. The cast look genuinely uncomfortable (scratchy hired costumes and filming in December were probably jointly to blame) but they don’t really get much to do. Michael Ironside turns up for an afternoon’s work (and probably some Christmas shopping) as the sentencing judge, but without a ripe script and the presence of Ms Higgins (and to some extent the resourceful character of Persephone) this would have been a duller, if elegantly staged film.

*A version of this review was first published on www.bloody-flicks.co.uk

The Sanctuary aka Heilstätten: Haunted Hospital (Germany 2018: Dir Michael David Pate) Director Pate uses the rise of social media and YouTube stars as an excuse to return to the found footage movie, a sub genre most of us hoped had run its course.

Two annoying youths, who run a prank website, challenge fellow YouTuber Betty to spend a night at Heilstätten, an abandoned and supposedly haunted hospital on the outskirts of Berlin. Also along for the ride are serious Theo, constantly sounding a note of caution (but does he protest too much?) and Theo's ex, Marnie, another social media queen.

The setup is much as you'd expect, with all the standard abandoned hospital cliches present and correct: barbaric surgical equipment; overturned wheelchairs; cine projectors that work themselves; and discarded partly burnt toys (the hospital achieved its notoriety by carrying out Nazi experiments back in the day, and one particular patient, driven to take her own life, supposedly haunts the corridors).

True there's nothing particularly different on display here than any number of similar 'kids-wandering-around-a-spooky-building' films. However, there's less aimless rambling and more inventive use of the hospital's rooms and accoutrements than I was expecting. The cast are annoying (which is intentional, hence the line "because of guys like you, and that stuff you do all day, our youth is going stupid") but they're also competent: there's some well delivered gore moments and a last reel twist that, while not unexpected, is less eye rolling than it might have been. More interesting is that, as a German film, it's not afraid to use the legacy of Nazi horrors as its narrative base (the director being born in 1980 might have something to do with it). Don't expect greatness, but The Sanctuary is far from awful.

Curse of the Scarecrow (UK 2018: Dir Louisa Warren) In 'Supermarket Sweep' #4, I reviewed Warren's pitiful Scarecrow Rising aka Bride of Scarecrow. I wasn't kind, and I didn't think I'd be going back for more pedestrian Scarecrow action from this director. I was clearly wrong.

June (Kate Lister, an Australian actress whose accent is rather out of place in a film about a UK family) together with her brother Carl, witnessed the death of her parents twenty years previously, and is summoned back to the homestead by Carl's death, seemingly by his own hand. June is accompanied by her therapist Karen (Cassandra French), as you do, and friend Nancy (Warren). The trio very slowly learn from the locals about the curse of the scarecrow, who returns every twenty years to wreak mayhem. Perhaps it's the same scarecrow sitting lifeless in the field with the sack on its head, or the one in the barn (you'd think that once the curse was known you'd eliminate all potential threats, wouldn't you?). The rest is a hideously slow build to the inevitable scarecrow menacing climax, a welter of straw and pathetic attempts to escape.

Heavily borrowing from the Jeepers Creepers films, apart from Lister, who provides the movie's only non scenery chewing performance, this is as leaden as her previous offering, with characters uttering awful lines like "It's a house in the middle of nowhere. Of course there are going to be unexplained murders," and oodles of banal psychotherapy banter. Warren has no less than four films in post production with titles like Scarecrow Vs. Vikings, Vikings Vs Krampus and Cyborg Wives. But this will be my last dalliance with her cinematic career. I promise. No, really this time.

Demon (USA 2017: Dir Dallas King) Boasting rear cover art that to quote fellow lover of trash Gavin Whittaker "looks like someone took a photo of their mate waking up from a bender and photoshopped wings on his head," hopes were not high for this 67 minute (well 60 plus credits) US independent effort.

But Demon, with its tag line "When evil rises to destroy the earth," is not what it's advertised as (and you'll get no clues from the IMDB entry): in fact it's a collection of six short films which, much like any viewing of a shorts collection, is a mix of highs and lows.

The vaguely witty Demon's Dilemma (2012) features a demon on earth who mistakenly does a good deed and is turned into an angel (complete with halo) as a result; Devil Town (2016) has an obnoxious London estate agent (is there any other kind?) shown the existence of undercover demons all around him, They Live style, by a strange tramp he meets in a cafe, and includes a great twist; Little Soldier (2010) shamelessly rips off 1998's Small Soldiers (with about one hundredth of the budget) in a story about a small child whose constant bed-wetting infuriates his military father, but is helped to a dryer state by the animation of his collection of toy soldiers, who band together to successfully defeat a troll in the boy's closet; Incubus (2016) is a very short movie about a guy who is visited at night by a strange woman (so shouldn't that be 'succubus'?) - this is the film from which one of the stills on the back cover of the DVD is taken, except that the photo has indeed been photoshopped to make it more exciting; Van (2018) is one of the best of the lot; a short which uses Unfriended style split screen stylings, about two girlfriends who become separated after a party, one of whom finds out what really happened when she fell asleep at the wheel - clever end credits too; and finally we have Most Wanted (2011) a sci fi short rather out of place in the rest of the collection, about two teleporting cops trying to track down the villainess Bodega in a night club, a low budget combination of Tron and Strange Days, ambitious but not very exciting.

The film-makers involved probably won't be very impressed that King (who also directed the Little Soldier and Most Wanted shorts) has hacked up the movies, removing the titles and the end credits and bunching them together at the end. There's no link story between the films, so by rights King can't really take the directing credit, and he probably shouldn't have been so proud at announcing himself as editor, unless he did it blindfold. With garden shears.

The Siren (USA 2019: Dir Perry Blackshear) "That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." When a film opens with a quote from Nietzsche, it's generally not a good sign. But for once the use of his words is spot on, in this stunning movie that totally took me by surprise in its intensity, and builds on the director's 2015 feature They Look Like People.

Margaret Ying Drake is Nina, a once human creature who now lives in water. Heartbroken and cast out, she is variously named 'siren' and 'rusalka' but is doomed never to leave her aquatic prison, but to kill others in revenge. Evan Dumouchel is Tom, mute as the result of a watery accident, a man of the church who has rented a waterside cabin to collect his thoughts. And then there is neighbour Al (played by MacLeod Andrews), whose husband died in the water, and who seems similarly imprisoned on land, trying to make sense of it all.

Tom and Al strike up a friendship of sorts. Meanwhile Tom, who is now understandably afraid of swimming, meets Nina and mistakenly thinks she is another neighbour out for a dip. The two form a strange bond, her helping him conquer his watery fears, and a relationship of sorts blossoms. But when Al sees a charm around Nina's neck that once belonged to his husband, her true nature is revealed.

Some critics have suggested that Blackshear's movie, which premiered at Glasgow FrightFest earlier this year, is too slow, comparing it to other slowcore movies like Oz Perkins' recent output or David Lowery's 2017 flick A Ghost Story. But where those films were overly ruminatory, The Siren has a glacial pace but a steady directorial hand which manages the relationship between the three central characters perfectly. It's also beautifully shot, with an ethereal score by Kitka, a San Franciscan women's choral group. In a nice reversal, it is Tom who is the quiet character, with Nina - who would normally in a film like this be mute - oddly wholesome and chatty (this is really Drake's film; she spends 90% of the film in the water and wholly convinces as the enigmatic creature). A scene where Nina shows that she cannot fully leave the water, one foot remaining submerged, is both erotic and enigmatic, and there's some humour too (she dresses for Tom on a kind of aquatic date by wearing some earrings which she keeps in a watertight tin full of things she's obviously stolen from past victims).

The Siren is an elegant, sublimely paced film which really has no right sitting in the 'Supermarket Sweep' pile. Get yourself to a supermarket now and snap one up. It's a film of the year for me.