Voodoo Black Exorcist is really fucking bad. From the reverb drenched inner monologues to the constant and pointless panning on the (doughy) actors faces, the film is permeated by aura of suck disguised as 70s grindhouse stylings. What I think is most frustrating about the film is that, despite the unnerving awkwardness of the filming/editing style, the film still feels like a poverty row horror flick. In fact, it inexplicably brought to mind 1941's King of the Zombies. The unnecessarily abrupt ending in particular reminded me of older B-movies.
Typically I would start a review with some sort of plot summary, in this case it almost feels irrelevant, as the small amount I could ascertain from the muffled dialogue and the chainsaw editing is derivative of lowest common denominator horror. The basic plot is cribbed from The Mummy and relocated on a cruise-ship. As a side note, has there ever been a decent horror film that has taken place on a boat? (The Ghost Galleon definitely doesn't fucking count).
So a Voodoo mummy (because those totally exist) is taken aboard this ship in a coffin that splits the difference between a traditional Subsaharan mask and an Egyptian sarcophagus. He falls in love with a reincarnation of his long lost blah blah blah, and eventually gets down to finding excuses to kill people. From there pedestrian direction takes us through another 40 minutes of so of drawn out cliches until King Tut with a skin infection is trapped in a cave and is immolated (along with his romantic interest) by a rookie cop with a flamethrower. Mercifully we are almost immediately greeted with "The End", although, expectedly the cut is awkward (almost as poorly executed as the "End" of Kung Fu Zombie).
This is the second film I've seen (and reviewed) by director Manuel Cano. His previous film, The Swamp of the Ravens was quite a bit of fun, had a great off-kilter atmosphere, and set precedents for later films like Reanimator. Voodoo Black Exorcist… well, its really fucking bad.
Not so much the poster that would appear on an actual grindhouse,
more of the kind of dvd cover you would see in a bargain bin.
Who is Catherine Miles? The answer would appear to be that she is a marketing gimmick, intended in all likelihood to draw in filmgoers who bought into similar "based on a true story" hype that Amityville, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Snuff and Cannibal Holocaust benefitted from. In fact the film itself fits snuggly into the genre of Italian pre Blair Witch experiments in verisimilitude derived from Ruggero Deodato's famous 16 millimeter excursion into animal cruelty, human torture and social commentary.
The film is constructed as an exhibition of evidence in a hilariously fake trial, complete with pompous commentary throughout and the prosecution occasionally yelling "Objection your honor!" While this kind of narration is common in low budget film-making, it never ceases to be obnoxious. I find it hard to imagine anything more irritating in the context of film than watching a character enter a room and the tacky disembodied voice of that actor announcing "I walked into the room". However, the biggest problem with providing this kind of commentary is that it is usually quite obvious that there are major errors that this post production bandaging was intended to fix. Without the narration the film is merely a procession of atrocities and banalities sandwiched between a bare bones revenge plot.
I have always found the idiosyncratic cliches of Italian Exploitation films to be hilarious. One trope in particular functions as an excuse to get actresses undressed: Any scene in which there are 'savages' of any kind (the cliche is that these are usually played by Italian men in wigs and grass skirts) the women are forced by some measure of extenuating circumstance to take their top off. My favorite example of this is in Bruno Matei's Hell of the Living Dead. Amazonia follows suit.
While there are a number problems with Amazonia, in certain contexts, its sentimental schlockiness has a certain charm, much less so with the bottom half of this double bill. In stark contrast to the saccharine pretensions of amazonia, SS Experiment Love Camp is extraordinarily nihilistic, at least as far as the subpar acting and special effects allow.
I have previously mentioned the history and evolution of the Italian nazisploitation sex-and-shock film; describing the devolutionary transition from Salo and The Night Porter to Red Nights of the Gestapo, SS Girls, and The Gestapo's Last Orgy. Recently I discovered a flaw in this description. A wider examination suggests that the Nazi exploitation genre originated in Germany. The use of this type of film as a device to dehumanize the Third Riech and separate (and thus absolve of guilt) the average citizen from those committing the atrocities was common in post war West Germany. Due to the apparent similarities of these films to the Italian pictures, in function and content, one can view a much more complex matrix of influence.
SS Experiment Love Camp is somewhat of an amalgam of the aforementioned three films. There is an attempt at the cruelty of The Gestapo's Last Orgy, the inept sexiness of Red Nights of the Gestapo, and a hint of the intended tackiness of SS Girls. There are even moments so insipid as to bring The Beast In Heat to mind (one thermostat control in particular evokes the slipshod, bubble-gum-and-duct-tape approach of that video nasty).
The film's plot involves various excuses to get (mostly) attractive italian women naked and shagging in front of Nazi mad scientists and their diabolical assistants. The driving force behind the picture (pardon the pun) is a Nazi Colonel who had his balls bitten off for unknown reasons and proceeds to order a number of failed transplant operations until he tricks the protagonist into undergoing this surgery, and since this is bad movie, it magically works this time.
This triggers the perfunctory murder of the SS Colonel and declaration of revenge against the Third Reich, not without some unintentional humor. May I suggest that "It… happens sometimes" is probably the worst thing you could say to someone who just discovered he's been rendered surgically impotent? Similarly "What I did… was very bad" is probably not the best thing to tell the man who you had tricked hours earlier into being castrated, and who now is aiming a machine gun square at your…. chest.
One could criticize the medical basis behind the plot, but I think that would be a matter of being unable to see the sloppily painted thermostat throughout the trees.The film aspires to true nastiness, but ultimately falls as limp as the colonel's pecker.
Sexploitation. The kind of ultra softcore that could only be appealing to my confused 12 year old self. And appealing it was. I remember a lot of covers like this as I pretended to pass through the section of my local videostore that, from my memory, seemed to specialize in real-life gore videos and these half-animated-naked-women-on-the-cover movies. I really wish I could remember the titles of some of the films that seduced/repelled me as a child. I find it impressive that a few of these films may have escaped the internet (and my memory... although admittedly this is not the case with Veronica 2030). Interestingly, the same New Hampshire rental joint I used to frequent as an adolescent is now selling all of its vhs. I thought I had bought out the stock 2 years ago, but inexplicably they had more when I returned from Oakland this summer. The woman at the counter didn't know what the prices were, and seem surprised that I could purchase them, which leads me to think that perhaps I am the only one buying these.
I've failed to write a post for two months, so bear with me. Fashion, hair, and make-up were the reasons I was initially drawn to italian cinema. My fondest childhood moments were spent watching 1970s Indian films. When Ryan introduced me to non-new wave Italian cinema, I noticed elements of 1970s Bollywood style and current trends in fashion. So I continued watching.
The '70s was a time for great hair. "Cold Eyes of Fear" is a giallo set in "swinging" London but the look is irrefutably italian. The mullet has popped up as a trend in the past 10 years. Though it has disappeared in most respects, all-womens' colleges the world-over continue to adopt this super-styled mullet. Here are his and her mullets:
Make up is a hard subject to discuss, because I don't know how to use it. But I know what looks good when I see it.
Here are some examples of excellence in face painting:
This screenshot is from Dario Argento's "Inferno." This incredibly attractive female engages the camera for a few minutes with her bewitching good looks and her cat. What adds to her allure is her smokey eye make-up and smoldering tinted lips, without which she would just be some girl in a classroom with a cat. This changes the scene from weird to seductively engaging.
This photo is a still from "Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion," which prominently features women with intricately painted faces and bourgeois outfits. The film is more of a mystery than a typical giallo. This photo features a look from the 1970s that will likely never be revived: the curled piece of sideburn that juts into the face. I've noticed many women in Italian and Indian cinema during this time with hair shorn to sideburns to achieve the look.
In addition to being reviewed on Whip Zooms and Stinger Chords, "The Perfume of the Lady in Black" should be praised for its use of neutral clothing to turn Mimsy Farmer into an ethereal pixie-ish beauty. Note: All of her outfits are repeatedly re-designed for wear today by major labels and chain retail stores alike.
Here her angelic and menacing beauty is juxtaposed with her lanky friend's "dated" 70s look.
Note: Many people would not dress like the lady to the right today. The author is not included in this category of people.
This entry on fashion would be incomplete without the inclusion of Daria Nicolodi. She is not only a brilliant writer and actress, but she has a strong sense of style. Her style mixes menswear and silky fabrics in a way entirely inspirational. Designers today often try to seek this balance in masculine-feminine apparel, but few women can carry it off like Ms. Nicolodi.
This week's VHS was acquired down the street from the apartment Sana and I recently moved into. I really enjoy the modifications locally owned (I'm not going to say, Ma and Pop, nobody says that outside of Rue Morgue columns) stores used to make to their cassettes.
We found this among a variety of films we had been meaning to watch for a while. I was holding out for the criterion laseridisc, but I think this is just as attractive, in its own way.
We've started a new feature on the blog to draw attention to some of the better VHS covers in our collection. This week's pick is Project Metalbeast, a film that unfortunately does not live up to its cybernetic werewolf premise (especially when practical effects were still used in low budget films). Luckily, you don't have to waste an hour and a half of your life watching bad actors pretending to be scientists debating the morality of werewolf cybernetics. Instead, feast your eyes on this hulking beast of box-art cheese.
During my four day sprint across the country, I found myself getting an oil change in the mountains of Utah. While there, I decided to look up the filming locations of troll 2. I remembered it had been somewhere in Utah, but I was totally unfamiliar with the area. By an odd bit of luck, I found that I was only about 30 miles away.
It is an odd experience to know you are near a location you have only observed through mediated experience. I found myself attempting to impose Nilbog on this quirky, but mostly uninteresting midwest town. After interviewing a few local people, and eventually resorting to showing around pictures on my phone, I found myself in the old commercial district. Here are a few photos of my experience.
'Kill me now' ... is Goblin spelled backwards!
'125 North' ... is Goblin spelled backwards!
I think you get the point
You crazy boy? We're all vegetarians here in Nilbog.
Claudio Fragasso is an oddly important figure in Italian filmmaking. What his films represent in his country's cinematic industry in some sense overshadow his actual role in. His film Troll 2 is a cult obssession and often viewed as the pinnacle of a crisis in Italian cinema and exemplary of the accumulated gimmicks and cost cutting procedures that had been introduced by an industry barely limping forward since the early 1980s.
Nightkiller is an odd film. I have no evidence to back it up (other than general trends in Italian exploitation cinema), but it seems like the script was intended as a psychological thriller, with certain superficial elements changed so as to capitalize on the success of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. It is the only way I can explain the incongruity of a realistic (at least by Fragasso standards) story of a murdering rapist and the amnesic woman he's stalking, with the fog and expressionist shadow scenes of a Freddy Krueger look-alike ramming his claws through a series of arbitrary victims (in the same manner, every time).
Literally the Same Way...
Every Time
Granted, there are scenes showing the (night?) killer taking off his mask, but much like Friday the Thirteenth Part V this is a film that wants to have its cake and it eat it too. If the killer is simply someone in a mask, how is he able to punch through people with his (apparently rubber) claws and how is he able to summon the fog? To be fair, the "fog" I'm referring to could easily be the grain and bad compression from the vhs to DVD transfer. More on that later.
I think I would have enjoyed the film more if he had simply tried to plagiarize Nightmare on Elm Street. He is much more successful with supernatural material, and his often bizarre understanding of American film comes through in even his most derivative pictures. The Fragasso penned Hell of the Living Dead is a perfect example of the this.
I don't intend to attack his filmmaking or insult Fragasso. I actually think his work is impressive in its own odd way. Troll 2 remains one of my favorite films, and one that I can watch repeatedly. He has very odd sensibilities and I think that if he spent more of his time as a director working on horror films, he might have released a few more whacked out classics. Films like Nightkiller are perhaps not as interesting because he's working with more serious material.
Another issue with the film in its current form is that the only available copy comes from a terrible vhs dub. I personally would liked to have seen a decent dvd copy of the film, or even a vhs that looks slightly less noisy and washed out. The burnt in subtitles, do not improve the experience.
Cats are prominent images in a plethora of giallo films of the 1970s. This list is not exhaustive, but there are some moments of animals acting as feline omens or scary tricksters.
There are two major trends; when cats appear at climactic moments and when cats appear at moments of quiet which allude to the horrors about to come.
Cold Eyes of Fear (1971)
This orange cat appears during a climactic moment of horror. The male protagonist is searching the premises for the killer he believes is present. A booby trap is placed at the door to catch the killer exiting a room, but this cat trips the chord instead.
The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)
This cat appears at the patio door of this couple's apartment at a moment of quiet when thingsjust start getting weird. The couple then stops what they are doing, goes to the door and lets the cat enter. For several moments, the camera focuses on the cat's eyes--so as to allude to the common belief that cats (or domestic animals) can sense danger.
Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye (1973)
Aside from what is given in the title, this cat plays an important interpretive role in this movie. The cat is entombed with the body of a murdered woman (supposedly an enchantress), but comes back to creep through. Voyeuristically, from its view we see the drama unfold. Not only does the cat ominously creep around in the background, but it attacks and interacts with the characters strangely.
Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)
I previously reviewed this movie for the blog, but failed to mention the creepy leering cats. First, there is a cat that attacks Silvia (Mimsy Farmer) which belongs to an old female neighbor. Throughout the film, the old woman carries around the cat; and in a later scene repeatedly asks Silvia is she knows of the cat's whereabouts. If you remember, I mentioned that several of the people with whom Silvia associated were in on some fake "African voodoo" plan to coerce Silvia's actions. This moment further drives his paranoia.
Additionally, a male elder neighbor whom she regarded as father-like figure, feeds his cats the remains of her young friend who lives in the building. Here are these casts feasting on her fingers
Inferno (1980)
Dario Argento makes the image of a witch with her cat look scary. In this film, Mark, the male protagonist sits in a lecture hall amongst several students wearing headphones and reading sheet music. An enchanting young woman with lustful eyes and an open pandering mouth sits diagonally from him, petting her cat and staring bewitchingly in his direction. Wind and light aim themselves at her as she bewitches him in this manner. After this scene, Mark begins his discovery of the Three Sisters' legacy in a most horrifying manner.
Swamp of the Ravens is a film for which my experience is clouded with nostalgia. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) it is not due to a previous viewing of the film itself, but rather my conception of it, along with a semi-accurate description and a few minuscule images. Before the irritating (although admittedly helpful in acquiring certain out-of-print titles) resurgence in interest in films where the dead get up and kill (the people they kill, get up and kill…), there were very few places from which one could obtain information about the more obscure films featuring the undead.
Regardless, as a thirteen-year-old embarking on yet another trail of hyper-focused interest, a now defunct website (Undeadfilms.com) became the center from which much of my cinematic and monetary activity spread. With the exception of the myriad SOV pictures released throughout the 90s, Swamp of the Ravens remained the the last film from my original investigations I had yet to watch.
The film itself is comparable to the more minor entries in the Italian exploitation cannon. Attempts to brand the picture as "no-budget" or "amateur" misrepresent the film, at least within the context of general exploitation film-making. The techical crew apparently had some experience in these pictures (the same cannot be said for the actors or scriptwriter, but to an extent this simply made the film more entertaining). To my admittedly unrefined perception the shot composition was mostly well balanced, and the lighting was far from terrible.
Other general descriptions of the film tend to describe the nonsensical aspects of the plot, and its apparent convolution. Perhaps I am jaded, but I personally found the film a fairly straightforward Reanimator rip-off with occasional endearing weirdness.
What confused me much more than the plot was the bizarre english soundtrack. Voices are rarely anywhere close to matching the lips supposedly generating them, implying (or rather directly stating, out of sync) that the film was redubbed. However, there are elements that strongly suggest the film was made in English. Most prominently this manifests itself in a song already guaranteed a spot on the next WZ&SC mixtape. The track in question is sung to the Mad Scientist's inevitable Frankenstein bride, as the singer (involved in a love triangle with the other two) completes a world tour apparently consisting of several people standing around in a room at every show. Sample lyrics include "Don't stare at me with those eyes of horror/you've thrown out my love for you to the houndogs" "The blood flowing lifeless from your body/Wherever you find yourself I wish you were dead/My own Robot, my own my lady"
If in fact this track was added in the dubbing process it implies a more extensive translation process than one would expect this type of film to get. It also begs the question, What was he singing in the Spanish dub?
Aside from a flubbed conclusion and a rather hilarious scene where the police tracking star Ramiro Oliveros by employing an instrument used more famously by a very different Oliveros (A sine wave oscillator, and Pauline, respectively), the film isn't particularly remarkable. The mis-en-scene surrounding the mad doctor's hut is effective, and the film moves along at a glacial, but not insufferable pace. For completists and weirdos, luckily, we fit into both categories.
*Note this is a Spanish/ Ecuadorian co-production, not the usual Italian exploitation we generally cover.
**Apparently SOTR contains real autopsy footage. I honestly couldn't tell what was an effect and what wasn't, adding a degree of ambiguity/verisimilitude. Either way, you've been warned.
The Perfume of the Lady in Black is incorrectly labeled as a giallo film, though it is more of a psychological thriller a la Polanski's Apartment Trilogy (Repulsion, the Tenant, and Rosemary's Baby).
This movie took some of the more awesome elements of the Apartment Trilogy and made them more italian. The film centers around a socially and emotionally awkward pretty blond (Mimsy Farmer) who has flashbacks and hallucinations related to a lady in black—her mother.
After she encounters a black man (no, I'm not the racist one), who talks to her about “African” witchcraft in his garden (which looks exactly like a jungle), she begins her descent into madness. Not only is she really disturbed by him, but she begins to hallucinate about her past. Ultimately, it is revealed that she killed her mother, though she does nothing to recognize this act other than continue to kill people. You never see her internalize what she did, which I found interesting. She begins to regress into her childhood self, the character Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. At the point of absolution in this form, she throws herself off of her building while dressed her mother's black dress—much the way she pushed her mother off of their building years ago. You see no moment of regret or pain as a result of the murder- only as a result of other incidences, like seeing a man other than her father have sex with her mother. So, when the moment of absolution happens, you don't really know what she really resolving.
What's interesting is that her paranoia was quite reasonable-unlike in Repulsion or the Tenant, when the characters' paranoia is self-inflicted and unfounded. It appears that the neighbors, acquaintances and shopkeepers are really in on this witchery that relates back to the Black Man. What strikes me is that, in the end, all of the people she killed or encountered stab and eat her lifeless body. This confuses the shit out of me, as I assumed they were all actually dead.
Best parts of the film:
1. Seeing Mimsy Farmer's really black pubes contrasting with her really blonde hair
2. The final feast.
This is a project I've been working on for about a year. I guess its in the same spirit of other work I create in the sense that I tend to take in a lot of media, and as a way to get around annoying the hell out of everyone around me, I often will find ways to filter these things back out (with varying degree of influence).
I'm moderately proud of this, but at some point I would love to spend more time collecting music from my dvds. I did my best to get decent versions of the songs when possible, but a few I had to nab off youtube. Some of these I took from other sites or soundtrack albums, but there are a few gems that aren't anywhere on the net.
I'm planning on doing another compilation in the future, which would go several degrees deeper into the underground. Hopefully with a few from my VHS collection. Ok. Thanks. Enjoy.
The word “Epic”, in today’s young person’s vernacular, has recently taken on a slightly new meaning. It has taken its place next to that old, square “Neat”, the particularly West Coast American “Awesome”, the now dated “Fresh”, “Hype” and “Dope” and of course, the perennial “Cool”. Personally I love this newish slang status of “Epic” and enjoy using it, perhaps as a slightly sarcastic acknowledgement of my age. Making an “Epic batch of nachos” and saying a good night’s sleep was “Epic!”
Yet the word in its more classic use, has an ancient or timeless quality that comes to mind, especially when discussing the music of composer Ennio Morricone, and particularly his soundtracks to the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone. And “Spaghetti Westerns” don’t get any more “Epic” than Leone’s “Once Upon A Time In The West”
So, in the classic definition of Epic, what do we think of? Big and or long come to mind, and in re-viewing this film for this brief essay I will, perhaps regrettably, concur that it is long. Other words that come to mind when thinking of an epic are “myth” and “archetypes”. These are well-established concerns of the Western as a genre. Who is an archetypical cowboy? Why, Clint Eastwood of course, who made him that archetype? One could surely argue Leone. Even the phrase “Once Upon A Time…” suggests something that has always been. A legend.
George Lucas - John Williams, Tim Burton – Danny Elfman, Alfred Hitchcock – Bernard Herrmann, Federico Fellini – Nino Rota, David Lynch - Angelo Badalamenti, The Coen Brothers - Carter Burwell, etc. The history of cinema is graced (or littered) with classic, successful and /or safe pairings of director composer relationships. This is not anything startling; when people work well together why not continue on future projects? Like members of a band minus the tour van nastiness. But I offer that no other pairing in the history of cinema has been as rich as that of Leone & Morricone. That’s a hell of a thing to say, I know. But nowhere else in film, except perhaps in the Bollywood musical, does one find such an awareness and reverence of what has come before and what is “new” and an almost playful willingness to mix those two. Sure, composers and film makers have taken chances, but I’d like to offer that no one has taken chances and been as triumphant as Morricone has in the realm of what he works in, that of conventional, Western cinema (western here not referring to genre).
When one thinks of Morricone’s soundtracks to Leone’s film, generally one can call to mind the theme to “The Good Bad and The Ugly”. Recently in conversation with a colleague the question was raised if the human voice was used in soundtracks, and someone replied “not much, mostly as ethereal female soprano”. Morricone’s soundtracks are riddled with voices, and not just ethereal female sopranos, though he does use those in spades. All sorts of odd guttural male sounds, indecipherable, “native”, ceremonial chanting, wordless, hymnal melodies sung by boy choirs, etc. These almost play out as a combination of sound design as well as a memorable, though wordless, lyric. Most can mimic on cue the male voices of “The Good Bad and The Ugly”, but what are the actual words? Are they English? Italian? Native American? Are they actually words? Are they even human voices?
Morricone’s use of electric guitar is groundbreaking, it’s not rock music, and it’s not referencing “the youth problem”, and yet it has the power associated with Link Wray or Jimi Hendrix. Much like the greats of rock and roll, these guitars contain a distortion and thuggish purpose that I imagine, in the 1960’s held a degree of coolness (Or epicness) that perhaps has become, like that era’s rock, “classic”.
This appropriation and/or reference of the big, rock and roll electric guitar sound resonates as an important aspect that cannot be overlooked in postwar international art: the exchange of US 1950’s pop culture. A kind of force feeding took place after WWII, Hollywood movies, pop and rock and roll music, all consumed by the occupied territories as well as the destitute postwar axis countries reeling from the gutting effect of having its major cities bombed to smithereens, financial ruin and the general change from a rural, agricultural lifestyle to the cosmopolitan that the modern world demanded. US pop cultures almost seemed like an opiate that could sooth these changes and perhaps increase desire for more, an escape. What comes, in return, from theses countries is a sort of response. Reverent yet critical. By the time of the mid 1960’s, the US had been exposed for its “man behind the curtain” qualities with the growing Vietnam war. This coupled with the entertainment industry’s seemingly endless parade of recycled, tired ideas like the Elvis movies, one more insipid than the last allowed for a cultural hole to be filled. It’s been well established that a country like Britain took to the American Blues and Rock and Roll and turned it around to sell back to states. Similarly, I offer the French New Wave’s love for American Noir cinema was a response to their love for this particularly US post war genre. (Of note: noir directors and composers often being refugees from Europe just increased the Mobius strip of this Atlantic cultural exchange, but that’s another essay). Meanwhile, Japan with its nuclear fallout took an American classic monster movie such as King Kong and gave us back Godzilla, some suggesting that the monster IS in fact analogous to the States. And the Italians? With their penchant for machismo, and an operatic grandness and simplicity of good vs. evil, they gave us back the twisted and surreal Spaghetti Western. What was once low, pop art, through the heightened aesthetics of “Old Europe” becomes high art to the late 1960’s cinephiles.
I could not help but correlate Claudia Gorbman’s mention (in her book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music) of film music’s ability to create spatial depth to Morricone’s soundtrack to “Once Upon A Time In The West”. Depth of field plays a major role in Leone’s visual compositions. He is often cited as being influenced by Japanese cinema for its sense of composition, even as far as Kurosawa’s producers successfully suing the Leone’s production company for “A Fistful of Dollars” references to Yojimbo. Although it’s hard to argue against that particular case of influence, I feel that Leone has a particularly Italian aesthetic. A quality of his depth of field can be seen in both ancient Roman architecture and in Di Cherico’s seminal work. This element is of course echoed further with Fellini’s films. A certain dreamlike/surrealistic quality established by extreme perspective and figures in space. Perhaps nowhere can one get a more surreal sense of proportion and perspective then in the American South Western desert. While Leone captures the sun cracked crevices of the actor’s face in close up, he simultaneously layers in the image of the Navajo cave dwellings and South Western plateaus and canyons made iconic by the likes of John Ford.
Morricone’s score resonates with this expansiveness as well as a certain claustrophobic quality. Besides adventurousness in instrumentation, Morricone seemed excited by the new development of using the recording studio as an instrument itself. In the “Man With The Harmonica” theme, for example, the harmonica itself has a processed sound, as if it was put through a tape reverb machine. This reverb not only echoes the vastness of the landscape, but also harkens to memory. The repeated loop of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica is like the gadfly in Io’s head, bouncing off the walls of his skull & driving him mad with grief and revenge.
The intentional lack of music in the opening scene also suggests newness to approach. It’s reported that various ideas of music were offered but none worked. As a result one can perhaps argue that there is a John Cage influence, which may seem annoyingly handy in the context of my interest in contemporary/20th century composers. Handy but defendable, Morricone is, of course, familiar with Cage’s theories; I doubt that any young composer in Rome in the 1960’s was not. It’s a city with a history of being open & supportive to new music, well documented on the Cramps’ Nova Musicha series. Morricone himself was part of a groundbreaking improvising collective of composers, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. I’m not sure how much Morricone was involved in the sound design “Once Upon A Time In The West’s” opening title sequence, but I would not be surprised if Morricone was given a supervisory role in the sound design with Leone seeing the composer as such a driving force for his films, and this film in particular. So much so that Leone had Morricone compose & record the entire soundtrack to be played on set. This creative luxury is unusual and exceptional for a film composer. It was afforded by the large budget from Paramount Pictures following the success of the “Dollars Trilogy”. This on set broadcasting of the soundtrack was also no hindrance to the location sound since Italian cinema of this era NEVER used location sound. This constant ADR always added an additional surreal quality to Spaghetti Westerns to my young eyes & ears. “It’s dubbed, but these are English speaking actors?!? What’s going on here?” The lack of location sound greatly differentiates the Cageian qualities of the “natural” sounds in “Once Upon The Time In The West’s” opening versus the “true” location sound of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” seven years later by a fellow countrymen of the same generation.
Upon one full viewing of “Once Upon A Time In The West” we immediately get a sense of Morricone’s high regard of what Roy M. Prendergast calls in his book Film Music: A Neglected Art , the “monothematic score”: the use of one melodic theme to define a character. But here we have three main scores defining the three main protagonists; Cheyenne, Jill McBain & Harmonica. There may be one for the railroad baron and his lust for manifest destiny, but it escapes me now. Cheyenne’s is the “horse clopping”, slightly comic relief complete with banjo. Jill McBain’s is the closest we get to a traditional Hollywood score in this film, perhaps suggesting Hollywood’s “the whore with a heart of gold” character. The interesting thing about Harmonica’s theme is that it seems as if elements, primarily the electric guitar, are shared with Henry Fonda’s “against character” casting as the bad guy, Frank. This suggests that these two characters are intertwined, a ying yang (played out, of course with the iconic bad guy in black & good guy in light/white costumes).
I first saw this film home alone, as a child, flipping through the channels on a black and white TV. I stumbled upon it quite late in the film; I remember it as a “pan and scan” version before letterboxing on TV was as commonplace as it is today (adding yet another layer of surrealism coupled with the ADR). It was at the climatic, penultimate duel scene with Frank and Harmonica. My first thought was “Charles Bronson, a poor man’s Clint Eastwood” since both the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films were all the rage at the time. Though I’ve never seen either of any of those series of films, the Death Wish films always seemed seedier, cheaper. And Clint Eastwood, despite the crags always seemed conventionally handsome and American. Bronson seemed other, ethnic, and perhaps less handsome and more dangerous in the sense of conventional Hollywood language at the time. As the scene unfolds the flashback happens combining incredible music with the most brutal imagery. I had no idea what I was watching, and still am amazed by the audacity of this film and its soundtrack.
"One of the aspects that emerges in a study of this kind of cinema is a devolutionary trajectory running from a 'high' or artistically informed culture (which is de facto bourgeois) to a more vernacular cinema that 'reduces' the artistic and intellectual complexities of the antecedents into base forms of exploitation. Following from that, however, when these films are placed within a cinematic historiographic context, a different discourse opens revealing how the Nazi sexploitation cinema engages with the historical period it exploits."
- Ernest Mathijs, and Xavier Mendik. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945.
The above quote, for me epitomizes an interpretation of the Italian film industry I've found to be very characteristic. It has been especially helpful in explaining to those unfamiliar with Italian exploitation cinema certain incongruities of style or content. Typically I use the entire quote because it implies, when taken as a whole, the ambiguities which complicate this process of exploitation of themes. To view every excess or irregularity as the direct byproduct of consumer demand, or capitalist impulse, would be to overextend the scope of a useful model for understanding the seemingly absurd choices made in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s and 80s.
Definitions tend to be necessarily ambiguous, but I tend to view the transition from genre films to exploitation films beginning in earnest with the cannibal cycle. One of the features that I use to define exploitation is the aforementioned derivative nature of the majority of the projects. There is a sense that to be commercially successful, a film must exploit the aspects of another picture that made it commercially successful (whether or not this is actually the case).
One of the myriad reasons Nazi Sexploitation cinema is so reviled is that there is a sense, in viewing these pictures, that the directors looked at films like Salo or The Night Porter and thought to themselves "This could be improved with more exposed breasts". There is no concern that the subject itself is serious, although perhaps this reflects the displeasure of the filmmakers with their subject rather than their lack of knowledge with regard to it.
If one accepts the concept of a devolutionary track with regard to exploitation cinema the lineage of a film such as Red Nights of the Gestapo would be Salo and Salon Kitty. The film also follows a similar path to Bruno Mattei's SS Girls, with a shift in the ratio of violence to titillation (more breasts, less torture).
Both Red Nights and Mattei's film start with a conspiracy against the German reich, and a bordello constructed to ensnare those complicit. Whereas Mattei displays a certain self aware goofiness in his Charlie's Angelsesque gaggle of females, Red Night's director Fabio De Agostini (whose sole credits as a director include this film and two others, one of which contains the tagline "The Remarkable Story of a Small Boy Who Belonged to a Giant Dog!") displays his remarkable ability to retain knowledge from Pscyhe 101 by having each of the prostitutes chosen for pseudo-Freudian traits. One of the members of the "German Intelligentsia" had his mother die at a young age, naturally he gets a lactating woman. Another is a gluton; he recieves multiple women at once. There's even a disturbing bit where one of the men from the group misses his daughter, so the SS acquire a young (think six-year-old young) girl. Luckily all they do is sit on a bed for about a minute of screen time, before he gets shot by the SS.
Aside from a sub-plot about an SS officer whose wife makes puzzles of Hitler (they had those in the Germany of the 1940s?) and the discovery of a wireless microphone hidden in a cigarette lighter (once again, they had those in the Germany of the 1940s?!), that's about all that happens. The SS captain (or officer, or whatever) tries to get information out of these "German Middle Class Intelligentsia", they force them to sign a piece of blank paper, and then the SS come in and kill everyone, including the SS commander.
Cut to a freeze-frame with an arbitrary fact about the German-Russian conflict, and then "The Sleep of Reagon Creates Monsters". Yeah. The last time I saw a film with a typo that prominent was Ultra Warrior (major points if you've sat through that one).
So that's it. I didn't particularly like the film, but I wasn't as tough a sit as, say, Gestapo's Last Orgy. The phony bologna psychologist and his untreated sadists, masochists, and nymphomaniacs, are good for a couple laughs, however, on the whole most of the humor is pretty terrible (flatulence humor seems, oddly, to be a common trait of the general nazi-exploitation genre). Overall there was nothing particularly offensive about it (unless you are unsettled by the presence of Italians in Nazi regalia pretending to shag), but there's also little to recommend it. If nothing else, the film is exemplary as a generic case of Italian nazisploitation filmmaking.
“Who Saw Her Die?” and “Short Night of Glass Dolls”
Aldo Lado directed these two giallo films, both of which display Hitchcockian influence in visual styling and theme (birds?). Sadly, they drag on forever. Despite fairly interesting plots, they both dwell on the search for the killer which takes few creative detours. Not to mention, these movies both suffer from a lack of beauteous hair and make-upping that many Giallo from the 1970's do so well.
“Who Saw Her Die?” (1972) follows a mustachioed father's search for his red-headed daughter's killer. The daughter dies 30 minutes in, so the first half-hour shows her establishing small but creepy bonds with older men. This film was set in Venice, so Lado takes waterway travel and tries to keep it interesting---the typical movie car chase scene is done by boat! Unfortunately, the next third follows the dad while he interviews all of the older men with whom the daughter established the creepy bonds, which is where the film drags on. The highlights are: the aviary death scene and the religious plot (which you only really discover in the end).
“Short Night of Glass Dolls” offered an interesting variation on a typical giallo set-up, the film opened with the usual discovery of a body, but the body belonged to the protagonist. It is at his supposed death, that the film begins. At first it seems that he is only going to explore the circumstances that led to this predicament, but luckily those circumstances involved exploring the disappearance of his toothy girlfriend. Like “Who Saw Her Die?” the movie's protagonist is a fairly handsome mustachioed fellow, and also like “Who Saw Her Die?” he spends the bulk of the film slowly but surely exploring all of the relationships that the female character established and the actions she took prior to her disappearance.
Though this doesn't seem like it should be as boringly long as it was, 3 out of the 4 people in my company fell asleep. Similar to the other film, the movie took interesting directions in the last 30 minutes of the film; featuring a weirdly spiritual orgy of naked, unattractive old folk (think: Rosemary's baby). Highlights of the film: the orgy/ritual scene, the Prague setting, and the ending. Note: Ryan disliked the ending.
I wish I could find more on Aldo Lado, because it is strange how he fits into Italian cinema. He is from a part of Italy that is now Croatia, so it is interesting to note how this difference in origin affects the casting, visuals, and plot devices he uses. Overall, his films are visually very beautiful and explore interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the pacing is quite painful and requires patience to get to the fun parts.
