Kino Lorber's THE APE reviewed

THE APE (1940, Kino Lorber, 62m 50s): There has been a recent spate of books about Bela Lugosi's so-called "Monogram Nine" but we mustn't forget that, before the Poverty Row studio gave Bela a call, Boris Karloff was placed under contract for a half-dozen Monogrammers - welcome work at a time when the Hays Office was doing their best to discourage the production of horror pictures. All but one of Karloff's Monogram pictures were mystery programmers in which he was rather imaginatively cast as the Asian-American detective James Lee Wong. The last one was the ringer, taking a turn toward the sort of "Mad Doctor" thrillers that Karloff had been making for Columbia Pictures around the same time. This was THE APE, directed by William Nigh (the maestro behind all five Mr. Wong pictures) and scripted by Curt Siodmak, then fresh from scripting BLACK FRIDAY for both Karloff and Lugosi over at Universal.

Though I don't think it's technically public domain, THE APE has been included in numerous PD presentations on home video and it has tended to look every day of its age, taken from battered 16mm prints and worse. This also goes for Retromedia's "Double Feature" Blu-ray disc of THE APE and PRC's THE BLACK RAVEN with George Zucco, of which an Amazon reviewer noted: "The print for THE APE is not any better than a typical standard DVD release of a public domain movie." Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray disc, on the other hand, is sure to astonish anyone previously familiar with the film and its past presentational woes; it's a brand new 2K master taken from a nearly pristine British release print preserved by the Library of Congress. While not absolutely spotless, it's at least 97% so, and a pleasing rejuvenation of this cheerfully implausible 63m melodrama. 

Karloff plays Dr. Bernard Adrian, a former scientific big shot who has retreated to a small town after being rejected by the medical association for experimenting on human subjects. Inspired by the plight of a polio-stricken young woman (Maris Wrixon) he's devoted to, he develops a spinal fluid serum that tests well on animals, so he takes the step of administering it to his human subject - with promising results. Unfortunately, said serum requires healthy spinal fluid from well people, who aren't likely to offer it willingly. In a simultaneous stroke of bad and good luck, a large gorilla escapes from a visiting circus, which breaks into Dr. Adrian's lab. He manages to kill it and (offscreen, of course) converts the carcass into an ape suit, which he dons before taking to the streets and juicing people's spines!

The idea is preposterous (the filmmakers seem cheerfully oblivious to this), the performances are competent and sometimes surprisingly sincere, and there's a charming, down-to-earth quality about the rustic, old-fashioned, small town setting with its muddle-headed elders, moon-faced young lovers, and obnoxious rock-throwing kids - and hey! There's an ape on the loose! With the film's newly restored gloss, it's now very obvious that the glass in the windows is some porto-form of Saran Wrap, but the ape (played by Ray "Crash" Corrigan) makes quite a good impression when he comes crashing through. An uncredited Philo McCullough is fun to loathe as the town's resident louse, and I. Stanford Jolley (one of my favorite bit players) turns up as the sadistic animal keeper at the circus, who gets to play a nice dramatic scene with Karloff. 

KL has added collectable "oomph" to the package by adding not one, but two audio commentaries by the ever-reliable Tom Weaver and Richard Harland Smith, respectively. Both are informative and witty but distinctively different. Weaver scoffs at much of the film but his love for the picture comes through in his careful attention to props, detail, and in the way he traces stock footage to its point of origin; he even traces the shingle outside Dr. Adrian's abode to its recycling in a later Monogram picture. Smith, on the other hand, takes a somewhat warmer, more humanistic approach, appreciating the movie on its own terms and showing particular attention to the players, not only their lives but their times. Both commentators point out little Buddy Swan as one of the neighborhood brats - his immortality as the young Charles Foster Kane in CITIZEN KANE came the following year - but I can't think of too many other points of redundancy. One can only wish that Olive Films' releases of VOODOO MAN and RETURN OF THE APE MAN had this kind of enthusiastic supplemental support.

     

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Arrow's WARNING FROM SPACE reviewed

Koji Shima's Daiei production Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru ("Space Men Appear in Tokyo," 1956) was not the first Japanese science fiction film - that honor might go to the early Toho production THE INVISIBLE MAN APPEARS, with Eiji Tsubaraya special effects, released in 1949 - but it was the first to be made in color. As a new transcontinental Blu-ray release from Arrow Films demonstrates with impressive clarity, it was a far more important film than was discernible to American audiences when AIP TV belatedly released it directly to television in moderately re-edited form as WARNING FROM SPACE in 1964. 

When stacked against Toho's kaiju eiga, with their inclination toward gigantic monsters and cataclysmic spectacle, WARNING FROM SPACE can seem almost quaint with a laughable alien design - but it was coming from a very different place. Anyone with a more than passing interest in science fiction cinema can recognize in its beautiful cinematography certain stylistic quotations from such classic American SF movies as INVADERS FROM MARS (1953) or THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1954), but it also brings its own bent to the idea of a benign alien visitation to intervene in Mankind's unknowing trespass into a dangerous scientific discovery. The "peaceful invasion" script by Hideo Oguni (surprisingly, the author of numerous Akira Kurosawa films, from THE SEVEN SAMURAI through RAN) certainly owes something to DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) but it also looks forward to such properties as the OUTER LIMITS episode "Soldier" (1964) or THE TERMINATOR (1984), in which emissaries from the future travel back to our time to disrupt the research presently in place to launch the world into global war. It's understandable why AIP-TV would retitle the film WARNING FROM SPACE but this sets the viewer up for disappointment, as it's anything but an aggressive film full of interplanetary spectacle. To the contrary, it's a charming, quiet, surreal film packed with marvelous, dream-like images.

Reversible inner sleeve art.

Often the butt of easy jokes, the aliens from the planet Paira are essentially a collection of starfish-like creatures with eyes at their centers, who communicate telepathically - via onscreen subtitles in the original, making the human's terrified reaction to them seem more disruptively loud and hysterical. They would never beat any of Toho's monsters in a contest, but they were designed by leading Japanese artist and graphic designer Taro Okamoto (credited as Color Designer), whose work is now the subject of an entire museum in Kawasaki and who would later design the Tower of the Sun for Expo 70. As Stuart Galbraith IV notes in his audio commentary, the Japanese did not share the American pursuit of realism in their special effects, able to admire the technicians' visual effects concepts for their innate ingenuity. 

Look closely at the text surrounding this French headline.

Though Galbraith counts it as a negative, I found Oguni's decision to eliminate the standard hero and heroine (given the absence of real stars) to focus instead on a more general response ultimately a worthwhile and successful experiment, and an interestingly democratic one. It's true that the film doesn't pause to dwell on any individual's backstory for very long, focusing instead on the widespread response to the situation at hand, but even so, the casting shows such acute sensitivity that every character is introduced looking already well lived-in; there is no one in the film's vast cast list that strikes a wrong note. To Western tastes, the idea of the aliens creating a human likeness for themselves after a celebrity showgirl may seem humorous, but the idea is not so far off from what Honda-san himself did with the Princess Selina character played by Akiko Wakabayashi in 1964's GHIDRAH, THE THREE HEADED MONSTER. In this case, the popular dancing showgirl Hikari Aozora is played by Toyomi Karita, who makes an impressive human vessel for the alien addressed as Ginko. 

The films are presented in their original 1.37:1 standard ratio with optional English subtitles. While the Japanese version is ravishing in contrast to the reddish 16mm TV prints which have represented the film here for so many decades, the restoration of the English version may be more impressive though it has been (I suspect) assembled from the same pictorial elements. The bump up from 16mm to 35mm HD is stunning from the opening title card. As you might expect, the film's dubbing distorts some of the film's original meaning and it's not quite so coherent as the original, but for many of us, it's the version we grew up with, for better or worse, and its inclusion here is absolutely welcome. Theatrical trailers and a photo gallery are also included.

The commentary by Stuart Galbraith IV - a widely-published authority on Toho Studios, Akira Kurosawa and the kaiju eiga generally - is identified on the packaging as a "select scene commentary," which is not quite accurate as he doesn't address any scenes specifically and there are no programmed stops to help us jump forward or backward to desired topics. Galbraith has a pleasant speaking voice and friendly delivery and speaks continuously for roughly an hour, then stops. While his research is trustworthy, the substance of his talk boils down to a lot of lists - in this case, lists of names, titles, and credits in Japanese. For a commentary that runs short, this is a bit too much - and also too little. His pronunciation is fine but such lists are not very helpful without some additional context brought into it, and are best when left to the printed page. I was also frankly disappointed that he tends to shrug the film off when he makes personal remarks; it is clearly a sincere work crafted with some artistry and it's one that could have benefitted from an observer more willing to engage with its values toward a useful understanding. Fortunately, more help in this regard comes in the 30-page color booklet included with this release, which offers a solid, perceptive overview of the production and Okamoto's involvement by Nick West and a close study of the English version by David Cairns, who tracked down the names of everyone who dubbed it, thanks to inside info from Arianne Ulmer Cipes, the daughter of filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer and the widow of the track's producer/director Jay Cipes. All well worth reading.  

Arrow's WARNING FROM SPACE streets on October 13. It should be noted as one of this year's outstanding film restorations, a thoroughly refreshed presentation that should raise its estimation among science fantasy's fans and historians, young and old. 

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LENZI/BAKER: SO SWEET, SO PERVERSE reviewed

Though Umberto Lenzi's second Carroll Baker giallo, SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE, finds the director working once again with cameraman Guglielmo Mancori, editor Eugenio Alabiso, and composer Riz Ortolani, it has a totally different feel than its predecessor ORGASMO. Everything that was suggestive of a burgeoning auteurist touch in that picture is suddenly missing: the taut, insistent use of zoom-ins and zoom-outs, the extreme close-ups, the conscious emphasis on comic-strip-like compositions, the elastic studies in depth, even the clever use of diegetic music. You'll find none of that here. Instead, Lenzi couches this film in static images of impact, more telling art direction, extended takes, and a more languid, even downbeat soundtrack that seems suitable to the taken-for-granted wealth and comforts of the main characters and their search for meaning and new sensations from a place of middle-aged, existential despair. It's not for no reason that the film's theme song is called "Why?"

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean Reynaud, a wealthy pharmaceutical baron, who has arrived at a sexual impasse with his wife Danielle (Erika Blanc) after only three years of marriage. He acts the past with just the right degree of amoral detachment, introduced driving a convertible through the streets of Paris with a shotgun available to view in the backseat. A tenant in an oversized building with an antique elevator and opulent, house-sized apartments, Jean overhears troubling activities going on in the apartment upstairs and finally rushes up to interfere with what sounds like a man beating a woman. He arrives to find the place seemingly empty, and he is drawn to exploring a converted church confessional in one of the front rooms, which opens to reveal an assortment of antiquated S&M props displayed against a red velvet drape. As he handles a small dagger, a bruised Nicole Perrier (Carroll Baker) re-enters the room. She's initially afraid of this new intruder but he slowly gains her confidence and they fall in love - yes, it's a bit too sudden to take such admissions seriously, but what's really going on between these two is more complicated than what they're willing to admit. Nevertheless, in declaring himself Nicole's knight in shining armor, Jean puts himself on the wrong side of Klaus (Horst Frank), a professional photographer who has long dominated Nicole in a relationship driven by fear and submission. Hey, it beats being rich and bored. 

The major differences between ORGASMO and SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE boil down to three other crew principals: the first is screenwriter par excellence Ernesto Gastaldi, who initiated the Carroll Baker gialli with 1968's THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH, directed by Romolo Guerrieri, which likewise shared the remaining two principals, producers Luciano Martino and Sergio Martino (Luciano's younger brother, who initially served as production manager). DEBORAH was likewise edited by Alabiso, but had a different cameraman (Marcello Masiocchi) and composer (Nora Orlandi). As one might expect given these returning key players, SO SWEET... is something of a return to Guerrieri's earlier style, which Sergio Martino himself would repeat and claim more or less as his own when he took over the family's gialli reins in 1970 with THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH aka BLADE OF THE RIPPER. This raises certain questions about how much control over the film's look and style Martino may have exerted, given that he was the persistent element. Lenzi's handling of both films is consistent and professional but the touches often credited to directorial guidance - the look and character of a film - are not.

In retrospect, there is a feeling about ORGASMO that its exciting visuals were employed to emphasize its Youth vs. Age theme and also to inject as much juice as possible into a thin and somewhat mechanical plot. SO SWEET..., on the other hand, has the confidence to let Gastaldi's pleasingly involuted script dazzle us with its own ingenuity; the sense it evokes of a smooth, anesthetizing ride underscores the privilege and restlessness of characters in search of excitement, however potentially dangerous. Lenzi himself was approaching the hallmark age of 40 when he made these pictures and he felt, in some ways, that his directorial career was only beginning to find its footing with ORGASMO. The protagonist of SO SWEET... has no wish to prolong his youth with young companionship - he's interested in women of his own age - but, at the same time, its entire constellation of characters seems hellbent on rejuvenating themselves with the spontaneity of incautious and irregular behavior. It should be noted that Spanish genre film favorite Helga Liné also appears in the supporting role of a colleague's wife, with whom Jean nearly has an affair.    

Neither Trintignant's hero nor Baker's masochistic heroine are all they seem, and - thanks to Gastaldi's pleasingly tricky script - saying that much doesn't even begin to qualify as a spoiler. The film's great revelation is Erika Blanc's performance, one of her best; Danielle starts out as the proverbial iceberg, emotionally numb and unresponsive to her husband, but in the last half hour her façade crumbles and we are shown the inner workings of an insecure, vulnerable, frightened woman laid bare. She just about steals the film, but this is also partly due to Baker's complementary performance, which dances with Blanc's in a pas de deux toward a quite different revelation. Nicole turns out to be the most masculine of the film's characters, with Trintignant registering as a confused but virile, essentially tender man. This film adds another facet to his extensive, underappreciated career as one of the icons of the European thriller, for such directors as Georges Franju, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Chabrol, Giulio Questi, and Bernardo Bertolucci. 

The greater auteurist imprint on this film belongs, I feel, to the Gastaldi/Martino/Martino triumvirate. It is very easy to step back from the present casting and mentally replace Blanc with Edwige Fenech, Baker with Susan Scott (Nieves Navarro), Horst Frank with Ivan Rassimov, and Trintignant with George Hilton - the repertory company who would soon step up to play and replay these figures in various different patterns in the Sergio Martino gialli of the early 1970s. This would suggest Lenzi as the most dispensable of all the main creative ingredients, but there's no shame in delivering a film to order, to serve as its trusted central facilitator rather than as another imposed personality. Of the two, I think ORGASMO is more visually exciting while the latter has the more palpable and daring story. The plot takes a daredevil leap around the 60m point that seriously risks alienating the viewer; the remaining half hour showcases the slow ratcheting of a mercilessly ironic postscript, before concluding with revelations quite other than those we are led to expect. For those viewers who can't resist thinking ahead and anticipating the turns still to come, this may result in a disappointing film, but when studied on its own terms, SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE is a handsome model of the post-DIABOLIQUE Euro thriller and harbinger of the more optically radical Sergio Martino gialli still to come.

The film has been beautifully restored with a 2K scan of its original camera negative and is available as part of Severin Film's region-free THE COMPLETE LENZI /BAKER GIALLO COLLECTION box set. The film is viewable in English and Italian versions with optional English subtitles; the English version is definitive as the lip movements show that all the actors were speaking English at least phonetically. The extras include excerpts from an airport interview with Lenzi, a brief 5m visit with Ernesto Gastaldi (who acknowledges the film's debt to Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES and doesn't seem to hold his own script in high regard), and a new audio commentary by DIABOLIQUE editor and critic Kat Ellinger, who delivers a well-organized, well-spoken and always interesting defense of the picture. It's possibly one of her best solo outings. 

   

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Severin's ORGASMO/PARANOIA reviewed

In both audio commentaries found on Severin Films' ORGASMO (aka PARANOIA, 1969; included in their COMPLETE LENZI/BAKER GIALLO COLLECTION box set), director Umberto Lenzi is mentioned as having a "hack" reputation, and while neither of them offers much of an explanation of why he's not, watching the images go by while listening is explanation in itself. It's not just the colors, which are noted, but the constant flow of images, which is like a dance distilled from glamorous women, glittering pools, elegant panning, shocks, surprises, tight close-ups of menacing eyes, sudden moves, the flutter of thrown magazine pages, zooms in, zooms out - and Lenzi and his cameraman Guglielmo Mancori put extra oomph into each shift of its gears, making the whole thing somehow more noticeable and appreciable as a mechanical construction - a kind of celluloid Ferrari. 

The four gialli collected in this set, all directed by Lenzi and starring American actress Carroll Baker - ORGASMO (1969), SO SWEET SO PERVERSE (1969), A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (1970), and the lesser-known KNIFE OF ICE (1972) - were mostly made just prior to Dario Argento's reinvention of the Italian thriller with THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of its US release this very week) so they do not always seem as relatable to the genus as one might hope, and I think this has a good deal to do with the disregard they've suffered. They aren't offspring of, say, Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964), but are actually more relatable to a whole spate of "women on the verge of a nervous breakdown" melodramas made in Hollywood from the postwar years through the 1960s. Susan Hayward made a number of these, encompassing Stuart Heisler's SMASH-UP: THE STORY OF A WOMAN (1947), Daniel Mann's I'LL CRY TOMORROW (1955), Robert Wise's I WANT TO LIVE! (1958), and even Mark Robson's VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967); as did Lana Turner with Douglas Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), Michael Gordon's PORTRAIT IN BLACK (1960), and David Lowell Rich's MADAME X (1966); and if Doris Day's turn in Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956) seems a little too lofty to qualify, her casting in David Miller's MIDNIGHT LACE (1960) is spot on. While these "mellers"were ultimately about survival, they were also fairly guilty of taking sadistic pleasure in showing how any well-meaning woman can be mercilessly beaten down and dragged through the mud - mostly the mud of her own natural desires mixed with a bit of bad luck. 

Though Hitchcock had little to do with this kind of movie, there are aspects in much of his work that dovetail into this fellow body of work quite nicely - the tendency toward international travel and intrigue, the flash of light on sudden knives, and of course those icy blondes (Vera Miles in THE WRONG MAN, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, Tippi Hedren in MARNIE) that dark circumstance does its very worst to thaw. You can certainly add to this legacy the past work of Carroll Baker, who after a supporting role in George Stevens' GIANT (1956), almost single-handedly defined a certain wing of Hollywood trash cinema with her starring roles in Elia Kazan's film of Tennessee Williams' BABY DOLL (1956), Irving Rapper's pious yet sensationalist THE MIRACLE (1959), Jack Garfein's SOMETHING WILD (1961), Seth Holt's STATION SIX SAHARA (1963) and, of course, Edward Dmytryk's film of Harold Robbins' THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964). All of these films show us, to some extent, about how far a glamorous woman can be ground down by circumstances and still rise back up with her self, if not her heart, intact. This is the wellspring that led to something like Lenzi's film, one of the first X-rated thrillers to be released in the United States under the title PARANOIA.

The rather shockingly titled ORGASMO casts Carroll Baker as as Kathryn West, a rich widow who returns after a retreat to a resplendent villa that looks like Rome but is apparently located in London. A former painter, she considers going back to her work but - despite the friendly guidance of her lawyer Brian Sanders (Tino Carraro, the Herbert Lom of Italian cinema) - instead retreats again, this time into alcohol (cue shots of a brace of never-ending J&B bottles), to avoid the fact that she spent too many years looking after a much older husband. When young Peter Donovan (Lou Castel) appears at her villa gates, asking for tools to help him repair his car, he gets invited in and proceeds to slowly take over, soon introducing his alleged sister Eva (Colette Descombes) into the increasingly sexual equation. Of course, three into two won't go, and what results is an extended mind game addressed by the two incestuous, with-it "siblings" against a woman who could just about be their mother but wants very badly to be young again. In this respect, ORGASMO is also directly related to predecessors like Joseph Losey's THE SERVANT (1964) and Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1968/released 1970). Especially like the latter, ORGASMO has scenes of isolated living, mutual bathing, orgiastic love-making, rock music bombardment, people getting dosed with LSD, and attempts to push the frontiers of identity, with Baker at one point sporting a wig that makes her look more like Descombes. (Neither commentary draws these connections.)

This film, and its variant, have never been privy to a truly acceptable home video presentation before, so we can safely say that Severin Films have given us the first opportunity to enjoy and process the film with accuracy in half a century. The disc includes both ORGASMO (the extended Italian version, viewable in Italian or English) and the American version PARANOIA (which is some 7m shorter, mostly minus a protracted ending that punishes the victors, yet incorporates noticeably more nudity). In her audio commentary for the former, Australian author and academic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas quotes Lenzi at length about how Baker was his favorite actress and a thrill to work with, and that she inspired him to new heights of achievement in his work. Of those who have written seriously about the giallo in English, Heller-Nicholas is one of the sharper knives in the drawer and her track is generally a model of how to juggle much-needed information, valuable translations of Italian materials, academic and gender insights, humor, and a charming delivery. Unfortunately she falls quiet for too much of the final third of the picture, coming back every few minutes to tell us what we're seeing, to crack wise, or to remind us she's still there. The second commentary, found under the PARANOIA cut, features SO SWEET SO PERVERSE: 50 YEARS OF ITALIAN GIALLO FILMS author Troy Howarth and MONDO DIGITAL's Nathaniel Thompson, who are so energized by the film and each other that they quickly (and in Thompson's case, I mean "Slow down a bit, man; we're not going anywhere") make full amends for the other track's early collapse. I described their commentary style here recently as "podcasty," and that still goes, but this is an especially engaging and lively example. After two versions of the film and one commentary track, and an archival Lenzi interview besides, I was ready to shut down, but they held my interest for the long haul.  

More LENZI/BAKER to come.

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50 Years Ago: Now Playing

     

CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH reviewed

IM SCHLOSS DER BLUTIGEN BEGIERDE ("In the Castle of Bloody Lust" 1969, Subkulture German import): Directed by German actor Adrian Hoven under the alias "Percy G. Parker," this Aquila Film production (co-produced by Hoven and co-star Pier M. Caminnecci and eventually released in English countries as CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH) was the fourth film in a series initiated with three Jess Franco films featuring much the same cast and crew: NECRONOMICON aka SUCCUBUS, RED LIPS - SADISTEROTICA aka TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS, and KISS ME MONSTER. By the time Franco had completed those three, NECRONOMICON had caught the attention and admiration of producer Harry Alan Towers, who invited Franco to step up to the experience of working with real stars and guaranteed international distribution on a series of films for him. (I suspect that Mr. Towers may have had something to do with bringing NECRONOMICON to the attention of American International, as they distributed his Commonwealth United releases and subsequently released it as SUCCUBUS through their adult subsidiary, Trans American Pictures.) Franco gladly took the bait and made 10 films for Towers over the next two years, only to discover at the end of his tether than he much preferred making films in a less expensive, freer way. Meanwhile, his former partners in Munich were left there to make the most out of their own success with this bizarre contemporary Gothic thriller, which doesn't credit Franco but certainly recycles the "mad scientist tries to revive half-dead daughter" scenario he introduced in THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF (1962), with Howard Vernon reprising the lead role - here reduced to supporting player prominence. 

Janine Reynaud and Howard Vernon.

Filmed in Austria at Burg Kreuzenstein, the same castle where Caminnecci would produce his last film (Freddie Francis' THE VAMPIRE HAPPENING, 1971) and where Mario Bava would later lens his splendidly atmospheric BARON BLOOD (1972), the story begins with a decadent bourgeois party thrown by playboy Roger de la Valière (Caminnecci, very much playing himself) where the aristocratic Baron Brack (Michel Lemoine) invites Vera Legrange (Janine Reynaud) and two other couples (including her sister Elena, played by Elvira Berndorff) to spend the weekend at his country home. Brack and Elvira arrive before the others and he takes advantage of their solitude to rape her, after which she flees to the nearest neighboring property, the castle owned by the present Count Saxon (Howard Vernon), who ends up playing host to the whole crowd when they come looking for her. The Count - the only living descendant of the original Graf Saxon, who was a notorious alchemist - is conducting experiments toward the reanimation of his long-dead daughter Katharina (Claudia Butenuth) and is shocked to see her living likeness among his young visitors. The film jumps back and forth in time, with ancient history sometimes inhabiting the same plane as the contemporary characters (who are shown as having played important past life roles in certain legends), and the sometimes soft-focus lensing shows that this distinct style introduced in SUCCUBUS may have had more to do with co-cameraman Jorge Herrero than Jess Franco.

Michel Lemoine and Reynaud. 

Married in real life in the most open way, Lemoine and Reynaud have a fascinating onscreen chemistry; it's not exactly a mutual attraction so much as a mutual fascination, and we can't help sharing it too. Lemoine (a true devotée of the fantastique who made his screen debut in a couple of José Benazeraf pictures and ended up directing French porn) had one of the most uncanny faces in Euro exploitation; he is handsome, but so extremely handsome that he borders on becoming another, more Satanic species. (In an ideal world, he would have played Prince Namor.) Reynaud is at once elegance incarnate but also has something unclassifiable about her, an insistently sexual yet ambivalent vibe that makes us wonder if she might be transexual or so attuned the female and the male within herself that she's asexual. Directors tended to keep them apart and in the arms of other actors (or adventurous producers), but when you see them together, one on one as it were, when they turn their eyes on other characters, you feel a distinct chill in the blood, a regal chill, that you sense might enjoy the power of deciding, with a mere gesture, whether you live or die - that they would laugh as you breathed your last. Here they both demonstrate their horseback-riding prowess, and Reynaud so dominates the early part of the film with her energy and her dancing, it's a bit disappointing that Vera becomes such a dishrag toward the third act. The same goes for Lemoine, who is so believable as the aristo libertine rapist, and yet he's knocked off his pedestal in the most humiliating fashion - by a woebegone actor in a moth-eaten bear suit. A mad bear is said to be haunting the mad scientist's neighborhood.  

Lemoine finds out there really is a crazy bear in the woods.

In the marvelous and English-friendly extras included with this Blu-ray disc, Hoven's widow Joyce and son Percy (who played one of the child roles in his MARK OF THE DEVIL, 1970) give us some interesting and quite necessary information about him, such as the fact that he grew tired of the popular leading man roles he played in the 1950s and once went to the extent of shaving his head to declare his independence from public expectations of him. He wanted to play offbeat characters and make equally offbeat films, but he also suffered from a weak heart and this played hob with the fact that he could only get the roles he wanted when he was also producing and directing, resulting in a workload that overtaxed his heart and eventually claimed his life at the age of 58 in 1981. Before that, he'd suffered many strokes and more than one heart attack - and we see the fear he lived with take literal form in this film in the shape of inserted surgical footage of a pacemaker being implanted in a human heart. It is also intercut with an extended sex scene between Reynaud and Caminnecci, who were in fact involved in an open extramarital affair at the time, which lends the footage a sense of sexual dread, if not outright sexual panic. (It should be noted that the nudity here is noticeably more prolonged and explicit than in SUCCUBUS, which has a somewhat bewildering reputation as a bold, erotic film.) There is also a hectic, antic quality about the filmmaking here, which is quite uneven and subject to peculiar jolts of changing mood, the one constant being the about interpolations of lush, syrupy arrangements of classical themes by Chopin and others, which we learn were ripped from the vinyl copies in Hoven's own record collection. So, whatever we may think of the film overall - and I think it's an enjoyable wedge of stinky cheese, the kind that goes well with the right wine and the right company - it can't be said that it was impersonally made. It's actually very consistent with the later films we know to be Hoven's, such as the two MARK OF THE DEVIL films. (His family explain in detail that the first film was only briefly directed by Michael Armstrong and that Hoven replaced him after the first few days, though Armstrong retained credit by contract.) They are all marked, so to speak, with contrasts of horror and schmaltzy Bavarian beauty, episodic structure, and a tendency to overstatement. 

The extras include half-hour Q&A with the Hovens conducted by Uwe Huber at a screening of MARK OF THE DEVIL, an additional private interview with them strictly concerning this film, a tour of the film's locations, Percy Hoven's introduction to the film, German and English trailers, an optional alternative title sequence, and a choice of English or German soundtracks with optional English subtitles. I believe this disc was released as much as five years ago, but I just found out about it - by accidentally acquiring what appears to be a BD-R bootleg from an eBay seller. It didn't include the locations tour.  

   

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Jess Franco's SHINING SEX reviewed

SHINING SEX (1975, Severin Films): Behind this brazen exploitation title is one of Jess Franco's few forays into science fiction and a study in what we would now term "body horror" surprisingly contemporaneous with David Cronenberg's feature directorial debut SHIVERS aka THEY CAME FROM WITHIN (1975).

Made back-to-back with MIDNIGHT PARTY, a fourth-wall breaking spoof of the autobiographical porn star films being made at the time, this one stars Lina Romay in the similar role of Cynthia, an exotic dancer whose personal services are procured for a private party by a mysterious couple named Alpha and Andros (Evelyne Stewart, Ramón Ardíd), who turn out to be a visiting alien and a human under her hypnotic control who functions as her "Morpho," or servant. In an eerily clinical blending of storylines from THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z (1966) and SUCCUBUS (1968), after experiencing earthly sex with her captive (whose steep learning curve for the alien woman provides most of its dramatic interest), Alpha applies an otherworldly lotion to Cynthia's shaved genitals (observed in loving close-ups), then turns her loose on the three known people who have been psychically sensitive enough to discover her presence on Earth, who happen to be a female mystic (Monica Swinn), anthropologist Dr. Kallmann (Olivier Mathot, who has taken to hiding somewhere remote, "maybe Africa"), and the wheelchair-bound scholar Professor Seward (Franco himself), a wheelchair-bound scholar. 

Though not technically hardcore, SHINING SEX will pose certain problems for those viewers who shy away from gynecological detail, which is fairly persistent and in a strange way actually enhances Romay's character's sense of innocence and vulnerability. While the film has its ups and downs (the latter including a lengthy portion of the film that documents Cynthia's pursuit of Dallmann on a boat that essentially circles a small harbor before returning to the exact same spot!), there are moments when an inexplicable and stunning magic suddenly takes hold. In Cynthia's death tryst with the mystic Madame Pécame, the imagery suddenly locks in a perfect and uncanny iconography, and in the long, silent penthouse scenes involving Cynthia and her two captors, Franco achieves a sustained mood from no-budget elements which evokes memories of the more costly alien scenes shot for Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (released the year after, 1976). The title is derived from a side-effect of Cynthia's bodily contamination, which gradually causes her nubile form to erupt in sparkling cells of disease and contagion, what a character in Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE called "the glitter of putrescence"- as arresting an image of lethal contagion as you can imagine. As ever, Romay gives herself body and soul to Franco's camera, and sometimes, at the dramatic height of a moment, you can believe you see her eyes searching out his. It's said that it was during the making of this film that their professional relationship took its fateful, more personal turn.  

Madame Pécame makes Cynthia more comfortable.

Severin's Blu-ray disc (2:39:1, English mono) is far better-looking than the various grey-market sources that have been kicking around, but the source element has its limitations, including a little too much cyan in its color grading which turns the pure reds ever so slightly purple. The audio is limited to a cheesy English-dubbed option (previously available only on a Japanese VHS release), which is rare but undoubtedly less ideal than French with English subtitles would be; that said, the disc does offer English-speaking fans the opportunity to focus solely on the images, which are a sometimes fascinating mélange of the spellbinding and the uncomfortable. The extras include the third in an illuminating series of locations visits with Franco expert Stephen Thrower (who goes to Madrid, visits actor Antonio Mayans, and gets to cradle the urn holding Jess' cremains), who also lectures on the film in a separate featurette; interviews with French filmmaker Gerard Kikoïne (who edited several Franco films without ever meeting the man); Eurociné producer Daniel Lesoeur; and BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF director Christophe Gans, who speaks at length and with great passion about how and why he became an admirer of Franco's work. There is also an audio commentary provided by I'm In A Jess Franco State of Mind blogger Robert Monell and Naschycast host Rod Barnett, which makes this bounty of supplements a pleasurable evening of its own.

The cover makes erroneous mention of an included audio CD of Daniel J. White soundtrack music that was actually included solely as part of a pre-order package (if you missed this, check eBay and pay dearly), but this is nevertheless a great and nutritious bounty of content added to one of Franco's most notable later films. I remain hopeful of an English-friendly French release some day, but even if you're half the Franco fan I am, this is an essential and rewarding package.        

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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For Her Book Only

Circa 1967, Sean Connery's then-wife, actress Diane Cilento, published her first novel, THE MANIPULATOR. I remember seeing her on a talk show at that time, and that the interviewer mentioned that the cover painting was the work of a certain notable artist, prompting her to reveal that it was the work of her husband, Sean Connery - who was still James Bond at that time. This memory just came back to me after 50+ years and I have no idea how generally well-known this information may be. That said, should this be news to you, here are two views of Sean's original artwork. The book is supposed to be a kind of exposé of the movie business and is actually dedicated to Connery. I think it would make a nifty conversation piece in any Bond collection.

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(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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