Sonno Profondo is a fascinating take on the Giallo formula, and an impressive example of what a filmmaker can do with very few resources other than a few friends willing to get in front of a camera and their own ambition. The fantastic soundtrack and carefully sculpted look of the film make it well worth a look for Giallo fans looking for something new, but anyone not already enamored of the genre may find the film a bit of a chore to sit through, even with its slim runtime. Here’s hoping Onetti gets behind the camera again sooner rather than later, as Sonno Profondo is unquestionably an intriguing debut feature.
The Sorcerers (1967)
Originally published on Film Monthly 11 October 2012
Boris Karloff is best known to many film fans as the iconic monster in Universal’s Frankenstein, but he had a long career in film well after that hugely popular and influential film. Karloff worked constantly all his life, and he gave a few of his other most famous performances in the years leading up to his death. One often overlooked film of Karloff’s late career is 1967′s The Sorcerers, the second film by director Michael Reeves (who would go on to direct Vincent Price in Witchfinder General). Until now, The Sorcerers has never been released on DVD in the United States, which is probably one of the main reasons many U.S. horror fans have not seen it. Thanks to the new Warner Archives release, those fans will finally get a chance to see this under-seen classic.
Karloff plays Professor Marcus Monserrat, a professional hypnotist who has spent decades in private practice after a scandal all but killed his research career. His wife and assistant, Estelle (Catherine Lacey), has helped Monserrat develop a machine that will allow him to control another person’s will. Once the machine is complete, Monserrat looks for a perfect subject, a “bored” young man with “a pliable mind.” He happens upon Mike Roscoe (Ian Ogilvy), a young artist who has become tired of club hopping with his girlfriend Nicole (Elizabeth Ercy) and their friend Alan (Victor Henry). Mike ditches Nicole and Alan to take a walk and meets Monserrat, who convinces Mike to return to his apartment laboratory with the promise of experiences Mike could only imagine.
After a psychedelic interlude in which Monserrat and Estelle use their machine on Mike, they discover that they can not only influence his thoughts and actions but also physically experience the things Mike feels. When he cracks an egg, they can feel the yolk on their hands; when he swims, they feel the water all over their bodies. While Monserrat immediately begins trying to come up with humanitarian applications for his device, Estelle has another idea. After their decades of isolation and ridicule, why not use Mike for some fun? Monserrat reluctantly agrees, and soon Estelle finds she has a taste for dangerous behavior, and Mike finds more and more of his time disappearing into blackout periods.
While Karloff gives a great performance here, The Sorcerers is all but carried off by Catherine Lacey as Estelle. She begins the film as a gentle assistant to her husband, but becomes more menacing as she realizes her true power. It’s exceptionally rare for a horror film of any kind to focus on elderly characters, and The Sorcerers handles its troubling subject matter seriously. The film’s psychedelic colors and music instantly date it to the late 1960s, but that’s probably no accident on the part of director Reeves, who tragically died after making the even better Witchfinder General in 1968. Reeves was clearly on track for a distinguished career, which makes The Sorcerers even more of a lost treasure.
Classic horror fans who have never seen The Sorcerers are certainly in for a treat, and those lucky enough to have seen the film before will be glad to have a good DVD release of this great, overlooked film. The Sorcerers is available now through Warner Archive.
Spiderhole (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 23 January 2012
In a lot of ways, it’s a good time to be a horror fan. Interesting genre films now regularly make their way from all over the world to the States thanks to distributors like IFC Midnight, who are willing to take a chance on genre films that other companies may take a pass on. One of their more recent acquisitions is Spiderhole, a nasty little thriller from the UK.
Molly (Emma Griffiths Malin) is introduced uncomfortably sitting in a waiting room at a hospital. She’s a little freaked out, as she has a problem with waiting rooms, but luckily for her it seems all she has wrong is some particularly bad heartburn. She leaves the hospital and meets up with three of her art-school friends: unpredictable Zoe (Amy Noble), ringleader Toby (George Maguire) and nice guy Luke (Reuben-Henry Biggs). The four have decided to find an abandoned house and squat in it to save money on rent, and so they can have crazy parties whenever they want, not necessarily in that order of importance. After driving around London for hours, they finally find the perfect place.
Which translates, in squatter terms, to a terrifying mansion that looks like a long-neglected crime scene. They break in and poke around a bit, and it does seem like just what they’re looking for. It’s huge and empty, with electrical hookups and water still working. Not so desirable, though, is the fact that Zoe stumbles upon a closet stuffed with bloody clothes. Toby tries to calm everyone down and manages to talk them into sleeping on it, and heading out in the morning if they still want to. This plan is complicated when they wake up to find they have been welded into the house– metal slabs have replaced the doors and windows, and it quickly becomes clear that they are not leaving any time soon.
Spiderhole bears some resemblance plot-wise to another recent import, Adrián García Bogliano’s Cold Sweat. Both films feature people trapped in a house by cruel villains, but Spiderhole is much more coy with its “monsters.” In fact, for most of the film’s running time, it is not entirely clear whether Molly and her friends are facing off against a human or something more supernatural. This adds a bit of mystery to Spiderhole, but instead of explaining the villain’s motives (one of the more interesting facets of Cold Sweat), Spiderhole leaves many questions open to audience interpretation.
This is not a bad way to end things, considering how slight everything is that comes before Spiderhole ‘s jarringly abrupt finale. At a slim 80 minutes, Spiderhole doesn’t spend too much time with any of the other characters but Molly, and so it’s tough to muster much concern for them. Especially given how they make terrible decisions from the outset; it is truly as though none of them have watched a horror film before. Even so, Spiderhole manages to create an impressively dingy atmosphere and some effective shock scenes, although many horror fans will be left wanting something a little more substantial.
Spring Break (1983)
Originally published on Film Monthly 10 August 2009
Sean Cunningham is not a filmmaker known for subtlety– this is the man who produced Last House on the Left and directed the original Friday the 13th. Before getting involved with those two horror classics, though, Cunningham started out doing super low-budget sexploitation films, and learned how to make a lowbrow hit in various subgenres. The teen sex comedy was booming in the early 1980s, and Cunningham took a shot at it with 1983′s Spring Break: a none-too-subtle title, perfect for what the filmmakers were aiming for. This one was a shot at all-time teenage sex comedy immortality.
Nerdy pals Nelson (David Knell) and Adam (Perry Adams) arrive in Ft. Lauderdale in the midst of Spring Break fever, check into the Breeze ‘n Seas hotel, and are barely settled in when a mix-up makes them roommates with Stu (Paul Land) and OT Bangin’ (Steve Bassett). The fact that OT’s full name is apparently “Out there Totally Bangin’” tells you pretty much all you need to know about him. The four quickly bond over beer, bikinis, and, uh, more beer. Meanwhile, Nelson’s stepfather Ernest Dalby (Donald Symington) is infuriated that Nelson has taken Spring Break vacation instead of helping him with his campaign for the Senate and tracks him down to Ft. Lauderdale. Inexplicably, Dalby is also involved in a plot to tear down the Breeze ‘n Seas for some reason. After a while the epic plot starts to feel like a Spring Break version of Spartacus. Luckily, any time things threaten to get too heavy, there’s usually something ne
arby for the characters to spray each other with while the soundtrack explodes with painfully 1980s music.
Cunningham had a lot of competition in the teen sex comedy market in the 1980s, and was far from the only filmmaker using Spring Break and Florida as his jumping-off points. It’s pretty obvious he was going for the ultimate Spring Break movie: the film runs a comparatively epic 101 minutes, most of that running time packed with people drinking beer, young ladies in bikinis, people pouring beer on other people, female rock bands playing songs like “Do It” (“I wanna do it/ I wanna do it to YOU“), spitting out beer, nudity, spraying beer around, wet t-shirt contests, guys peeing because they drank so much beer, people getting thrown into pools with their clothes on, and a lot of screamed dialogue that’s mostly incomprehensible. In short, if you can think of a ridiculous Spring Break movie cliché, it’s probably somewhere in Spring Break.
That’s not to say Spring Break is bad, necessarily. It’s actually pretty damned close to the Platonic ideal of the Spring Break movie, except it runs a little too long and packs in too many characters. There’s a montage somewhere around the halfway point that summarizes neatly the valid complaints against the film– suddenly, it seems like the four guys have been living together at the hotel for months. This isn’t the kind of movie where we need to spend this much time with any of the characters. For example, we follow Nelson as he goes from bullied nerd to somewhat assertive nerd who can drink a lot. That’s not really the kind of character arc that needs too much explanation.
Even if there weren’t quite as many authority figures being tossed into swimming pools fully clothed as I would have liked, Spring Break is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s sort of amazing that it’s just now finally being released on DVD. If you’re looking for some intensely goofy fun, or are nostalgic for the days when you saw the VHS cover at your local video store but never rented it, there’s no better time to check it out.
The Spirit (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 27 December 2008
It’s pretty rare that any comic book to film adaptations are anything but disappointing, but The Spirit is in a class of its own. A much more fitting title for the film would be Frank Miller’s The Spirit, because there’s precious little here that owes anything to Will Eisner’s original creation. To be fair, The Spirit is a tough character to get right– Darwyn Cooke and J Bone nailed it with the first 12 issues of the current DC Comics series, but things fizzled when the team handed it off to Sergio Aragones and Mike Ploog. The trick with the character is that the book should be bold, colorful, and funny while keeping the noir underpinnings, and under Aragones’s hands the book has become far too goofy.
Frank Miller’s film veers wildly from being overly badass to embarrassingly goofy, often in the space of a few moments. Much has been made of the film’s visual similarities to Sin City, but other than a few 100% black and white scenes, it doesn’t look exactly like Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Miller’s books. It just looks a lot like it. Still, Miller has assembled a cast that’s mostly very easy on the eyes, and soaks them in enough CG that some of the film looks more like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow than Sin City. If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time talking about what the film looks like, there’s a reason for that: it’s the only thing I really have anything nice to say about it.
The film opens with the first in a long line of monologues delivered by The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) about his City. Depending on the circumstance, the city is his mother, his lover, his weapon, his soul mate, etc. etc. etc. Since this is the first filmed version of The Spirit, Miller seems to feel obligated to present an origin story of sorts, and while some of the plot points regarding the Spirit’s previous identity are more or less consistent with the character’s origins in the books, Miller adds some extra links between The Spirit and his nemesis The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) for some reason. The Octopus is trying to retrieve a relic that will give him godlike powers from jewel thief Sand Serif (Eva Mendes), who ended up with the relic during a botched heist.
Along the way Miller crams in as many ladies as he can and then some, playing up The Spirit’s weakness for women. There’s Serif, a figure from The Spirit’s past; Silken Floss (Scarlett Johanssen), The Octopus’s allegedly brilliant sidekick; Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), your guess is as good as mine; Lorelei (Jaime King), the angel of death(?); and Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), the only doctor The Spirit trusts to keep him patched up and in good health. While each of these characters are interesting and have their own story arcs in the books (except, uh, the ones not in the books), in the film they’re little more than an excuse to flash some t & a and give The Spirit something to do in between beating up crooks and/or getting his ass kicked by The Octopus.
There are a few things that carry over from the books that work, but there are enough changes that diehard fans are going to be pretty much completely disgusted from sometime around the end of the opening scene. Anyone not familiar with the book will probably just be confused as to why a character with Wolverine-style healing powers spends so much of his time getting beaten up; anyone familiar with the book will wonder why the hell Frank Miller thought it would be a good idea to give The Spirit any kind of powers at all– Will Eisner’s original character was basically just a tough guy who was a great detective and a better fighter. LORD, as a fan of the character I could complain forever, but that’s not going to do anyone any good.
I will give Miller points for some inspired visuals, but that’s it. The Spirit is an indefensible mess, an awful film version of a great character. Miller’s typical hard edge has been neutered by the requirements of the PG-13 rating, leaving characters to sheepishly utter such brutal insults as “Shut up, you fart.” That’s an actual line of dialogue. Sometimes The Spirit addresses the camera. Somehow, a character gets their head removed without any blood appearing anywhere on-screen. There’s a scene in which The Octopus is dressed in full Nazi regalia. The Spirit doesn’t need a review so much as a list like that of reasons for you to avoid seeing it. There are infinitely better films in theaters right now– please, go see one of them instead of this.
Stage Fright (2014)
Originally published 22 April 2014
1980’s slasher film throwbacks have been pretty popular over the last few years, with some films trying to directly mimic the era (like Justin Russell’s The Sleeper and others content to just bring the familiar “stalk ‘n slash” storyline into present day more or less untouched (see Steve Goltz’s Don’t Go to the Reunion). While varying in terms of entertainment value, most of these films don’t really bring much (if anything) new to the table. However, a few particularly clever filmmakers have recognized the rigid structure of the early-80’s slasher template means even the slightest tweaks can completely reinvigorate the formula and feel like something totally new. This is definitely the case with debut feature director Jerome Sable’s Stage Fright, which mixes comedy, buckets of blood, and musical theater with wildly entertaining results.
After the opening night performance of The Haunting of the Opera, star Kylie Swanson (Minnie Driver) is viciously murdered, leaving her twin children in the custody of her partner Roger McCall (Meat Loaf). Ten years later, Roger has established a musical theater camp where theater kids can come from all over the country to learn all about putting on a show. Twins Camilla (Allie MacDonald) and Buddy (Douglas Smith) work as cooks in the camp canteen, but Camilla wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and sing on stage. Buddy just wants her to stay away from the “theater geeks” so she doesn’t get her feelings hurt.
This summer, Roger decides to try to relaunch The Haunting of the Opera, and Camilla sneaks into the auditions, catching the eye of the production’s camper director Artie (Brandon Uranowitz) with her spectacular singing. Artie uses his position to pit Camilla against one of the older campers, Liz (Melanie Leishman), casting both of them in the lead female role. And, naturally, casting himself as the male lead so he gets plenty of on- (
and off-) stage make-out time with both of them. Meanwhile, an angry figure lurking in the shadows steals the “Opera Ghost” mask and bangs out distorted chords on an electric guitar in a dark room pasted with pictures of the cast, screaming at them with 80s metal wails.
There is quite a bit of singing in Stage Fright, and writer/director Jerome Sable also co-wrote the film’s music and lyrics with Eli Batalion. The pair also collaborated on the short film “The Legend of Beaver Dam”, which had a hugely successful festival run with its similar mix of comedy, music and bloody horror. It’s not hard to see how the short naturally led into the feature, and the two films make good companion pieces, although the severe tonal shifts from the relatively light “puttin’ on a show” sections of the film and the brutal killings don’t work quite as well in the context of a feature, where the audience has more time to engage and identify with the characters. And make no mistake, the murders here are nasty business. Sable doesn’t hold back and really splashes the blood around, thankfully entirely through practical effects. The body count isn’t particularly high, but the quality of the makeup and effects is great. If there’s one major problem with the film, it is that once its climactic guitar solo attack is finished near the start of the third act, the musical numbers all but disappear as Stage Fright turns into a more familiar kind of stalk ’n slash for its final stretch.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 65
