31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 19: THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959)

Hook-handed alcoholic Cajun versus newly-minted human/alligator hybrid. That's entertainment!

Under the psychiatrist-supervised influence of pentathol, nurse Jane Marvin falls into a trance and recounts the last events of her original life as Joyce Webster (Beverly Garland), a newlywed whose husband mysteriously disappears during their honeymoon. Over the following months Joyce follows clues and ends up at the Cypress Plantation, an estate deep in the Louisiana swamps that was her husband's most recent address as recorded on his college paperwork. Once there she meets a number of people who claim to know nothing of her husband or his whereabouts, so she digs deeper and things escalate along a trail of radioactive materials, a hazardous trek through the 'gator-infested swamp in the driving rain, violence leading to a close brush with rape by a drunken hook-handed Cajun handyman in a swamp shack, well-intended mad science gone horribly wrong, mutation, and the unthinkable truth about her husband's fate. When Joyce's story is captured on tape for posterity (and evidence of her "delusions"), her psychiatrist opts to never let her hear her own confession out of concern it will cause a relapse, and a cheerful "Jane Marvin" returns to her new existence.

The handyman (Lon Chaney Jr.) attempts to get his drunken rape on.

Long considered a disappointment by genre addicts, I'd like to suggest that THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE be reevaluated for what it is, rather than for what it is not. Instead of straight-up shocks, what the audience gets is an unexpected southern gothic fused with a mystery and a standard 1950's weird science yarn, sort of "Tennessee Williams writes an H.P. Lovecraft story." The swamp setting drips with hothouse atmosphere that's greatly enriched by the black & white photography, and imagery of live alligators swimming and strolling around the place lend a sense of foreboding to the proceedings. The fear of losing a loved one with no explanation is something that anyone could relate to, as is the frustration of being lied to by people whom one knows know full well what's really going on, and Chaney's hook-handed Cajun handyman is a movie creep of the first and most sleazy order. As for the story, it would have worked as an eerie piece even without the presence of its sole alligator-man (forget the title, there's only one full-on 'gator hybrid at hand), so his presence is gravy, even if he does look like a refugee from a Pertwee-era episode of DOCTOR WHO when finally seen.

Sometimes it's best for a lost hubby to stay missing.

And Beverly Garland's performance here is quite compelling. Joyce's dogged pursuit of her missing husband holds the audience's interest and embroils us in her curiosity and frustration, so when she finally discovers her beloved's fate and final loss of humanity, we understand why she went mad and we side with her shrink in his decision not to cure her of her trauma-induced amnesia.

Joyce's quest reaches its inevitable end.

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE is not deep stuff by any means but it's a fun twist on southern-set melodramas. And how can you not love the visual of a cheesy shirtless alligator-man in slacks?

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 18: MONSTER A GO-GO (1965)

The horror...The horror...Or not...

Bad horror movies happen all the time. In fact, it's not a stretch to state that bad horror movies outnumber the worthwhile ones by an almost incalculable degree. But then there are bad horror movies that go above and beyond with their cinematic wretchedness to find themselves numbered among the very worst works that the entirety of cinema has to offer, films that offer nothing by way of scares, interest, or anything of note to prevent the audience falling into a boredom-induced torpor. Such a piece is MONSTER A GO-GO, an infamous, turgid stink bomb from director Bill Rebane (THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION) and an uncredited Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yes, Lewis, the "Godfather of Gore" himself, the man who opened the floodgates of cinematic visceral excess with such stomach-churners as BLOOD FEAST (1963) and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964), was somehow involved in this dead cat of a movie, and while his own solo filmography is not stocked with any works to rival those of Cronenberg or Romero, even the most poorly-regarded flick in his rosters looks like PSYCHO when measured against this floater.

An astronaut returns to Earth as a hulking radioactive monster and embarks on an aimless non-rampage that's tracked by military investigators and scientists. There's much wandering around in barren fields, plus tons of un-involving, poorly-acted dialogue, and the end result could kindly be called an endurance test to try the patience of even the most die-hard of bad movie veterans. In short, the film is seventy minutes that subjectively feels like four hours and is practically guaranteed to serve as a cinematic soporific. So why I am I bothering to bring this complete and utter dog to your attention, you may ask? Simple. Because it possess an ending of such jaw-dropping content that it practically dares you to witness it for yourself. After making the hapless audience suffer through virtually nothing happening over its entire running time, the film ends by announcing that the astronaut had actually splashed down unharmed somewhere in the North Atlantic and that there was actually never a monster at all, so everything that we'd watched was just superfluous, time-wasting bullshit. Here's the actual narration from the film that outlines that "twist" and pretty much raises a huge, stiff middle finger to  moviegoers:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called "Douglas" to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

Absorb that galloping horseshit for a moment. Things like that don't just spontaneously happen. That so-called ending was deliberately perpetrated and knowingly released with the intent that innocent people would shell out their hard-earned cash to see it. It was downright criminal and I would have given a lot to be there to see how audiences reacted upon finding out they'd just been so frustratingly ripped off while simultaneously being bored nigh unto death. If MONSTER A G-GO had played at my home county's most notorious grindhouse, the late, lamented Norwalk Theater, I can tell you with a certain amount of authority that the irate audience would have stormed out of the auditorium and killed and spit-roasted the theater's staff right there in the lobby, not a stone's throw away from the popcorn machine.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 17: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)

Fetish wear...IN SPAAAAACE!!!

In a nutshell: Travelers in deep space intercept a distress call from a remote, uncharted planet and land there to investigate. Once they arrive, very bad shit happens. If that sounds somewhat familiar, it should, because if you take the Italian/Spanish-made PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965) and threw it into a blender with the American-made IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958) and hit purée, you'd pretty much end up with Ridley Scott's ALIEN (1979), the ne plus ultra of horror movies set in outer space. While IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE provides the archetypal DNA for the whole "trapped in a spaceship with a malevolent xenomorph" thing, but what PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES brings to the mix is an unrelenting air of dread and a visual sensibility that transplants the haunted house/spookshow ethos into the cosmos.

The dead rise.

As a movie, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES has not aged particularly well. It's glacially-paced (a common problem for Italian sci-fi films of its era), has a distracting dubbed English soundtrack voiced by actors familiar from SPEED RACER cartoons (the unmistakable voices of Peter Fernandez and Jack Curtis being prominent), and there are no vampires per se (the threat is actually disembodied alien presences that reanimate the dead). But what remains is a work that somehow manages to be colorful while simultaneously manifesting an ambiance of spookiness straight out of childhood fears. If anything, it brings to mind an episode of LOST IN SPACE as directed by H.P. Lovecraft, only minus any tentacled wigglies (unfortunately). Several of the building blocks of ALIEN are present, including a foreboding, fog-shrouded planet, a giant skeleton of another hapless space-traveler who crashed there (in this case the remains indicate that another life form attempted to investigate the distress call and also met a grim fate),

Not quite the "space jockey" from ALIEN but close enough for rock & roll.

and the and-then-there-were-none whittling down of the cast.

Bottom line: I include PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES in this year's roundup solely to alert ALIEN fans who were not in the know about its existence. It's totally worth seeing to absorb legendary director/cinematographer Mario Bava's evocative visuals, though if you really want to see the ALIEN precursor that offers up actual shocks, I strongly recommend schlamping IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE into your DVD player.

Poster for the original American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 16: WILLARD (1971)

Willard (Bruce Davison) and Socrates.

Once one has made it past the toddler years, one begins to notice the world outside of the house in a number of ways, one of which is noticing what the parents are watching on TV. During my earliest pre-Connecticut years I was fascinated by the TV and all of the interesting shows it brought into the living room but what I was most enthralled by were the era's ads for upcoming movie releases. It was the early 1970's and I remember seeing tons of commercials for assorted sci-fi and horror movies that I was too young to be allowed to see, but those brief come-ons stuck in my head until I was able to see the movies in question years later. Thanks to the Bay Area's CREATURE FEATURES movie showcase, hosted by the legendary Bob Wilkins, I was a "horror kid" from Day 1 and my hunger for new, non-black-and-white scary flicks was strong, so I paid close attention to what was coming down the pipeline and of all the horror offerings from those formative years, I most remember the ads for 1971's WILLARD. They didn't really reveal the particulars of the story but it made perfectly clear that the protagonist was a guy whose pet rats did his bidding, apparently with horrifyingly lethal results.

One of the TV spots for WILLARD's original theatrical release.

Kids love stories about people and their loyal pets, so how could I not be drawn to a  tale about a twitchy weirdo who used his animal friends to murder people by eating them alive? Needless to say, I appealed to my parents to take me to see WILLARD but their response was a resounding — and in retrospect understandable — "no," so it wouldn't be until perhaps four years later that I saw the film when it aired on THE CBS LATE MOVIE.. At age nine, I totally ate it up and went on to enjoy it several times before leaving for college, after which it became a fond memory from childhood. Over the years, WILLARD achieved something of a cult rep among those of my generation, often looked back upon as a "starter" horror film that offered stronger meat than what we kids were used to from local TV horror movie showcases, but how much if that fondness was clouded by nostalgia and not actual remembrance of the film's details? While watching the film again for the first time in perhaps 35 years, I was confronted with a few hard truths about the film when not seen through the filter of faulty reminiscence. 

While its marketing campaign and legend have painted it as "the rat movie," WILLARD is less of a straight-up horror movie and more of a sad character study of the twenty-something titular character (Bruce Davison), a put-upon friendless loser whose stifling world consists solely of his dead-end clerical job and caring for his ailing, overbearing mother (Elsa Lanchester). His job is at a company founded by his father but that was taken over by uber-bastard Martin  (Ernest Borgnine), whose awfulness as a human being may have led to Willard's father's untimely demise. Martin despises the meek Willard and takes every opportunity to demean and humiliate him while also plotting to buy Willard's house out from under the young man and his mother so he can demolish it and turn a massive profit. Meanwhile, on the home front, Willard's mother nags him and treats him like a child while being his sole non-work interaction. (He's also surrounded by his mother's gaggle of annoying oldster friend, a group he cannot stand.) But Willard's world is brightened when he befriends the rats that run rampant in the backyard. He feeds them, gives them shelter and a breeding ground in the basement, and endeavors to teach them simple words and commands. He even adopts an adorable and smart white rat that he names Socrates, and the pair become inseparable. Over the months, Willard strongly bonds with the rats, including a rebellious black one that he dubs Ben, and a mild romance blossoms with a tempo worker (Sondra Locke) but when his mother dies, leaving him with $1500 of inheritance and the house that he did not know was mortgaged to the point where it must be sold to pay back taxes, Willard's world is once more shrouded in woe. And when his boss kills Socrates (whom Willard has been smuggling in to the office for company) and follows that act by firing Willard, which finally causes the young man to snap. Arriving at Martin's office after regular business hours, an empowered Willard does a full-tilt "worm turns" speech before sicking dozens of rats on Martin, memorably ordering them to "Tear 'im up." With Martin horribly killed, Willard's new self-confidence spurs him to up the romantic ante and get a new job, but his plans are immediately halted when Ben, who has been abandoned at the scene of Martin's murder along with the rest of the rat army, returns with vengeance in mind...

Ben returns with a mind full of hate.

This time around, I saw WILLARD for what it actually is, a drama about one milquetoast's misery that's brightened by an unlikely friendship, and the rat stuff is actually pretty much only incidental to the proceedings. It's well-acted and one cannot help but root for Willard to get out from under the obstacles that mar his existence, but if one arrives at the picture with a yen to be scared, WILLARD proves to be rather a damp squib. It possesses only one real scene of horror — Willard's worm turn and subsequent murder of martin — and it's certainly a memorable one, but the overall movie is really a straight drama with only the most minor of horror elements. In fact, the rat angle could even be dropped and the film would still work as a mundane drama.

Martin (Ernest Borginine), about to take a header through his office window while being gnawed alive by dozens of rats.

Though the much-ballyhooed rat murder sequence is indeed a classic, the movie really could have done with a lot more in that department. Sure, the rat material plays into many viewers' fear and loathing of the creatures but the movie screws itself by allowing us to get to know Willard and his rats and find their relationship charming and heartwarming. Yes, being chewed up alive by hundreds of sharp, tiny teeth would be one of the worst deaths imaginable, but it's not as effective as it could have been when perpetrated by rodents that we've seen being fed and cared for and happily playing with their human master as he showers them with all the surplus of love that had been laying fallow in his lonely heart.

The bottom line here is that WILLARD is a solid little film whose shock reputation has been greatly inflated thanks to nostalgia. It's engrossing but there are few scares to be had from it and, despite the "tear 'im up" moment, there's no gore whatsoever. Watch it for the sake of completism and bear in mind that its immediate sequel, BEN (1972), has none of its charm or interest. The only thing of real note about it is its Oscar-nominated #1 hit theme song sung by Michael Jackson (when he was still a negro), a touching tune that amounts to a love song to a homicidal specimen of vermin.

My autographed photo of Bruce Davison as Willard.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 15: THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

And how.

Those of you who are regular readers of my blogs know that I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, which granted me a certain skewed and bleak viewpoint when it comes to Connecticut in general and its southern portion in particular. To outsiders, much of the area appears to be an affluent haven where everything is idyllic and sitcom-perfect but to those of us who grew up there and were forced by certain circumstances to look beyond that rose-colored facade, Connecticut could reveal itself as an ideal locale for horror scenarios. Its quaint and homey atmosphere, old New England architecture (which is now slowly dying out in favor of hideous "McMansions" for those who can afford them), desolate and remote roadways shrouded by carefully-landscaped foliage, and its sometimes deafening quiet all contribute to an undeniable atmosphere that's rife with creep factor. A number of horror films have latched onto that potential and run with it — with wildly varying results — including THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH (1964),  LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), and even BEETLEJUICE (1988, it being a comedy notwithstanding), but perhaps no other film nails that specific Yankee sense of dread like Wes Craven's shattering THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Especially for those of us who grew up in Westport, where much of it was shot.

Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) has just turned seventeen and is in the full flower of young womanhood. As her parents (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr) prepare a birthday party for her, Mari sets off to Manhattan to attend a rock concert with her best friend, Phyllis (Lucy Grantham). All is right in Mari's world and the perfect accent for the day's fun would be some marijuana scored on the street. Things turn jet black when the girls make the mistake of trying to buy weed from Junior (Mark Sheffler), a pathetic junkie who's part of a gang of vicious escaped criminals, including the "animal-like" Sadie (Jeramie Rain), ultra-sleazy "Weasel" (Fred Lincoln), and the unspeakable Krug (David Hess). This vile quartet's crimes include serial murder, rape, child molestation, and voyeurism, so the kidnapping and subsequent horrific abuse of two innocent girls amounts to just another day's diversion for them.

Faces of death: Krug (David Hess), Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and "Weasel" (Fred Lincoln).

Once the criminals flee NYC with their captives stashed in the trunk of their car, the girls are put through a living hell of beatings, torture, rape, dismemberment, disembowelment, and eventually murder, and the tragic irony is that the end game happens in the woods directly across the street from Mari's home. The degradation of Mari and Phyllis is so physically and psychologically inhumane that even the pack of stone-cold killers is given pause by their own actions, but that moment of all-too-human clarity swiftly passes as they clean themselves up and seek shelter at Mari's house, telling her parents that they're traveling salesmen in need of overnight lodging. Having noted that Mari did not return from her night out and also not being dumb as a sack full of doorknobs, Mari's folks soon figure out what's up and even discover their daughter's ravaged body in the woods. After that, it is ON, and the parents' vengeance is indeed merciless and terrible...

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is one of the most uncomfortable works in the annals of cinema and it is absolutely not for the weak, squeamish, or easily offended. Drawing inspiration from Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), the film starts off with a frivolous and flippant hippie-era sensibility that gets utterly sideswiped by the outright savagery that ensues once all of the characters are introduced. Though some would classify it as a thriller and it is undeniably riveting, there are no thrills to be had here. Instead the audience bears witness to a shabby tapestry of misogynistic atrocities on an intimate scale, all-too-relateable horrors wrought by monsters who don't even have the excuse of being the undead, lycanthropes, Lovecraftian wigglies, or seemingly-indestructible slashers in hockey masks. Krug and his companions exude a vileness that fairly oozes off the screen and while moviegoers have been exposed to countless rapists and murderers before their advent, this batch of human beasts are truly something special that will never be forgotten once encountered. The ugliness of their abuses offers no titillation for those who may be into that sort of thing and instead is presented with an honesty and sense of helplessness that puts the audience right there with Mari and Phyllis, and that is a place where no one wants to be. It's bad enough that the girls are tormented and raped, but the film reaches new depths in questionable taste when Krug takes the time to sign his cruel handiwork by carving his name into the still-living Mari's chest.

Seriously, do NOT rent this film as a date movie.

As Mari's birthday goes horribly awry, we never lose sight of the fact that she is on the cusp of an adulthood that she — and by association, Phyllis — will not live to experience, and it's a downer of epic proportions. And as her parents sink to the level of their daughter's tormentors, there are no winners here. It's the death of the hopeful peace-and-love hippie era writ in wretched microcosm and as such it's an incredibly powerful work of dreadful art. But with that said, the film does have one major flaw and that's its tonally-jarring attempts to shoehorn comic relief into material of the blackest order. There's a running thread involving  two hapless local cops — one of whom is played by a young Martin Kove, who would later gain screen immortality as the assholish sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo in THE KARATE KID (1984) — bumbling their way through the investigation of Mari's disappearance, and the so-called comedy simply does not work. In a film of this sort of unrelenting nature, staying true to its nastiness is in its best interests and all forms of humor are best eschewed. It's like going for yucks in the midst of the Sand Creek Massacre.

Director Wes Craven enriched the horror genre with a number of subsequent efforts, most notably  THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), and SCREAM (1996), but none of his other films dared to return to the utter darkness brought by THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and perhaps that's a good thing. Such nastiness is hard to get out of one's head once it's in there. God knows I can't drive around while visiting my mom and not recognize several of the Westport locations where the despoilment of Mari and Phyllis took place...

I'm not sure which release this poster accompanied but it's certainly appropriately bleak.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 14: DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932)

The 1932 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE: A rare example of the most famous version of a film being inferior to one of its remakes.

Unexpectedly, this looks like it will be the shortest of this year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR entries.

Last year I watched the 1941 Spencer Tracy version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE for the first time since I was a child and was amazed by how good and adult it was, especially for a film from its era, so I figured this year I would revisit the 1932 version of the story, which features Frederic March's iconic look as the kindly doctor's horrific alter-ego. So indelible is that iteration that when most folks think of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie they usually immediately think of March as the werewolf/apeman-like Hyde, even if they have not actually seen the film. Admittedly that visual for Hyde is truly memorable and quite disturbing, so I was looking forward to seeing the film again for the first time since I was in the single digits.

Upon sitting through the 1932 version again, I noted that it was one of those features that bore the just-post-silent feel to its acting and visual storytelling, and it tended to play like a dull drawing room stage drama when Hyde wasn't onscreen abusing women, engaging in felonious assault, and just being an all-around vicious asshole. In fact, if I'm being perfectly honest, I found myself watching the clock until the film finally reached its conclusion. It's not that the film was bad by any means but, pre-Hays Code content notwithstanding, everything that it has to offer is achieved to far greater effect in the Spencer Tracy version, which is an almost beat-for-beat remake of the 1932 classic. Trust me when I urge you to see the 1941 version instead. Click here to read my in-depth look at that one, which gets my vote as the definitive telling of this particular classic horror scenario.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 13: THE WOLF MAN (1941)

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and autumn moon is bright." Poor Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) finds this out in no uncertain terms.

There are very few horror films that could be considered as perfect in every way and 1941's THE WOLF MAN can be counted among them. Though the classic Universal horror entries that preceded it are seminal works that defined the genre for a couple of decades, all of them — with the notable exceptions of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and WEREWOLF OF LONDON (both from1935) — bore the earmarks of cinema that was only just finding its way after the advent of sound and the demise of the silent era. They tended to possess the feel of stage plays, often featured exaggerated/over-the-top acting and melodrama common to the era, and also suffered from issues of slow pacing (or at least slow when compared to what we're used to from the 1940's onward). THE WOLF MAN benefits from coming a decade after DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN in that it's a more modern and sophisticated piece. Though lacking that dark fairytale quality that flavored its antecedents, THE WOLF MAN more than makes up for that with moody atmosphere to spare, a pervasive air of impending dread, and a terrific and grownup script by Curt Siodmak that brings the audience characters whose actions and motivations are quite realistic, especially when seen within a horror movie context. 

I won't go into the full details  but all one needs to know is that THE WOLF MAN tells the story of a hapless innocent, Lawrence "Larry" Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who becomes afflicted with the homicidal curse of lycanthropy and how that condition inevitably leads to his tragic destruction. Siodmak's much-imitated script set in stone many of the werewolf tropes that we now consider the very DNA of the sub-genre, elements such as:

• A protagonist that we cannot help but like and genuinely care about
• Ye olde superstitions and pagan magic colliding head-on with disbelief wrought by modern science and psychology
• Doomed romance
• The involvement of wise/creepy gypsies (Yeah, I know that "gypsy" is now considered an ethnic slur, but I use it here rather than "Romani" because most folks who know the stock type in stories of this nature may be unfamiliar with the accurate ethnic/cultural designation)
• Charms to ward off the curse that serve little or no purpose
• Ill omens that all point to werewolf-related awfulness
• Silver being the surefire way to kill a werewolf
• All of the "modern" characters firmly believing that the afflicted's claims of being cursed with werwolfism are indicators of grievous mental illness
• The protagonist's tragedy being compounded by his death inevitably being facilitated by a loved one

Larry stalks the moors.

THE WOLF MAN is arguably the most influential werewolf film ever made and its impact continues to reverberate some seventy-four years after its debut. Though Jack Pierce's pioneering makeup effects have long since been eclipsed by superior techniques in prosthetic effects, animatronics, and digital wizardry, it says a lot that THE WOLF MAN would still be an effective film if the wolfed-out version of Larry had been achieved with naught but some glued-on barbershop floor sweepings and creative lighting. The film's true strength lies in its script and soul, so if you have not yet experienced this Rosetta Stone of lycanthropic pop cultural lore, I strongly urge you to see it for yourself as soon as possible. In its sequels, Larry proved to be immortal and THE WOLF MAN itself also endures.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 12: WEREWOLF WOMAN (1976)

Annik Borel wolfs out.

There are those among the horror-addict fraternity who don't give a shit about how terrible a film may be reported to be, so long as they get to see a new movie about their favorite creepy-crawly. I have friends and loved ones who will sit through even the most wretched and boring waste of celluloid provided it gives them their ghost/vampire/slasher/zombie fix, and I'm the guy who's dumb enough to do likewise for werewolves. I’ve endured a number of those horrendous Paul Naschy wolf-man flicks (of which there are around a dozen), WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS, the HOWLING sequels, that THE COMPANY OF WOLVES bullshit, THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON and THE BEAST MUST DIE, so I figure I can take just about anything offering the merest hope of lupine violence. So  despite its rather foul rep, I’d wanted to check out LEGEND OF THE WOLF WOMAN since I first heard about it just over thirty-six years ago in a CINEFANTASTIQUE review that gave it a sound panning. Well, that opportunity finally came when the movie was released on DVD in its uncut form (apparently the original U.S. release trimmed the movie by nearly a half hour) under the title WEREWOLF WOMAN and while I’ve seen far worse, I’ve also seen far better.

This bit of lycanthropic Eurosleaze stars French-born, ferret-faced Annik Borel — late of such classics as BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE DEVILS (1972) and the Isaac Hayes blaxploitationer TRUCK TURNER (1974) — a blonde with haunted eyes who looks like a fusion of Sondra Locke and Judith Light (a concept far more shudder-inducing than anything found in the film). As was the wont of Eurosleaze actresses of the period, Borel was in no way afraid of shedding her clothing, a point made apparent less than thirty seconds into the flick as she is seen completely bare-assed nekkid, gyrating in a circle of fire to cheesy voodoo drums by the light of the full moon.

Ah, the joys of witchcraft and ritual nudity!

This marvelously gratuitous nudity plays out in lots of close-ups as the credits roll, the camera occasionally getting so close to Borel’s gingerish pubes that I began to feel like her gynecologist, something I’m not used to outside of the context of straight-up pornography, and I am willing to bet was one of the elements edited when the film first hit these shores. This display of bump & grind is cut short when she lures a horny villager to his death, gorily planting an axe in his skull in what may be the first case of a werewolf committing an axe-murder.

Yes, this chick’s a werewolf and her furry look can fairly be described as the makeup artist — overrated hack Carlo Rambaldi, just prior to his leap to international fame with the 1976 KING KONG remake — sticking a fake nose and some bogus teeth onto Borel, then painting the actress’s nekkid skin with an adhesive and having her roll about on a barber shop floor. Perhaps the most bizarre aspects of this makeup are the werewolf’s blonde hairdo coupled with her otherwise brown fur and Borel’s pendulous breasts being stricken by gravity in such a way that they resemble the much-suckled-upon teats of a mother beast, capped as they are with nipples resembling black olives.

Anyway, the werewolf chick is abruptly seen trussed-up and ready for burning at the stake (we aren’t shown how this happens) and we skip ahead by about two hundred years to then-present day Italy where we meet Daniela (Borel), a mid-twenty-something dead ringer for the werewolf chick who was one of her ancestors. It’s not really made clear, but apparently Daniela summoned the spirit of her shaggy ancestor (that’s what the opening sequence was supposed to be, I guess) and is now possessed by it, giving vengeful power to her deep-seated hatred of men and the sex act. Raped in her early adolescence, she now lives in the country with her kindly and concerned father, but her now-possessed psyche goes completely around the bend when she witnesses her sister having sex with her new husband and lures the guy into the woods where she attempts to seduce him while stark naked and instead tears his throat out with her teeth before dumping his corpse down a ravine.

Driven insane by what she’s done, Daniela is institutionalized but soon escapes with the help of a friendly nymphomaniac (whom she kills with a pair of scissors), immediately embarking on a murderous spree, growling like a crazed wolf and ripping out throats willy-nilly before falling in love with a sweet and hunky stuntman who lives in an abandoned movie studio town once used for filming Spaghetti Westerns (no, seriously). Cured of her bloodlust after a month with this guy (and one of those soft-focus “romantic” montages common to Euro nudie flicks of the seventies), Daniela’s life starts taking a turn for the better. Well, that is until she’s gang-raped by three local scumbags during a home invasion, a trio of from-out-of-nowhere vermin who also murder her lover. NOTE: we are spared the “main event” of the actual gang rape but we do witness the preamble, a nasty bit of business very reminiscent of the most famous sequence in Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS (1971). If you’ve seen that movie you know what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind before renting this on date night.

Finally driven irrevocably mad, Daniela decimates her attackers, somehow tracking down each of them despite having absolutely zero clue as to who they are or where they live and crushing two of them with a junkyard’s claw-crane that she learned to operate after watching it in action for about a minute. Catching up with her at long last, the hapless detectives who’ve fruitlessly tracked Daniela since she escaped the mental institution capture her at a remote location where she sits, open-bloused and titties-a-swingin’, sampling spoonfuls of stew from a cauldron (where she got it from is anyone’s guess). Now snarling and completely feral, Daniela is apprehended as a ridiculous voice-over informs us that we’ve just watched a re-enactment of “true” events that took place in 1968.

What?!!?

So, those like me who love werewolf movies were suckered in by WEREWOLF WOMAN’s promise of a straight-up lycanthrope fright-fest but instead we got a squalid piece of seventies Euro-sleaze exploitation featuring the so-called werewolf being seen only during the movie's first five minutes, minimal gore, no scares or suspense, a script full of ridiculous plot holes, and so much wall-to-wall nudity that I nearly got tired of staring at a naked chick’s bush (say it isn’t so!!!). Simply put, WEREWOLF WOMAN is kind of worth a look as a seventies curiosity that’s infamous for its general uselessness but if you have something else to do rather than see it, by all means do whatever your other choice is. Believe me, you won’t be missing a blessed thing.

Poster from the original American theatrical release.

31 DAYS IF HORROR 2015-Day 11: MOTHER OF TEARS (2007)

The Mother of Tears (Moran Atlas) lets it all hang out.

There is a very vocal camp among horror movie fans that finds the efforts of writer/director Dario Argento to be the finest work produced in the realm of Italian horror cinema, and while that may be true it’s an assessment that doesn’t really say all that much since the vast majority of Italian horror movies suck ass. I’ve never been much of a fan of Argento’s work — I’m a Mario Bava man — but I have to give him credit for crafting movies that are coherently filmed and clearly identifiable as the work of a singular creator with a visceral vision. That said, MOTHER OF TEARS is the final chapter of Argento’s “Three Mothers” witchcraft trilogy, a series consisting of the classic SUSPIRIA (1977, the commercial for which was far scarier than anything found in the actual movie, in my humble opinion) and INFERNO (1980) and though the evil witches found in those flicks were quite decisively dealt with, the most malevolent of the lot is the focus of this final installment. All of which is well and good in the eyes of the horror-hungry, but this film unintentionally (?) stands as concrete proof that Argento has either completely lost his goddamned mind of he just plain does not give a flying fuck anymore. In fact, MOTHER OF TEARS can best be summed up as “Dario Argento goes bullmoose insane and makes a Lucio Fulci movie.”

Director Dario Argento: genius or loony? You decide!

When an urn containing artifacts relating to Mater Lachrimarum, the “Mother of Tears,” is unsealed in a modern day Roman museum, the hapless unfortunate who opens the urn is immediately set upon by some bogus-looking demons (and an evil, shrieking monkey) and in short order her teeth are ripped out with an infamous Inquisition torture device known as a “pear” (look it up and be appalled), followed by a graphic disembowelment and subsequent strangulation with her own innards. All hell then literally breaks loose and the city becomes a maelstrom of senseless and gory murder, suicide, rape, infanticide, you name it, and that’s just the first ten minutes of the flick.

Asia Argento as American (yeah, right) scholar Sarah Mandy.

American art restoration student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento, the director’s daughter, who couldn’t be more obviously European Italian if she tried) flees the museum’s scene of horror and immediately finds herself both the target of a police manhunt and the unwanted attentions of the Mother of Tears’ minions, a group mostly composed of chicks who abuse makeup, hairspray and rummage sale fashion sense to a degree not seen since the heyday of Cyndi Lauper. Bouncing from one set piece to another and barely staying one step ahead of the cops and the creeps, Sarah becomes aware of a hidden legacy, namely her latent sorcerous superpowers inherited from her late mother who happened to be a white witch. When not fending off the bad guys, Sarah is urged on by the rather ineffectual shade of her mom but offered no real instruction or insight into her powers, other than that she’s somehow supposed to use her unexplained gifts to defeat the Mother of Tears.

As this odyssey of non-self-discovery plays out, Sarah meets alchemists, an exorcist (played by Euro-horror mainstay and walking cliché Udo Kier), a bunch of the aforementioned “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” witches (one of whom memorably gets her head crushed repeatedly in a train door) and a couple of good lesbian witches (who kindly provide an utterly gratuitous and from out of nowhere girl-on-girl scene), all of which leads her into direct confrontation with the title character (ridiculously played by Moran Atlas), a literally tits-out evil creature who spends the bulk of her time without a stitch on, gyrating and gesticulating in ways that call attention to her outrageously fake breast implants (an aspect that totally confuses me since a shortage of big tits has certainly never been one of Italy’s problems). During the times when the Mother of Tears deigns to be clad at all, she sports either a hooded cloak that falls open to display flesh,

or a red piece of attire found in the urn that amounts to a magic t-shirt which comes just short of completely exposing her witchy nether parts.

"All hail my magic t-shirt!!!"

By the time that Sarah gets to the witch’s underground lair, we’ve witnessed graphic eye-gougings, disembowelings, an immolation, throat-slashings, demonic possession, cannibalism (as if you needed more proof that you were watching an Italian horror flick), torture of church officials and a vaginal impalement with a seven-foot spear (which is literally shoved out of the recipient’s mouth), so we’re within our rights to expect a suitably apocalyptic battle between good witch Sarah and the Mother and her minions, but after all the hype about Sarah’s powers being the key to winning the day all we get is Sarah ripping off the Mother’s magic t-shirt and dumping it onto an open brazier. That move results in an impromptu earthquake (?), the routing of the minions, and what I believe was the enormous spire of a church simultaneously running through and squashing the buck-nekkid Mother of Tears. Sarah and the cop who was leading the manhunt after her escape through catacombs filled with raw sewage, and when they make it to the surface they’re suddenly clean (symbolism?) and sit there laughing like a couple of mental patients. Then, before we’re offered any kind of real conclusion or are even told that the world has been set to right, the credits abruptly roll to the accompaniment of some really bad heavy metal song. Reminiscent as it was of the ending of Lucio Fulci’s THE GATES OF HELL (1980), the finale left me sitting there gobsmacked for a few moments before I exclaimed, “What the fuck did I just watch???”

I have not seen all of Argento’s films but I think it’s a safe bet to say that MOTHER OF TEARS is easily his most over-the-top and nonsensical work, featuring a plot that makes virtually no sense and revels in the kind of gore that his lesser-talented contemporaries relied upon in lieu of Argento’s directorial talents. Compounding the rampaging idiocy on hand is the fact that the film was shot in English, and the consequent delivery by a cast that presumably for the most part doesn’t speak the language ranges from emotionless to downright hilarious; the very idea that Asia Argento is supposed to be playing an American is ludicrous enough thanks to her blatantly native Italian looks, but the accent heard whenever she speaks brings to mind gondolas and the beautiful hills of wine country rather than someplace like Newark, New Jersey.

But despite its myriad flaws, MOTHER OF TEARS is definitely a must-see for the spectacle of what can happen when all reason flees an acclaimed director and he lets his most questionable ideas run rampant across the screen. In fact, I’d rate MOTHER OF TEARS as Argento’s analog to Ken Russell’s THE FALL OF THE LOUSE OF USHER; sure it’s a piece of galloping horse shit, but this is a steaming turd that simply has to be seen to believed, so I recommended it to any and all willing to take the chance.

(Oh, and for the record: the vaginal spearing occurs while the character on the receiving end of it is clad in a shift so there’s no nudity, and that makes it even worse thanks to our imaginations filling in the obvious details with imagery probably worse than anything Argento could have actually shown us.)

Theatrical release poster.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 10: TOKYO GORE POLICE (2008)

Okay, I have one big question about this flick: How can a movie featuring content like this,

or this (yes, that is a gun/penis),

or even this (giving new possibilities to the old "snail trails" joke)

turn out to be something of a disappointment? The only answer I can come up with is that the Japanese have twigged to the fact that a movie doesn't have to make one lick of sense to rake in box office cash, provided the film in question is crammed wall-to-wall with ultra-violence, gratuitous nudity, kinky sexual freakishness, monsters like something out of a softcore remake of KAMEN RIDER and truly unbelievable amounts of torrential arterial spray, the likes of which have not been seen since Peter Jackson's DEADALIVE (1992).

TOKYO GORE POLICE is a batshit-crazy orgy of over-the-top carnage hung upon a framework that plays out like the result of a three-month working vacation in Japan as taken by David Lynch or David Cronenberg. Replete with "body horror" revolving around the human form mutating into a myriad of fascinating and horrific variations, the film is nothing more than an excuse to showcase loony prosthetic makeup effects, CGI, and Gwar-style splatter that decorates the camera with matter-of-fact abandon, and actresses who are quite content to get topless and allow the makeup people to run rampant transforming their nubile bodies into grotesque fusions of the feminine and the fearsome. But while that's all terrific in theory, the movie itself has the feel of a semi-obscure and at times pretentious art movie that wallows in grue yet manages to stay objective to its own abattoir excesses. Sort of like it's focusing its perception on its own content and not being viscerally engaged in the least.

The often nonsensical story unfolds in a near-future where the Tokyo Police Corporation finds itself at constant war with the "engineers," genetically modified super-baddies whose motives are never explained to any satisfactory degree, but they do have the ability to take helacious amounts of high-caliber punishment and transform assorted bits of their anatomy into bio-mechanical hybrids of flesh and weaponry or disturbing fusions of man and other sundry life-forms.

A trio of "engineered" nightclub performers: gotta love those snail shell ninnies!

Few movies can function without some sort of protagonist, even one with a surfeit of sanguinary explosions and bucketloads of offal, so TOKYO GORE POLICE provides us with Ruka (Eihi Shina), a seriously disturbed cop trained to deal with engineers, whose skirt and garter belt ensemble fetchingly complements her short skirt and razor-edged katana. 

Eihi Shina as policewoman/slayer Ruka.

Haunted by traumatic events from her youth, Ruka vents her neuroses by regularly taking a blade to her left forearm, but when not engaging in self-mutilation she fights against a persistent engineer serial killer who, unbeknownst to her, is tied to her personal tragedy. Her investigation leads to the fetish club headquarters of the engineers and unearths unexpected truths about her adoptive father before the film climaxes in a half hour of nigh-unimaginable bloodshed and totally gratuitous mayhem. But at times the film's visual storytelling is an incoherent mess, and my buddy Chris and I spent much of the film trying to piece together exactly how some of the characters figured into the plot, exactly who they were, and even if they were in fact another character altogether. Our perceptions were not in any way altered by booze; we were simply and profoundly confused by much of what we saw and I'll be damned if I've got all of it straight even as I write this review. I honestly wonder if the filmmakers simply did not care if the film was coherent or not, as long as they were able to create what amounted to a feature-length special effects demo reel. Take f'rinstance this post-punk geisha chick:

She shows up a bunch of times during the movie and bloodily engages the engineers in combat, but exactly who and what is she? I thought she was another incarnation of Ruka but apparently not, and Chris was also at a loss to explain just who she was. I think she may have been another policewoman because she shows up during the climax wearing a kicky uniform while wielding a naginata (a weapon I always welcome with open arms) but I couldn't honestly tell you for certain, even if there were a gun to my head. Then there's the guy seen standing to Ruka's left in the shot below:

As seen here, he's clearly another member of the police corporation, but once Ruka makes her way to the fetish club this same guy is seen wandering in off the street, decked out in tacky '70's gear, and he runs afoul of a chick with stitched-over nipples who bites off his cock in a truly spectacular/ludicrous display of fountaining blood. He then falls prey to the chief engineer and gets turned into a berserker with a sword-arm and a gigantic cannon-penis, but here's the thing: I had no idea that the throwaway cop seen above and the guy reborn with the ballistic boner were one and the same until I took a good, long look at this photo. The character is never really pointed out to be one of Ruka's co-workers (at least not that I can recall), and during the bits where his discoed-out self saunters into the fetish club Chris kept asking, "Who the fuck is this guy, and why are we supposed to care?"

A cock-biter with stitched-over ninnies: not the kind of girl you take home to meet your mom.

But maybe I'm the one who's fucked-up for actually giving a shit about expecting a plot in a movie that has nothing on its mind other than pleasing the gore-hounds that comprise the bulk of its audience, an audience of which I'm supposedly a part?

Despite its art house pacing and feel, TOKYO GORE POLICE lives up to its name and intent, providing colorful and ridiculous gory set pieces that don't disappoint, although as previously stated there is an element of the camera's gaze upon these events being a case of "point and stare" that doesn't necessarily engage the viewer. In fact, at times it kind of reminded me of mediocre porno: all the stuff you want to see is there onscreen, but its depiction is little more than explicitness for the sake of being explicit and it's all rather mechanical. But what other film can you name that depicts a living, breathing torso-chair that treats the patrons of the fetish club to a golden shower of epic proportions?

Seriously, this piece of flesh furniture lets fly with a literal geyser of piss while those in attendance cavort with glee. Hey, whatever turns you on...

The pee-pee chair prop.

There's also abundant eye-candy on display, covering a number of aesthetics from standard fetishy

to my favorite visual in the entire film:

The most impressive example of the classical "vagina dentata" ever seen on the big screen, so there's something for everyone.

Bottom line: TOKYO GORE POLICE is a seriously flawed piece of work and I would only recommend it for those who just have to see every gory movie ever made. It's visually interesting but uninvolving, and while there are many out there who will not care about the story, I felt kind of let down by it. For a vastly better film that mines similiar territory, I recommend THE MACHINE GIRL instead.

Poster from the U.S./U.K. theatrical release.