All posts by Rod Lott

Reading Material

Italian Horror Cinema

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italianhorrorcinemaWhile regular visitors to this site would join me in disagreement, the very things that make horror films from Italy so distinctive — namely, unflinching violence, oft-excessive gore and heavily linked sexuality — are why scholars and critics long have turned their collective noses up at it. And yet, even a casual viewing of Mario Bava or Dario Argento works reveals real visual artistry at work, even amid controversy.

Standing on our side are Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter, co-editors of Italian Horror Cinema, and their 11 fellow contributors, giving the form that study of which others find it unworthy. The best kind of academic-minded texts (read: accessible), the trade paperback is ready-made reading for the genre’s most fervent enthusiasts, whose hunger doesn’t end with the final shot.

New from Edinburgh University Press, Italian Horror Cinema pushes Lucio Fulci on the shark-vs.-zombie cover and, within a baker’s dozen of essays that awaits inside, seemingly every remaining Italian filmmaker of note, right up to such current directors as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the team behind The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.

Russ Hunter lays the trade paperback’s foundation with an informative survey of the country’s early fright fare, including a silent Frankenstein picture and — exclamation theirs — 1916’s I Prefer Hell! This provides proper context for the articles that immediately follow, chronicling Italian horror’s international dawn in the 1960s to its largely retro-reflexive existence today, with an in-between stop to the living rooms of a VHS-obsessed ’80s. While chapters on Bava and Argento are expected, their theses are not; in the latter case, that means Karl Schoonover’s study on how the maestro treats the ecological and the unwanted.

The further the reader goes, the more specific the contents become. Adam Lowenstein demonstrates the influence of the giallo on the all-American slasher film, with a primary focus on the now-iconic Friday the 13th; turns out, the relationship is akin to the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup. Meanwhile, a less healthy marriage — that of (often unsimulated) animal cruelty in the cannibal epics — is probed by Mark Bernard (whose terrific Selling the Splat Pack was published by Edinburgh last year). Those moviegoers who extend their love of cinema into their choices of reading material and listening pleasure will appreciate the chapters on Italian film journals and the unsettling yet irresistible soundtracks of Goblin. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Satan’s Triangle (1975)

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satanstriangleMayday! Mayday! A Coast Guard chopper sent on a rescue mission for a small ship in the Bermuda Triangle find quite a ghastly sight: A dead guy hanging from the mast by his feet, another dead guy chucked through a window and, inside, yet another dead guy — suspended in midair! Only a former prostitute in a purple sweater lives to tell the tale.

That reformed call girl, Eva (Kim Novak, the Hitchcock blonde of Vertigo), relays her harrowing story of survival to her rescuer, Lt. Haig (Doug McClure, Tapeheads), making Satan’s Triangle first and foremost a flashback. One would think that a day of innocent marlin fishing wouldn’t go to hell once you come upon a priest (Alejandro Rey, The Ninth Configuration) floating in the ocean. Alas, ’tis not the case …

satanstriangle1Just about any review the curious can find of this made-for-TV movie makes particular mention of its twist ending — namely, that it terrifies and induces shivers, if not pants-wetting. The big problem is that director Sutton Roley (Chosen Survivors) forces the viewer to sit through an awfully tedious hour to get there, where a bigger problem awaits: that the ending is vastly overrated and ridiculously predictable. It would work in the 30-minute span of a Twilight Zone.

I suppose Satan’s Triangle could have possessed the power to chill in its prime-time day, when real-life fear of that stretch of North Atlantic Ocean had crested to a tabloid peak. But I don’t wanna dwell on it; you’re better off watching Mexico’s Bermuda Triangle anyway. —Rod Lott

Action

City on Fire (1979)

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cityonfireFor City on Fire, Canada took The Towering Inferno, knocked it on its side, reduced its running time by an hour, then plucked a few supporting players from The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Swarm. Ta-dah! Instant disaster movie! (Half a decade too late to capitalize on the craze, but still: “A” for effort.)

Directed by Death Ship cap’n Alvin Rakoff, the fiery film quickly introduces the characters we theoretically are supposed to care about — a tall order when one of them is Shelley Winters. We have a fire chief two months from retirement (Henry Fonda, Meteor), a vodka-pickled newswoman (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel), a wealthy widow who donated $3 million for the new downtown hospital (Susan Clark, Porky’s), that hospital’s numero uno surgeon (Barry Newman, Vanishing Point) and the city’s corrupt mayor (Leslie Nielsen, in his creepy Creepshow mode) with eyes on being governor and being atop Clark’s character.

cityonfire1Meanwhile, over at the world’s ninth-largest oil refinery — which the mayor allowed to be built right next to waterways, all the better to Irwin Allen this here shit up — a beady-eyed, longtime maintenance worker named, of course, Herman (Jonathan Welsh, Starship Invasions) is shown the door and retaliates by punching timecards that aren’t his and causing a big explosion. And that big explosion results in more big explosions. And those big explosions travel down that flammable river like one long wick and set off even bigger explosions, all over town! Why, one might go so far as to say the city is on fire.

Indeed it is, all to show that the film’s appetizer sequence of an apartment building going up in flames — thanks to some pesky kids trying to smoke cigs — was like an hour of TV’s Emergency! by comparison. Please note there is nothing wrong with Emergency!, but is there an episode where a VW Bug flips in the air from the sheer force of a kablooey? Where quake-style rumbling causes some old dude to fall into a swimming pool? Where walls collapse around some poor young guy just trying to get in some reading while taking a dump? Where a Hollywood legend like Gardner says “fuck”? Hell, did Julie London ever go the extra mile like Clark, and give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a stranger whose face is caked with yellow vomit?

cityonfire2Look, Rakoff may have had to resort to the ol’ shake-the-camera trick and leaned too hard on one terrible matte painting, but cut him some serious slack: He shows a crazy woman from the hospital purposely walk toward the raging fires, seemingly oblivious that the skin on her face is peeling like an onion. Hell, Rakoff’s concluding set piece puts Nielsen in control of a fire hose, and he turns the throng of exiting patients into his own personal wet T-shirt contest! Something tells me Emergency! creator/producer/goody-two-shoes Jack Webb wouldn’t go for those shenanigans.

But I sure as hell did. City on Fire earns its R rating, because it wanted to. It’s surprisingly gory and, therefore, surprisingly good. Not even Fonda’s ending sermon could temper my enthusiasm. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

HauntedWeen (1991)

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hauntedweenAlthough little Eddie Burber (Craig Bitterling) was told he was too young to participate in the Kentucky family’s haunted house, he dons a mask, slips in through the vents and does it anyway … and accidentally impales a pigtailed girl in the process. Oopsie! Time to flee the state!

A predictably even 20 years later, Eddie’s mother (a near-Xerox of Vicki Lawrence in full dress rehearsal for Mama’s Family) keels over and dies, making it time for a now full-grown Eddie (Ethan Adler) to return to his hometown of Regawas for Halloween — er, we mean HauntedWeen. (Apparently, Halloween already was taken as a night-he-came-home title.)

hauntedween1Eddie’s homecoming coincides with the financial foibles of Tophill State College fraternity Sigma Phi. As their leader, Kurt (Brien Blakely, Diary of a Serial Killer), explains, they face a revoked charter if they can’t pony up some $3,700 in unpaid dues ASAP. (It is worth noting that Kurt is the only one who looks like an actual member of the Greek community.) Fate — or perhaps all-too-convenient screenwriting — intervenes when the mysterious, mute Eddie shows up at the frat house’s door just long enough to deliver a key to the old Burber house in the hands of the cornpone-accented Hanks (Brad Hanks), who makes Gomer Pyle sound like a master of elocution. Hanks is also considered the frat’s resident “funny” guy. He is not funny, but he does make Jim Varney’s Ernest character look subtle in comparison.

Suddenly, the Sigma Phi bros have a can’t-miss plan: Revive the Burber family’s House of Horrors for one night and charge $5 admission! (Okay, so they’re not the brightest at math. Dudes, did you learn nothing from your $3-a-head beer blowout?) Andy Hardy-style, the guys and their gals in their ALF and Edie Brickell & New Bohemians T-shirts chug down some refreshing RC Cola and get to work. Even Kurt’s on-again/off-again girlfriend (Blake Pickett, The Erotic House of Wax) pitches in, despite them being squarely in the “off” position.

hauntedween2What these crazy co-eds somehow don’t know is that Eddie — whose face is not revealed until the final scene, for no logical purpose — also is working on his own room within the House of Horrors, which he will turn into his personal Grand Guignol stage. He paints “The Kill Room” on the wall and decorates the place with promo material purloined from the local video store, including posters for Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II, not to mention the coup de grâce of a Pumpkinhead cardboard standee. Look, no one ever accused of slashers of excelling in interior design.

No one ever accused Wm. Douglas Robertson of being a fine writer, director and/or producer, either. Just as his lone IMDb credit fails as a slasher, much less a feature film, words cannot quite convey the rotted fruit of the Sigma Phi labors. It’s as if the guys never had attended a haunted attraction, because each room the patrons walk through requires them to pause and watch a skit. The only stop that matters, of course, is Eddie’s Kill Room. Even with its noggin-bonked collegians tied up for mortal torture, customers assume it’s all part of the show; one braces-faced boy even goads, “Batter up, dude!” as Eddie swings a baseball bat at a Sigma Phi, causing an instant decapitation and a neck geyser of blood that looks like chocolate pudding.

Although utter trash, HauntedWeen makes for enjoyable viewing any time of year, because it is utter trash, shot on 16mm film for an estimated $65,000. Not only could that amount eliminate nearly 18 of the frat’s IOUs, but it represents a fraction of the sheer entertainment value silly-seeking viewers will gain. —Rod Lott

Get it at HauntedWeen.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (1977)

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yetiNot content to let Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis corner the entire giant-monster market with 1976’s King Kong, his fellow countrymen ripped off his blockbuster with, among other titles, Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century, directed by Gianfranco Parolini (aka Frank Kramer, helmer of the Sabata trilogy). But really, the two films are vastly different; in Yeti, the big guy climbs down a skyscraper. See? Nothing alike!

A giant of a different sort, the rotund captain of industry Morgan Hunnicut (Plot of Fear‘s Edoardo Faieta, aka Eddie Faye), calls upon an old friend, the professor Henry Wassermann (John Stacy, The Headless Ghost), to assist in a “humane expedition” in Northern Canada. (Despite always wearing a cap swiped from one of Santa’s elves, Wassermann enjoys great credibility in the field.)

yeti1This expedition involves the thawing and subsequent reanimation of an ancient abominable snowman encased in ice, discovered by Hunnicut’s grade-school grandson, Herbie (Jim Sullivan, the prototype for young Fred Savage), who has been mute ever since he lost his voice in a plane crash that claimed the lives of his parents. Under the prof’s supervision, Hunnicut’s team assaults the cryptozoological Popsicle with flamethrowers to reveal the body underneath, five times taller than you or I, and preserved in “a perfect state” for all these years. Just how many years wavers from scene to scene, from “millions” to “a billion” to “1 million,” with all estimates coming from the same source, and all running square in the face of the film’s 20th-century subtitle.

For some reason, the yeti (Mimmo Crao, Sergio Martino’s Sex with a Smile) has to be revived while within a TARDIS-like contraption hanging from chains to a helicopter in flight. This works, but down on the ground, the hirsute sasquatch gets freaked out by camera flashes, triggering the unavoidable rampage; before you know it, the blood of extras is on his hairy palms. He licks them.

yetihaggertyAlso unavoidable: He becomes smitten with Hunnicutt’s hot granddaughter, the teenaged Jane (Antonella Interlenghi, aka Phoenix Grant, Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead), so he scoops her and little bro Herbie up and carries them to a private spot among nature. Along the way, Jane accidentally touches the yeti’s breast, which gets the creature so excited, his nipple inflates. The creature’s resulting grin is so wide, it looks as if he inhaled a hit of Smilex. Aroused or not, he resembles Dan Haggerty with mange (see Exhibit A).

Speaking of aroused, Jane becomes just that when the yeti combs her hair with a giant fish skeleton likely still wet from being stripped of stinky meat seconds earlier. One could argue that the public is aroused as well, once it hears of this Bigfoot’s existence; Hunnicut Enterprises enjoys doubled sales, thanks to full-fledged yeti mania through everything from yeti gasoline to ladies’ “Kiss Me Yeti” T-shirts, whose fronts are adorned with the monster’s handprints purposely at boob-grabbing level.

Because the yeti’s initial dealings with camera-snapping humans went so well (read: not), the greedy Hunnicut plots the publicity stunt to end all publicity stunts, evidently forgetting it also will end the lives of several innocent people. But, hey, a buck’s a buck! And Parolini and his fellow producers spent as few of those as possible, judging from nearly two hours of evidence. Replete with miniature models and what sounds like two songs on repeat, Giant is chintzia — pretty sure that’s Italian for “chintzy.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.