Quentin Tarantino – Blood and Porridge

May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

The jolly films of Roger (Part 2)

© American International Pictures

Following on from my last blog-post, in which I paid tribute to the prolific, indefatigable and – it has to be said – thrifty filmmaker Roger Corman who died on May 9th, here’s a round-up of my favourite films that Corman directed.

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Character actor Dick Miller worked regularly with Roger Corman. His biggest role for him was in a movie that’s also Corman’s best work of the 1950s, the horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood. Miller plays a would-be avant-garde sculptor called Walter Paisley who’s increasingly frustrated at his lack of talent. This isn’t helped by the fact that, to make ends meet, he has to work as a busboy at the local Beatnik café, which is full of pretentious tossers going on about what creative geniuses they are. “Be a nose! Be a nose!” the hapless Paisley cries as he tries and fails to fashion a recognisable human visage out of a lump of clay. After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat and then killing an undercover cop who’s trying to implicate him in some drug-dealing at the café (Paisley memorably cleaves his head with a skillet), he hits on a way of producing perfectly proportioned statues: committing murder and coating the bodies in clay. Frankly, the resulting corpse-statues look hideous, but that doesn’t stop the Beatniks at the café proclaiming Paisley an artistic genius.

Their lack of taste in sculpture mirrors their lack of taste in poetry. At the beginning we hear Beatnik bard Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton) delivering an epic, and epicly bad, poem called Life is a Bum, which goes: “Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art… The Artist is, all others are not… Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, Jerk? Dead, dead, dead! They were not born before they were born, they were not born… Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive, alive, alive! They were born…!”

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

The Raven (1963)

As a kid, I loved this movie, the fifth of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International Pictures. The tale of a trio of feuding magicians played by Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, it’s more fantasy than horror – but spiced with delightfully ghoulish moments, such as when a torturer checks the temperature of a red-hot poker by pressing it into his own arm, or when Price opens a little casket and is discombobulated to find it full of human eyeballs. (“I’d rather not say,” he croaks when Lorre asks him what’s inside.) It’s like a version of Walt Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) for morbid children.

Needless to say, the film’s connection with Edgar Allan Poe is extremely loose. In fact, it’s only Karloff turning Lorre into a raven twice during the film that allows Corman to tack the title of Poe’s most famous poem onto it and have Price recite the poem mellifluously during its opening scene. Meanwhile, in the role of Lorre’s son, we get a 26-year-old and amusingly wooden Jack Nicholson.

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

A non-gothic movie Corman made whilst in the middle of his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the usual visual spectrum perceptible to humans.

I wrote about this movie last year in a post about its scriptwriter, Ray Russell. “Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distance edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.”

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman’s majestic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, scripted by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell (with a second Poe story, Hop Frog, stitched into the plot for good measure) and beautifully shot by the great Nicolas Roeg, showcases Vincent Price at his sumptuously evil best. He’s Prince Prospero, who’s holed up in his castle with an entourage of loathsome aristocrats while a plague, the Red Death, decimates the countryside outside. Price and friends happily live a life of decadence, fuelled by drink, drugs, sex and diabolism – rather like Boris Johnson and his lackeys and minions partying at No 10, Downing Street, during Covid-19 and breaking all their own lockdown restrictions – while refusing to help the neighbourhood’s terrified peasants. However, when they decide to enliven their social calendar with a fancy-dress masque, the masque is gate-crashed by a mysterious, Ingmar Bergman-esque figure swathed in a red robe. Guess who that is.

© Alta Vista Productions / Anglo-Amalgamated / Warner Pathé

Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Made the same year as Masque, Corman’s Ligeia has Price in a more sympathetic role, playing a haunted and reclusive man who tries to put his troubles behind him and find happiness with a new wife (Elizabeth Shepherd). Unfortunately, his former wife, though dead, is still around in spirit form and won’t leave him in peace. Tomb of Ligeia has a slightly over-the-top ending, but the build-up to it, involving black cats, flag-stoned passageways, cobwebs, candlelight, hypnosis, Egyptology and some spectacular monasterial ruins filmed at Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham in England’s County Suffolk, is spookily wonderful.

The Wild Angels (1966)

“Just what is it that you want to do…?” “Well, we wanna be free, we wanna to be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do…. We’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party!”

Scottish alternative rock / dance band Primal Scream immortalised this exchange from Corman’s The Wild Angels, between Frank Maxwell’s preacher and Peter Fonda’s Hells Angel, by sampling it on their 1990 dancefloor hit Loaded. Though to be fair, the American grunge band Mudhoney got there first when they sampled it on their song In and Out of Grace two years earlier. It’s also recited at the climax of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s underrated sci-fi / horror satire from 2013, during the face-off between Simon Pegg and a supercilious alien intelligence voiced by Bill Nighy.

In addition to Fonda, The Wild Angels features Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd – supposedly Dern and Ladd’s daughter Laura was conceived during filming, so Laura Dern is something else we have Roger Corman to thank for – and the baby-faced Michael J. Pollard shortly before he played W.C. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The script, officially written by long-term Corman associate Charles B. Griffith and unofficially rewritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is minimalist. While there’s stuff about Fonda’s Hells Angels chapter pursuing a stolen bike, and about Dern’s character being shot by the cops and having to be rescued from a hospital, it’s mainly a frame for scenes in which the Angels offend Middle America. Corman did his research by throwing parties with free beer and marijuana for real Hells Angels. He had Griffith attend them and make notes while those Angels recounted their wild (and no doubt exaggerated) tales of life on the road.

© American International Pictures

At least Griffith and Bogdanovich don’t pull their punches. In the script, the Angels come across as pretty assholey, particularly with their love for Nazi symbols and memorabilia. This causes a confrontation between them and a World-War-II veteran (Dick Miller again) early in the movie. When Dern’s character dies and they organise a funeral for him – predictably, the church service degenerates into an orgy – the coffin is draped in a Nazi flag. The real Hells Angels, some of whom had appeared in the film, were so annoyed by Corman’s portrayal of them that they threatened to both kill him and sue him (presumably not in that order). If that wasn’t enough, Corman had Frank ‘Dodgy Connections’ Sinatra breathing down his neck, concerned about daughter Nancy’s safety among the Angels on the set. Actually, the story of an exploitation director making a biker movie who unwittingly antagonises the Hells Angels and the Mafia sounds like it would make a good exploitation movie.

The Trip (1967)

Corman, Fonda and Dern were united for this movie, scripted by one Jack Nicholson. Yes, it’s about a trip, a hallucinogenic one, experienced by a TV commercial director played by Fonda, wearing a sensible red V-necked sweater. He takes LSD as a reaction to the break-up of his marriage and the trip initially happens at the home of, and under the watchful eye of, a friend played by Dern, wearing a sensible eggshell-blue polo-neck and fawn jacket. These scenes were filmed in the house of Albert Lee, leader of the rock band Love. The cost-conscious Corman was surely pleased to discover that Lee’s house had so much psychedelic décor already it hardly needed to be dressed up for the film. However, when Fonda hallucinates that he’s killed Dern – he hasn’t – he panics and flees down to Sunset Strip. Then things really get groovy.

Seen today, The Trip is inevitably something of a museum piece and the low budget means some of its fantasy scenes are ropey. Bits where Fonda, now wearing a baggy white shirt like a romantic poet, is pursued by medieval, cloaked-and-cowled figures on horseback through what is obviously modern-day California are particularly cringey. But there are enough genuinely weird things – Fonda having a question-and-answer session with Dennis Hopper on a carousel, Fonda making love to a lady under some heavily patterned lighting that makes them look like psychedelically-coloured chameleons, Fonda having a panic attack inside Dern’s wardrobe – to make it memorable. And if you enjoy a good 1960s-movie psych-out sequence, the one where the heavily-tripping Fonda blunders into a night club during a live rock performance is awesome.

© American International Pictures

Bloody Mama (1970)

Like The Wild Angels, this Corman movie isn’t so much a story as a series of outrages, with reprobates lurching from one confrontation to another. Unlike The Wild Angels, the characters in Bloody Mama are based, very loosely, on historical figures – Depression-era America’s notorious Barker-Karpis Gang, supposedly led by matriarch Kate ‘Ma’ Barker. Many have argued that Ma Barker’s reputation as a criminal mastermind was invented by the media and by J. Edgar Hoover, keen to justify the FBI killing an old woman when they finally caught up with her and shot her. As the fictionalised Ma Barker, lording it over her four gormless gangster sons, Shelley Winters gives a scenery-chomping performance that dominates the film and blinds you to its various budgetary and exploitative shortcomings. God-fearing, gun-toting, racist, incestuous and psychotic, she seems a monstrous metaphor for America itself. This is underlined when she herds her sons around the piano to sing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Among the sons, Don Stroud gets most to do as Ma’s eldest, Herman. He’s a hulking thug to begin with but, in some unexpected character development, gradually forms a mind of his own. Film buffs, though, will be more excited by the presence of a young Robert De Niro, playing well-medicated son Lloyd. At one point he gets high on glue, causing an uncomprehending Winters to exclaim, “When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly!”

Incidentally, Bloody Mama was such a money spinner for American International Pictures that they demanded another Depression-era gangster movie. Corman, though, was willing only to produce the follow-up, Boxcar Bertha (1972), and a young lad called Martin Scorsese got the directing gig.

When I first started writing this tribute to Roger Corman, I was going to title it THE MAN WHO ROGERED HOLLYWOOD, though I soon decided that sounded disrespectful. But Corman literally did roger Hollywood. Without his opportunities and tutelage, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Nicholson, etc., might never have got to where they did, and many landmark movies during the last half-century of Hollywood’s history – from the Godfather movies to the Scorsese-De Niro collaborations, from the Terminator and Avatar series to a host of classic films including Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1989), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1993) and Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential (1997) – might not have seen the light of day. And many of his own movies, cheap though they were, were a great deal of fun. No wonder Quentin Tarantino loved him.

Not bad for the guy who directed It Conquered the World (1956) and produced Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010).

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

February 21, 2023February 21, 2023

When Raquel ruled

© 20^th Century Fox

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress. Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego. Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles. Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers. This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming. Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her. Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since. Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist. Why? Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam. Which makes sense.

© 20^th Century Fox

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission. Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence. Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

Yes, it’s all very silly. In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible. But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs. The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage. Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s. It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career. I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films. Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969). However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him. Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

© 20^th Century Fox

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero. Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed. The cast is excellent too. In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle. You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings. Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western. It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965). And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured. The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring. But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero. Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher. The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists. There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s. He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers. The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen. Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy. At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic. They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous. With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work… But somehow, they do.

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos… And so on. Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed. But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

© 20^th Century Fox

January 31, 2023February 1, 2023

Norm!

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives. Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins. Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former. As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love. Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go. To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement. From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21^st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky. Morales survived and divorced him two years later. For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott. Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs. Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

And yet… I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees. This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

© Rhinehart & Company

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II. Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112^th Cavalry. It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war. The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot. They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other. In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union. The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island. If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word. Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly, Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’ It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process. Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together. However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park. This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs. Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot. Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water. At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam. To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here. About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

© Penguin Books

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself. Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too. At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person. Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight. This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine). With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event. It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20^th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country. Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it. And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good. Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all. And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest… The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

Random House USA Inc

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously. It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish. Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night. Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book. Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street. He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

© Penguin Random House

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies. Sounds good, yes? Well, no. The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987). And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality. It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’. (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.) Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this. Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day. This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die. Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness. At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr Five.” Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument. “I made you come 16 times – in a night.” “And none of them was any good!”

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad. I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993). Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange… There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash. Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel. Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them. Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff. My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!”

March 13, 2021March 15, 2021

The full Fulci

From amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com

Today, March 13^th, 2021, marks the 25^th anniversary of the passing of Italian director Lucio Fulci. Here’s a reposting of a lengthy treatise I wrote about the mighty Fulci back in 2014.

Nowadays, satellite television can beam any subject matter, however adult, into our living rooms. Thanks to this, the whole family, from grandma and grandpa down to the pre-school infants, can now sit together in front of the TV and enjoy, communally, such splendid sights as the bit in season three of The Walking Dead (2012-13) where Danai Gurira grabs a big jaggy chunk of glass and rams it in extreme close-up into David Morrissey’s eyeball. Even better, a few minutes later, they can enjoy the sight of David Morrissey, again in extreme close-up, pulling the jaggy glass out of his eyeball.

This wasn’t always the case. Audiences didn’t always have easy access to images of extreme eyeball abuse. Indeed, three decades ago, a scene where a person got a humongous wooden splint stuck in her eye while being dragged through a hole in a door by a mouldering zombie was enough to cause outrage amongst the powers who decided what British film-fans could and couldn’t watch. The scene belonged to the 1979 Italian horror movie Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the inimitable Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci. And it was the gory content of this and movies like it that led to Britain’s Video Nasties scare of the early 1980s.

By 1983, the Department of Public Prosecutions, cheered on by the likes of public-morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the right-wing British tabloid press, had drawn up a list of 72 films deemed liable to ‘deprave and corrupt’ and thus open to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. 39 of the 72 were successfully prosecuted. The remaining 33 weren’t prosecuted or were subject to unsuccessful prosecutions, but at the time you had little chance of seeing them through legitimate means.

Now that the hysteria has long passed, the majority of these films are available in uncut versions in Britain. A couple of them, like Don’t Go into the Woods (1981) and Contamination (1980), have even suffered the ultimate humiliation. They’ve been awarded wussy ‘15’ certificates.

Among the movies Lucio Fulci directed, two, Zombie Flesh Eaters and 1981’s The House by the Cemetery ended up on the list of 39 prosecuted titles; while a third, 1981’s The Beyond, was on the list of 33 that escaped successful prosecution. A fourth, 1980’s City of the Living Dead, didn’t make the Nasties list, but British police seized videos of it nonetheless. A fifth, 1982’s The New York Ripper, wasn’t classified as a Nasty either but still got banned from British cinemas. For this achievement alone, I think Lucio Fulci deserves respect.

I have a complicated relationship with Fulci. I doubt if I’ve ever seen more than one or two things he’s directed that I’d classify as good films, but I have to admit that when I encounter a new Fulci title in a DVD store or see one scheduled for broadcast on the Horror Channel, my pulse speeds up. I get a prickly, sweaty sense of excitement. I tell myself, I have to see this. Although the end result is usually the same. After the damned thing has finished, I sit back and feel a strange combination of bemusement, queasiness and disappointment, while a voice nags at me: “What the hell was that about?” Although to be fair to Fulci, there’s usually been at least one sequence in the film that’s made me think: “Wow!”

Lucio Fulci didn’t find fame, or infamy, in the English-speaking world until the late 1970s, but he’d been a staple of Italian cinema for a long time before. He started as a scriptwriter, first of all working on the 1954 comedy Un Giorna in Pretura. In 1959, a dozen film-scripts later, he began directing. One of his earliest directorial efforts was Ragazzi del Juke-Box, a musical starring the soon-to-be 1960s pin-up Elke Sommer. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lucio beavered away making comedies and spaghetti westerns. He also tried his hand at directing giallo movies, those twisted, kinky, violent and macabre Italian variations on the thriller genre: 1969’s Unna Sull’atra, 1971’s A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin and 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling.

Of Fulci’s giallo films, I’ve only seen Don’t Torture a Duckling and it’s surely one of the best things he did. It has none of the excess and goofiness of his later horror films and it benefits from its distinctly un-giallo-like setting. While most examples of this sub-genre take place in an affluent urban world inhabited by high-fliers in the creative industries (photographers and fashion models are common), Duckling is set in a rural and backward south Italian village, its separation from modernity symbolised by the nearby highway where traffic rumbles past oblivious to its existence. While the setting allows Fulci to take pot-shots at the institutions of conservative, traditional Italy, his cameras film the countryside there sumptuously.

That said, viewers today will be troubled by some early scenes, seemingly played for humour, which show heroine Barbara Bouchet teasing the village’s young boys by brazenly exposing herself to them. Imagine if the film had had hero Tomas Milian exposing himself to the village’s young girls. It’s a clumsy foreshadowing of the film’s themes, which are the threat posed to childhood innocence by an immoral world, and a serial killer’s determination to preserve that innocence by any means necessary.

Some commentators have noted that Fulci’s sudden interest in giallo movies, and hence in darker, bloodier material, coincided with the death of his wife Maria, who in 1969 committed suicide after discovering she had cancer. But the director himself never mentioned a connection between this personal tragedy and the darkening tone of his films.

The release of Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979 saw Fulci plant his flag both in horror-movie territory and in the consciousness of impressionable, sensation-hungry teenagers, as I was then. The film was a success despite critics slamming it as an inferior cash-in on George A. Romeo’s seminal zombie movie from the previous year, Dawn of the Dead.

Well, Zombie Flesh Eaters isn’t as good as Dawn of the Dead, but it has an undeniable something about it. The story kicks off with an un-crewed boat drifting towards New York Harbour while a ravenous zombie lurks in its hold. Then it shifts to the Caribbean island from which the boat originated, where a full-scale zombie epidemic, possibly scientifically induced, possibly supernatural, is underway. And at the very end it returns to New York, which has now succumbed to a zombie onslaught too. The stuff in New York is ropey but the scenes on the Caribbean island, depicted as a cursed, pestilent and windswept hellhole, are wonderfully atmospheric. A sequence where the protagonists stumble into a ‘conquistadors’ cemetery’ and the graves start disgorging some ancient cadavers is especially hard to forget.

But even that scene is surpassed by an earlier one where a female scuba diver flees from the predations of a large shark and hides behind a coral reef; only to discover that on the other side of the reef there lurks – eek! – a soggy underwater zombie. The shark and the zombie then proceed to fight, in a slow, balletic way. It’s typical of Fulci’s best sequences in that it manages to be simultaneously bizarre, haunting and totally bonkers.

The film is helped by the presence of two British performers, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson, who just ignore the absurdities of the situations and dialogue and get on with some proper acting. I read an interview with McCulloch a while back and he professed himself bemused by Fulci’s filming techniques in New York. These involved the cast and crew turning up at a spot, filming without any licence, and then clearing off as soon as the police appeared. This might explain the film’s curiously disjointed final image, which shows an army of zombies shuffling along an elevated bridge whilst below the New York rush-hour traffic trundles back and forth as if it’s just a normal evening.

The female lead, played by Tisa Farrow, is bloody awful, though. Tisa is the younger sister of Mia Farrow, and I’ve often wondered what the pair of them talked about when they met up during this period. “Oh hi, Tisa. I’m busy making A Wedding with Robert Altman and Death on the Nile with Peter Ustinov. What are you up to?” “Well, I’m fighting off a horde of flesh-eating zombies in a conquistadors’ cemetery with Lucio Fulci.” Mind you, considering what Mia had to endure with Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen, maybe she thought her kid sister had the better deal.

Zombie Flesh Eaters is one of my favourite Lucio Fulci movies because it has a story, one where things move from A to B and then to C. Unfortunately, for his next horror movies, Fulci decided that there’d be a common theme. Each would take place in a locality that, unknown to the inhabitants, rests on top of a portal to hell. And if you’re on top of a portal to hell, the laws of physics, of cause and effect, of A leading to B and to C, will be suspended. All sorts of crazy things will happen. The dead will rise, furniture will levitate, dogs will go mad, eyeballs will bleed, the sky will rain maggots, demonic winds will blow in your windows and satanic spiders will chew your face off. But there won’t be anything like a logically sequenced plot.

Many film fans have applauded Fulci for doing away with such outdated, bourgeoisie concepts as ‘plots’ in his films, but I have to say I find it a cop-out. This ‘portal to hell’ stuff was just an excuse for him to make things up as he went along.

First in this series was 1980’s City of the Living Dead, which centres on strange goings-on in a remote American town that, by bad luck, is built on one of those afore-mentioned portals to hell. The townspeople are soon falling victim to various forms of supernatural mayhem, which are orchestrated by a ghostly priest and a clutch of zombies who apparently have the power to teleport from one place to another. City is a shambolic film. Well, what else can you expect when there’s teleporting zombies in it? But as usual with Fulci there are scenes that really stick in the memory. I particularly like one where the protagonists explore some catacombs under the local graveyard, unaware that the cobwebby old cadavers there are stirring into life the moment they pass by.

A sequence that all viewers of City remember is one where a girl sits paralysed in a car while the ghostly priest leers in at her and, under his malevolent influence, she starts to vomit up her own entrails. Lovingly captured on Fulci’s camera, those entrails ooze from her mouth in a slow, slimy mass. The actress who had the honour of playing this scene was starlet Daniella Doria. She had to sit before the camera with her mouth crammed full of sheep’s offal, which she then slobbered down her front. People go on about the pain that Christian Bale inflicts upon himself in his quest for cinematic perfection, starving himself to a skeletal husk for The Machinist (2004) or making his weight balloon to play the slobby hero of American Hustle (2013); but I bet even Bale would draw the line at spewing mouthfuls of cold sheep-guts over himself in a Lucio Fulci movie.

Daniella Doria made three subsequent films with Fulci and she died horribly in all of them, via asphyxiation, stabbing and slashing. “She was one of my favourite actresses,” Fulci reminisced later. “I killed her so many times.”

Many rate the following year’s The Beyond as Fulci’s masterpiece and, indeed, its champions include Quentin Tarantino. But I have the same problems with it that I have with City of the Living Dead. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, because the action takes place on top of another of those pesky portals to hell. Again, though, there are some striking scenes, notably, one where heroine Catriona McColl encounters a spectral figure standing in the middle of a straight, seemingly endless causeway. The figure is that of a blind woman, played by Cinzia Monreale, who turns out to be a ghost. Later, though, the blind woman dies when her throat is torn out. Predictably, Fulci never explains how a ghost, someone who’s already dead, can be killed.

The Beyond also contains the barmy ‘spiders from hell’ scene, during which a lightning bolt knocks a character off a ladder. He breaks his back and then lies helplessly while giant spiders emerge from the ether around him, converge and start munching on his face. The spiders – real tarantulas – look creepy enough as they approach during the long shots; but for the face-nibbling close-ups they become phoney bundles of pipe cleaners that Fulci’s special-effects team probably threw together during the mid-morning tea-break.

Another problem is the ending. It seems that Fulci had intended The Beyond, which takes place in a dilapidated Louisiana hotel, to be a haunted-house movie. However, his financial backers expected him to make them another money-spinning zombie movie. I can imagine Fulci’s producer grabbing him one day on the set, after looking at what was already in the can, and waving his arms and ranting in a stereotypical Italian way: “Lucio! Hey Lucio! Where-za hell-za zombies?!” So, although he didn’t want to, poor old Fulci had to insert an incongruous climax into the film where McColl and hero David Warbeck have a shoot-out with a sudden and unexpected bunch of zombies.

The final instalment in Fulci’s ‘portals to hell’ series was 1982’s The House by the Cemetery, which has a young family moving into the titular house by the titular cemetery and discovering that they’re sharing it with, down in the basement, something horrible. But sadly, the film lacks those moments of demented flamboyance that distinguished its two predecessors.

Meanwhile, between City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, Fulci tried to do something different. This was filming a contemporary update of the Edgar Allan Poe story The Black Cat and setting it in England. I’d hoped that the subject matter would reign in the director’s excesses and impose a little discipline on him. The focus, after all, isn’t on a portal to hell that makes all things possible, but on a cat. A pretty evil cat, right enough, but at the end of the day just a cat.

Unfortunately, like Fulci’s other films of the period, The Black Cat (1981) suffers from having everything thrown into it bar the kitchen sink. The cat has somehow picked up subconscious psychic emanations from its owner, who’s a paranormal investigator obsessed with contacting the dead and who’s played by the distinguished Irish actor Patrick Magee. Imbued with the hatred Magee feels deep down for the untrustworthy yokels who live around him in a rural English village, the cat starts acting out Magee’s suppressed fantasies and starts killing the villagers.

But the cat seems to have picked up some other things, including super-intelligence and super-strength, for it can hypnotise its victims, sabotage ventilation systems, set furniture on fire, come back from the dead and even, like those silly zombies in City of the Living Dead, teleport. You wonder why with all these talents the cat ever bothers to scratch anyone, but it does that too. Still, the film has a few impressively eerie sequences, such as when Magee totters down to the village graveyard after dark and tests out his new contacting-the-dead wireless equipment.

Fulci is remembered for one more ‘major’ horror film, 1982’s The New York Ripper. A serial killer / slasher effort with a self-explanatory title, this was controversial to say the least and led to him being accused of misogyny. Even if Britain hadn’t been so jittery at the time about Video Nasties, the fact that it appeared soon after the real-life Yorkshire Ripper killings in northern England probably meant it was never going to get a British cinematic release. The New York Ripper is a gruelling film and, frankly, a pretty bad one. The killer’s quirk of performing Donald Duck impersonations during the murders isn’t so much deeply disturbing as deeply stupid. If nothing else, the film serves as a record of the sleaze and dodginess associated with New York in the 1970s and 1980s. This, of course, was before the city was cleaned up in the 1990s by its mayor, the totally non-sleazy, non-dodgy Rudy Giuliani

Thereafter, Fulci’s output tailed off in both prominence and quality due to a series of misfortunes that included a fall-out with his long-term scriptwriting collaborator Dardano Sacchetti and some serious health problems like hepatitis, cirrhosis and diabetes. Although ‘quality’ is a subjective concept when you’re discussing his movies anyway. He soldiered on into the early 1990s, his last directorial effort being the poorly received psychological thriller Door to Silence in 1991. I’ve watched a single movie from his later years, a 1987 teen-orientated horror film called Aenigma that was apparently filmed in the then-Yugoslavia and is a weak rip-off of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Richard Franklin’s telekinesis thriller Patrick (1978). One thing I’ll say about Aenigma is that its death-by-snails sequence has to be seen to be believed.

Lucio Fulci died impoverished, sick and alone in Rome in 1996. At least he had the satisfaction of attending, two months prior to his death, a convention in New York organised by the American horror-movie magazine Fangoria. Much to his astonishment, since he didn’t appreciate his popularity beyond the shores of Italy, he was mobbed at the convention by thousands of American fans.

Funnily enough, Fulci’s films make me think of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi-puppet TV show from 1964, Stingray. Each episode of Stingray would open with a voice intoning, “Anything can happen in the next half-hour!” That line would make a suitable opening for a typical Lucio Fulci movie too: “Anything can happen in the next hour-and-a-half!” Especially if the film takes place on top of a portal to hell.

July 21, 2020July 26, 2020

Morricone no more

The death of legendary film composer Ennio Morricone a fortnight ago shouldn’t have been a surprise since he was at the big age of 91. But he’d shown such a cussed approach to life and art, still composing music, going on world tours and quarrelling with young whippersnappers like Quentin Tarantino while he was in his ninth decade, that you assumed he was going to continue living and composing forever. Anyway, a heavy workload earlier this month prevented me from penning a tribute to the great man at the time of his passing. Here’s my belated tribute now.

Ennio Morricone was the first film composer I knew. I recognised his work well before I recognised that of John Barry, Bernard Hermann, Leonard Bernstein or Henry Mancini and even before the blockbuster themes of Jaws (1976) and Star Wars (1977) acquainted me with the name of John Williams. As a boy I was daft about western movies and as soon as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns started showing up on TV I realised that Morricone’s exhilarating music, soaring and swooping along the soundtracks with twangy acoustic guitars, electric guitars, whistles, chimes, bells, flutes and aah-ing choirs, was as much a character of the films as Clint Eastwood’s cigar-smoking Man with No Name. Remove Morricone’s music and they wouldn’t be the same. There’d be a gaping Clint-sized hole in them.

Morricone’s music for A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the film that put him, Leone, Eastwood and spaghetti westerns on the map, is great but I think his theme for the sequel For a Few Dollars More (1965), with added Jew’s harp and ocarina, is greater still. Maybe I’m biased since the film is my favourite of Leone’s Dollars trilogy. It has Eastwood, the Man with No Name, team up with the splendid Lee Van Cleef, the Man in Black, and take on Gian Maria Volonté as evil scumbag bandit El Indio. The climax sees Van Cleef facing up to Volonté in a duel whereby the participants can only draw their guns on the final chime of a musical pocket watch, which had belonged to Van Cleef’s murdered sister. It’s absolutely epic, thanks largely to Morricone’s music, which climbs majestically and drowns out the plaintive tones of the pocket watch, then plunges and dies away again a few palm-sweating seconds before the watch stops and the shooting starts.

The third and final movie of the trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), confused me when I saw it as a kid because although Lee Van Cleef starred in it alongside Eastwood again, this time he played a different character from the one in For a Few Dollars More and was as evil as Volonté had been in the previous film. I assumed he was the same guy and couldn’t figure out why he’d suddenly become so bad. Morricone’s theme here is perhaps his most famous work – I still hear blokes in the pub, after a few pints too many, going “Na-Na-Na-Na-Naaah…. NA-NA-NAAAH!” for no good reason. But it’s perhaps the accompaniment he provides for the Ecstasy of Gold sequence, in which an increasingly delirious Eli Wallach spends four minutes running around a cemetery while Leone’s camerawork becomes correspondingly frenzied, that’s the film’s musical highlight.

Of course, we hadn’t heard the last of Morricone as far as Leone’s westerns were concerned, because in 1968 he contributed to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, a movie that regularly gets mentioned in ‘best film of all time’ lists. (It’s certainly in my top three.) Morricone’s magnificent score ticks all the boxes. At times, it does the customary soaring and swooping. At others, it’s playful and jaunty. And at other times, it’s marked by a haunting and pained-sounding harmonica. Like Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volontè and the musical pocket watch in For a Few Dollars More, we discover the tragic significance of that harmonica at the end when hero Charles Bronson has a showdown with villain Henry Fonda. Ironically, the film’s most breath-taking sequence, the lengthy opening where three gunmen played by Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock await, with murderous intent, the arrival of Bronson at a remote, rickety train station, unscrolls without Morricone’s music (and indeed, without any dialogue) until nearly ten minutes in when that melancholy harmonica strikes up.

Morricone toiled away on many other Italian, and occasionally American, westerns and his CV surely makes him one of the great figures in the western genre. His work appears in Duccio Tessari’s The Return of Ringo (1965), Franco Giraldi’s Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966), Carlo Lizzani’s The Hills Run Red (1966), Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (1966), Giulio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (1967), Don Taylor and Italo Zingarelli’s The 5-Man Army (1969) and Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970). He also contributed to a few westerns like Navajo Joe (1966), The Hellbenders (1967), The Mercenary (1968) and The Great Silence (1968) that were directed by another Sergio, Sergio Corbucci, who was honoured in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) when Al Pacino described him as “the second best director of spaghetti westerns in the whole wide world!” Meanwhile, Morricone was reunited with the first best director of spaghetti westerns in the whole wide world with Leone’s late-period western Duck You Sucker (1971), a movie that I like but don’t consider in the same league as Leone’s earlier efforts. (James Coburn’s Irish accent doesn’t help.)

By the early 1970s Leone had shifted from spaghetti westerns to another staple of traditional Italian cinema, the giallo – the horror-thriller hybrid wherein a group of people, usually affluent and beautiful, get despatched by a mysterious killer (whose identity is revealed only in the closing moments) stabbing, slashing and hacking his or her way through them for some unlikely reason. The results are often Italian films at their most stylish, glamorous, violent, ridiculous and politically incorrect.

Morricone’s giallo music is frequently mannered, genteel and dreamy, at odds with the bloody events happening onscreen but matching the well-upholstered lifestyles of the doomed protagonists. He contributed to Elio Petri’s supernaturally tinged A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), Paolo Cavara’s slick but dodgy Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), Aldo Ladi’s rather brilliant Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971), Massimo Dallamano’s fairly reprehensible What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) and Umberto Lenzi’s lovably barmy Spasmo (1974). He also did the music for Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), but I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t provide it with suitable adjectives.

He also worked on three movies directed by the man who’s arguably the maestro of the giallo, Dario Argento: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). He didn’t, however, supply the music for Argento’s giallo masterpiece Deep Red (1976). That role went to the German prog-rock band Goblin and I have to say, with apologies to Morricone, that I think their baroque, intense Deep Red score just about pips his work as the best giallo music of all time.

By then, of course, Hollywood had discovered Morricone and his scores for such prestigious productions as Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and Rolande Jaffé’s The Mission (1986) won him international acclaim. A digression here – I remember reading an interview with Will Carling, the nice but dull skipper of the England rugby team in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carling told the evidently bored interviewer that before games, to settle his nerves, he listened to ‘The Mission’. The interviewer thought Carling was talking about the 1980s British Goth band the Mission and, believing he’d discovered something interesting about Carling at last, that he was a Goth, asked him if he liked Gene Loves Jezebel too. “No,” retorted a perplexed Carling, “The film The Mission. The music from The Mission!”

Morricone also enjoyed a final reunion with his old comrade Sergio Leone, creating a majestic but wistful score for Leone’s Hollywood gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Leone didn’t just provide the music for good films. He also plied his trade with many bad ones and often the music coming out of the cinema speakers and what was happening on the screen seemed to belong to two different aesthetic universes. I’m thinking of Reagan’s Theme, the haunting guitar-and-choir piece he composed for John Boorman’s much-derided Exorcist II: The Heretic (1978), or the soulful, religious sounding theme he provided for Michael Anderson’s Orca: The Killer Whale (1977), totally at variance with the ridiculous plot that has Richard Harris going Captain Ahab against a vengeful cetacean.

Among Leone’s Hollywood scores, I particularly admire the one he did for John Carpenter’s excellent remake of The Thing (1982). At the time, disdainful mainstream critics (who also hated the film generally) dismissed his work as being like one of Carpenter’s own, pulsating synthesiser scores ‘slowed down’ or ‘played at the wrong speed.’ Heard today, its doomy sound encapsulates the film’s claustrophobic and literally under-the-skin horror, whilst reminding you that, yes, this is a John Carpenter film but it’s a special John Carpenter film. I also like his subtle, creepy score for Mike Nichol’s underrated Wolf (1994), wherein a tired, middle-aged and downtrodden publisher (Jack Nicholson) gets bitten by a werewolf and discovers that his newly acquired lupine powers actually serve him well in the aggressive, cutthroat world of the 1990s New York publishing industry.

One of Morricone’s last major commissions was for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015). The two men had previously fallen out over Morricone’s contribution, eventually non-contribution, to Tarantino’s 2012 western Django Unchained, but Morricone was back on board for this and contributed an urgent and ominous main theme. Appropriately, seeing as The Hateful Eight and The Thing feature the same star (Kurt Russell) and a similar scenario (a stranded group trying to identify an enemy hiding among them), Morricone also donated some pieces he’d created for but hadn’t used in the 1982 John Carpenter film. And as extra icing on the cake, Reagan’s Theme from Exorcist II: The Heretic was borrowed to accompany a brief, arty sequence of coach-horses making their way through the snow. So it was gratifying that near his life’s end Morricone got an opportunity to show his mastery again of the genre that established his name, the western.

From open.spotify.com