The Screengrab : mario bava

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Honorable Mention: The Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

There was some back-and-forth among the writers here at The Screengrab over whether Steven Spielberg’s first blockbuster should be included on a list of classic horror movies. But ultimately, it made the cut because, whether or not it qualifies as a horror movie, the truth is that it’s seriously scary. A far cry from the long-standing King of Hollywood Filmmakers who has become semi-notorious for his inability to satisfactorily end his movies, the Spielberg who made Jaws did so with one thing on his mind -- to scare the ever-loving shit out of the audience. And oh man, did he ever succeed. Much has been made of the technical issues with the animatronic shark “Bruce” forcing Spielberg to find clever ways to make the shark’s presence felt onscreen (who can forget that moment when the dock slowly turns around?). However, the withholding of actual shots of the shark actually makes him more frightening, given all the buildup he’s had up to that point. Along with being Spielberg’s most frightening movie, it’s also his most perfectly structured, divided almost evenly between the attacks on the townspeople and the mission by Brody, Quint, and Hooper to bring down the toothy killer. The first half has plenty of good scares to be sure -- the head popping out of the boat, for one -- but it’s the second hour that makes Jaws a classic. The setup is little more than three men on an old boat, and as the makeshift crew hunts down, then fends off, the shark, Spielberg never once cuts back to the mainland. The claustrophobia that results causes the tension to skyrocket, so that every time the shark returns to take another shot at bringing down the boat, the film becomes ever more nerve-wracking. But for all the brutal attacks we see, nothing in Jaws burrows under your skin quite like Quint’s immortal monologue about his experiences aboard the Indianapolis, in which he shares his first-hand knowledge of just how much damage sharks can do.

BLACK SUNDAY (1960)

The Italian director Mario Bava, whose other credits include the 1971 Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve), regarded by some as the first slasher/splatter movie, is that rare horror specialist who has earned a reputation as a major filmmaker on the basis of his stylish and atmospheric approach to such genre eternals as cobweb-strewn dungeons and gore-stained torture instruments. He made his name largely on the basis of this Saturday-matinee classic, in which a beautiful young woman visiting her ancestral home is menaced by her long-dead but now-back ancestor, a Moldavian witch who was burned at the stake in 1630. The English actress Barbara Steele played both parts, popping her eyes ever so slightly to indicate when she was supposed to be the murderous, unearthly one. Neither Steele's youthful amateurishness as an actress nor the fact that, by her own account, she was never too clear on what the funny man with whom she shared no common language and who kept waving and jabbering at her from behind the camera was going on about, were enough to get in the way of the fact that, with her stunning features set off by her long black hair, she was both a striking image of virginal innocence imperiled and rampaging evil at its sexiest; the movie turned her into one of the best-loved scream queens of the '60s and '70s.

BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)

This deeply unwholesome film is perhaps the best work by boundary-pushing splatter director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker), who can be heard on the DVD director commentary reminiscing that he always managed to include one scene in each of his films that he enjoyed the pleasure of staging and shooting by himself, because at that point the crew invariably walked out shaking their heads and muttering, "Oh, you sick bastard..." This one, Henenlotter's version of an anti-drug addiction film, is about a fool (Rick Herbst) who strikes up a partnership with a parasitic creature called Aylmer (pronounced "Elmer") who injects him with an addictive, hallucinogenic substance in exchange for the man's help in keeping the monster well fed on his preferred diet of human brains. Elmer also talks, in a voice provided by John Zacherle, beloved in cult circles as New York's most celebrated TV horror show host.

FIDO (2006)

It's a measure of how influential George Romero's conception of zombiedom has been that people who adopt his ideas of shambling, flesh-eating corpses that can only be finished off with a crushing blow to their brains aren't seen as rip-off artists, but rather as traditionalists working with what, since 1969, have been the established rules. Another measure is the way that Romero's imagery has been spoofed in comedies whose makers are confident that the audience will immediately recognize what it is they're making fun of. The British comedian Simon Pegg and his collaborators had a major success making fun of zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but this Canadian film, directed and co-written by Andrew Currie, honors Romero's attempts to use his undead hordes to satirize American society, only with a steadier and subtler hand than the master has sometimes maintained himself. Set in a Blue Velvet-style suburbia where it'll always be the 1950s, Fido features perhaps the best ever performance by an actor as a zombie by Scottish comic Billy Connolly, in the title role of the hungry but strangely winning pet of little Timmy (K'Sun Ray), who soon realizes that his grunting, growling pal is trying to tell him something.

GINGER SNAPS (2000)

This Canadian film does for werewolves what Carrie and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series did for high school misfits in their respective supernatural target groups. The word "snaps" in the title is a verb: Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her little sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) have a close knit "you and me against the world" relationship, which manifests itself in the form of a deep (and, to the minds of their school instructors, inappropriate) fascination with death, but after Ginger experience her first period and begins to have confusing feelings about boys, Brigitte senses the beginning of a wedge coming between them that presages the conflict to come when Ginger is bloodied by a werewolf-like creature and begins to literally transform into a different, and dangerous, species. The movie almost didn't happen because of real life adults' concern about teenagers' "inappropriate" obsessions with death and violence: the project's funding was threatened by adverse publicity after the Columbine high school shooting took place during pre-production.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Seven

Contributors: Paul Clark of the Living Dead, Phil Nugent Is People!!!!

Vintage Trailer Review: Incredible Two-Headed Marathon Special

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It’s the middle of October, and many of you are no doubt getting ready for your Halloween festivities. But for all you movie lovers who are planning to be in Central Ohio this weekend, check out the area’s premier horror-movie event, The Incredible Two-Headed Marathon. Currently in their fifth year as co-hosts, Bruce Bartoo and Joe Neff have once again lined up a diverse and crowd-pleasing lineup, with something to delight horror lovers of practically every stripe. This year, to commemorate the Marathon, I’ve decided to post some trailers for the classics that are being shown, to go along with the Trailer Reviews I've already posted this week for the area premiere films playing at the Marathon, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Let the Right One In.

We begin with the trailer for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill!, one of Bava’s early classics and a favorite of giallo fans. I’m woefully underversed in my Bava, but there’s no mistaking that style, even in trailer form. Dig those zooms!

Next, we move on to the original Wes Craven version of The Hills Have Eyes, back before he got all mixed up with Kevin Williamson and violins and the like.

Another genre master being represented this year is John Carpenter, whose 1980 film The Fog will be playing here. Not exactly one of my favorite Carpenter films, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless.

Finally, Bruce and Joe always seem to include a movie that doesn’t necessarily fit with the “horror” theme but is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. This year, they’ve chosen Peter Jackson’s cult favorite Meet the Feebles, which should be a blast to see with a Marathon crowd.

If you’re planning to attend a horror marathon where you live, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section. And for anyone who’s interested in finding out more about the Incredible Two-Headed Marathon, check out the official Web site.

John Phillip Law, 1937--2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:00:00 GMT

John Phillip Law has died at the age of 70. Six foot five with blond hair, blue eyes and finely crafted features, Law worked in New York theater in the early 1960s before breaking into Hollywood films as the romantic juvenile in Norman Jewison's 1966 comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. He would go on to appear in two megaton bombs directed by Otto Preminger, the Southern gothic Hurry Sundown the acid-testing comedy Skidoo, in which he played a hippie. That project turned out to be harbinger of the career to come, as was this quote from an interview Law gave in 1966: "I've had more kicks out of playing far-out things. It's like putting on a funny face and going out in front of people and going, 'yaaaaaa.' " He was about to have plenty of opportunities to put on his funny faces. In 1968, in one of his highest-profile roles, he appeared opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968), playing a blind but well-hung angel and wearing enormous, tacky-looking wings. He also starred in a failed 1971 film version of the Jacqueline Susann pulp bestseller The Love Machine and had the honor of being kissed on the lips by Rod Steiger in The Sergeant (1968). In 1974, he donned a turban to star in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, one of the better later showcases for the stop-motion special effects of Ray Harryhausen.

Although he slipped far down from the A-list in Hollywood, Law kept working, on TV, in oddball low-budget genre films such as Night Train to Terror, and often in Europe, where he made such films as the 1967 spaghetti Western Death Rides a Horse with Lee Van Cleef. In recent years, he began to acquire a new fan base among new filmgoers who saw him as a key figure in the 1960s international cinema of the weird. (In 2001, Roman Coppola honored him as a living memento of that era by casting him in his directorial debut, CQ.) One movie that made a cult comeback through that particular pipeline is Diabolik (sometimes called Danger: Diabolik), a 1967 sci-fi comic-strip caper directed by Mario Bava, starring Law as a space-age super-cat burglar; it served as the inspiration for a Beastie Boys video (see below) and was the last film shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Law, a dedicated actor who was almost equally famous for his dedication to the Playboy mansion, could scarcely have asked for a more appropriate, and affectionate, tribute.

Unwatchable #100: “Devil Fish”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, you may recall, Sam Richards of The Guardian subjected himself to a handful of entries on the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list – the absolute worst of the worst-ranked movies of all time. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I realized he hadn’t gone nearly far enough. Any moron can sit through a few of these godawful pictures; it takes a special kind of idiot to watch all 100 of them. And I’m here to tell you, loyal Screengrab readers, I am that idiot.

For your entertainment and my own detriment, I am going to watch and review them all, starting with #100 and working my way to the top. Of course, the IMDb list is constantly changing based on the whims of the voting public, but I will be sticking with the Bottom 100 I downloaded on the day I decided to tackle this most awe-inspiring task. And on whatever day that was, the #100 ranked movie was Shark: Rosso nell'oceano, or as you may know it: Devil Fish.

There’s a reason you might know it: in what I fear may become a recurring problem with this project, Devil Fish is on the list because it was skewered by those pranksters at Mystery Science Theater 3000. This makes its inclusion somewhat illegitimate to my way of thinking, since nobody would have heard of it otherwise and it would have had no chance of making the Bottom 100. And I know this won’t make me any friends amongst the bad movie cognoscenti, but I’ve never really been a fan of MST3K; heck, I don’t even like the abbreviation MST3K. If I want to be trapped in a room with a bunch of dorks making lame jokes about a movie I’m trying to watch, it’s easy enough to accomplish that goal. I don’t need them actually pasted there in front of the movie I’m trying to watch, with no way of drowning out their commentary, but in this case, I had no choice. I did my best to pretend they weren’t there and come to the film with only the purest intentions, but it wasn’t easy.

Directed by Lamberto “son of Mario” Bava, Devil Fish (or Monster Shark or Red Ocean or even Devouring Waves) is a belated Jaws knockoff from 1986 set in the Florida Everglades. A bony dolphin trainer, a beer-swilling scientist and the local sheriff join forces to battle a waterlogged monster that doesn’t actually appear to be much of a shark at all, given that it has tentacles. In a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, the solution they arrive at is to douse the Everglades with gasoline and set it ablaze with flamethrowers. I guess this qualifies as eco-horror, though perhaps not in the way Bava intended.

With its wooden performances, cheesy effects and slack approach to editing, Devil Fish is certainly ripe for mockery, but I don’t know that it’s any worse than a hundred other low-budget monster movies that could easily have taken its place on the list. Which brings me to my “Unwatchable” rating system, inspired by my loyal co-watcher, Maury the Wonder Chibeagle. On a scale of one to four Maurys – one being a movie that actually has redeeming qualities, four being an atrocity against mankind – I hereby award Devil Fish two Maurys:

In Other Blogs: Spring Break Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

One of our all-time favorite blog names is Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; it really sums up the finest things in life in one pithy phrase. This week, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio has outdone himself with a mammoth rep report of his own, dedicated to specialty screenings in Los Angeles over the next month or so. A Mario Bava retrospective and a timely "Heist Films" festival are among the highlights, along with a series at the UCLA Film and Television Archives "highlighting the work of one of the pre-CGI greats of special effects, L.W Abbott. If you are of a certain age (like me), Abbott is probably directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring images you eve saw in a movie theater, and maybe even one of two of your most indelible nightmares as well. Abbott started in the film business as an assistant cameraman on no less than Sunrise, ended as a consultant on the physical effects for 1941, and spent some of the multitude of years in between, for 1957 to 1972, as the head of 20th Century Fox's special photographic effects department. The series, entitled 'Wire, Tape, and Rubber Band Style: The Effects of L.B. Abbott', is an unbelievable gathering of amazing imagery (and occasional patches of some clunky dialogue, if I remember correctly) that effectively illustrates the great talent Abbott summoned to create some of the most spectacular sequences in movies during the '60s and '70s."

At The House Next Door, Dan Callahan offers up an appreciation of Shelly Duvall, "one of the weirdest and most beguiling performers to ever find regular work in movies." We're in total agreement that 3 Women is "Duvall's magnum opus, her tour-de-force for Altman. She wrote some of her own role, the unforgettable Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan Alice Adams/Stella Dallas, and Duvall plays this isolated, deluded creature with such risky comic and tragic precision that it belies (or maybe confirms?) her seeming lack of technique. Millie's eyes are blank, and she moves stiffly beneath her yellow sun dresses (the hem of her skirt always gets caught in her car door, marking her as one of life's big losers). You could call what Duvall is doing here minimalist, but that implies a choice of some kind, and I think that she's really just working within the set confines of her own droll personal style, as a person, as an artist, but not really as an actress, per se. Millie talks and talks to the air in her light, fey voice, like a Beckett heroine, and her inane babble reveals what artist Jack Smith once termed the 'uninterrupted commercial intrusions into our daily lives.'"

At Cinematical, Kim Voynar rebuts "another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine" from Libertas, this one concerning "the movie industry's current favorite character, the sensitive pedophile." And here I thought the movie industry's current favorite character was the pregnant teen. I just can't keep up!

Andrew O'Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to explore "the boomlet of theatrical revivals and re-releases — often of obscure, forgotten or orphaned films — that has blossomed in recent years, even as contemporary films from all over the world beach themselves and expire on American sands."

Last week we presented our ten most anticipated SXSW screenings; Erik Childress of Hollywood Bitchslap has ten recommendations of his own. There is some overlap, but whereas Childress has actually seen his picks already, you might get more out of them than from our barely informed speculation.

Nothing But Dark Skys From Now On

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Imagine," Gary Giddins writes, "having only one great film in you, and that film being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." That Tobe Hooper classic, along with the lesser 1977 Eaten Alive, in which Neville Brand plays a hotel keeper who feeds people to his pet crocodile if he doesn't like what they've written on their comment cards, are now available on handsomely packaged DVDs from Dark Sky, a company that Giddins salutes for doing yeoman's work in the specialized field of retrieving rough gems and striking obscurities from the pop junk pile of half-forgotten and poorly received horror pictures. Dark Sky's catalog includes Trilogy of Terror, the 1974 anthology TV-movie that's legendary for its concluding segment, in which Karen Black, entering the screen-queen pantheon in a tatty bathrobe and a flying cloud of auburn hair, raced around her '70s bacheleorette pad pursued by a spear-wielding Zuni tribal doll with the "Check, please!" name of "He Who Kills." Giddins notes that, as an example of the nifty bonus extras that are a Dark Sky trademark, the Trilogy disc boasts a new interview with Karen Black: "Rolling her eyes in recollection of the filmmaking incompetence, she recalls the spills she had to take while pretending to wrestle the doll and offers her own analysis of the film's cult following: 'Women are afraid of vaginal entry'."

Other Dark Sky discs include Mario Bava's 1966 Kill Baby, Kill, John McNaughton's art-gore shocker Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind (made in 1973 with a cast that includes Ann Sothern, John Savage, Luana Anders, and Cindy Williams), and the unclassifiable Spider Baby, a 1964 film by cult director Jack Hill that makes The Addams Family look like The Brady Bunch. (It features a young Sid Haig channeling Hank Wordern and the star, Lon Chaney, Jr., singing, for lack of a better word, the opening theme song.) Coming soon from Dark Sky: the 1973 Ricco the Mean Machine, described by Giddins as "a Mafia revenge film in which Christopher Mitchum sets out to destroy a mob with his pageboy flip and a few awkward karate chops." An as yet undiscovered influence on Javier Bardem's haircut in No Country for Old Men? Duty compels me to check it out.