The Blind Dead at the drive-in

For less than fifteen quid, I picked up Anchor Bay’s R2 box set, The Blind Dead Collection, which covers Amando de Ossorio’s 4-film series made in Spain in the early 70s. These must have been inspired initially by the success of Night of the Living Dead, and are not without their attractions: the blurb claims ‘a relentless onslaught of creepy atmosphere, shocking violence, forbidden sexuality, and the still-chilling icons of Euro Horror: the eyeless undead who hunt by sound in their quest for human flesh’. For once the blurb isn’t far off, though it fails to mention the terrible acting, dubbing and increasingly stupid plotting.

Anyway, the titular bad guys are heretic Knights Templar, who seem to get an overall bad deal in movies. The idea that you can keep quiet and avoid them is initially neat but becomes more comic with overuse.

Tomb Of The Blind Dead (1971) is the first and works very well in parts, though I’m not sure about zombies riding horses and trains. The confusingly-titled Return Of The Evil Dead (1973) starts to smell a bit like a cash-in, and the suspicion is confirmed in number 3, imaginatively titled Blind Dead 3 (1974). By this time, de Ossorio is tiring of the gore and adds a load of naked ‘models’ to the cast as well as turning the Blind Dead into seafaring zombies (maybe this would be a good idea if you did it as a comedy…) Blind Dead 4 (1975) was actually titled Night Of The Seagulls when I first saw it, and is for completists only. De Ossorio’s talent for creepiness is still apparent but he doesn’t seem bothered by plot, continuity or anything else you might take for granted.

The box set contains a fifth disk with documentaries about and by de Ossorio. The whole thing is very interesting if viewed in a historical context (Spanish film-makers seemed to go a bit nuts after Franco died, shovelling on the sex and violence for no good reason except they had it saved up; see also Josef Grau’s bizarre Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue from 1974) and if you’ve got a strong stomach and an endless supply of alcohol then this is highly recommended at the price.

The American R1 box set is a lot fancier, being coffin-shaped, and has a few extra uncut seconds but costs four times as much.

Mild Peril Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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Kruger and Lindon in Pour Elle

I used to have  a well-earned contempt for French cinema, the only exceptions being the films of Claude Chabrol. However in the last few years, I’ve either been getting old or it seems that French film-makers have been attempting to make movies for audiences outside their usual target.  It’s hard to imagine Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension or the TV series Spiral as anything other than a reaction to the earlier cultural isolationism. Even more unlikely was the recent French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s typically American novel Tell No One.

Hard on its heels comes a similar edgy thriller, Pour Elle, retitled for the English-speaking world as Anything For Her. Vincent Lindon stars as a middle-aged dog-eared teacher who is inexplicably married to Diane Kruger, more famous as Helen of Troy. After Kruger is jailed for murder, apparently unjustly, Lindon works on a plan to free her.

Anything For Her isn’t the most plausible story, but Fred Cavaye ensures that it rattles along without giving you too much time to question various events,  and films most scenes as if they were action scenes.  Lindon and Kruger appear mis-matched but manage a fair bit of chemistry to convince you to invest some emotion in their fate.

Even if you don’t like subtitles, or French films in general, you’re likely to find Anything For Her a watchable and involving thriller.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.3 out of 5 stars

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Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is visiting the Uffizi Gallery when she faints while staring at a a painting. She is befriended by a stranger and makes it home. Soon after she becomes involved in a vicious rape, and it transpires that she’s a policewoman on the trailer of a serial rapist/killer. She’s also afflicted by ‘The Stendhal Syndrome’, whose victims become overcome by works of art. As the plot thickens and the corpses pile up, it becomes apparent that no-one can be trusted.

I had a bit of a problem writing the plot summary, as this movie contains very little that hasn’t been seen before. Most of it’s been seen before in Argento movies, and the rest will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Hitchcock, De Palma or indeed any of Argento’s Italian imitators. Several elements were incorporated into Gary Fleder’s Kiss The Girls, a slicker if less unsettling movie.

There are of course several well-executed set-pieces; the murders involve gallons of ketchup, gratuitous violence (if that wasn’t a bit of a ridiculous idea for anyone settling down to watch one of Dario’s masterpieces), and there are a few nice digital effects when the heroine appears to step into paintings.

However the movie doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is the ludicrous appearance of Asia Argento in the second half of the movie. She takes to wearing a bright blond wig (and that may give half the plot away to anyone with an IQ over 50), but fails to match this with her eyebrows. As she shares her father’s complexion, she looks like a circus clown. Before the half way point, she puts in a quite a good performance, despite being totally unconvincing as a policewoman. Then again, this does seem to be the most incompetent police force on the planet, missing all sorts of blindingly obvious clues, so perhaps they’re desperate enough to recruit teenage girls with severe psychological problems.

Another big problem is the failure to incorporate the syndrome into the plot. Although it plays some part in the initial set-up, this turns out to be a standard Argento movie where the ‘heroine’ happens to suffer from a medical problem, and it might as well have been acne for all the relevance it has.

Then again plot isn’t any reason for watching Argento. The problem these days is that his visual style stood still for twenty years while everyone else caught up, and without a supernatural plot as an excuse for crazy images, this movie is no flashier than Deep Red. Admittedly I only saw it on pan-and-scan video, so it may be better viewed as God intended. There’s a score by Morricone that’s far from his best, consisting of eight notes repeated endlessly, presumably in an effort to be ethereal but just becoming boring instead. Added to the implausibility of the plot twists, and some hideous continuity (check out the blood stain on Asia’s blouse in the first few minutes), it’s a jaded and unsatisfactory effort. I had a better idea for a plot while watching it: how about a movie involving a girl who is traumatised by her famous movie director father, who involves her in bloody rape scenes while she’s tied to a mattress in a dungeon?

Mild Peril Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

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The Nest (the original title is Nid de Guêpes) features a cast who are unfamiliar to me but are convincingly stubbly and Gallic, and the plot is noticeably different from Carpenter’s but ends up in pretty much the same place, with a diverse bunch of heroes and villains uniting to fight off an unseen force. There’s a sequence involving freight containers in a huge warehouse that’s bound to be copied by Hollywood at some point and it’s all good fun for any fans of the ‘original’. Certainly a lot better than the later US remake.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.1 out of 5 stars

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Presumably this was supposed to be Tykwer’s breakthrough into the mainstream, filmed in English and with international stars in Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. It has a screenplay written by Polish director Krystof Kieslowski shortly before he died, although it shares a lot of the things that made Tykwer famous – dream sequences, characters apparently driven by fate, and an inability (or lack of desire) to tell the story in a linear way.

The story, as far as I can tell, is about an English teacher played by Blanchett who becomes a terrorist on the run, and who is aided by Ribisi’s almost mute cop. As before, the look of the movie is striking – all Tykwer’s movies have been shot by Frank Griebe, who may well turn out to be the real genius here – but the pace is so slow as to expose the logical flaws and give you time to wonder at the crazy haircuts worn by the stars. I suspect I’m going to have to watch this again, as I found it to be occasionally brilliant but mostly irritating, and I suspect I’d think it was pretentious art-house twaddle if I was Joe Bob Briggs.

Mild Peril Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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Again Franka Potente plays the central character, this time a nurse in a mental hospital who becomes involved with an escaping bank robber posing as an amnesiac, and again it’s a meditation on fate, madness and coincidence. This time it plays out as a slower-moving tragedy, but Tykwer repeats his mastery of composition and editing. Like John Carpenter, Tykwer writes his own music and like Carpenter, you can always admire the technique and the wry sense of humour even if the movies don’t seem to be going anywhere.

The Princess and the Warrior needs a lot more patience than Run Lola Run, and features only the occasional big set-piece, but rewards the viewer with a moving if meandering story.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.7 out of 5 stars

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Here you get Stellan Skarsgard (probably best known to mainstream audiences as the unfortunate scientist in Deep Blue Sea) as a cop sent to a town above the Arctic Circle where it never goes dark, making a few mistakes and generally not behaving as we expect our heroes to do. It will be interesting to see if the Hollywood version recreates either the bleak look or the bleak tone of this great thriller.

The DVD is a bit disappointing for a Criterion release, containing only a trailer.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

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No Man's Land

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest is A Very Long Engagement. Jeunet will be most familiar here as the director of Alien 4, but has had bigger non-genre hits with Delicatessen and Amelie.

This tells the story of a girl played by Amelie’s Audrey Tautou who refuses to believe that her boyfriend has died in the WWI trenches, and sets out to find the full story. Like Jeunet’s previous movies, it’s a strange mix of Gallic humour and sentiment with big visuals and offbeat violence. The battle scenes are harrowing and unusual, and the post-war scenes are whimsical and poetic, leaving you wondering who the movie is aimed at, but it’s a beautifully made movie, even if the end is inevitable and it takes forever getting there.

Jodie Foster makes a very odd cameo appearance and the rest of the cast is composed of familiar faces from French cinema. The extras on the DVD are probably among the best I’ve seen and I can recommend this DVD to anyone, even the most cynical among you. Au revoir!

Mild Peril Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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DIY with Cecile De France

Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (released in the UK as Switchblade Romance for some reason) is an intense and striking horror thriller, reminding me of the old Robert Fuest movie And Soon The Darkness. Aja ratchets up the tension as two young girls wander about the French countryside, and it soon becomes painfully clear that what he’s doing is not remaking a cosy old Hammer thriller, but relocating ’70s US rural backwoods horror to an equivalent Gallic setting.

Still, you shouldn’t let that put you off seeing the movie, as it’s nicely shot by Maxime Alexandre and beautifully paced. Cecile de France is excellent as the heroine, Maiwenn Le Besco screams well and Philippe Nahon cuts a frightening figure as the bloke in overalls with an extensive array of tools, even if it can hardly be called acting. And don’t worry about the subtitles as there’s virtually no dialogue.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars

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