Avenue Kurtodrome

It may be one of the best lines I’ve heard in a while. Picture yourself, a couple, bound to chairs and three masked figures standing near you, holding knives. Ask them: “Why are you doing this?” Hear the reply: “Because you were at home.”

The line belongs to the movie The Strangers and it’s out in cinemas now. The first releases (USA, Canada, Russia) were in the last week of May, lots of countries (incl. Belgium and Holland) got to see it in July, the UK crowds will have to wait till the end of August and the Germans will have to wait till November. All of this is in 2008 of course, which (as a sentence) mainly makes sense because the film was shelved for nearly a year. Why did it take so many months for this movie to become released? Were people frightened for parallels with the French movie Ils? Both movies are about a couple who’re being watched at home and then attacked. I hadn’t thought of the parallel at first and when I knew, The Strangers fell a couple of spots on my “To See” list. Not because I don’t like ripoffs, but because I didn’t like Ils. The couple there was no annoying that in the end I was rooting for the villains, just so the movie could finish earlier.

The Strangers makes similar mistakes. It takes an eternity and then some to get started. As the movie starts, we see Liv Tyler crying in the car. She and her boyfriend are driving home and apparently he has upset her. It takes the film half an hour to explain this, so allow me to be a bit more brief: he proposed to her, she didn’t feel ready for marriage yet and declined. To make matters worse, he and a friend had decorated the house and now they have to spend the night there. There, did that take me long? No, it didn’t and the director should’ve known that too. Because it’s spread out over such a long period, I lost a lot of sympathy for the couple, especially for the obnoxious Scott Speedman. But things change rapidly. Someone’s at the door. Who could that be? And how late is it anyway? James Hoyt (Speedman) “suspects it’s around 4am.” A look at the clock informs him he was only five minutes wrong. Obnoxious guy! At the door is a lovely girl, who looks a bit strange and very much in the dark (literally and figuratively). The girl asks if Tamara is home. Nope, no Tamara. The girl leaves a bit reluctantly, uttering eerily she’ll see them later. For me this was a key scene: I couldn’t help but wonder if all this would’ve happened if they’d been nicer to the girl (they could’ve invited her in, given her a phone etc.). We will never know.

Anyway, back to arguing. Kristen (Tyler) is out of cigarettes and James tells her he’ll go and get some. “That’s not what I meant,” she says. Not that it stops him. Annoying man. After he leaves, the girl and her companions become a bit more active. In fact, the viewer gets to see the masked figures before Kristen does. We see him looking through a window, we see him standing inside the house (without her knowing someone’s in the house). This is a lot creepier than what happens when Kristen phones James to come home immediately because she knows there are people in the house. Macho James goes looking through the house and the director decides to turn the sound up as James pulls away a curtain. Which is scary because it’s a sudden and loud noise, but in the long run that’s a bad idea: the viewer is aware the director wants to scare him/her with essentially unscary sounds. Movies work better when you stay unaware.

Had I already mentioned the masks were brilliant? Not in the least because the girls’ masks look a bit like their faces (well, judging by the girl who asked for Tamara). Incidently, these three individuals who enter a house to torture a couple both mentally and physically remain anonymous for most of the film. Even the credits list them as Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Man in the Mask. Well, ‘mask’ is a bit much for this guy: doesn’t it remind you of El Orfanato (reviewed earlier this year)? Good, we know who Dollface is (the girl looking for Tamara), but I wish the director had known his movie would’ve been better if he hadn’t decided to show their faces in the penultimate scene. This penultimate scene features the three people driving away in the morning (and no, that is not a spoiler: I’m doing my best to write a review and keep the spoilers and a couple of scares out) and meeting the two Mormon boys we’d already seen in the beginning of the film. Dollface (well, not anymore) asks for a flyer and one of the boys asks if they’re sinners. “Sometimes,” the girl replies. As they drive off, we hear an even more ominous line: “Next time it’ll be a lot easier.”

That is where the film should’ve stopped, but no, Bryan Bertino apparently wanted to do everything to make his movie longer and less good. There comes another scene and a scene that annoyed me so much the film lost a full point there and then. Good, The Strangers was his debut, but someone could’ve told him to chuck twenty minutes and the final scene out, no? (By the way, the original title of the film was The Faces, which would’ve made the three criminals even more creepier: now they’re just strangers, otherwise they would’ve been even more bodiless.)

At least the film does something with its title. Apparently James and Kristen like vinyl records more than cds and that’s why in this film all the music you’ll hear comes from vinyl records you’ll see playing. The crackling sounds are included. Excellent choice. One of the artists is Merle Haggard, whose band was called The Strangers. One of the other songs included in the movie is Sprout and the Bean by Joanna Newsom. I was quite happy to hear that one being used.

Allow me to go to what may seem like a conclusion: it’s a pity Bertino fell in the same trap as the makes of Ils: using a good idea and milking it. The masked figures are often quite scary, but sometimes overused. At one point (it’s the scene pictured on your left) Pin-up Girl follows Kristen, but Pin-up Girl doesn’t do anything and Kristen doesn’t notice her. And then Pin-up Girl just runs away. That’s just a poor attempt to scare the viewer and, as I mentioned earlier, viewers will eventually become sick of being scared without reason. If fewer scares had been better timed (lose five, that would’ve been enough), this film would be better. If the introduction wouldn’t be so long, you would’ve had more sympathy for Kristen and James (especially for James - had I already mentioned if found the guy quite obnoxious?). Oh, and that final scene. Out with it, no excuse for that. Right, so if all that advice had been followed, we would’ve ended up with a classic. Now, it’s a lenient 6/10 because it’s Bertino’s first movie and because the movie company shelved this for a year.

Never mind all this criticism. Go and watch the film: you’ll be guaranteed to jump out of your seat at least a couple of times. Yes, you may notice that the final scene doesn’t make any sense if you remember how the movie started (the text you’ll get to read) and that’s one of the scenes that’ll give the movie a nasty aftertaste, but it’s still worth a watch. If only just once.

Here’s the trailer:

Bonjour, tout le monde! If you don’t understand that sentence, it’ll be pointless to tune in to France 2 this Tuesday night (at 01.00). The movie shown is the obscure cult movie Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966). If you are French or understand the language well, it’ll be well worth staying up for. If not, there are DVDs of the movie out there.

The movie was directed by photographer and filmmaker William Klein. It’s Klein’s debut feature (after a documentary about Cassius Clay). The movie opens with a fashion show, where a designer is about to show his new collection: iron plates bent around the models’ bodies. One girl complains the plate is cutting into her flesh, but never mind those minor details. Fashion magazine editor Miss Maxwell enters the room, ignoring the people in the audience muttering “There’s that dragonfly.” Maxwell likes the outfits, says it’s excellent (which is echoed by everyone else in the room - dragonfly or not, she’s famous and powerful) and claims the designer has “re-invented woman”.

One of the models is Polly Maggoo (Dorothy McGowan), the it-girl of 1966. Polly enters her room, only to find it filled by a camera crew and the producers of the television show “Qui êtes-vous?” (Who are you?), a show that claims to bare the soul of the interviews. The real question here is: who are you, Polly Maggoo?
Polly’s first attempt at self-analysis is abruptly stopped due to technical difficulties, her second attempt becomes a completely different story and, to top that all off, the production team lay words in her mouth. Who is Polly Maggoo? A beautiful girl with ugly teeth, who decides to keep her mouth opened rather than have her teeth fixed? A modern form of Cinderella? An American girl who becomes a model in Paris and learns a couple of French words and idioms every day? All of those? None of those?

The big producer of the show thinks Polly is nothing more but an empty shell: lots of poses on the outside, nothing on the inside. A model is like an onion: peel off the layers and you end up with… nothing.

Someone has a different opinion: Prince Igor (Sami Frey) is madly in love with Polly and wants her as his princes. The majesty of this small country has two spies sent to Paris, to dig up more information about Polly and to convince her to come to her monarchy. Despite displaying only incompetence, the spies manage to get near to Polly. Polly accepts the poster of the prince, which is apparently a sign of engagement in the Prince’s country.

Polly has another suitor: Gregoire (Jean Rochefort) is one of the people working on the tv show and feels rather confident: the more he sees Polly (while falling in love with her), the more he sees his role in the tv show grow. He assures himself, the producer and even Polly there’s more to Polly than just her outside.

Or is there? Is Polly nothing more than an empty shell with clothes, the flavour in the month who doesn’t know the month is almost over (the world changes, next thing you know mankind may travel to the Moon)?

Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? is a child of its time. If you didn’t know this was made in 1966, you’d guess it. London and Paris were in love with fashion (think of Carnaby street), pop-art hit the streets and above all the movies. Add to this the director of the film: William Klein came to Paris as a GI in 1947. He met the woman of his life there and has mainly operated from France ever since. In a way, this is reflected in Polly’s character. She’s also an American in Paris and in one of her daydreams she imagines how Gregoire’s family would react to her (the obvious stereotypes: is it true all the food in the US is canned? etc.).

For another link to Klein’s life, look at Miss Maxwell’s character. It was apparently based on Diana Vreeland, Klein’s former boss. She’s so satirized some wonder why Vreeland never sued. Miss Maxwell was played by Grayson Hall by the way: the actress was flown over from America for the role and had to learn French to do her part.
All of which brings us to the heart of the movie: it’s a satire, a mirror of its time laughing at itself. True, a movie like dates easily, but if it wants to be a sign of its time, that is not that big a problem. Yes, it looks as if it was made in 1966, but wasn’t that the subject of the movie? And have things changed? Really? Aren’t we still obsessed with models and celebrities? Aren’t we keen to think those models are dimwits? So we’ve been to the Moon ever since this movie was made, but did that change us?

A bit more annoying is the movie’s style: yes, it’s 1966 and it’s about fashion (albeit in glorious black and white, but executed to perfection - as one could expect from a director who’s also a photographer), but that swinging sixties style has always annoyed me. For me you’d have to be a Blow-Up or Femina Ridens to get away with it. Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? only succeeds in this partially, but it does. Maybe thanks to its satirical tone. Think of a Swinging Sixties satire, a Godard movie where the politics are traded in for fashion and philosophical rambling (I swear, a couple of scenes sound as if Godard and his gang were co-writing the film) and feel sorry for Polly Maggoo. Or not.

Here’s the opening scene (in French only), so you can check the lovely steelmetal dresses:

Here’s a scene with English subtitles. The tv crew ask Polly to tell the audience who she is:

P.S. It’s only a minor role, but always worth mentioning: Delphine Seyrig (Daughters of Darkness) also has a part in this movie.

WANNA WATCH ON TV?
France 2: Wed 30 July, 01.00-02.40

PREFER TO SEE IT ON DVD?
OPTION 1: ARTE’S RELEASE
NTSC Region 0
Aspect Ratio: 16/9
Languages: French or English
Subtitles: English
Bonus: In and out of Fashion (a documentary on Klein with many excerpts)
Available at the ARTE shop

OPTION 2: CRITERION’S ECLIPSE SERIES
A box set containing Klein’s movies Polly Maggoo, Mr. Freedom, Le Couple Temoin
Available at Amazon.com

Jess Franco’s Killer Barbys is to the band The Killer Barbies what Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys go America was to the Leningrad Cowboys. Both are movies starring an existing band and both are typical products of the directors.
Kaurismäki is known for his deadpan black humor presented in films totally weirding you out and Leningrad Cowboys go to America is a weird and funny tale of the Leningrad Cowboys going to America.
Franco, on the other hand, is known for erotic horror movies and Killer Barbys is a mix of horny rockers and cannibalists.

But there’s more. Kaurismäki made a sequel, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, an attempt to make the worst movie ever. To a certain degree he succeeds in doing so.
Franco’s Killer Barbys doesn’t look as if it pretended to make a similar effort,but it’s difficult not to see how many horror cliches you can see in this film: at night you hear the sound of wearwolves, it’s often twelve o’clock, there’s cannibalism, you’ve got some dwarves, most of the rockers constantly want sex, a semi-naked girl is being chased in the woods, there’s lots and lots of blood and someone even ends up being crushed.
How much gore can you get into one movie? We’d ask Lucio Fulci, but unfortunately he’s dead.

But movies like Killer Barbys and the “Leningrad Cowboys” films (apart from two movies, Kaurismäki also directed a concert documentary and several short movies with the band) never meant to be original pieces of cinematographic genius.They serve, in a way, to let you know the band exists.
Sure, the directors are there to produce an end result that’s a nice business card for both band and director, but if these movies weren’t large band promos,the directors could’ve gotten just as well a bunch of actors. If anything, they are much more enjoyable than your average rockumentary.

There’s one advantage the Leningrad Cowboys have: their name. You may have noticed I talk about the movie Killer Barbys and the band Killer Barbies.
The answer to this riddle is simple: Mattel didn’t like the idea of seeing their top product linked to a dirty rock band’s movie with sex and fangs and threatened to sue if the movie would bear the band’s name. One intentional spelling mistake later, everything was okay again.
Sure, it’s a minimal difference but if you look for the name of the band, you’ll need a bit longer to find the film. Thankfully someone invented the internet, home of the spelling mistake, and you won’t have to search that much longer.

But let’s go back to the film.
Even though Franco made lots of no-budget movies where anyone can see through the special effects, I suspect him here of making the effects as bad as possible (if you can’t see that the dead bodies are dummies, you desperately need to get your eyes checked.)
Either that, or the band intended to make a parody of a horror movie and everyone was in on the joke, except for the director.

It is true that Franco could have tried harder and that the movie could have been better, but it’s common knowledge that it’s better not to look Franco’s best movies in the nineties.
Most of Franco’s movies are so badly acted, it’s somehow ironic to conclude that in Killer Barbys two rockers act better than Franco’s cast of regulars (Lina Romay, Linnea Quigley, …).

To me, Killer Barbys stands out as the only decent movie Franco made in the nineties, so if you want to see some of his later work, this is the best choice you can make. As long as you remember it’s a Frankenstein experiment of combining gore and rockumentaries.

As everybody seemed happy with the result, Franco directed a sequel in 2002, Killer Barbys vs. Dracula. It just seems to make the weird parallels to Kaurismäki’s work with the Leningrad Cowboys even stronger, and it may be something for bands to think about: both the Cowboys and the Barbies managed to make more than one movie, whereas you don’t often get to see a sequel of a rockumentary.
If a band is inspired by this review to contact a director for a movie instead of a rockumentary you can always send me some money. I accept cheques.

By the way, “Love Killer” is not a bad song.

P.S. Killer Barbys is out on DVD. Details are below. You can order the VellaVision DVD at dvdgo.com and the ShriekShow is sold by (a.o.) Xploited Cinema.

Region 2
Label: VellaVision (Spain)
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: Spanish / English
Ration aspect: 4:3 (Fullscreen)
Extras: Interactive Menus, Scene Access, Filmographies, Photo Gallery, Trailers

Region 2
Label: VellaVision (Spain)
Same DVD as above, but in pack with the movie’s sequel, Killer Barbys vs. Dracula.

Region 1
Label: Shriek Show
Uncut Anamorphic Widescreen Version
Language: English and Original Multi-Language Dolby Digital Stereo Tracks
Extras: Interview with Sylvia Superstar and Billy King, 2 Killer Barbies’ music videos, notes, biographies and trailer

I have to agree with the movie’s premise: Bruges is a shithole. I’ve been there a handful of times and 60% of that were bad experiences. However, it also has some nice scenery. Another point correctly observed by the movie.

Fortunately, my research on Martin McDonagh’s output was very limited. I knew he’d made a short movie and that this was his first feature film, but that was about all I knew. Again… fortunately. I did see Six Shooter, his award-winning short and was gravely disappointed. I liked some of the ideas and I could see where he was going, but I didn’t like the sauce that was poured over the film. And as you know, a dish ain’t complete without a good sauce. And the wrong sauce makes the dish unappetising.

In Bruges shows great progress. Six Shooter was set on a train (you may remember I have said before that some of the best movies were set on things people can’t get out of - but if the movie isn’t great, the result is horrendous), featured gun violence and an actor named Brendan Gleeson. Sounds familiar, anyone? For his feature debut McDonagh has done a similar trick: two hitmen have to go to Bruges and stay there waiting for further instructions. Both sense that there may be another job ahead and thus the city becomes another locked place. (So it’s not a train this time - although, funnily enough, there is a train in the movie.)

It is not the only problem the movie has: sometimes it’s hard to find the plot credible. Yes, we know that Bruges is the setting of the film and that Ray (who at one point tries to leave the place) has to return there, but the way McDonagh (writer and director) handles this… I don’t know if in Ireland police will make a train stop in the middle of nowhere (literally, we’re in a field) to arrest a man for what’s arguably not the biggest crime in the world, but I’ve never seen that happen here. Honestly, Ray coming to the conclusion he’d forgotten his wallet and travel back to Bruges on foot would’ve made more sense.

Staying in Bruges isn’t too awful for Ken (Gleeson) who loves the beauty of the city. Unlike his partner. We learn quite soon that Ray (Colin Farrell) hates the city with a passion, but that part of that anger comes from a recent job that didn’t go too well (Ray and Ken are both hitmen.) Things seem to improve when Ray meets local girl Chloë (Clémence Poésy), who hangs around a film shoot for unclear reasons.Her claim she deals drugs for the film crew sounds unbelievable, but Ray soon finds out that’s the truth. This is also how he meets Chlöe’s less than gentle friend Eirik (can you recognize Jérémie Renier?).
This brings us to one of the biggest problems I have with the film: the film is based in Bruges (which lies in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region called Flanders) butthe locals aren’t portrayed by local actors. Renier is from Wallonia (granted, that’s still in Belgium), Poésy is French and the lovely innkeeper Marie is played by Thekla Reuten, who may be lovely but she’s Dutch. I’ll admit it’s not a problem for Marie (we only know she manages the inn/hotel with her husband, but we don’t know more about her: she may have been a Dutch girl who fell in love with a Flemish guy who wanted to buy a hotel in Bruges). It is a problem though for Chloë, who even says Bruges is her hometown. (Yet her accent is incredibly French.) Why is this horrid? Well, just imagine In Bruges with Colin Farrell as Ray pretending he’s from Cornwall. The British press would cry murder over the horrendous casting.

Another problem I had with the film is that it isn’t always credible. At one point Ray tries to leave Bruges by train, but he’s stopped by the police (yes, the train is stopped in the middle of the field) who come toarrest him for a minor offence. I don’t know if that happens in Ireland, but I’ve never seen it happen here.

If all this complaining has given you the idea I didn’t like In Bruges, you’re wrong. It’s just that I didn’t like it as much as I could have for the reasons stated above. Now let’s turn to what’s good about the movie. First and foremost the casting of Gleeson and Farrell. They’re a great movie couple and good for the role.
There’s also the script which contains - as one should expect from a British gangster comedy - a lot of politically incorrect moves and jokes. In Bruges is quite foul-mouthed, but because that’s perfect for this sort of movie. The young hothead and the older gangster who doesn’t mind hiding in a town that’s full of culture, quietness and Belgian beer. The ‘job’ that awaits them in Bruges. The local gangsters. What else should you expect? Mamma Mia?

The movie is actually cleverer than you might think. Chloë tells Ray the movie they’re shooting in Bruges is a Dutch adaptation of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. That makes sense as Bruges is nicknamed “Venice of the North”. In between its own storylines In Bruges sometimes offers you echoes from Don’t Look Now, but by far one of the cleverist twists is that Roeg’s movie starts with a scene which foretells the rest and especially the end of the movie. In Bruges isn’t quite so bold, but does mimic that in a way: something which you see in the beginning will be echoed near the end of the film. There are more parallels between Roeg’s classic and McDonagh’s feature debut, but because I might spoil a couple of things I won’t go further. The best you can do is watch both films. After all, I might not like In Bruges as my fellow reviewer deeopey (read his review here), but it’s not a bad film. And in case you haven’t seen Don’t Look Now… for shame, for shame!

Don’t Look Now: 10/10
In Bruges: 6.5/10

It’s the seventh day of the seventh month and it’s time for me to publish my 77th post. Coincidence? Frankly, yes. Anyway, it’s time for another movie review, but tonight it’s not just any movie that’s up for a review…

The next movie up for a review is ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? , a sadly much too obscure Spanish cult film from the Seventies. I say ‘obscure’ because the movie hasn’t been seen or released that much, even though it has a good reputation.
The biggest culprit here may be the film’s subject: murdering children.
The movie starts with several minutes of news footage, showing us how badly children have been treated, contrary to common belief that noone wants to harm children. There aren’t many films that’ll start with footage of WWII’s concentration camps, wounded children in Vietnam and African infants starving to death. The accompanying soundtrack of children chanting seems awkward, almost perverse.
After seven minutes of hard-hitting history lessons the movie starts with kids enjoying themselves at a beach. Up to the moment waves carry a woman’s corpse to the shore. ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? has started: enjoy yourselves.

Cast and crew
Like so many other European films from the Seventies, ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? (released in 1975) has more titles than anyone can remember: so far I’ve come across ‘Who Could Harm A Child?’, ‘Who Can Kill A Child?’, ‘Could You Kill A Child?’, ‘Trapped’, ‘Island of the Damned’, ‘Island of the Dead’, ‘Scream’ (I kid you not), ‘Todliche Befehle aus dem All’, ‘Les Revoltés de l’An 2000′, ‘Killer’s Playground’ and ‘Death is Child’s Play’. One title better than the other, still ¿Quién? doesn’t manage to beat possibly the best movie title ever, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972).
The director is Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador, the son of two actors who made two movies for the big screen and two for tv. Ever since, Ibáñez-Serrador has made his living directing tv shows. The other movie he made was La Residencia (1969), a sleazy thriller best known as The House That Screamed.

Protagonists are Lewis Fiander (Tom) and Prunella Ransome (Evelyn), a happily married couple enjoying their holidays.
Ransome is best known for being in Alfred The Great and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd.
Lewis Fiander has the best cult credentials from being in Hammer’s underrated film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the Phibes sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

Back to our film.
Tom decides to visit a nearby island he remembers visiting when he was very young. This is the biggest mistake they could’ve made. They take the boat to a little village that seems to be deserted. The ice cream is runny and there’s noone in the pub. The couple can only spot a handful of kids. So what has happened? Where is everyone?
You don’t need too many clues to figure out that the children have started killing adults and there aren’t that many left. Some people are killed onscreen and this is quite upsetting: to the children, murdering someone almost seems like a game. And perhaps it is.

I can’t tell you more without revealing too much of the plot, but there are still a few things to be said. ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a horror movie, but don’t expect it to be gory or you’ll be disappointed. I’d describe it as psychological horror, which is why the few gory bits are all the more unsettling. The movie has been compared with Children of the Corn, based on a Stephen King novel and many think King must have seen the Spanish movie before writing his book. This could have happened, but one shouldn’t forget there have been more movies and books where children end up taking over the world from adults (some of John Wyndham’s books spring to mind, especially The Midwich Cuckoos - made into two movies as Village of the Damned). ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a far better film than Children of the Corn, so it’s a damn shame that up to 2006 the movie was only released on DVD by a Spanish label that couldn’t see the use of adding subtitled to please the rest of the world. If you’re lucky, you might have found a French dubbed version of ¿Quien? under the title of Les Revoltés de l’An 2000, but you’d probably hear of the movie while reading a specialized cult movie magazine. Maybe that was part of the charm of the movie: the fact it was so hard to obtain.
That may be partially gone now there’s a global DVD release, but for my money the movie is still intriguing as hell. By the way, I myself own it twice, but only as a lame VHS copy of a copy dubbed in French and as a Spanish DVD without subtitles. I’ve seen the movie twice now and it isn’t always easy to understand what it’s about, but here we have a movie so clear in image language that it doesn’t really matter you won’t understand most of the dialogues (and to be honest, many scenes don’t have dialogues as the couple find the only inhabitants of the village, the children, are far from talkative).
¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? does not need dialogue to be good. The film succeeds in being both entertaining (in the way psychological horror movies entertain) and asking an interesting question: what would happen if children stopped being innocent victims? So obscure, relevant and good: movies don’t need much more to end up being cult.

¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is currently available on Region 2 DVD in Spain (try dvdgo.com) and on a Region 1 disc in the US.

If one had to summarize the works of Jean Rollin into just two words, I would pick “vampires” and “nudity”. Not just because the director made a movie called La Vampire Nue, but mainly because it’s hard to think of a Rollin movie without gratuitous nudity.
Not that I’m not lauching a general complaint against Rollin’s obsession with naked women, it’s just that in most of his movies there’s so much of it things can get a bit boring: oh, more nudity, more fake blood, …

Les Deux Orphelines Vampires was Rollin’s penultimate movie. It was made in 1997 and starred - no real shocker if you known a bit of French - two young girls who live in an orphanage.
So what makes them characters for Jean Rollin rather than Charles Dickens? They are blind, but not always. At night their vision returns, even though everything looks a bit more blue. But it’s not just their eyesight that returns, it’s also their fangs. Yes, every night these two girls, the sweetest girls in the orphanage, transform into bloodsucking creatures.

Teenage girls in an orphanage who are vampires… you get frightened only of the thought how Rollin could’ve turned this into a sleazefest that overstays its welcome, but no, for once the director toned down his usual style and made an effort. There’s an actual plot in this movie, not just trying to make it to some forlorn castle for whatever reason so all the women can get derobed.

Which brings us to one of the lesser elements of the movie: the plot. Whereas some people in the movie just can’t seem to make their text seem natural, it must be said that some of the dialogues are quite peculiar. It sounds as if Rollin was trying to win a poetry prize with his script. And it’s not good poetry either, but rather the work of a hermit who should really get some fresh air into his house.
During their nightly visits the girls meet other women. The orphans claim to be Aztec vampires, but the other girls say they’re creatures of the night too (a werewolf, a ghoul…) Not that Rollin bothered to make his werewolf woman look like a werewolf. No, he just wrote her some hyperbolic monologue which should make us believe she is a werewolf.
Especially the ghoul’s monologue is completely hammy and horribly unconvincing.

Then again, the orphans could be making all of this up, who knows?

The girls are lucky enough to leave the orphanage when a doctor takes them into his house. Sure enough they leave the house every night to get fresh blood and noone ever notices them. Not that one should pay attention to such trivial matters as a believable plot or continuity (the girls’ canes sometimes pop up from nowhere), this is a Rollin movie after all.

This helps the movie greatly, as there are only so many victims the girls could make around an orphanage without being discovered. The woman who gets murdered in a circus is another scene which shows Rollin’s stronger points: he really knew how to make a scene look good. Sadly, the man was not powerful enough to make the scene itself good. It may look great, but if it’s completely unbelievable, the scene will lose a lot of its strength.
That the girls only have night vision and everything looks blueish to them was a better idea: it not only helps us see when the girls are on the prowl again, it also gives the movie a look that helps it distinguish itself from the rest.

Alexandra Pic and Isabelle Teboul probably didn’t get a César for their performance, but it wouldn’t be fair to say they were not good. Isabelle Teboul (Henrietta) never became a professional actress (her only two other performances were as an uncredited extra and as ‘Nurse 3′), but here she has a scene where she has most of the lines and you’ll notice that the scene doesn’t cut for five minutes.

After Les Deux Orphelines Vampires in 1997, Rollin waited five years before making his next movie (La Fiancée de Dracula) and allegedly his next movie, La Nuit des Horloges, will be completed soon, so he is no longer the prolific filmer he once was. Most fans say Rollin is well past his prime since the seventies. They may have a point, but I was never a big fan of Rollin. If you want to see a typical Rollin movie, it may be best to avoid Les Deux Orphelines Vampires. If, however, you felt unsatisfied by a movies that existed for 75% out of naked women biting other naked women in castles, you may want to give this movie a shot. Despite all its faults the atmosphere is right and some scenes are truly gorgeous.

Plus, if you want to play “Whatever Happened To…?” you may want to see this movie for another reason: cult porn star and Rollin favourite Brigitte Lahaie and Tina Aumont (Torso, Salon Kitty) have small roles in this picture. See if you can identify them. It’ll give you something to sit through the drearier scenes.

My videotape of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue is living proof of how Eurotrash this movie is: not only do I find myself watching a Spanish/Italian film with an international group of actors filmed in the United Kingdom, I’m also watching the Belgian version: dubbed in French with Dutch subtitles. Yes, in just that one sentence I managed to include half of the European union (well, before the EU as it was before another ten countries joined in May 2004).

Let’s try the other Eurotrash test: does the movie own a wide array of alternative titles?
Let’s see: originally released as Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti, the film is better known as The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, except in the US where Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was deemed a more appropriate title.
The working title was Fin de semana para los muertos and my Belgian tape goes by the name of Le Massacre des Morts-Vivants and the film is also known as Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, Don’t Open the Window, No profanar el sueño de los muertos and Sleeping Corpses Lie.
In Italy, the ongoing attempts to cash in on the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (released as Zombi in Italy) resulted in the alternative title Zombi 3 (Da dove vieni?), even though The Living Dead is four years older than Romero’s classic. To complicate matters even further, there actually is a real Zombi 3 (made in 1988) and in the US Zombi Holocaust was released as Zombie 3, so make sure you don’t pick up the wrong movie. (On a sidenote: the film Virus has both Zombi 4 ànd Zombi 5: Ultimate Nightmare as alternative titles, which in a way is quite a remarkable achievement.)

Cast and crew

Manchester Morgue is an interesting addition to the Vault, as it combines the subgenres of a zombie film with that of eco-horror. Even more surprising, the film is rather decent.
The director is one Jorge Grau who wrote and directed 30 movies, most of them completely forgotten. Only two films have made the step to video and DVD, the other film being Ceremonia sangrienta (Grau’s take on the Bathory story which also has an impressive set of alternative titles). None of his films have been released on DVD in Grau’s home country Spain.
All this makes it hard to say if Grau is a good director or not, but at least we’re left with at least one good film.

You’ve probably seen the leads in other Italian cult classics: Ray Lovelock has played in over 60 films, the best known being Macchie Solari (a.k.a. Autopsy). Cristina Galbó played in many gialli and sleazy films (I haven’t seen Sex Life In A Women’s Prison, but I wanna bet it’s a bit of sleaze) of which La Residencia (by the director of that other Vault film Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño?) and What have you done to Solange? are the most acclaimed.

They’re joined by Arthur Kennedy, whose filmography of over 80 films is worth looking up, if only to come across a bunch of classics (incl. Elmer Gantry, Fantastic Voyage and Lawrence of Arabia).

The Film

One of the most startling scenes in this film is the first scene: we see the main character leave his shop and for some reason the camera moves towards a painting and suddenly green concentric circles start flashing before your eyes. And while we’re on the subject of flashing: after that first scene the movie treats us to a handful of urban views, one of which is a running woman who’s running naked through town. The relevance of this scene is still completely unknown to me.

Manchester Morgue is a slow starter, it takes quite some time before Grau gets to the main story of the film: experimental pesticides have a slight side effect of bringing the dead back to life. As mentioned before, this rather silly concept is worked out so well it makes Manchester Morgue worth checking out (and not for the reasons you’d usually check out films with improbable plots, like The Giant Claw). Less convincing is the subplot that tries to convince us the pesticides also make babies become aggressive creatures. This subplot is downright silly and it’s worked out so hastily it makes the movie lose some punch.
After all Manchester Morgue manages to deliver quite a few punches: some zombie scenes are quite effective and overall the movie has a gritty quality, especially in the last part of the movie. If the combination of a zombie film with an ecological message already seemed a bit weird, you should be warned that Arthur Kennedy’s role as a police inspector mainly functions to add a little detective flavour to the movie. At the same time the police angle helps and bothers this movie: it adds a bit of realism to the film, but it also bothers the plot from developing naturally.

The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue is an interesting film: it has its failures, but all in all it’s astounding a movie that is such a melange of a handful of odd subgenres, manages to work in the end. It’s definitely not a masterpiece, but an essential cult classic.

Happiness can be found from the most unexpected things. Case in point: in Paris I found two Hitchcock movies. I grabbed one, wasn’t sure about the other one and started looking for other candidate DVDs (”buy 3 DVDs? get 30% off”).
By the time I’d walked round the shop the other Hitchcock was gone. Turns out the customer in front of me had bought it.

Not that it mattered as I found out today, when I was giving Waltzes From Vienna an IMDb score: it turns out I’ve now seen ALL the British talkies by Hitchcock. (Well, either I’ve seeen them or I own them.)

So why is Waltzes From Vienna the odd one out? Why is that movie not as available as the others?

Maybe because Waltzes is - you’re sitting down, right? - a romantic musical. Not the sort of film people expect from old Hitch (well, young Hitch at the time).

And it shows that the director isn’t on familiar grounds. Some of the comedy elements just don’t work.
But do not despair: talent can always help a water-absorbing ship from drowning.

Talent n°1: Hitchcock. While this isn’t a thriller, the climax of the movie does use thriller elements and you find yourself really being pulled into the film. Sure enough, Hitchcock had an eye for where to put his actors/actresses and the movie looks great. Throw in the occasional experiment: just look at how Rasi is running towards the camera after Strauss Sr refuses to play her song. (Yeah, you see a cut, but it’s an experiment, right? And the idea was good.)

Talent n°2: Rasi (short for Therese) is played by Jessie Matthews. Though we’ve forgotten about her (which we shouldn’t have), she was a good actress in the 30s and 40s. She had a nice voice and she was the first actress to play Victor/Victoria.

Waltzes From Vienna is a movie about Johann Strauss Jr, who isn’t loved by his father (no talent, that boy) and in love with Rasi, the baker’s daughter. He composes his works for her and one of those compostions is heard by a countess, who thinks he’s a good choice to put her poem to music. That poem: “Die blaue Danube”.
The count had father Strauss in mind, but old Strauss is too stubborn. A complete scheme is put into work to make old Strauss arrive late at a concert and young Strauss (who by now had given up music due to supposed lack of talent and had gone to work in the bakery) to conduct his composition in front of an audience.
Much to the dismay of Rasi, who believes the countess wants her lover mainly for romantic interest.

Definitely not a bad movie, but certainly not one of the Hitchcocks you must see.
Unless you want to see how the master can cope when he’s directing a genre that isn’t familiar territory, if you like to see how the young Hitchcock still tried to sneak in the odd experiment to learn the trade and/or if you don’t want to miss an opportunity to see a movie starring Jessie Matthews.

Verdict: 6/10

Silent Hill isn’t the sort of movie I’d normally reserve for a review, but this isn’t a normal review. Let me start by saying that Silent Hill is above average and slightly better than I’d expected.I saw Silent Hill in the same week as Romanzo Criminale, which is an Italian film about a gang of Italian criminals who were in and out of the news between 1977 and 1972.
In the initial scene Romanzo couldn’t impress me, a feeling I couldn’t shake off during the two and a half hours that followed. It’s like watching a short version of La Piovra, with all the good bits cut out. The main reason was that the principal characters weren’t interesting enough for me to look at for over two hours. If they’d wanted a good movie, they should’ve focused on the two girlfriends in the movie: the sweet girl who doesn’t know her beau is involved in crime and the prostitute who has ties with both the criminals and the policeman chasing them.
However, the way this was filmed you might as well print out pictures of the lead actors, stick them to your wall and watch that for 2.5 hours.
Talk about flat characters!

The good news about Romanzo Criminale is doesn’t want to look like Ta****ino, but treats them as characters you’d see in a drama. Which is nice: some depth is always good, but sadly the characters are pretty flat and there’s no depth to explore.
Good news that did work is the director knows how to handle a camera. None of those shaky camera movements that try to make the movie seem more lively. What’s wrong with showing a camera isn’t too heavy for you to handle? Even in The Secret Life of Words there’s a moment where the camera goes for a shaky close-up. But given that Sarah Polley is a nurse sitting on the bed of Tim Robbins, who’s immobilised, why is there a need for a camera to shake around?This is also true for Silent Hill: Gans knows how to direct the camera and proves that chasing scenes are not more boring if the camera isn’t placed on a bouncing ball, but held pretty steady.
Yes, Silent Hill looks pretty good. Which is also an achievement if you know that almost every action scene in the movie was designed by another company. You’re just going from scene to scene, but the movie went from sfx company to sfx company. That you don’t really notice this when watching the movie can be called an achievement.

A friend of mine said this was the sort of movie that Fulci would make if he were still alive. Would he? Yes, there’s the scent of burnt corpses you love to smell in the morning and there’s a body tied to a toilet with barbed wire. And the close-up scene where you witness how a body held above a fire goes from pink to slightly overdone black is something Fulci would love to do too.
But my main problem with Silent Hill is that the build-up is great and really scary, but once Rose follows a little girl inside a dark basement and the siren is making an ominous sound, I suddenly sat in the chair and discovered I wasn’t scared. Up to that point, the movie looks incredibly creepy and scary but once Rose finds herself surrounded by the weird creatures from the trailer I had lost the ability to get frightenend.

Which is also a bit like Fulci: I fail to get scared by his last movies, but with Zombi 2 he does know how to push the right buttons. Need I say more than ‘the scene with the eye’?

Which brings us to the second movie I’d like to compare Silent Hill to: The Descent. There were four loud girls in front of me, but also four lads who told them to shut up (but proved equally noisy once the movie had started). Incidently, during the credits a boy told the girls to shut up, but they rebuked “It’s not even started yet!” Which is an interesting discussion: does a movie start when the lights go out or when we find ourselves watching scene 1?

My main criticism with The Descent is that it’s too long. Sure, it’s 90 minutes long, but hey, I often watch films from the 40s where movies of 70 minutes were no exception. The Descent takes up too much time with establishment shots, but when the girls enter the caves the exciting part of the movie starts.
Yes, both The Descent and Silent Hill literally go below the ground at one point, but where one movie stopped being scary there the other one started its relentless sequences of terror that would’ve made Fulci proud. You’ll find bones sticking out, gore, a girl falling in a pool of blood and flesh. Scary and it works.
The loud eight in front of me were either completely silenced or shouting out in terror (which for the girls translated in shrieking and for the boys in howling).
I also have a problem with the final ten minutes of The Descent, which I found a bit predictable, but bear in mind I’m still selling videos on eBay and half of them are horror, so maybe not everyone will mind as much.
And let’s face it, shortcomings aside, The Descent is a movie you should try and see. It’s far from perfect, but the other sequences (which still means 70% of the movie) is genuinely scary and great.

Silent Hill does have frightening sequences and occasionally succeeds in making you think there can really be such a thing as a guy with a really big knife and a pyramid on his head. (Erm, okay, to regular visitors of DV that won’t come as a surprise.) And where it is clearly a computer game transposed to the silver screen, it’ succeeds better in coming alive as a movie than its predecessors.
But still, there are scenes like the one in the hotel: Rose and Cybil are in the hotel looking for Rose’s daughter, when Cybil opens a closet where the mail is kept and finds there’s a note for room 111. Which, gamers will know, it’s time to go to find room 111. But room 111 doesn’t exist! Oh well, let’s tear this painting to pieces and maybe there’s a hidden room (and of course there is).
This scene and the two things that happen next are clear indications that Silent Hill has its origins in a game. It’s done well enough for you to accept it as part of a plot (the girl who looks like Rose’s daughter clearly wants Rose to find out what’s happened to her), but it’s a point where I felt like looking for a joystick rather than popcorn.

So is Silent Hill a good movie? No, but it’s better than we were expecting. Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman, Le Pacte des Loups) is an able director, who knows how to handle a camera. His movie looks good, but it’s a bit too transparant that it has its origins as a game. If you don’t like the work of Lucio Fulci, stay away: it’s pretty gory from time to time and will go beyond imagination to explain what’s happening (remember how in The New York Ripper a blood sample told the police the killer was approx. 35 old and that the killer had never left New York). If you’re unable to put your Suspension of Disbelief button to the maximum degree, you’ll find a large part of the film ludicrous. (Which is another plus for The Descent: that movie is courteous enough to switch your buttons itself… I had no trouble believing there was a race of creatures living in underground caves.)

Silent Hill: 6/10 (better than average)
The Descent: 7/10 (but a recommendation)
Romanzo Criminale: 4/10 (crap that was made well)

Silent Hill’s official Site
The Descent’s Trailer

(All images were found on the cinebel.be site. Originally published on DV in May 2006. Slightly edited now and (re-)published here.)

As ReGenesis is currently being shown on Belgian television (Friday night on canvas), I thought this would be a good time to reload this review from the Delirium Vault archives.

And now we move to the wacky world of television series…
ReGenesis is the name of the show and you’re in luck if you manage to track it down. It is a Canadian tv show (of which the third series has just been broadcast on Canadian tv), it hasn’t been bought by many tv stations (as far as I can tell, it’s only been bought by French tv in Europe - but, luckily, the pan-european channel ARTE bought it, so at least it could be seen in a handful of countries with one broadcast) and the series has been released on DVD. But only the first season. And only in the UK. Yes, we’re really trodding the thinnest line between cult and obscure here.

ReGenesis focuses on the life and works of David Sandström (played by Peter Outerbridge), a brilliant biochemist who drinks more than he speaks and has more enemies than friends because he’ll never shut his mouth and frankly often is quite an asshole.
But he’s also brilliant, though you may not get this impression when the series opens. Sandström is on the verge of breakdown and stumbles through the streets. He’s calling people on his cell phone. He confesses: “Now I’ve done it, I’ve gone too far…”
So what happened? Rewind six months…

Which brings us to my biggest problem with the series… the show likes to jump around in time. There are quite a lot of scenes throughout the series which don’t stop at the end, but suddenly rewind in hyperfast mode to a point earlier in that scene to focus on another character.
If that sounds confusing, let me explain. A scene opens with David Sandström walking into the office. He’s greated by Bob, an equally brilliant guy but overtly shy because he has Asperger syndrome. Bob tries to talk to David, but David says: “Not now, Bob.” and walks on, closes the door of his office and looks at the list of known victims of a virus outbreak. We see him scribbling and he gets an idea. He grabs the phone and makes an appointment with a fellow scientist. Suddenly the screen rewinds to the scene where David walks into the office. David ignores Bob again, but now we stick with Bob and we get to see why Bob wanted to talk to David.
This is mildly irritating at first, but you soon get used to it and - let’s be honest - it also shows how good the actors are, because these interwoven scenes were shot with two cameras and are occasionally quite long, so everyone clearly should know their position and lines, in order not to fuck up two scenes at one go.

So what’s the story? The first series opened with a flash forward to episode 12. David tells us things are completely fucked up and then we scroll back six months, to how it all began… with a race against time to identify the cause of a deadly virus, spreading rapidly and headed straight for the city. It’s up to Sandström’s NorBAC (North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission) to identify patient zero and contain the outbreak.
ReGenesis combines shorter stories (taking up only one episode, sometimes even less, sometimes a bit more) with a storyline that’s behind some of the stories and is spread over the entire season. Quite effective as a new story can be introduced at the beginning or the end of an episode and because you can’t tell whether this new story belongs to the larger scheme or whether it’s not related to any of the other plots.

What was a bit annoying (but prone to happen in series like this) is that, in my opinion, a bit too much happens to David Sandström. Especially in the first three episodes. And it’s only in the last two episodes (of the first series) that your suspension of disbelief has to work overtime again.
What is also helpful is that all the main characters have storylines dedicated to them. Which doesn’t only show there’s life outside a lab, but it helps you to think of the characters as human beings.

Now I am not a biochemist, though I did attend some scientific classes when I was younger, but the series focuses a lot on biology, viruses, chemistry and physics, so as a layman you can only guess how much of the theories in the series are bullshit. My first impression was that a lot of it was quite credible and Wikipedia informs us “extensive knowledge of various chemistry and biotechnology issues is required to find out why the plot in many episodes can’t be true (if it can’t)”.
Over on Amazon.co.uk, one happy customer informed the general public: “I’m a biochemist, and while I love science-based TV, I almost always have to watch with my suspension of disbelief cranked up to high. Not so with ReGenesis. Real, accurate science, and fascinating storylines. Of course the real genius is that they manage to make it accessible to the layman too without huge indigestible dollops of exposition. I watched the entire first season in less than two days, then made my husband (who wouldn’t know a carbon atom from a cheese sandwich) watch it too. He’s as hooked as I am [...]”

All in all, ReGenesis is a pretty intelligent series and quite rewarding for those who are lucky enough to find it somewhere (on TV or DVD).
You can read more about the series on its Wikipedia page, but beware of some spoilers.