¿Que honda, bruja?

It’s June in Oxnard, California, and cheerfully unemployed best friends and neighbours Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and Hector (Jorge Diaz) ease into their first post-graduation summer. These guys don’t fret much over having nothing to do. Jesse gets his hands on a GoPro, which he uses to document tequila shots with his abuelita, dancing with Chavo, his pet Chihuahua, and convincing Hector to do idiotic stunts like hurl himself down the stairs of their two-story walk-up in a rubber storage container. When asked how it feels to be out of high school, Jesse replies, “I feel like a man now.”

When a shut-in in their building is killed in her own apartment and their class valedictorian is fingered as prime suspect, Jesse and Hector decide to do a little private investigating—it’s not like cops spend much time in their neighbourhood anyway, and a few hits from the bong is all it takes to turn these guys into Shaggy and Scooby Doo. They break into the victim’s home, which seems long abandoned: everything’s covered in dust, including a huge collection of VHS tapes and a nursery. But wait, the dead lady didn’t have any children. Hmm…

The next morning Jesse wakes up to find that not only has Hector drawn a dick on his face in magic marker, but there’s also a inexplicable circular mark on his arm. Soon after he’s using an old electronic Simon game as a Ouija board, and soon after that he begins to sense that he has superpowers, or maybe a guardian angel! Rather than fight crime, consult a parapsychologist or report to the FBI, Jesse opts to laugh himself silly doing trust exercises and blowing up an inflatable mattress really fast on camera—which he and Hector immediately put online and await approving comments. All of this is pretty hilarious. Think of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones as a genre/sociological experiment: What happens when you put teenage Chicanos who live in walk-ups into an otherwise garden variety American horror story? You get comedy. Or anyway, half a comedy. I wish it stayed a comedy.

Watching The Marked Ones, which was written and directed by PA 2 and 3 helmer Christopher Landon, you begin to realize just how rare genuine ethnicity—not to mention class diversity—is in American horror, which is nearly always about white people and their token black/Asian/Hispanic pals. A veneer of normalcy is essential to most horror stories, but it seems that Landon or someone else overseeing the PA franchise finally clued into the fact that the American normal has shifted since Amityville. To be sure, The Marked Ones capitalizes on racial or class stereotypes, but this is (half-) comedy, and comedy is partially dependent on the shared recognition of such stereotypes, and I’d argue that the film doesn’t do so at the expense of its characters.

Now about that other half. As The Marked Ones burrows deeper into its not-very-mysterious mystery, the hi-jinx largely fall away and the humdrum boo moments accumulate. A conspiracy is uncovered. “He said they’re witches trying to build an army or some shit,” says the MIA valedictorian killer’s gansta brother. Where the movie was previously ridiculous in a good way, it soon just gets really dumb. There’s too much pointless exposition, the car won’t start, and no matter how much hair-raising mayhem unfolds, the camera, of course, always stays on and, miraculously, is always pointed in the right direction. At least the final moments forge a connection to the rest of the PA mythology that’s so absurd you have to laugh. And the audience I saw it with did laugh—a lot. They knew exactly what kind of movie they wanted this to be.   

                       

Season of the Witch: some had it coming

After experiencing an unexpected moment of moral clarity while thrusting his blade through the belly of some helpless woman during the smoky Battle of Smyrna, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and his grizzled old infidel-slaying buddy Felson (Ron Perlman) resolve to quit the Crusades and return to a plague-ridden Europe where everybody everywhere speaks English and have gone without shampoo for longer than anyone can remember. Picked up by some eagle-eyed church cops for desertion, Behmen and Felson decide to take an escort gig rather than face execution. Their destination is some remote mountain-top monastery, their cargo a wily teenager (Claire Foy) charged single-handedly causing the Black Death via witchcraft. Thing is, that accusation might just turn out to be entirely accurate, so you could say Season of the Witch starts out as a remake of The Seventh Seal, with Cage modelled after Von Sydow and Perlman after Björnstrand, turns into a Dungeons & Dragons module, pays homage to The Exorcist during its climactic supernatural showdown, while the whole thing could be interpreted as an apologia for the Inquisition, an implication exacerbated by the film’s entirely superfluous, essentially unrelated prelude concerning a conscientious priest who gets iced by an accused witch whose death by hanging he oversaw earlier that same day. But it might be grossly overestimating the ambitions of this project to presume any sort of polemic, even such an inanely misogynist one.

The reunion of Cage and Dominic Sena, who directed the actor in his remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, should have at least offered some super-stupid fun, but there’s an almost puzzling stiltedness to Season of the Witch. Cage seems largely disinterested, even in the bits where he gets to bark or convey spells of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sena meanwhile seems to be lacking decent coverage for virtually every scene, so many of which end with lingering close-ups of hammy reaction shots, that enduring convention of daytime soaps. Scripter Bragi F. Schut—not, from what I can tell, a pseudonym—resorts to medieval melodrama clichés and dialogue so comically leaden as to invoke Monty Python: “Damned fog. Like a veil before my eyes!”

But producers Alex Garter and Charles Roven should share some blame too, given that it looks like far too much of the film’s relatively limited budget was spent on umpteen needless crane shots and abysmally poor CGI, which winds up gauzed over everything from splintering bridges to apparently supernatural wolves to vast History Channel battle scenes. The zombie monks shamble about like puppets—could they not have just used puppets?

Al the names: multi-monikered Italian horrors bathe Barbara Steele in blood, wall Lucia Bosé in stone, dub everybody into other languages, badly

Visiting the local video store with a fresh hankering for horror I discovered a number of recent DVD releases showcasing a subgenre I’ve previously neglected to dig very deeply into: the Italian horror films of the 1960s and 70s. Which inevitably leads to a lot of castles, a lot of Barbara Steele, and a lot of lousy dubbing. I’m fine with the first of these attributes, positively delighted about the second, but not so big on the third. I’ve watched an unhealthy number of movies in my life and learned to groove with a great many conventions that initially put me off, but lousy or excessive dubbing, whether in low-budget chillers or in the films of Fellini, Pasolini or Pontecorvo—the Italians apparently have an endless tolerance for this—has always had a numbing effect on me, washing whole movies with a layer of technical artifice and incongruity that keeps me from investing as fully as I’d like to. I’m not sure if any of the films below helped to cure that entirely, but watching people get whipped, dissected, bitten and burned alive does go some way toward distracting one from such niggling annoyances.

When listing the commonalities between the bulk of Italian horror films, I should also add alternate titles, of which there are usually a good half-dozen for every film. I’ll try to stick to the ones most commonly used. Previously available only on an ultra-crappy disc, Nightmare Castle, aka The Faceless Monster, aka Lovers Beyond the Tomb or Amanti d’oltretomba (1965), has been restored and newly released by Severin. Deliciously perverse and intriguingly ambiguous, its narrative of infidelity, bad science and cursed legacies proves richer than its recycling of gothic tropes might imply. There are two central locations, the castle of the title and its adjoining greenhouse, the first being a place of decrepitude and rot while the second is fecund and sensuous. It’s in the greenhouse that Lady Muriel Arrowsmith (Steele) trysts with her stable hand David (Rik Battaglia). But it’s in the castle dungeon that the lovers, chained to the wall, are forced to endure the torments of Muriel’s scientist husband, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller). Echoes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover abound, but erotic or class transcendence is swiftly squandered in the name of jealousy, sadism greed.

Having disposed of his wife, Stephen can only inherit Muriel’s fortune by marrying her mentally ill sister Jenny (again, Steele), whom he takes in and begins to model after Muriel with a hint of the necrophiliac drive of Vertigo’s Scotty. Jenny takes to the game so well that she begins dreaming of meeting a lover in the greenhouse, and uncovering the truth about her sister’s demise. As directed by Mario Caiano and scored by a young Ennio Morricone, Nightmare Castle is pleasingly thick with monochromatic gloom and doom and benefits tremendously from Steele’s effortlessness with swinging from positions of power to unease and terror. Those huge eyes hold so much.

Unfortunately, neither Steele’s talent nor her strange beauty are able to help She-Beast, aka Revenge of the Blood Beast, aka Satan’s Sister or La Sorella di Satana (66), now available from Dark Sky Films. Written and directed by British filmmaker Michael Reeves, it starts promisingly with a riveting expository prologue about a community gathering to torture and kill a witch—clearly echoing the prologue of what perhaps remains Steele’s greatest achievement, Mario Bava’s legendary Black Sunday, aka The Mask of Satan or La Maschera del demonio (60). It then quickly succumbs to a wildly uneven contemporary tale of British tourists on holiday in Transylvania, a place where nearly all the locals are impoverished inbred dolts and staunch communists, spouting lines like “Privacy breeds conspiracy!” and “I have petitioned the government for new wallpaper.” The main problem here is really just that She-Beast can’t quite decide if its horror or comedy, though anyone watching can clearly determine that it should have opted for the former—the high-speed, Keystone cops gags are woefully limpid.

A far better investment in Central European vampire lore arrives in the shape of Legend of Blood Castle, aka The Female Butcher, aka Bloody Ceremony or Ceremonia Sangienta (73), slyly directed by Spanish veteran Jorge Grau and now out on a new disc from MYA. No Barbara Steele this time around, but instead we get Lucia Bosé, who some of you might recognize from Death of a Cyclist (55), which was released last year by Criterion in a special edition. In a sense, Blood Castle is a story of marital renewal, albeit of a sinister and myopic sort. In this heavily extrapolated retelling of the story of Elizabeth Bathory, Bosé plays the Countess with surprising texture and sympathy, despairing for the aging of her flesh while her husband only gets excited by watching his falcons rip apart their prey, and by the unfulfilled possibility of sex with peasant girls. When he dies and returns as a vampire, the couple discovers a new kind of partnership in which he finds pretty virgins to kill and drains their blood for the Countess to bathe in, an ostensible formula for rejuvenation that Grau does little to make seem like more than a delusional effort. The real Bathory was said to have been responsible for over 600 deaths before being sealed up behind a brick wall for the rest of her life. Bosé doesn’t get quite that far, but her reign of terror is still pretty impressive, thanks especially to Grau’s graceful camera work, hampered only by some pretty clumsy editing and a few rather dated looking zooms.

Fires were started: Day of Wrath

Though her trial is held in sparely furnished quarters composed of shafts of light, passageways and the shadows of torture devices, rooms where pale, gloomy men in enormous ruffs bend over quills and candles, the execution of Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) is conducted outdoors on the loveliest summer day, with the sun high in the sky and a children’s choir singing a tune to drown out her cries of agony. It is the 17th century in Denmark and the burning of a frightened old woman is no cause for spoiling the afternoon. Yet Herlofs’ words linger gravely with Reverend Absalon (Thorkild Roose), whose pretty, much younger, and so terribly unsatisfied wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin) has perhaps something of the witch in her, too. Even Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), the Reverend’s son from a previous wife, who’s in love and secretly trysting with Anne, can see it. There are fires in her eyes, he tells her.

Day of Wrath (1943) shares obvious affinities with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s earlier The Passion of Joan of Arc (28), but here the corruption of the oppressive, gynophobic patriarchy is a given, the condemned woman’s disposed of at the outset, and the real drama unfolds methodically through parallel storylines that weave together several characters carefully positioned at distinct points in the social geometry. The men are resigned to a fatalistic status quo, and even Martin can only think of death, or of how things will end, whenever he’s with his beloved, who he ravishes in the woods while his father worries indoors. The women however are all mutually opposed in their disparate bids for transcending a life so fraught with limitations. Anne leaps at any chance for fulfillment, sexual or otherwise, with Martin. Herlofs, who fears not spiritual perdition but mere death, opts for assuming the very role of demonic collaborator that she’s been assigned by the clergy, so as to at the very least put the fear of God into her persecutors. Absalon’s mother (Sigrid Neiiendam), so easy to loathe, is likewise simply taking the only route she deems prudent, one of pious rivalry and maternal martyrdom. She’s always had it out for Anne, and only waits for the ideal conditions to cut her down.

As the performances and camerawork align themselves to Dreyer’s mesmerizing, somewhat theatrical style, with dialogue that’s never more loaded with subtext that when it seems most direct, Day of Wrath moves forward with classical inevitability. Fates are declared, fears announced, weather forbids. The recurring image of an apple tree looms large, reminding us just how profoundly original sin burrows into such minds, and how the real source of anxiety here stems from repressed desires the women are blamed for simply representing. Everything that will come to pass is mapped out in the early scenes with great economy, yet watching how things come to pass offers much suspense, as well as a deeper kind of dread, and that certain pleasure we feel in witnessing something realized with such structural elegance. The interplay of the dictates of flesh and spirit create as bold a dynamic here as in Joan of Arc or Ordet (55), and like those films, Day of Wrath is an absolute masterpiece.