Halloween 2021: October 15th

Spirits of the Dead (1968)

Histoires extraordinaires

I have very little evidence to back this up but, it seems to me anyway, that Edgar Allen Poe was experience a renewal of interest in the sixties. I base this assumption on the popular of the Poe Cycle: The series of Poe-based films Roger Corman and Vincent Price made for American International Pictures. Those films were so popular, as to spawn a mini-wave of gothic horror movies, many of them coming out of Italy. Around the same time, European arthouse cinema was making in-roads in America really for the first time. Filmmakers like Truffant, Bunuel, and Bergman were suddenly becoming household names. Someone had the idea to combine these two trends. Arthouse luminaries Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini would be brought together to adapt a trio of less well-known Poe stories. The resulting omnibus feature is known abroad as “Histoires extraordinaires” or “Tre passi nel delirio” abroad but was entitled “Spirits of the Dead” here in America. 

The first story is “Metzengerstein.” It follows the depraved Countess Frederique, who develops an unhealthy fixation on her cousin, Baron Wilheim. To settle a family feud, she burns down the stable where Wilheim keeps his beloved animals and kills him in the process. Afterwards, she becomes increasingly obsessed with a black stallion, the sole survivor of the fire. In “William Wilson,” the titular character has spent his life performing acts of increasing cruelty and greed. A mysterious doppelganger, with the same name, has haunted him all the while, keeping his evil acts from escalating. Inevitably, Wilson must confronts his lookalike. In “Toby Dammit,” a washed-up Shakespearean actor arrives in Italy for an award ceremony. He's haunted by visions of the devil, who appears to him as a little girl. After recklessly fleeing the awards show in a sports car, he comes to an uncompleted bridge and meets his fate. 

Roger Vadim directs “Metzengerstein” and it's the movie he made right after “Barbarella.” Like that film, this one is mostly about letting Jane Fonda look stunning in a series of increasingly outrageous outfits. Fonda gives a decent performance as the decadent countess. She's mildly intimidating while torturing underlings, playing with a pet cheetah, and having heavily implied orgies. Casting Jane's real life brother Peter Fonda as the countess' cousin/rival makes the incestuous undertones of that subplot all the more uncomfortable. Otherwise, “Metzengerstein” chugs along at a languid pace, which is not helped by the equal parts pastoral and plodding musical score. The tapestry central to the story looks cool but this one mostly moves towards its inevitable conclusion without much energy.

Louis Malle handles “William Wilson” and it's probably the episode most faithful to Poe's original texts. Malle makes Wilson's acts of evil more intense. Yet Malle certainly brings a level of artistry to scenes involving torture by rat, a nude girl being strapped down and prodded with a scalpel, and an extended whipping. The idea of a thoroughly amoral man being pursued by a righteous double, like his conscience catching up to him, brings certain ideas about man's capacity for both good and evil to mind. There's a definite tension to the presentation, as we wait for Wilson and his lookalike to finally confront one another. Or during a drawn out card-playing scene, that proceeds another grand act of cruelty. Alain Delon is effective in the dual role, with Brigitte Bardot also making a notable appearance. 

The last story in “Spirits of the Dead” seems to be the most highly regarded. Fellini is ostensibly adapting Poe's “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” here but really only keeps the ending. Instead, he creates another stylishly directed tale of the lifestyles of the rich and famous in trendy Roma. Fellini's visual approach here is scrumptious. Toby's arrival in an Italian airport, shot through orange filters, is notable. His appearance on a TV talk show is perfectly framed. Lots of atmospheric fog and icy blues sneak in later on. The second half is devoted largely to impressively fluid POV shots of the sports car speeding through darkened streets. Terence Stamp is delightfully bitchy as the perpetually sloshed performer. 

“Toby Dammit” has a certain dreamy power to it, which is most notable in its spooky conclusion. Yet, as I often do with Fellini films, I frequently found myself wondering when the hell it would arrive at the point. It's the longest segment in the film, running for nearly an hour. After the first couple incidents of Toby being an asshole in public, things start to drag. I'm sure the filmmaker was expounding on the hollowness of fame. Or making some satirical point about the Italian media. How does that connect with Toby's reoccurring foreboding visions? I have no idea. It's beautifully shot, well acted, and has a creepy ending but “Toby Dammit” is ultimately a self-serving piece of artifice. 

One imagines having such respected filmmakers handle this material was an attempt to raise the esteem of an often derided genre. To make some “elevated horror” back in the sixties. If this was the case, it's funny that the film would still be distributed by the same company that Roger Corman used to work with. “Spirits of the Dead” would be handled in the U.S. by A.I.P., who even added Vincent Price reading from the titular poem to the beginning and end of the movie. (They did the exact same thing with “Witchfinder General” the same year.) Bringing together directors with such distinctive individual styles means each segment of “Spirits of the Dead” feels truly disconnected from one other. While all the episodes have their positive attributes, the film still feels too self-consciously artistic and stuffy for my taste. [6/10]

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)

When I was a teenager, I had an idea for a “Friday the 13th” sequel. Hang with me, this will become relevant in a minute. The premise revolved around a group of escaped prisoners, who take some innocent teens captive, hiding out in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. Since so many people root for Jason to kill people anyway, I thought making the slasher bait bad guys was a valuable premise. You'll be happy to know that my attitude towards the slasher genre has changed these days. Two years after “Wrong Turn 2,” Fox would greenlight another direct-to-video sequel to the West Virginia-set murderous hillbilly saga. Whoever makes these decisions had a very similar idea to my aforementioned premise, so I guess it was far from a unique approach to the material. 

A big time criminal named Carlo Chavez is being transported from a prison in West Virginia to a more secured location. The authorities are concerned about a potential escape attempt and include an undercover  U.S. marshal, named Willy, among the group of criminals. As they are traveling through the countryside, the bus is attacked... But not by Chavez' men. Instead, the cannibalistic hillbilly mutant Three Finger and his adopted child Three Toe run the bus off the road. The guards, Chavez, Willy, and the other criminals – which include a former marine, a white supremacist, and a car thief – are stranded in the woods. Soon, they begin to fall into the traps left by the killers, who are still hunting them. Teaming up with the last surviving person from a previous group of Three Finger's victims, they attempt to survive the night.

In my review of “Wrong Turn 2,” I noted how surprisingly likable and well defined the characters were for a low budget, direct-to-video slasher sequel. “Wrong Turn 3” does not uphold this standard. The opening scene has a group of college-age white water rafters stepping out of the river, smoking pot, getting naked, and deciding to have sex. All but one of them are then graphically killed. It's like the slasher genre was boiled down to its sleaziest, most obvious essentials without any art or grace. The new cast of characters introduced after that are just terrible. The crooks are obviously horrible people, with the Neo-Nazi who likes to threaten to rape people being the most blatantly despicable. The cops are indistinct. The college girl is nothing but a shrieking victim. The entire movie is devoted to them arguing and fighting among themselves. What a bunch of bickering, obnoxious assholes that you definitely do not care about.

If this is one of those slasher movies were we aren't suppose to care about the characters and just enjoy watching them killed, “Wrong Turn 3” totally drops the ball in that regard too. Either as a money saving measure or an attempt to ride the coattails of the “Saw” series, there's very little direct slashing in this sequel. Instead, traps Three Finger has set up throughout the woods perform a lot of the butchery. What makes this even less appealing is the amount of hideously cheap CGI that is used to bring these gore gags to life. A dude has his face sliced off by a giant pendulum. Another is bisected by a swinging fence and a spear slams down a man's throat. But it all looks like shit. It's hard to enjoy the cheap thrills of gore effects when physical fake blood and latex is replaced with floppy, plastic-y CGI. This extends to the make-up for Three Finger and his accomplice, who look increasingly rubbery with each movie.

You can tell that writer Connor James Delaney – in his sole credit – had no further ideas for the film outside of the initial premise of “killer hillbillies versus escaped convicts.” The film piles on more and more desperate plot points, in an attempt to extend the movie to feature length. A big fat sheriff and his dog wander into the story before quickly exiting it. A discovered cache of money weaves in and out of the plot in a way that proves completely irrelevant. (This plot point returns for a post-credits scene I can't even pretend to understand.) A movie that's eighty percent wandering around the woods swerves to include a car chase and a fiery explosion at the very end. Three Finger has also taken up the hobby of torture, as he has a naked woman wrapped up in barbwire, because that's just what shitty horror was in 2009. 

By the way, none of the “Wrong Turn” movies have actually been filmed in West Virginia so far. The first two were shot in Canada, which was fairly obvious to a W.V. native like me. This one was made in Bulgaria, where a lot of garbage like this is filmed. While Canada doesn't look like West Virginia, Bulgaria definitely doesn't look like West Virginia. If “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End” was surprisingly good, “Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead” is exactly the kind of zero-effort-wasted, shitty piece of disposable product shoveled out onto DVD that better characterizes cheap, direct-to-video sequels. It exists to make the studio a little money, and keep a brand name of some sort alive, at almost zero expense for them. [4/10]

Goosebumps: Stay Out of the Basement

Even though I've found both “Goosebumps” episodes I've previously reviewed to be underwhelming, I still feel the need to revisit the series for nostalgia's sake. “Stay Out of the Basement” – a two-parter that was released on VHS as one forty minute presentation – is both a well regarded episode and one I remember. It concerns Margaret and Casey, the children of Dr. Brewer. Brewer is a botanist who is increasingly adsorbed in his work, spending more time in his basement laboratory. When their mother leaves home to visits her sick sister, Margaret is increasingly disturbed by her father's strange behavior. After defying his orders and sneaking into the basement, she discovers bizarre plant-like creatures down there. Soon, she begins to suspect that dad is more plant than man. 

To a child, there's not a situation much scarier than a formally loving parent suddenly becoming cold and abusive. From the opening minute, Margaret is already upset that her father no longer calls her “princess.” Throughout the episode, her dad becomes an authoritarian dickhead. He bars his children from entering his lab. He demands they stay in their rooms or commands them to eat a bizarre breakfast, of what looks like creamed spinach. She tries to tell her mom about her father's behavior but he appears in the room and snatches the phone away from her. This is a common childhood fear and a strong foundation for a horror story. 

“Goosebumps” is, of course, a kid's show. It can't really address the disturbing implications of a father mistreating his daughter. However, “Stay Out of the Basement” does, at least, attempt to be scary. This is probably because it was directed by Robert Fruet, a Canadian filmmaker who got his start making exploitation movies like “Baker County U.S.A.,” “Funeral Home,” and “Killer Party.” A sequence of Casey being strangled by a creeping vine creates the mildest form of suspense. So does a scene where Margaret hides under her father's bed, while he sits on top of it and worms fall on the floor. There's even a tiny bit of gross-out horror, when Margaret spies a kind of green chloroform bleeding from a wound on her dad's arm. Fruet also puts a green filter over the scenes in the basement, overgrown with vegetation, which at least creates a degree of atmosphere.

Still, even a decent episode of “Goosebumps” can't escape the kiddie show bullshit that was endemic to this program. Part of the dad's weird behavior includes leaves growing out of his scalp, a visual more comical than frightening. The way Margaret slingshots between believing the things her dad says or being scared by it strains disbelief. The episode's ending is underwhelming, with a “shoot us both, Spock!” dilemma climaxing in the least interesting way possible. We then get a heaping load of exposition, which gets goofier the way it goes on. And, naturally, “Goosebumps” has to throw in an underwhelming moral – parents, don't work too much – and a completely senseless twist ending. Still, this does rank among the better “Goosebumps” episodes I've seen so far, with less dumb shit and more attempts at serious horror. [6/10]

One of the Missing (1968)

A couple weeks back, I watched my way through all of Tony Scott's films. At the very beginning of his career, before he became the master of glossy visuals and big-budget action movies, Scott made a simple short film. “One of the Missing” is an adaptation of a story by Ambrose Bierce. An Union soldier during the American Civil War goes on a scouting mission. He comes across a group of Confederate soldiers around an alcove of rock. After firing at them, a rock slide ensues and buries the soldier under the rumble. He is stuck in place with his rifle, already primed for firing, pointed directly at his head. He grimly anticipates the inevitable moment his own gun goes off in his face.

Compared to the elaborate action sequences and sunlit imagery he would become famous for, Tony Scott's first movie is pretty low-key. The early scenes have little music, focusing on the natural sounds of the forest and the barely heard muttering of the soldiers. (Most of the sound was dubbed in post, I think.) The reason I'm talking about this short during the Halloween Blog-a-Thon is because it eventually bends towards psychological horror. As he's buried up to his neck, the Union soldier has hallucinations of enemy soldiers moving in slow-motion and speaking in garbled voices. The grimness of the situation is emphasized, the audience feeling as trapped the protagonist is. His attempts to prevent the gun going off come as desperate attempts to starve off his own death. The ending is suitably downbeat, leaving the viewer with a chilly feeling. Scott – who is credited as Anthony Scott – clearly showed a talent for suspense and visuals in his debut here, even if this is quite a bit grimmer than even his darkest features. Only a scrambled-up timeline, that makes this a little confusion for anyone who hasn't read Bierce since high school, keeps this from being more effective. [7/10]