A Stuffed, Legless Duck Production

The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality -- teenage violence and immorality.

It's tempting to call The Delinquents the work of a talented amateur, but when Robert Altman made it in 1957 he didn't display much of the talent that would be present later in his career -- and he was most definitely an amateur. Written, directed and produced by Altman in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, The Delinquents was one of many films about the tragic plight of misunderstood teenagers that followed in the wake of Rebel Without a Cause (it even features a sequence at an abandoned house, just like Rebel) and it would be utterly forgotten today if it weren't his first stab at a feature film. (Ironically enough, it was the last of his features that I had to see; I have to thank Turner Classic Movies for finally giving me a chance to do so.)

The Delinquents isn't even notable for giving Tom Laughlin (a full decade before he created the role of Billy Jack) his first starring role as nice guy Scotty White, who falls in with a bad crowd after his girlfriend's father breaks them up because he disapproves of them going steady. If you ever wondered who Laura Dern's model for her role in Blue Velvet was, I'd say it was probably Rosemary Howard as the totally whitebread Janice, especially during her crying scenes. And lead delinquent Peter Miller (as "Cholly") was pretty convincing, but after a while the tough guy voice grated on my nerves -- and this film is only 72 minutes! As for Altman, after trying his hand at a documentary (The James Dean Story, also ineptly done) he spent the next decade toiling in television, learning his craft and generally figuring out what the hell to do with a movie camera. At least he had the good sense to start out with a number by a swinging jazz combo. Too bad those darn delinquents have to show up and start the movie.

Long, long ago, when people still believed in witches...

Soon after director René Clair set up shop in Hollywood he made the delightful fantasy comedy I Married a Witch, which starred Fredric March as a candidate for governor of an unnamed New England state whose distant ancestor once burned a witch and her sorcerer father. Before she was condemned, though, she was able to curse his family to be unlucky in love. So it is that 270 years later March is due to be married to harridan Susan Hayward the day before his election, but the witch is magically reincarnated as Veronica Lake and she does everything in her power to make him fall in love with her instead. At first she does this just to wreck his life, but when she falls for him herself it's a completely different story. The film also features Robert Benchley, in fine form as a prominent doctor backing March, and Cecil Kellaway as Lake's incorrigible father, who's more interested in getting revenge against his old foe's descendant than seeing his own daughter happy. It's slight, but it's just the kind of escapist fare than audiences flocked to during wartime, and it established Clair as a director with a light touch in any language.

I don't believe in being caught. I don't believe anyone is watching.

Patricia Highsmith's third Tom Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, was actually the second to turned into a film (and then later on the fourth). Made in 1977 and retitled The American Friend, it was adapted and directed by German New Wave filmmaker Wim Wenders, who changed the locale to Hamburg and cast the unpredictable Dennis Hopper as Ripley (complete with a cowboy hat). The basic plot is still the same, though: Ripley is slighted in public by a picture framer (Bruno Ganz) who has a terminal disease, one of Ripley's underworld contacts (Gérard Blain) asks him to recommend someone who can carry out the murder of two mafia men who are muscling in on his business interests, and Ripley offers up the insolent picture framer as a sacrificial lamb. Of course, to get Ganz in the correct frame of mind to accept the job Ripley puts around the rumor that his condition is a lot worse than he thought, thus leaving him with nothing to lose and quite a bit of money to gain for his wife (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son. Ganz is hard-pressed to explain to his understandably suspicious wife where the money is coming from, though.

The theme of an innocent being seduced into murder is one that Highsmith returned to frequently in her writing and the novel Ripley's Game illustrates it quite persuasively. Wenders doesn't have the time to capture all of the nuance of the character's descent, but Ganz conveys so much with his eyes and the way he carries himself that voice-over would have been superfluous. Wenders also gives the character of Ripley a much different demeanor than what he has in the book. It's hard to tell how much of that was in his script or if it's something that Hopper brought to the part, but this Ripley is a lot less sure of himself and his reasons for doing certain things are harder to pin down. As if to make up for skipping over the second book, Ripley Under Ground, Wenders brings in legendary director Nicholas Ray to play the presumed-to-be-deceased painter Derwatt, whose works Ripley brings to auction as they're "discovered," and he has Samuel Fuller play an American mobster who comes after Ripley. (In the book, it's the Italian mafia, but Wenders made them Americans.) A most satisfying thriller.

Two and a half decades later, and in the wake of the success of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Italian director Liliana Cavani brought Ripley's Game back to the screen under its original title -- this time with John Malkovich in the role. Working with screenwriter Charles McKeown (best known for co-writing Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), Cavani makes Ripley much more self-assured, quicker to violence (a brutal opening scene demonstrates this) and extremely articulate. Malkovich sells all of these qualities marvelously, but he also plays up the character's wry sense of humor, which hadn't been seen in any of his previous incarnations. He's an actor clearly having fun with playing a genial sociopath and relishing every minute of it.

The able supporting cast includes Dougray Scott as the terminal picture framer who invites Ripley to a party and then makes the mistake of insulting him when he's in earshot, Ray Winstone as a thuggish Brit operating out of Berlin who has some Russian mobsters he'd like to see eliminated, Lena Headey as Scott's dubious wife, and Chiara Caselli as Ripley's wife (a character left out of The American Friend but reinstated here), who has no problem accepting his criminal past as long as it doesn't intrude on their present. Of the two films, the later one sticks closest to the novel, but both capture its spirit quite nicely. Sadly, despite excellent production values Ripley's Game never received a theatrical release in the United States, a fate that also befell the 2005 adaptation of Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper in the lead. Maybe someday that will come to DVD and I'll get to see it. One can always hope.

There is no situation you cannot turn to your advantage.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that my personal tastes and those of the people who determine what is "popular" culture had little overlap. This has become even more pronounced since my move to Indiana, which is why when, say, a new David Mamet film opens at the local multiplex, I jump on it without hesitation. Hence my presence at the five o'clock showing of Redbelt today, which was attended by three other people who kept getting up and wandering in and out of the theater. I don't know how much Mamet thought a film about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (a fundamentally reactive form of martial arts) was going to electrify audiences, but even if it doesn't it's really just the window dressing for yet another one of his expeditions into the world of con men.

Mamet has a great affinity for the long con, having employed them in films ranging from his directorial debut House of Games to Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner and Heist. Even more lighthearted fare like his comedies Things Change and State and Main involve one (or more) characters having the wool pulled over their eyes. In Mamet's world it's possible for just about anybody to be fooled as long as there are enough conspirators lined up against them. The subject of the con in Redbelt is martial arts instructor Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose Jiu-Jitsu academy is perpetually in financial trouble, much to the consternation of his wife Alice Braga, a clothing designer whose business has to pick up his slack. I won't go into too much detail because the joy of watching a Mamet film is in discovering along with the main character how they got in deep and who engineered it, but there does come a time where Ejiofor, who is too principled to fight in martial arts competitions, is coerced into doing so.

As always, Mamet employs a terrific supporting cast, with numerous actors who have been mainstays in his plays and films since day one. These include the great Ricky Jay as a fight promoter, Joe Mantegna as a movie producer, David Paymer as a loan shark, and Matt Malloy as a crooked lawyer, with Mamet first-timers Emily Mortimer as a more upright lawyer who comes to Ejiofor's aid when the chips are down and Tim Allen as an action movie star (who's actually quite credible in the role) whose wife is played by Rebecca Pidgeon (who also co-wrote and performed three songs for the film). If Allen's casting seems peculiar, there's something about appearing in a Mamet film that lends gravitas to just about any actor. Even Ed O'Neill, who had a more substantial role in Mamet's Spartan, shows up in a brief cameo. If nothing else, one can count on Mamet's films to be filled with familiar faces -- even if you can't always place the names.

You went pretty far. What kind of game is this?

The first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was René Clément's Purple Noon, which was made in 1960 and -- along with Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers -- made a star of Alain Delon. Unlike Anthony Minghella's 1999 remake, this film jumps right into the action with Tom Ripley already living it up with Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), the American playboy Ripley has been hired to bring back to San Francisco. Clément doesn't spend as much time on exploring Ripley's psychology as Highsmith or Minghella, preferring to watch without comment as Ripley drives a wedge between Greenleaf and his fiancée Marge (Marie Laforêt) and then, once she's out of the picture, assumes his identity. If Ripley has a talent for anything, it is for improvisation and knowing how to make a narrow escape, but the law still catches up with him in the end. The film world of 1960 wasn't ready to present a criminal that gets away with it.

I think you agree family loyalty cuts both ways.

Well, this is a relief... of sorts. I've had a perfect record of seeing Woody Allen's films in theaters since 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery (my first was Alice when I was 17, but I missed out on Shadows and Fog because I didn't have a car my freshman year of college and I skipped Husband and Wives because that came out during his notorious split with Mia Farrow and I wanted to be able to judge the film on its own merits), so I was chagrined when his latest opus, Cassandra's Dream, came and went this winter and completely bypassed Bloomington. Once again, though, the Ryder Film Series comes riding to my rescue -- and to the rescue of the 20 other people who joined me for the first local screening this evening. Too bad the film itself was fairly mediocre.

Cassandra's Dream is Allen's third film in a row (after Match Point and Scoop) to be shot in England and I believe it's time for him to come home to the States. It stars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as brothers with financial woes (McGregor is running the family restaurant for their ailing father, but he wants to get the money together to invest in some hotels; Farrell is a compulsive gambler in debt to loan sharks) who are asked to do an unusual favor for their uncle, a wealthy plastic surgeon played by Tom Wilkinson. Seems he's done some shady business deals in his time and would like his nephews to eliminate a potential whistle-blower. McGregor is quick to see it as an opportunity to get ahead in life, but Farrell is a lot more shaky about the whole thing.

Complicating matters are the brothers' love interests. McGregor is smitten with stage actress Hayley Atwell, who apparently thinks their relationship is more open than he thinks it is, leading to jealousy and recriminations. Not only that, but he's deceiving her about how much money he really has, which is another reason why he's willing to do his uncle's dirty work. Meanwhile, Farrell's relationship with the more down-to-earth Sally Hawkins reaches a plateau when they move into a flat together, which he frets about paying for when he loses big at a high-stakes poker game. He's also constantly popping pills and drinking, which the other characters frequently upbraid him for. Allen the writer used to be a lot more subtle about this sort of stuff. And there was definitely something off-kilter when laughter greeted Wilkinson's suggestion that a second murder may be required to cover up the first. Somehow I doubt that was the reaction Allen was going for.

I don't want to make the film out to be a total failure. It has a nice rhythm for the first half as Allen sets his characters in motion, and he makes good use of the Philip Glass score, the first dramatic score he's ever commissioned and the CD of which I picked up weeks ago. (Of course, until now I had to avoid looking at the back cover of lest I read the spoiler-ish track titles.) The main problem is the way he has his characters repeat themselves over and over, as if we didn't pick up on what they said in earlier scenes. Farrell fretting once or twice over the fact that there's "no going back" after they commit a murder is fine. Having him do it in scene after scene just gets tedious. The same goes for McGregor's mistrust of Atwell. Maybe what Allen needs is an editor who's willing to cut his films to the bone, because he's clearly unwilling to let go of anything himself. It also wouldn't kill him to shoot a second or third take of some scenes.

No man could tear a person apart the way the beast that butchered those people did.

The '90s were less kind to werewolves on film than the '80s (which, it must be said, also produced dreck like Silver Bullet and the Howling sequels, along with weak comedies like Full Moon High, Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too, My Mom's a Werewolf and, umm, Curse of the Queerwold). Case in point: 1996's Bad Moon, which came between such "classics" as Project: Metalbeast (which, I shit you not, is about a secret military plan to create armored werewolves) and An American Werewolf in Paris (a misbegotten sequel which I have no intention of wasting my time on). Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have wasted time on this, either, but it was sent by the same friend who provided me with my own copy of Wolfen (thank you, Migs), so I felt duty-bound to give Bad Moon a look. Plus, the thing's only 79 minutes long. How torturous can it be?

The answer is not very torturous at all. Bad Moon is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it's ridiculous enough to be laughable for long stretches of time -- even when the filmmakers are trying to play it straight. It was written for the screen and directed by Eric Red, who deserves an award for adapting a novel called Thor and not filling it with references to Norse mythology. Rather, Thor is an überprotective German shepherd owned by high-powered lawyer (is there any other kind?) Mariel Hemingway and lovable moppet Mason Gamble, who have moved to the Pacific Northwest to get away from the big, bad city. What they end up doing is moving next door to the big, bad wolf when Hemingway's brother Michael Paré returns from the jungle, where he was attacked by a werewolf, and takes up residence in their backyard. Thor knows what's what, though, and does what any dog would do to protect the family.

Werewolf films live and die by their transformation scenes. In the olden days, they were accomplished with the use of time-lapse photography (as in 1941's The Wolf Man) or simple cutaways (as in 1935's Werewolf of London, which is featured in this film). During the wolf's '80s resurgence the order of the day was in-camera make-up effects (which were pioneered in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London). By the '90s, however, the standard was CGI "morphing," which in the case of Bad Moon looks about as cheesy as you would expect. The werewolf itself isn't half bad and Paré's performance as its human side is reasonably credible, but one wishes the effects crew had skipped the part in-between.

P.S. - The '00s haven't exactly been the werewolf's decade, either. I should know, having been suckered into seeing Wes Craven's Cursed in theaters. (I should have known something was amiss was I found out it was rated PG-13.) With any luck, though, the remake of The Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot (now that's good casting) will turn things around for the misunderstood creatures.

In their eyes, you are the savage.

When people discuss the great werewolf movies of the early '80s, they tend to forget 1981's Wolfen and with good reason -- because it's not actually about werewolves (despite what the Mooninites think). Directed by Michael Wadleigh (whose previous film was, ahem, Woodstock), the film stars Albert Finney as a police detective called out of retirement to investigate a series of unusual slayings. One of the victims is a super-rich real estate developer with political connections out of the wazoo, so there's concern that terrorists may be responsible, but with the help of criminal psychologist Diane Venora, coroner Gregory Hines and zoologist Tom Noonan, Finney comes to believe that they're actually the work of wolves -- or wolf-like creatures. Eventually militant Indian and high steel worker Edward James Olmos explains to him about the Wolfen, but not before he strips down and freaks Finney out by pretending to "wolf out." Anybody going into this film expecting those kinds of effects will come away disappointed. However, fans of Steadicam shots -- which are used throughout when Wadleigh cuts to "Wolfen-cam" -- will find a lot to like here.

My family's always been in meat.

I recently acquired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion, a book that was published in 2004 to mark the film's 30th anniversary, so the time seemed ripe for me to revisit the film. (I am speaking, of course, of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original. I had the misfortune of getting a free pass to the abysmal remake when it was in theaters a few years back and have no intention of ever revisiting it.) Now, if there is any one film in the history of cinema that has had enough written about it in print and online, it is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so I will keep my write-up brief.

Chain Saw is the film that both launched Tobe Hooper's career and forever limited what he would be able to do with his considerable talents. It is a rite of passage for hardcore horror fans -- there is the time before you saw Chain Saw and the time after. It is a film that puts one of its characters in a wheelchair -- which would normally make them sympathetic -- and then makes him such a whiny, obnoxious chatterbox that you can't wait for a maniac to come along and slice him up. Most of all, it still manages to be shocking and unsettling even after all these years. Today's audiences may be jaded when it comes to gore and special effects, but what Chain Saw has working for it is an atmosphere steeped in dread and evil portents that never lets up. I've seen it several times on home video, but never in a darkened theater with an audience. That is one thing I definitely want to do at some point down the road.

A scream at the right time may save your life.

Vincent Price's second film for producer/director William Castle was 1959's The Tingler, in which Price plays a pathologist who seeks to discover the physical creature that causes fear in all vertebrates. Kind of a far-out notion for a '50s horror film, especially since Price experiments with injecting his test subjects (namely, himself) with LSD, but one gets the idea that Castle and screenwriter Robb White (who wrote all of Castle's films from this period) weren't too worried about realism. In fact, certain plot elements (like the fact that one of the characters runs a silent movie theater with his deaf-mute wife) are introduced just so Castle can cut to a black screen and have Price announce, "The Tingler is loose in this theater!" Naturally, the only way to neutralize the Tingler is to scream your head off -- something audiences in 1959 may have already been predisposed to do, regardless of how many seats Castle had rigged with buzzers.

The wild beasts know no mercy. They wait for us in the wood, in the shadows.

The Week of the Wolf continues with Neil Jordan's 1984 fantasy The Company of Wolves, based on the story by Angela Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay. More than just a retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" with an emphasis on the psycho-sexual subtext, it's also a tale about a young girl's awakening sexuality -- several tales, in fact. The film starts in modern day, where Sarah Patterson dreams about a pack of wolves attacking her hated sister, then we enter her dream, which takes place in a fairy tale world, but never fully. Jordan periodically cuts back to Patterson tossing and turning in bed to remind us that everything we're seeing is being generated by her subconscious. (In a way, it would make an excellent double feature with Labyrinth.)

The cast includes Angela Lansbury as her granny, who tells her stories full of warnings about men whose eyebrows meet and wolves that are hairy on the inside, David Warner as her father, who's at a loss with his daughter in both the real and the dream world, Brian Glover as the father of the neighbor boy who takes a liking to Patterson (who, of course, has no time for him), Graham Crowden as the kindly old priest, Kathryn Pogson as the young bride in one of Lansbury's tales, who marries traveling man Stephen Rea, who "answers the call of nature" one night and doesn't come back, an uncredited Jim Carter as the man Pogson marries in his stead, and an uncredited Terence Stamp as the Devil, who appears in a flashy car to tempt a young man in the forest. If that last part doesn't seem to make sense, remember it's in a story being told by a girl in her own dream. With all the different levels of fantasy and reality, things are bound to get a little mixed up.

The police report said they were attacked by an escaped lunatic. Must have been a very powerful man.

I've long maintained that The Howling and An American Werewolf in London -- which was released just four months after it in August 1981 -- were tied for best werewolf film of all time, but having just watched them back to back I now have to say the latter definitely has the edge over the former. It's not just that Rick Baker's makeup/transformation effects are better -- that comes from having a larger budget -- but the human story is that much more involving thanks to the central performances by David Naughton (as the American student on a backpacking trip through Europe who gets bitten by a werewolf on the moors of Northern England and then runs amok in London four weeks later) and Jenny Agutter (as the nurse who loves him fangs, fur and all). Shoot, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I actually had tears well up as the film was drawing to a close because I knew there was no happy ending forthcoming for them.

The film was written and directed by John Landis, who had harbored it as a dream project from his early days in the film business. In fact, he wrote the initial draft of the script in 1969 when he was on location in Yugoslavia working as a production assistant on Kelly's Heroes. The twin successes of Animal House and The Blues Brothers a decade later gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, so this is what he chose to make -- the first modern comedy/horror hybrid. There had been previous films that alternated between scenes of mirth and fright (the Abbott and Costello Meet _______ series chief among them), but American Werewolf was the first with some real teeth. Sure, there are laugh lines aplenty, but this is a film where the laughs really stick in your throat. And it also has some incredibly well-crafted scenes of suspense (the chase through the London Underground is a particular standout).

The able supporting cast includes Griffin Dunne as Naughton's best friend, who doesn't survive the initial attack and returns as a progressively rotting corpse to warn him about his curse, John Woodvine as the skeptical London doctor who looks into his wild stories, Lila Kaye as the barmaid at the Slaughtered Lamb, the pub where Naughton and Dunne seek shelter on the night of the full moon, Brian Glover as the Northerner intent on keeping their werewolf problem a secret (with Rik Mayall as the chess player he handily beats in the opening scene) and Frank Oz as tactless embassy official who's present when Naughton first comes around. And there's an amusing parallel with The Howling since that film starts with an encounter with a werewolf in a porno store and this film ends with a werewolf passing his last few hours in a porno theater before transforming one final time. The only real misstep is the pandemonium in Piccadilly Circus that follows. (You'd think The Blues Brothers's plentiful pileups would have satiated Landis's car crash fever, but alas, no.) It's only a minor distraction, though. The best werewolf film of all time retains its crown.

We should never try to deny the beast, the animal within us.

I'm a sucker for a good werewolf flick and the early '80s produced a number of great ones in a short period of time. The first one out of the gate was Joe Dante's The Howling, which benefited from Rob Bottin's innovative makeup/transformation effects, an intelligent script co-written by John Sayles (who has nifty cameo as a morgue attendant), and a pitch-perfect score by Pino Donaggio. Dante loves his in-jokes, so the cast of characters is littered with the names of directors of classic werewolf movies, and he gives screen time to great character actors like Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens and Dick Miller (once again playing Walter Paisley, his character from A Bucket of Blood) and cameos by Roger Corman (as a man lurking outside a phone booth so he can check for change) and Forrest J. Ackerman (who gets to flash copies of his Famous Monsters of Filmland fanzine).

The star of the film, however, is Dee Wallace, who plays a television reporter who is used as bait by the Los Angeles police to catch a notorious killer who goes by the name of Eddie (played by Robert Picardo, in his first of many roles for Dante). When she's traumatized by the experience, she and her husband (Christopher Stone, Wallace's husband in real life) accept the invitation of new age-y psychiatrist Patrick Macnee to stay at The Colony, which turns out to be a haven for werewolves attempting to live in peaceful coexistence with mankind. Of course, the more feral members of the community, led by the enigmatic Elisabeth Brooks, couldn't care less about coexisting with humans, they just want to feed on them -- and maybe turn a few of them while they're at it. The film even makes the prospect seem reasonably attractive. (If I had a choice between being turned into werewolf or a vampire, I know which one I'd pick.)

28 days... six hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds... That is when the world will end.

When a film has built up a sizable cult following over a short period of time, how is one supposed to approach it? Is it possible to write about it objectively or does one have to tread carefully lest they say the wrong thing? And what the hell was up with the guy in the bunny suit? These are some of the questions that ran through my mind as I watched Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko for the first time tonight. It's not a horror movie, per se, but it does take place in October, so it fits in perfectly with my Halloween in April. And it's a good follow-up to Prophecies of Nostradamus since it also deals with the end of the world, albeit in a more roundabout way.

Released in the fall of 2001, but set in 1988, Donnie Darko stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the title character, an emotionally detached high school honor student who's in therapy and on medication, but that doesn't prevent him from hearing strange voices in the night and doing their bidding. He's also in the habit of sleeping outdoors, which comes in handy one night when a jet engine falls out of sky and lands in his bedroom. It's when he starts listening to Frank, his new imaginary friend in the bunny suit, that things really get strange.

The film boasts an incredible supporting cast, with Maggie Gyllenhaal as Donnie's Harvard-bound sister, Mary McDonnell as his mother (who's first seen reading Stephen King's It), Patrick Swayze as a slick motivational speaker (is there any other kind?) with a series of tapes about Controlling Fear and a book called Attitudinal Beliefs, Jena Malone as the new girl at school who agrees to go with Donnie, Seth Rogen as one the class dicks, Noah Wyle as the science teacher who awakens in Donnie as interest in time travel, Drew Barrymore as the English teacher trying to reach her students any way she can, and Katharine Ross as the therapist who finds out more than she ever expected when she tries out hypnotherapy on Donnie.

Kelly establishes the time period with his soundtrack choices ("The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen, "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears, "Notorious" by Duran Duran, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, "Under the Milky Way" by the Church) and cultural references (voting Dukakis, Married... With Children, The Smurfs, Back to the Future, Rubik's Cube, The Evil Dead on an improbable double bill with The Last Temptation of Christ, Star Search and, of course, someone going as Hulk Hogan to a costume party). I caught all that. What escapes me is why the film developed such a fervent cult. It's got an intriguing premise, I'll give it that, but maybe I need to let it worm its way into my subconscious before I buy into it completely.

Stop pretending to be humanitarian. Have the courage to really come to terms with this crisis.

This afternoon Halloween in April leaves Italy and boards an SST flight to Japan to take in Toho's Prophecies of Nostradamus, a heavy-handed environmentalist parable based on, well, the prophecies of Nostradamus. Made in 1974 and fairly swiftly banned in Japan and other countries -- despite breaking box office records -- it hasn't been seen in its 114-minute form since its original release. What Jeff was able to provide me with was the 85-minute international version, which is dubbed into English and subtitled in Danish. That means a huge chunk of the film is missing and what's left over plays like a '70s disaster film version of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (which brings to mind the 1981 Nostradamus documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, which was narrated by Orson Welles). Of course, neither of those films features an electronic score by composer/synthesizer player Isao Tomita, so advantage Prophecies.

Also seen on American television under the title The Last Days of Planet Earth, the film was directed by Toshio Masuda and features Tetsuro Tamba as a scientist whose belief in Nostradamus makes him something of an alarmist, Toshio Kurosawa as a photographer who can't stop taking pictures while society breaks down around him, and Kaoru Yumi as his pregnant lover (and Tamba's daughter). Tamba's views are looked down upon by the government, but it becomes harder to dismiss him when many of his dire predictions come to pass. The film starts out with word of an impending food crisis and a scene of children in surgical masks thanks to air pollution (decades before SARS), and continues with birds and animals dying by the thousands and the discovery of monster slugs, deformed babies (with a cameo by Takashi Shimura as a cold-hearted pediatrician), fast-growing weeds in the subway, and mutant children with exceptional abilities (and short lifespans). Soon enough the planet is faced with overpopulation, droughts, deluges, exploding jet airplanes, instant ozone depletion, fires, violent storms, flooding and outbreaks of hippies.

In the middle of all this, Tamba heads up a team of U.N. researchers in New Guinea studying the effects of a radioactive cloud over the island. They're actually the second expedition sent there -- one of their objectives is to find out what happened to the first (shades of Sir George Head's expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro, as well as Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters). Along the way they encounter carnivorous plants, giant bats, killer leeches and hostile cannibals (is there any other kind?). Meanwhile, back in Japan rationing is imposed, leading to food riots (this is fiction, remember, not World News Tonight) and a mass exodus from Tokyo, which spectacularly goes up in flames after one car overturns while trying to get through the bumper-to-bumper traffic. (I've heard of chain reactions, but this is ridiculous.)

Out of desperation, the youth of the nation begin committing ritual suicide by taking boats out to sea while dressed as a cross between kabuki actors and the cast of Godspell or by riding motorcycles over cliffs and plunging to their doom. In the end, Tamba's predictions expand to include volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, racial divisions and war which goes nuclear in 1999, leaving the surface of the planet uninhabitable, save for the "monsters" (i.e. atomic mutations) who are left to "stalk the earth." Not a pretty picture and it's what got the film in the most hot water. Maybe someday it will be seen in its uncut version again, but I'm not holding my breath.

We made a deal, sure. Nobody said anything about murder.

Dario Argento concluded his unofficial "animal trilogy" with 1971's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, a bizarre and not entirely successful mix of suspense and horror about a rock drummer (Michael Brandon) who is tricked into stabbing a stranger while a ventriloquist's dummy takes photographs -- and that's just in the first ten minutes. Soon Brandon is being blackmailed by a mysterious individual, which leads him to assault his mailman, blow off his band mates and alienate his wife (Mimsy Farmer). Afraid to go to police for fear of implicating himself, he seeks the advice of guru Bud Spencer, who puts him in touch with downmarket private dick Jean-Pierre Marielle (playing one of the two distasteful gay stereotypes in the film, the other being one of the contacts he makes during his investigation). Eventually his wife splits and Brandon wastes no time hopping into bed with her cousin, which is precisely what I would do in the same situation.

There are a lot of things about this film that don't make a whole lot of sense and it meanders around when it should be ratcheting up the tension. (The private detective's investigation, for example, doesn't seem to go anywhere and quite literally comes to a dead end.) What starts out as a promising variation on giallo conventions gets sandbagged by interminable scenes of "suspense" with insufficient payoffs. By the time Argento starts getting creative with the deaths, all the viewer wants him to do is reveal who the killer is already and be done with it. One gets the feeling Argento was anxious to move on to other things at this point, too, but after a failed stab at comedy (the virtually unseen Five Days in Milan), he returned to the genre with 1975's stylish Deep Red -- his first film scored by prog group Goblin. Together they would become an almost unbeatable combination.

You haven't changed, I see. You always loved violence.

Had my own personal Argento vs. Bava ~~Night~~ Afternoon, watching Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body and Dario Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails back to back. The former was a bootleg videotape of poor quality bearing the film's American title What, the latter a pristine Blue Underground DVD which restored 22 minutes of footage cut out of American prints. Both are relatively minor works in their respective director's careers, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that they were shot in English, but I figured I'd mention it.

Made in 1963, The Whip and the Body stars Christopher Lee as the disinherited son of a nobleman who returns to the family estate, where he finds he is less than welcome. He wants to have his entitlements restored to him, but his father has bestowed them on new favorite son Tony Kendall, even going so far as letting him marry Lee's former lover, Daliah Lavi, with whom he had a sadomasochistic relationship (his whip, her body). Lee's return stirs up her old feelings, proving that she may have married Kendall, but she's always belonged to Lee, body and soul.

As befits a Bava film of the period, The Whip and the Body is absolutely gorgeous to look at and includes some striking imagery (like the funeral that is attended by four red robed and hooded pallbearers -- not sure where they came from or what purpose they served, but they sure were cool to look at). The atmosphere of dread that Bava evokes is powerful and there are some surreal touches, too, like the muddy footprints that are tracked all over the castle. At first only Lavi sees them, but eventually the others do, too. Of course, why somebody entombed in a crypt would track mud everywhere is a puzzle the film never bothers to address.

Speaking of puzzles, Karl Malden is crazy about them in The Cat O' Nine Tails, which was released in 1971. Malden plays a former journalist who retired after he was blinded in an accident. One night he hears a crime being committed near where he lives and teams up with reporter James Franciscus to get to the bottom of it. This film is more indebted to Hitchcock than Bava, although I doubt even Hitchcock would have conceived of somebody killing off people who know they're genetically disposed to violence (thanks to an extra Y chromosome, according to Argento's script). This is also the second film in a row where Argento includes a distasteful gay stereotype. (In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it was a solicitous gallery owner. In this film, one of the suspects is a homosexual who patronizes "St. Peter's Club.") I wonder what I have to look forward to tomorrow night in Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

What's happening to me? This damned thing is turning into an obsession.

Back in the day, South Jersey's Exhumed Films occasionally had an "Argento vs. Bava Night," which is how I got to see Dario Argento's Deep Red b/w Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill and Argento's Inferno b/w Bava's Black Sabbath. Accordingly, it only seems right for me to follow Bava's Blood and Black Lace with Argento's first giallo -- and his directorial debut -- 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. As in the earlier film, the killer in Crystal Plumage is decked out in a black hat and gloves, only this one wears a shiny black raincoat. And Argento goes to greater lengths to fetishize the killer's gloves and glinting knife collection, frequently to the strains of Ennio Morricone's creepy score.

The plot is set in motion when American writer Tony Musante, who is in Italy to get over a bout of writer's block, witnesses an attempted murder in an art gallery and, much to his girlfriend Suzy Kendall's consternation, becomes obsessed with trying to solve it. This suits police inspector Enrico Maria Salerno just fine because, like most inspectors in giallo films, he's bad at his job and quite content to let a civilian chase down all the crazy leads (like the visit Mustante makes to an eccentric painter, which would be echoed later on in Deep Red). He also lets Musante take enormous risks, putting himself (and eventually his girlfriend) in danger. Never let it be said that the police in a giallo film have your best interests at heart.

Perhaps it's the female beauty that makes him kill.

I realize it's entirely possible for someone to watch horror films all year round, but for some reason I tend to confine my viewing of them to the month of October, with some spillover into early November. Actually, the reason for this is not too mysterious; I'm simply in more of the horror mood around Halloween. Apart from the occasional anomalies like the Bob Clark films I watched over the winter, the notion simply doesn't occur to me. And with rare exceptions like Romero's Diary of the Dead or Zombie's Halloween, I just don't see them in the theaters. What's a horror fan like me to do? The answer is Halloween in April.

You've heard of Christmas in July. Well, Halloween in April works on the same principle, only without the dressing up (I don't care how much the car dealership is paying you, it's submoronic to wear a Santa suit in the height in the summer) or the candy (sure, it might be possible to get remaindered Easter candy for a steal right now, but pastels and blood red don't quite go together). To kick it off, I have gone with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, the film that touched off the Italian "giallo" subgenre and established many of its trademarks. It's also one that I've been meaning to catch up with for years and that's no exaggeration.

Made in 1964, Blood and Black Lace is about a series of murders revolving around the fashion house run by countess Eva Bartok and her lover Cameron Mitchell. Seems a mysterious assailant dressed in a black trench coat, hat and gloves, and wearing a featureless mask, has started killing off their models, and police inspector Thomas Reiner is so clueless that the bodies continue to pile up even after he's detained all of his suspects. This is the sort of film that is more concerned with creating atmosphere and building up to shocks than having a logical plot or characters. For example, when one of the women finds a corpse stuffed into the trunk of her car, does she immediately phone the police? No, she drags the dead body into her house and stupidly hides it, even though she had nothing to do with the murder. Of course, this sort of thing doesn't seem to bother most giallo fans. Give us a few startling images and a well-staged murder set-piece or two and we're happy as clams (or, as the Italians call them, molluschi).

By August the 22nd, two of these people would be dead, and one of them a murderer.

Right before the outbreak of World War II, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder collaborated on the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Immediately after the war they produced the medical thriller Green for Danger, which Gilliat directed and co-wrote. Set during the summer of 1944, when Britain is being bombarded by "buzz bombs," the plot is set in motion when a patient dies while being given anesthesia. Naturally suspicion immediately falls on anesthesiologist Trevor Howard, but it's not as clear cut as that, especially after a second victim is added to the roster, which brings Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard (played by the inimitable Alastair Sim) to the scene.

Sim's self-satisfied manner rankles Howard, but he's not the only one perturbed by it. During the course of his investigation Sim finds reasons to suspect everybody who was present at the operation, including surgeon Leo Genn, who didn't even get the chance to operate (although he's quite the smooth operator with the ladies), and nurses Sally Gray (who broke off her engagement to Howard just the night before) and Rosamund John (whose mother recently died in an air raid). Like Sim, Gilliat keeps us guessing right up until the very end who the actual murderer is -- as well as their reasons for doing it. Clearly he learned something from working with Hitchcock.