Election Day and Halloween HorrorFest Bonanza on Monday Morning Diary (November 2)

by Sam Juliano

     The time of reckoning has finally arrived.  With eight months of the most stressful existence so many of us have been forced to endure we have reached the time when our opinion can be heard.  Tomorrow (Tuesday, November 3rd) is perhaps the most monumental presidential election in our lives and it comes up after the most acrimonious and divisive lead-up imaginable.  My sentiments have been expressed repeatedly and I can only hope and pray that polls and general vibes based on months of study and investigation will result in a victory for the Biden-Harris ticket.  For some of us the matter has kept us obsessed 24-7 and no matter what the outcome the closure will be a relief, though another surprise will be sure to have us exceedingly depressed for quite some time in the future (an understatement).  Most of us had uneventful Halloweens, with the surging COVID numbers keeping children and parents away.  Last year we had over 150 trick or treaters, but this year only one single child came to our door!  Jamie Uhler’s winding down HorrorFest 2020 is his greatest ever in terms of stupendous writing quality, eclectic selections and volume.  This week we have quite a diverse lineup and we are expecting some others for next week as well from him.  What a ride from our Chicago horror scholar!  Stay safe!

Frankenstein Conquers the World (I. Honda… 1965) monster/sci-fi horror

When a Nazi experiment is rushed out of the country just before it falls to Allied forces in 1945 to Japan, who is still very much in the fight, we know we’re in for quite a wild tale. Japan is looking for a last ditch effort, which a beating heart in a locked box, promises. It’s been given everlasting life from a protein solution discovered by a German mad scientist, that Japan hopes, if harnessed, the solution can create soldiers who don’t die in battle, eventually turning the tide of war. But, in a few months the city is A-bombed and the war ends before it can be brought to fruition. The heart experiment goes missing, and eventually turns up (I think, it’s not totally clear) in a young homeless teen 15 years later who moves and acts very much like a rabid dog. Eventually it’s clear that the teen, growing exponentially under lab observing, is a Frankenstein. He escapes, and hides in the countryside, eventually running into a dinosaur like monster that has been unearthed from the deep recesses of the earth when an earthquake opens up a large rift in the planets crust.

The end where Frankenstein, now several stories tall, wrestles the burrowing lizard beast amidst a raging forest fire that the lizard’s throat vapors has created is positively apocalyptic visually, the beauty of a closely controlled studio shoot. Purple and orange lighting accentuate the aura to beautiful, delirious heights. It’s only slightly hampered when another fight is tacked on when an octopus monster appears that Frankenstein also has to deal with. But, no biggie, it makes me think that the sequel, War of the Gargantuas (which I’ve seen, but largely forget) from a year later will be screened imminently. I can’t wait.

The Black Tower (J. Smith… 1987) art horror/short, 23 mins

A short, arty piece of Modernist Horror where simple video set ups of an English working class city are overlaid with matter-of-fact narration on the ever increasing presence of a moving, black building in the distance. It has no dimensions outside its towering black totality, eventually unnerving the narrator who had otherwise never noticed it before. Is he doing mad? It’s a very dry, but also very effective work, the idea that anyone, with enough creativity can make a great piece of Horror on a nothing budget.

Poltergeist (T. Hooper… 1982) supernatural thriller

The prime time Halloween watch was a revisit of Hooper’s much ballyhooed work of extreme hysterics and special effects. I’m not sure why I chose it, perhaps because I hadn’t seen it since I was a pre-teen probably, and barely could judge its quality now (which I always more or less slagged off). I might have been a tad harsh, but I don’t think totally off base, I liked some of what’s here, but I can’t deny that, like most projects Spielberg was involved in—certainly during this era—the effects take over the story, and characterizations and subtext are rendered moot, or largely in the background. It’s a shame as you can imagine a film where the predatory nature of suburban housing companies that gobble up land for development without much care for its past (in this case that it was hallowed ground) being quite interesting. Plus, it was made for everyone, kiddies included, so the scary bits only go as far as a MPAA would allow. Needs some brutality, as one sequence where a large ghost like skeleton shrieks in the face of father Craig T. Nelson is genuinely scary. Still, it’s pretty entertaining, and was just what the doctored ordered on Halloween night.

Velvet Vampire (S. Rothman… 1971) vampire

This is something of a lost gem, Stephanie Rothman’s feminist reading of vampire lore which I’d imagine would make a great companion with The Blood-Splattered Bride from the following year both in terms of quality and thematic concerns. Here, the vampire is the usual lothario like creature, but he’s instead a she, using her womanly wiles to prey on a couple she’s invited to her secluded desert abode. It brings vampires into the swinging, hippy 70’s counter-culture, and while sure, Hammer did that too (most readily in something like Dracula AD, 1972) this, given its independent spirit, seems more appropriately trippy and progressively original. A slight gem, essential for Horror fans, especially ones in love with the genre’s output from the 1970’s.

Deadly Sweet (T. Brass… 1967) giallo

Apparently before he made both soft- and hard-core highly stylish erotic works on huge budgets, Tinto Brass was an aspiring art director in the New Wave mold; wanting to make crime romps like the French had at the start of the decade. Deadly Sweet then, given these concerns and mix of titillating sex, is a giallo technically, making it worthy of inclusion here. Otherwise the Horror is pretty slight, but this isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it—rather, I did quite a bit. It was supposedly storyboarded by a comic book artist and you can tell, this is Pop Art pomp full of split screens and mayhem, Brass taking nothing serious but Bernard’s (Jean-Louis Trintignant doing his best Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless impression) ever increasing romantic overtures to the beautiful Jane (60’s icon Ewa Aulin) who is connected to a murder that she must hide out from with Bernard’s help. This one isn’t often uttered amongst the more interesting giallos (probably a statement more on its scant availability) but, I’d argue, if you’re a fan of the genre and hoping to explore all its facets, this would be essential.

Lone Wolf (J. Callas… 1988) monster/slasher

This was a totally random watch late, mostly due to insomnia. A small interconnected group of college students (that operate in clinks more aligned with high-schoolers which I spent most of the film thinking that’s what they were, only to realize they look more like they’re approaching 30) are slowly picked off one by one when the full moon is out by a werewolf like beast. Several of the students are also members of an aspiring rock band who has, based on their brimming brilliance, secured a nightly residency at the campus’ most popular bar. It’s all quite cheesy and poorly staged as you can imagine—the band, for example, you keep seeing people say how great they are, but the performances show a cock rock band with terrible songs, so you just sorta laugh. The subplot of the police investigation over the murders partially led by Det. Commitski (lol) also prompts ironic chuckles. With the right group this is a good ‘bad’ beer-and-pizza work of stupid 80’s trash. Should I really be spending my days at 39 doing this stuff? Meh, I don’t know.

Electric Dragon 80.000 V (G. Ishii… 2001) Japanese art horror

Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri (M. Akita… 1990) gore/short 34 mins.

It’s not hard, when prompted, to detail what Horror looks like, so saturated are our minds with foggy moors, dimly lit, cobweb filled stone corridors, or black cats and blood-dripping fangs. All these and more are Horror to the eye, providing chills and scares when seen. But I’d imagine it’s a lot harder to think about what Horror sounds like, especially beyond an instantaneous creaky door or blood curdled scream. Those are initial spasms of sounds, not sustained aural atmosphere. So what exactly does Horror sound like for us film fans? I can initially say Herrmann’s famous strings alongside a kitchen knife shower stabbing sequence in Psycho, that when given a larger canvas becomes something of audio dread, an unsettling unnerving sensation on the eardrums. Or perhaps you think about the titular tribal scream in The Shout, Skolimowski’s 1978 masterwork, where a bellowing is passed down to doomed souls that can now let out a sound that can kill anything in its wavelength.

I bring this up due to the duo I did last night, a pair of noisy Japanese genre works that use feedback sensations and musical experimentation to overwhelm the viewer, creating, to me, a perfectly acceptable definition if one needed to describe a soundtrack to Horror. The first, Electric Dragon 80.000 V contains sound in its very plot construction, where the story of Morrison, who as a child receives hellish electro-shock treatment to curb his schoolyard aggressive behavior. But, over time his body learns to absorb the electrical current like a sponge, in time becoming like a superhero who can emit electricity whenever his rage grows. The film makes parallels to Godzilla’s creation via nuclear test blasts to Morrison’s electric mutation, soon seeing visuals to lizards and iguanas, him being simply Electric Dragon 80.000 volts of the films title. Armed with his guitar and his amps to 11, the Lizard King (here’s why he’s named Morrison after the Doors frontman, a metaphor the film spells out further by cloaking him in black leather throughout) belches out feedback noise in a black and white kinetically edited work recalling the cyberpunk films Tetsuo and Rubber’s Lover. We learn of Thunderbolt Buddha, a TV repairman who also has electric conductive powers, and the film ends with the two doing battle atop the slummier rooftops of Tokyo, further completing the Godzilla connections. As you can imagine, the film is overlaid with noisy punk rock for much of its runtime, but sadly, it’s not the total aural assault you’d imagine (and, for my tastes, wish) it to be. More to that is Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri, Masami Akita’s ritualistic, sexually charged gore film were we watch a single, isolated woman disrobe and run a sword slowly across her gut, spilling her entrails out to which she rolls around in before eventually dying. A man enters, seeing the seppuku aftermath and promptly blows his brains out with a revolver. Over the dialogue free films is a discordant, fuzzed tone soundtrack from director Masami Akita, better known in the music world as perhaps the most prolific noise artist ever, Merzbow. It’s an intense work, for 34 minutes we watch his camera slowly probe and gaze over the main character’s death, a sexualizing of death that you’re not going to shake anytime soon.

Taken together, I’m interested in the deficiencies of both film’s plots, and while Akita’s is clearly intentionally so, I wonder if both, in the use of highly esoteric, grating music know their punches must be swift and concise otherwise the average viewer (though, lets be honest, the norm cinemagoer isn’t seeking this fare out anytime soon) will drift quickly with patience. Or, probably more apt, in the world of more experimental cinema, shorter runtimes often allude to smaller productions. Either way, they were an interesting shakeup for the season, what more can you ask for on an otherwise humdrum chilly, Tuesday night?

Knife + Heart (Y. Gonzalez… 2018) giallo

Hearing a lot of buzz around Knife + Heart from several younger critics I follow online piqued my interest in Gonzalez’s giallo-homage thriller. The tale of Vanessa Paradis’ Anne, a semi-successful producer and director of gay pornography in late ’70’s Paris, her tight-knit troupe production crew and stable of actors is rocked when a leather masked killer begins picking them off one by one. After the films first reel concludes I was grew dubious of some of the critical takes—we’re two highly erotically charged kills in with a pair of primary color drenched nightclub sequences to match and little else. Groaning, I thought this is another on the pile of the dozens of giallo and slasher riffs we’ve gotten over the last 15 years or so, kinky voids full of stylish murders and little else (here its nearly offensive homo-eroticism). But, a picnic in the country is had to ease everyone’s unrest, and our bleach-blonde Paradis’ in a sky blue mohair cardigan is positively ethereal, and the sequence, though adding another kill, begins offering the barest of emotional subtexts, we’re still in style treatments, but its amazing when it’s a human instead of a strobe lit one. Playing with giallo convention, we’re fed an easily understood red herring, but the trick seems to actually be a treat; it could actually be the murderer after all.

In the end it’s a real solid homage, drifting my mind into a prolonged trance of thinking about what the height of the giallo years would have looked and moved like had it been a French, rather than Italian, genre. Perhaps, in the end, it makes my long overdue need to do a lot more of Claude Chabrol’s filmography It also makes me think I do need a Cruising revisit, a film I more or less was happily committed to never seeing again.