January 2010 - Horrorphile

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Horrorphile - January 2010

Peeping Tom

January 28th 2010 03:12

Released the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell, was also a movie years ahead of its time, a psychological thriller that operates with the dark machinations and severity of a horror. Powell had garnered enormous critical acclaim for numerous films he made with Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s, but he went alone on Peeping Tom, and it proved to be the kiss of death, effectively ending his career in England. He made several other features before his death in 1990, but none came close to capturing the disturbing slow-burn subversive power of Peeping Tom.

Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a strange, lonely, sexually-repressed man working as a focus-puller for a British film studio. He moonlights shooting “cheesecake” pics in his mezzanine apartment for the seedy newsagent on street level below, whilst harbouring his own directorial desires; a documentary on the expression of extreme human fear. It is this unhealthy obsession with the elusiveness of mortality and his intent on capturing it on film that has lead Lewis to become a murderer.

Anna Massey as Helen

Maxine Audley as Helen's mother

His twisted state of mind, kept in check (just) by the mundane routine of his day job, and the amorous curiosity of his apartment building neighbour, Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her suspicious blind mother (Maxine Audley), dates back to the psychological testing of his scientist father when Lewis was just a boy serving as his father’s subject for cold-blooded experiments in terror. Of course, now as a grown man, Lewis is a chip off the old block … but he’s fallen much further. Lewis is a determined documenteur, recording women’s contorted features and dying gasps on his portable 16mm camera after he stabs them with the blade concealed in his tripod. But like all obsessions, it will eventually consume him.

Mark sets up a shot of Dora (Brenda Bruce)

Shot in startlingly vivid technicolour and partially on soundstages Peeping Tom is garish and sumptuous in equal measures. A brilliant and utterly creepy performance from German actor Boehm (real name Karlheinz Böhm), who bore a striking similarity to a young Udo Kier (albeit Aryan blond). Anna Massey was excellent also; a rather mature 21-year-old I might add. Rounding off the solid support cast were Jack Watson as Chief Inspector Gregg, Moira Shearer as dancing model Vivian, and Shirley Anne Field, as the frustratingly inept movie starlet Diane Ashley.

Mark gets to the point with Vivian (Moira Shearer)

24 frames a second of fear

Compared to modern horror movies Peeping Tom is very tame in terms of what is shown, however the tone and suggestion of violence is just as powerful. Although not specifically sympathetic to the character of Mark Lewis, the movie does indulge him in his angst, his psychological turmoil, his insanity, suggesting he might have been capable of salvation (but in the reality of the movie he was too far gone). It was both clever and dangerous for Powell to have challenged his audience at the end of the puritanical, yet rebellious 50s. It had a double-edged sword: shooting over most people's heads, but also cutting a deep wound in the society's moral psyche.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

Mark shows Helen his father's home movies

The movie was heavily cut by the BBFC censors before being released, and consequently some scenes still have a jagged feel to them. The murders of Vivian Moira Shearer) and Dora (Brenda Bruce), the two models, were toned down, shots of nudity were deleted (including photos of nude girls in Lewis’s album), and the killer's suicide was shortened, as were the scenes featuring the lethal spike. Although some of these cuts were restored in later video and DVD releases much of the edited footage is now considered lost forever. Even with the censors’ cuts, the moral ambiguity and reviled darkness inherent in the movie left the public outraged and the critics incensed. Powell had unwittingly sabotaged his own career, and left it in ruins (imagine if Spielberg decided to make a movie about pedophilia or bestiality …)

Life flashing before one's eyes

Yet ironically, Peeping Tom has aged extraordinarily well, even with those prim and prissy English accents of the time. Playing on the theme of scoptophilia (the morbid fear of being stared at) is just as fascinating now, and will perhaps become more so as society’s ever-increasing desire for access-all-areas, the allure of online voyeurism, and the burgeoning Big Brother reality of surveillance breaks down more and more our sacred walls of privacy. The blurring between reality and fiction, the merging of sensuality and the grotesque, has always been ripe for the cinematic plucking, Powell dipped his feet in the waters, was compelled by the lurid sensation to delve deeper, began to wade in further, only to be taken by the crocodiles.

Here's the hysterical original trailer:

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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BLOWING MY OWN TRAFFIC HORN

January 27th 2010 05:51

It’s always curious to see where your readers are clicking around your blog. So here are a few Orble stats for the record. The Hit Count is the raw page views (although I’m not entirely sure what “raw page views” actually are), the Individual Readers are the number of individual readers as measured by the number of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, basically an indication as to how many people are actually reading my blog. The Link Readers are those that arrived at my blog after clicking on a link, or who clicked on a hyperlink within my blog.

Apparently if a reader types in a web address, uses their favourites list, or clicks on a link in an email (like most subscribers do) they won't register as a click (link) reader. Therefore the true number of real people who are reading your blog is somewhere between the number of click (link) readers and the number of individual readers and is usually closer to the latter.

I received the following traffic statistics today, which is from the proceeding 24 hours’ traffic. To give you an idea of Horrorphile – Pleasure of Nightmares’s popularity, the average Orble blog received a hit count of 17 and the individual readers clocked in at 6, so I guess I’m not looking too shabby with yesterday's 5229 Individual Readers and a Hit Count of nearly 11,000.

The most frequently visited movie reviews were for Cannibal Holocaust (205 individual readers), the documentary The Meth Epidemic (90 readers), the remake of Lolita (61 readers), Coppola’s Dracula (55 readers), and The Exorcist (54 readers). Doesn't sound like many, but when you include all the other clicked on posts and categories it adds up.

Cannibal Holocaust and The Meth Epidemic have been popular for awhile now (predictably Paranormal Activity was very popular for awhile too, but has recently dropped off). As far as comments go my Debate Battle! Vampires vs. Werewolves still receives comments almost daily, more than two years after I first posted it. The posts that featured the tattooed Zombie Boy and a teaser for Lucy Lui getting her gear off as a vampire in Rise have been floating frequently in the top twenty, as are the individual posts I did for those amusing name generators (werewolf, demon, and vampire).

My Orble traffic stats for Tuesday February 26th revealed that Horrorphile was not only the top blog in Film, but the top blog amongst Individual Readers, and I was the number one Orble Writer too, so of course, I couldn’t resist blowing my own horn. Admittedly I've had a higher Hit Count before, and more Individual Readers, but yesterday for the first time I was #1 across the board! Woo hoo!

Thanks to all my True Believers! Now I just need to get all my subscribers, and anyone else, to vote for their favourite vampire movie! If you’re cyber-shy and don’t want to register, you can vote anonymously, however you still have to use the comment section to do so.

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Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction)

January 25th 2010 00:26

Reazione a Catena (1971), or A Bay of Blood and Twitch of the Death Nerve, as it is most popularly known, was Mario Bava’s most controversial movie. It is also his most influential, and is considered by horrorphiles as the blueprint to the modern slasher flick. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) was the first American movie to copy the stylistic of an unseen killer, using their POV as a visual motif, and featuring mischievous adolescents in peril who die in gruesome fashion. Then John Carpenter pared it back and made a box office killing with Halloween (1978) and the stalk’n’slash sub-genre was well and truly established.

Bava wanted another opportunity to work with actor Laura Betti, and the two of them cooked up a story concept (an elderly heiress is killed for control of her fortunes and thus relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field) which they named Odore di Carne (The Stench of Flesh). Later as the movie went into production it had working titles that translated as Thus Do We Learn to be Evil, and That Will Teach Them to be Bad. Finally the title of Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction) was settled on for its premiere at the 1971 Avoriaz film festival. Bava’s old pal Christopher Lee was in the audience and was apparently so disgusted with the graphic violence that he left the screening in protest. The movie went on to win the festival award for Best Makeup and Special Effects (to the legendary Carlo Rambaldi).

In American the following year the movie was released as Carnage, sporting the alluring tagline The 2nd Film Rated V for Violence (the first being Mark of the Devil from '69), and in newspaper ads announcing that “Carnage is the real thing – the first movie that dares to show Hard Core Violence” (and a bold snatch of full-frontal nudity too!). The MPAA, however, threatened legal action against the US distributor alleging that the advertisements intruded on their exclusive right to rate motion pictures. The movie was subsequently pulled from release only to re-appear later under a new title (and campaign) as Twitch of the Death Nerve. It apparently holds the record for having had more alternate titles than any other movie, including Blood Bath, Ecology of a Crime, The Antecedent, and most bizarrely, The Last House on the Left – Part II (even though Wes Craven’s original movie had come out a year later!)

The movie was shot on a low-budget; so cheaply, in fact, that Bava doubled as his own cinematographer (strikingly), utilised a child’s toy wagon as his camera dolly, and faked an elaborate forest setting by having crew members hold up tree branches and leafy twigs strategically in frame to create the illusion (which is surprisingly convincing!). Despite the low production values Bava still manages to achieve a lush atmosphere, and Rambaldi’s murder set-pieces are excellent - two of which were blatantly ripped-off, almost shot-for-shot, in Friday the 13th – Part 2 (1981) – especially the sickle-machete to the face.

Twitch of the Death Nerve Roberto Bonanni

The editing and camerawork are solid (allowing the indulgent use of crash zooms), but the storytelling has a strange kind of aloofness, which permeates the characters. This is a stylistic exercise: thirteen characters and thirteen murders. It is a deliberate shocker with a very high body count designed to shake the audience of its time out of their comfort zone by presenting a series of graphic murders that are linked by fate and seemingly orchestrated by a higher darker nature. Is it the bay itself that is acting as a kind of judge, jury and executioner; dealing out extreme measures to those that threaten to compromise its existence and surroundings …?

One shouldn’t read too much into Bava’s blackly comic joyride of the macabre and grotesque. He was having fun at the audience’s expense – and many of the critics too; who cried foul, claiming the master of the Gothic horror had abandoned any decorum and good taste only to produce a careless disaster. Twitch of the Death Nerve isn’t an especially great movie (while Black Christmas is a better slasher, it was Dario Argento who took Bava’s stylistic baton and ran long and hard with it), but it is an important one, and it has some good scenes and great moments; the slimy octopus sliding over a water-logged corpse is one in particular.

For anyone at all interested in the history of the slasher flick Twitch of the Death Nerve is essential viewing.

Laura Betti as Ann Fossati

Here's the brilliant and surreal original Italian trailer:

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VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE VAMPIRE MOVIE - Poll closed

January 21st 2010 22:31

With Twilight angst still hanging in the air, and Daybreakers science fiction breathing at the door I thought I’d put a poll together to find out just what are my True Believers’ favourite vampire movies. But let’s face it, there are at least 170 movies featuring Bram Stoker’s character Count Dracula, let alone the number of movies featuring simply vampires and those that like to drink the blood of others.

I’ve put together a list of sixty-one titles, with an option of “other” for any title(s) I’ve not included that any reader wishes to vote for (there may be two or three I suppose). Vote three points for your top favourite movie, then two points for the next favourite, and one point for your third favourite. Type your selection with the points in brackets beside it ie Let the Right One In (3), 30 Days of Night (2), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1

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Cronos

January 20th 2010 23:40

Guillermo Del Toro’s feature debut, Cronos (1993), is a peculiar and arresting diversion on the vampire mythology with a stunning lead performance, fantastic production design, and a deliciously macabre sense of irony; up there in the pantheon of great vampire movies.

In 1536 an alchemist builds an extraordinary mechanism that encapsulates a truly exotic scarab, an insect capable of providing its user (parasite) with eternal life, as long as they continue to abide by its demanding usage. The Cronos Device, as its known, survives its maker until 1997 where it ends up in the antique store of aging Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi). Later, Jesus with his granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath) as witness discovers the device’s gift of youthful vigor and is immediately addicted. Meanwhile a wealthy, greedy, but dying tycoon, Mr. De La Guardia (Claudio Brook), knows of the Cronos Device’s existence and he sends his disgruntled nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) out to fetch it, at any cost, before the blood congeals

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Daybreakers

January 20th 2010 03:47

We’ve been waiting some time for this movie. I seem to remember first hearing about production on this at least two years ago. I believe it was in post-production hell for quite a while, and it hasn’t done the movie any favours. Daybreakers (2010) tries way too hard and is ultimately mutton dressed as lamb.

Australian directors Michael and Peter Spiereg first came to attention with a low-budget zombie comedy called Undead (2003) which impressed some critics and minority audiences. It featured some inventive visual effects, but was too silly and pretentious for my tastes. The brothers background in visual effects carried over into their next feature when Undead, and their pitch for a science fiction-vampire tale, impressed Hollywood executives. But it took seven years to get the movie made

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BLOODY DISGUSTING'S TOP 20 FILMS OF THE DECADE

January 19th 2010 05:00

Blood Disgusting, probably the most popular horror movie site in the world, has posted their top twenty movies of the past decade as compiled by their freelance writers and in-house staff. It’s not a surprising list in the slightest, in fact it’s about as safe as houses. I even predicted the top three as I moved into the top ten (which were being revealed in groups of five from bottom to top).

I’ve seen them all except for Session 9, which has yet to be released on DVD down under. Takashi Miike’s masterpiece Audition would’ve featured very highly in my own selection had it not been released in 1999. It’s included in the Bloody Disgusting list because it wasn’t released in the US until 2000. I really enjoyed May, but it didn’t quite make my selection. I also really enjoyed the Hollywood remake of Ringu, The Ring, and agree with their comments, but I still think the Japanese original commands a wholly unique nightmarish atmosphere that Hollywood cannot replicate

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Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film

January 19th 2010 00:24

The first major documentary tracing the history of an American institution: the stalk’n’slash flick. Going to Pieces (2006) is based on the book of the same name by Adam Rockoff, published 2002, and has been adapted for the screen by J. Albert Bell, Rachel Belofsky, Michael Derek Bohusz, and Rudy Scalese.

I haven’t read Rockoff’s book, but I intend to purchase it for my own literary archives. It’s curious to note he penned an original screenplay, Wicked Lake (2008) - which was re-worked by another screenwriter – about a bunch of young lesbian witches on a weekender of carnage, which I’m still waiting to be released on DVD under down under (so I can indulge in what looks to be some seriously deep trash), but I digress

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The American Nightmare

January 18th 2010 04:00

“I think there is something about the "American Dream", the sort of Disney-esque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can; that sort of expectation, and the flipside of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter. I think that gives American horror films in some ways a kind of an additional rage …”

The American Nightmare (2000) is a concise, unpretentious and enlightening celebration and examination of several seminal American-produced horror movies and their respective directors (with the exception of David Cronenberg who is Canadian, and special effects make-up guru Tom Savini) from the late 60s to the late 70s directed by Adam Simon

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HORRORPHILE'S 50 NIGHTMARES OF THE DECADE: 2000 - 2009

January 14th 2010 06:32

Despite having worked as a film critic for more than fifteen years I’ve never compiled a decade’s best of list. I was resident film critic for Sydney street press magazine Revolver (now The Brag) for several years and bridged the new millennium, but I never got to publish my best of selection for the 90s, however I did get to make a list of important films of the century, so there you go.

My criteria for selection for Horrorphile - Pleasure of Nightmares’ best of the decade was pretty straight forward: the movies that have burnt their imagery onto my retina, atmospheres and textures which have permeated my skin, the nightmare tone and elements lingering in my mind long after the movie had finished

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LET ME IN - teaser posters

January 12th 2010 21:58

With a scheduled release date of October this year in the States, director Matt Reeves’ re-envisioning of the masterful Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In (2007) has already had four distinct teaser posters released. The American version is called Let Me In (probably because the literal English translation of the original title, Låt Den Rätte Komma In, is too obscure for the average American moviegoer; Let the Right One In. Which one is that? Sounds like a non sequitur of sorts.)

Of course the real reason the remake has been made is because executive producers smelled a potential cash cow after the Swedish version received enormous critical acclaim and did great international box office ... and Joe Average American doesn't like having to read subtitles

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Thirst

January 11th 2010 00:41

A vampire movie with lots of baggage, the South-Korean Thirst (2009), directed by Park Chan-wook (who made the masterful Oldboy), is a difficult kettle of putrid fish, and not a wholly successful stew. The darkly humourous tone sits uncomfortably with its crooked faith whilst straddling the classic vampire mythology it becomes a farce, and frequently falls flat on its face.

Thirst slapped me in the face with disappointment. Having waited all year to see it, my expectations were admittedly very high, especially considering how powerful and potent his mutant revenge flick Oldboy is. He’d raised the bar so high it was going to be very hard to top it. I haven’t yet seen the other two movies in his “revenge” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Kind-Hearted Ms. Geum-ja AKA Lady Vengeance), but plan to

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March 2010

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February 2010

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January 2010