Black Sabbath (Mario Bava Collection)

Anchor Bay Entertainment recently released their Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1, containing five films by the Italian maestro: Black Sunday; Black Sabbath; Kill Baby, Kill; The Girl who Knew too Much; and Knives of the Avenger. As I slowly make my way through the attactively-packaged box set, I'll post a review of the individual films, only one of which I've seen (the gothic horror classic Black Sunday).

Mario Bava was an Italian director who used his training as a painter to great effect in the beautiful colours and striking visual compositions of his films. Bava began his film career as a cinematographer, building a reputation as an optical effects expert, and took his first directorial steps by replacing director Riccardo Freda on I Vampiri in 1956 after the filmaker left the project. His first complete film as director, Black Sunday (1960), was a wildly influential gothic shocker that launched the career of 'scream queen' Barbara Steele and unleashed a wave of European horror films that lasted through the 1970s. He worked in several genres, including historical epic, western, science-fiction, and giallo (pulpy psycho-thrillers), but it is his horror films that are most fondly remembered by film fans. He made striking use of lighting, set design, rich primary colours, and visual composition in a directorial style that has heavily influenced subsequent filmakers like Scorcese, Fellini, and Tarantino, and has delighted generations of film buffs. Bava died in 1980, leaving behind a vivacious legacy of pure cinema.

And so on to the first Bava Collection review: Black Sabbath (1963).

Black Sabbath is an anthology of three short horror stories, introduced by Boris Karloff. The Telephone takes place solely in the apartment of Rosy (Michèle Mercier), who is being terrorized by phone calls from an anonymous woman who promises to kill her (and also, in daring--for the time--hints of homosexuality, makes admiring comments about her body). The story is a simple and fairly transparent Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, but is beautifully shot. Bava moves the camera effectively, shooting on one set and using foregrounds and backgrounds to create a sense of depth and texture and claustrophobia. Though it features an obvious twist, The Telephone is a textbook example of how to build and layer suspense through extremely limited means.

The Wurdalak spins the gothic horror story of the patriarch of a family (Boris Karloff) that returns with the curse of vampirism. This story features some evocative set design and pellucid lighting that Bava uses to emphasize character and mood, and some effective shock-editing. In Bava's hands, the stark European landscapes become dark fairy-tale domains bathed in rich primary colour.


The final tale, The Drop of Water, is the most famous and chilling of the three. A nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) steals a jewelled ring from the finger of a dead psychic, and pays the price when the psychic's ghost returns to claim it. Bava's astonishing use of lighting and colour is most prominent here, with different primary-coloured light focused on different planes in a shot, giving a profound sense of depth that lends itself to uneasiness as we wonder what could possibly be lurking there. The disturbing makeup on the corpse and the ghost, and the use of the sound of dripping water on the soundtrack contributes to the chilling effect of this segment, resulting in one of the most satisfying tales of the supernatural ever committed to film.

The picture quality on the DVD is stunning, beautifully conveying the bright, phantasmogoric colour in rich detail. Black Sabbath is a must-have for all serious film buffs.

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Directed by Mario Bava

Written by:
Mario Bava
Alberto Bevilacqua
Ivan Chekhov (story, The Drop of Water)
Marcello Fondato
F.G. Snyder (story, The Telephone)
Aleksei Tolstoy (novelette, Sem'ya vurdalaka)

Starring:
Michèle Mercier...Rosy (segment The Telephone)
Lidia Alfonsi...Mary (segment The Telephone)
Boris Karloff...Gorca (segment The Wurdalak)
Mark Damon...Vladimire d'Urfe (segment The Wurdalak)
Susy Andersen...Sdenka (segment The Wurdalak)
Jacqueline Pierreux...Helen Chester (segment The Drop of Water)
Milly Monti...The Maid (segment The Drop of Water)
Harriet Medin...Neighbor (segment The Drop of Water)

GRINDHOUSE

Grindhouse is Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grungy hymn to the cheap dingy theatres that showed endless double and triple features of wild exploitation movies in the ‘70s. A specious enterprise, indeed, but it’s like a theme park ride, a complete recreation that comes with fake trailers, “Our Feature Presentation” in cheesy swirls of psychedelic colour, animated film clips gleefully announcing the “Restricted” rating of each film, and even a scratchy ad for a tex-mex restaurant within ‘walking distance of the theatre.’

Now if only theatre owners would paste fake vomit on the theatre floor, rip up seats, and hire actors to portray down-and-out theatre patrons to hurl abuse at the screen and their neighbours, and we’d really be in business.

The core of the Grindhouse experience is, of course, two feature-length films, albeit both featuring a ‘missing reel’ (strategically placed in movie moments that get a big laugh--one getting the director out of a plot corner, the other cruelly depriving us of some sleaziness). Bottom line: Rodriguez’ Planet Terror is wildly fun but overly self-referential and parodying, while Tarantino’s Death Proof is a genuine movie and a worthy follow-up to Kill Bill.


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Planet Terror involves the release into the atmosphere of an evil bioweapon gas that turns people into gooey, blistered zombies intent, George Romero-style, on devouring any hapless victims in their path. El Wray (Freddy Rodríguez) is the mysterious gunman, ripped from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, who emerges as the reluctant saviour of a hodge podge of uninfected humans. His former lover Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) has her leg torn off by zombies, and Wray helpfully provides an assault rifle as an artificial limb, which leads to much enjoyable silliness as Cherry jumps and spins around while blowing apart biozoms with her handy appendage.

All the key beats of ’70s and ’80s sci-fi/horror are here, resulting in a stew of sleaze, gooey violence, weird characters, handheld POV camera, Rio Bravo-like last stands, and escapes from hordes of pustuled creatures, all underscored to a music track that mashes up electric guitar and Carpenteresque synths. The film even morphs briefly to one of those cheesy postapocalyptic nomad films that were shoved into existence post-Mad Max.

Even with its smug, winking tone of self-parody, Planet Terror is more fun than it has any right to be, thanks mainly to its sheer kinetic energy. The film is digitally scratched up to approximate the look and feel of a cheap exploitation film, but features some digital effects that are clearly beyond anything such films could afford, resulting in a strange hybrid of re-enactment and the fevered hopes of viewers that these films could possibly, maybe, live up to the promise of their trailers and posters. With its tongue firmly in its post-modern cheek, Planet Terror is hugely entertaining, but would not stand on its own outside of the Grindhouse theme ride.


Tarantino’s Death Proof, on the other hand, is a genuinely good film that happens to use the grindhouse style to tell its story. Subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. In Death Proof, Tarantino mixes up the car chase and female revenge genres with his unique dialogue-driven sensibility. The film follows two groups of women and their encounters with psycho ex-stunt driver Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, reminding us he has serious acting chops) and his ‘death proof’ movie stunt car, which he uses as a weapon to slaughter pretty young women that take his fancy. So, in a way, I guess the slasher genre is represented here also.

The second group of women, headed by Zoe Bell (playing herself, a stuntwoman who doubled for Uma Therman in Kill Bill), eventually get the upper hand in a final car chase sequence that forgoes any digital effects work and delivers some great, old-school gritty stunt work. It’s not really an action picture, though, it’s a Tarantino picture through and through. More than any of his films since Pulp Fiction, there are reams and reams of fascinating dialogue delivered by fleshed-out characters, something that will likely turn off a sizeable chunk of the audience that may be attracted to this whole double-feature in the first place.

However, if you’re hip to this kind of stuff, and can shift like Tarantino between cinematic smarts and pulp exploitation, Death Proof is heady stuff.


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Planet Terror

Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Starring:
Freddy Rodríguez...Wray
Rose McGowan...Cherry
Michael Biehn...Sheriff Hague
Naveen Andrews...Abby
Josh Brolin...Dr. William Block
Marley Shelton...Dr. Dakota Block

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Death Proof

Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring:
Kurt Russell...Stuntman Mike
Zoe Bell...Herself
Rosario Dawson...Abernathy
Tracie Thoms...Kim
Sydney Tamiia Poitier...Jungle Julia
Jordan Ladd...Shanna

Slither: '80s horror's greatest hits

James Gunn's Slither is a great mash-up of gory '80s horror and '50s alien creature flick. Grant (Michael Rooker), after being spurned by his hot wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks), makes out in the woods with Brenda (Brenda James). Earlier, a meteorite hit the ground in these same woods--blissfully ignored by local Sherrif Bill Pardy (Firefly's Nathan Fillion) as he tries to snooze in his cruiser and avoid inane conversation from his partner. In a riff on the 1950s The Blob, the meteorite contains an alien organism that fires a slimy something into Grant's chest, and after that he is, well, not himself--he eats raw meat, padlocks the basement door (informing Starla it is a 'surprise' for her birthday), develops acute skin problems, and slowly transforms into a slithering, tentacled Lovecraftian monstrosity.

The real fun starts when thousands of alien slugs get loose. These wormy things try to leap into people's mouths (and other places, courstesy of a homage to Cronenberg's Shivers) and turn their victims into mindless zombies, which cuts director Gunn loose to unleash hordes of B-horror references to Romero films and comic-splatter classics like Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator.

Though it's obviously a pastiche of '80s cult classics like From Beyond, The Fly, The Hidden, Evil Dead and more, Slither works on its own as an engaging horror-comedy. Harkening back to a time when the makeup effects guys were stars, the prosthetics are appropriately elaborate and slimy, enhanced by the occasional CGI. Cult actor Rooker manages to give a real performance buried under layers of makeup and goo, and there's an attempt to populate the film with memorable characters.

The film is never genuinely scary, but it is fast and witty, with several laugh out loud lines. One of the Sherrif's posse, for instance, on a stakeout for the mutated Grant, spots the slithery creature and comments that it looks like "something that fell off my dick after the war."

Slither is a great little B-movie, best watched with a few beers.

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Written and Directed by James Gunn

Starring:

Nathan Fillion..Bill Pardy
Elizabeth Banks...Starla Grant
Gregg Henry...Jack MacReady
Michael Rooker...Grant Grant
Tania Saulnier...Kylie Strutemyer
Don Thompson...Wally