Freddy Krueger Has Risen from the Grave

I'm taking some time at the moment to rewatch some of the horror films of my misspent teens and twenties. First and foremost: the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I've seen and adored the 1984 original a good number of times over the years, but I haven't watched the sequels since boarding school, back in 2003-4, on DVD with a friend. (I remember being thrilled by cherry coke and microwave popcorn, which didn't exist in my parents' sensible household.) We gave up after The Dream Child, if memory serves at all right, which from what I've read seems both sensible (in the light of Freddy's Dead) and regrettable (I missed out on Wes Craven's New Nightmare). The point is, it's been a while.

Back in the day I enjoyed A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), but the reviews I've read since haven't been kind. And yet the film really holds up. Freddy's Revenge has problems, sure; a lot of them if you're exacting, but none to my mind film-breaking. And at the same time it's really bold and experimental and subversive (within the limits of the extremely rigid slasher genre, you understand). That's partly by accident - slasher aficionados have given the genre far more thought than the people who made most of these films ever did - but it's real nonetheless.

We open on a school bus in Springwood, Ohio, where an awkward-looking teenage boy, Jesse (Mark Patton) sits alone, while groups of cool kids giggle among themselves. But what seems like a normal ride to school turns to terror when the bus driver, a burnt-looking man with a knife-glove, drives the bus off the road and into the desert (!?), where shenanigans ensue - until Jesse wakes up, soaked in sweat and screaming, in his bed.

It turns out that awful nightmares have been a regular feature of Jesse's life since his family moved to 1428 Elm Street, the house where Nancy Thompson lived in the first film. Jesse has trouble fitting in at school, spending time only with his girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers). The nightmares grow worse: Jesse finds himself walking into the boiler room in the basement and keeps running into the fedora-clad bus driver from his nightmares, one Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Freddy explains that he wants Jesse to 'kill for him' so that he can take over his body and return to the real world. Before long the bodies start to pile up, each followed by Jesse waking up with Freddy's glove on his hand...

The plot isn't just not a rehash of the original, it inverts it: where in A Nightmare on Elm Street Nancy was trying to pull Freddy into the real world to defeat him, in Freddy's Revenge it's Freddy himself who's trying to punch through the looking glass, while the heroes are trying to keep him down. What I like best, though (SPOILERS), is that the role of protagonist shifts from Jesse to Lisa at the end of the second act. As Jesse becomes ever more stressed and sleep-deprived, he's increasingly incapable of dealing with the situation; eventually, Freddy takes over his body entirely, so that Jesse, inasmuch as he exists any more, is now the antagonist. Lisa takes over as Final Girl and resolves the plot, so that the happy ending is her freeing him from captivity. The standard slasher structure is definitely there, but twisted for a more interesting take.

Here's what makes this messier, alas: Freddy's Revenge doesn't follow the franchise rulebook for what Freddy can and can't do. While he's still yelling about how he wants to return to the real world, he's already doing things in the real world that he shouldn't be able to. Specifically, a lot of stupid poltergeist crap that's more baffling than scary, like setting the family toaster on fire ('It wasn't even plugged in!' dunh dunh dunh) or the film's abiding moment of shame: Freddy possessing the family parakeet. Oh noes, the bird is swooping down on the family in tremendously goofy POV angles, giving Jesse's dad a minor cut on the cheek! Shock horror, Jesse's dad broke the lamp trying to hit the bird! Followed by the pièce de résistance: the bird bursts into flames and blows up, showering the family with feathers, like it swallowed a stick of dynamite in a forties cartoon.

But then again, A Nightmare on Elm Street didn't do it by the book either: Freddy levitates Tina off the bed, in one of that film's best scenes, in a way he absolutely shouldn't be able to do according to what we think of as the franchise rules. The ending, of course, is famously obscure and totally blurs the line between dream and real world: you tell me who's alive and who's dead at the end of the first film, since I can't (Freddy's Revenge clears that up in a bit of exposition), whether Glen and Nancy's mum were in fact dragged off bodily to the underworld or not and so on. Really, Freddy's Revenge is breaking rules that didn't exist yet when it was made, so I'm happy to give it a pass.

Then there's the issue of what, if you didn't know the meaning of words, you might call the film's 'homoerotic subtext'. Jesse is gay. It's just barely possible to read the film in other ways, since no-one ever says so in so many words; but really everything that's right there in the finished product insists on it. A small part of this is only due to Patton's performance (his palpable discomfort at Lisa's attempts at seduction, for instance), but pace writer David Chaskin, Jesse's visit to a fetish club or Coach Schneider's naked shower death are all in the writing and pretty hard to misinterpret. What's more, this can't be separated from the plot. Jesse's uncertainty about his own identity and inability to open up to his girlfriend create the insecurity that makes him a perfect victim for Freddy. 'The gay issue' isn't extraneous, it's central to the plot.

The dream sequences are much better than I remembered, though not a patch on Dream Warriors; the performances are fine, i.e. not Heather Langenkamp, but not Friday the 13th Expendable Meat either. Freddy is still a skulking shadow-dweller, but he does talk more this time around, since he has to explain the plot. He's definitely not yet the killer clown he'd later become, though. Witness this exchange towards the end of the film:

TERRIFIED PARTYGOER: Just tell us what you want, all right? I'm here to help you. FREDDY: Help yourself, fucker! *kills him*

Not exactly a zinger, is it?

Dream Warriors would bring back Heather Langenkamp and take the franchise in a totally different, initially delightful direction. That means Freddy's Revenge is a dead end, a road not taken. Does it have flaws? Yes, definitely. But it's still very much worth it: besides being a decent way to spend an hour and a half, it's one of the strangest slashers of the eighties.

All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood

There's probably no better testament to the iconic status of Thunder Road (1958) than the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. Not because 'Thunder Road' and Thunder Road have anything to do with each other: one's a proto-carsploitation thriller about moonshiners, the other a lament of lost youth tied to 'one last chance to make it real'. What matters is that Springsteen saw the poster to Thunder Road when the film was making the rounds on the drive-in and grindhouse scene, and was so inspired that he wrote a signature song without even watching the whole thing.

The other bit of trivia I'll pretend to know about before watching Thunder Road: Robert Mitchum wanted Elvis Presley to play the role of his character's younger brother. 'Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch,' Ian Johnston drily notes of their meeting. Nothing came of it, since Elvis's notorious manager demanded a sum of money that would have exceeded the film's entire budget. And thus did the world come to enjoy the spectacle of Mitchum's son pretending to be his brother.

World War II veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) has returned to the East Tennessee holler where he grew up. There, he is the best driver in the dangerous business of evading the FBI while running moonshine from the mountains to Memphis. A gangster from the city, Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon), attempts to muscle in and bring the moonshiners, including Luke's father (Trevor Bardette), under his thumb. After he refuses to be swayed by Kogan's offers, Luke is in increasing danger, while also trying to keep his mechanic younger brother Robin (James Mitchum) from joining in his life of crime.

Mitchum's assured movie star performance helps sell all this, and the film works hard to make him the epitome of cool. It works, in a very fifties way: Mitchum strikes matches on the soles of his boots, wears leather jackets, and humiliates his enemies by repeatedly crushing their hats. There are not one but two women madly in love with him, femme fatale singer Francie Wymore (Keely Smith) and wholesome girl next door Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight). But since dialogue bluntly establishes Roxanna is all of eighteen years old, her unrequited longing also points to a central problem: Mitchum was plainly about a decade too old for the role, and casting his son as Luke's fool brother makes it worse.

On the plus side, though, Thunder Road is jolly entertaining. The story of working-class underdogs facing down a wealthy bully is hardly original, although the fact that all parties involved are criminals gives it an edge. The younger Mitchum's performance is no great shakes, and that causes undeniable problems in the film's last act; but his father's swagger holds it all together. What really makes the film click, though, is the action. Largely eschewing the rear projection that still dominated driving scenes in the fifties, Thunder Road has some outstanding car chase scenes that prefigure the carsploitation mania of the seventies, complete with terrific stunt driving and excellent fluid camera work from director Arthur Ripley.

It's a perfectly good low-key crime thriller, and it's no wonder it became a staple of grindhouses in later decades. Its outsized legacy elevates Thunder Road to a status it doesn't necessarily earn. Without this film, it's hard to imagine about half the oeuvre of the Drive-By Truckers, or the current deluge of country-rock bands with 'whiskey' or 'still' in their name. Mitchum's obsession with the project may not have paid off financially or critically, at least not in the short run. But it proved, in case that needed proving, the enduring appeal of cool.

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

And there was no longer any sea

Watching Fast & Furious 6 with friends a couple of nights ago inspired me to write up an earlier Paul Walker film that offers similarly base pleasures. Really, all Into the Blue (2005) ever seeks to accomplish is in that damnable poster: people in skimpy swimwear, with maybe a plot in there somewhere if you're the kind of snob who likes that sort of thing. By that extremely modest standard I suppose Into the Blue succeeds, inasmuch as it stars Jessica Alba and Paul Walker, both of whom are attractive and don't wear a lot of clothes. Congratulations.

But Into the Blue was hardly conceived as an experimental documentary on people displaying skin within the constraints of the PG-13 rating, a Koyaanisqatsi of late capitalist standards of beauty. That's where not-very-prolific screenwriter Matt Johnson came in, churning out a script in a couple of hours while doing something else (or so I assume). Considering Into the Blue was a sizeable flop (it made $18.8 million domestically on a budget of $50 million), that didn't really pay off.

This blog has something of a tradition of outlining a film's plot, and I'll stick with that even when the story is a wispy, ethereal thing. Anyway: we're in the Bahamas, where Jared (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba) go scuba-diving with Jared's visiting friend Bryce (Scott Caan), a lawyer with a heart of gold buried beneath many, many levels of jerkishness, and Bryce's girlfriend Amanda (Ashley Scott). As luck would have it, during the very same trip they discover both the Zephyr, a treasure-laden ship that's been at the bottom of the sea since 1861, and a plane chock full of cocaine.

That causes something of a dilemma: if our heroes report the massive amount of drugs, the DEA (who apparently have jurisdiction in the Bahamas, if Into the Blue's grasp of police work is any better than its understanding of history) will discover the wreck too, thus depriving Walker & Co. of their stab at treasure. Lacking the funds to mount a proper operation, however, they have to make do with bringing the wreck up piece by piece - despite Bryce's idea of making money by selling some of the cocaine. Meanwhile, they're starting to arouse the suspicions of Reyes (James Frain), the drug lord who owns the plane, as well as Bates (Josh Brolin), an unscrupulous treasure hunter.

Built on the astonishing contrivance of a shipwreck and an aeroplane full of drugs being found in the exact same spot, Into the Blue mostly refuses to embrace the utter ridiculousness of its concept and sort of just shuffles along, occasionally throwing a half-hearted twist at the wall in the hope that something will stick, and then ends. The script is curiously uninterested in itself, alternately being obvious and not explaining what's going on. (One character's loyalties change without any explanation whatsoever, unless I fell asleep at an inopportune moment.) The intellectual laziness of conflating centuries of Caribbean history, of course, is something of a given in this genre.

Both leads are, I suppose, better known for their looks than their acting ability, but even so Alba is distinctly better than the totally blank Walker, and more than once her despair is palpable. 'I believe in you more than in the prospect of any treasure,' the script makes her say; she tries mightily to sell that line and does not go gentle into that good night. Opposite her Walker frowns slightly, trying to remember what human emotions are and which of them he's supposed to be mimicking. So much for the leads, but there is real joy to be found in the supporting cast. Caan's smarmy frenemy is pretty good, but the standout is Brolin, then stuck in his wilderness years and committing fully to a gloriously unhinged performance that threatens to elevate Into the Blue to the level of genuine entertainment more than once.

What's worst is that the film looks terrible: its underwater world is an entirely flat sandy seabed, and cinematographer Shane Hurlbut and director John Stockwell conspire to shoot it like a modest documentary. For all its $50 million budget, the diving scenes look about as good as if they'd just dunked the actors' heads into a paddling pool. (Perhaps all the cocaine is genuine - it would explain where the money went.) In terms of the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship that's the real glory of many a B-movie, Into the Blue is a massive disappointment. Even Jessica Alba at the peak of her pin-up days can't restore any joy to a film that looks and feels like a direct-to-video sequel that somehow found its way into cinemas.

My castle is in the hills above the village

After Dracula made boatloads of cash in 1958, a sequel was a foregone conclusion. Initially, it was to be strictly formula. Both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were approached to reprise their roles, but Lee declined, and the screenwriting team (Jimmy Sangster of Dracula, helped out by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy and producer Anthony Hinds) had to cobble together a new script. The result, released in 1960, is a thoroughly good Gothic horror film, but boy, do the seams ever show.

Some of that, of course, is just a marketing ploy: naming a film The Brides of Dracula (with the poster advertising 'the most evil, blood-lusting Dracula of all!', no less) when the prologue immediately explains that Dracula is (still) dead is at least a tiny bit cynical. Sexing up the property by using a premise designed to have lithe young women wander around in nightgowns is as shameless, but it's not like vampire fiction was ever particularly wholesome.

A young schoolteacher, Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), is on her way to a new job at a girls' boarding school in Transylvania when, through shenanigans inexplicable and foreboding, her coach driver abandons her. She accepts the offer of a seemingly lonely aristocrat, Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), to spend the night at her château. (Note to self: refuse any invitation that begins with, "My castle is in the hills above the village...")

At Château Meinster, Marianne discovers that the baroness is not quite alone: she keeps her son (David Peel) chained up in one part of the castle, ostensibly because he is mad. During the night, though, Marianne frees the baron after he tells her his mother has locked him away to keep his land and titles for herself. To nobody's surprise, this is a terrible idea. Although Marianne does not understand it yet, the younger Meinster is in fact a vampire, kept confined for years and fed a steady diet of young women by his mother, who could bear neither to let him loose nor to dispatch him. Now that he is loose, he quickly takes off with the aid of his nanny, Greta (Freda Jackson).

The following day, Doctor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) finds a traumatised but otherwise unhurt Marianne in the woods. He asks her detailed questions about her experience, but fails to tell her what's going on. After dropping Marianne off at the girls' school, Van Helsing investigates the Château Meinster. There he encounters the baroness, who has been turned into a vampire by her son against her will. Van Helsing stakes her in her sleep, but finds the young baron's coffin missing. That the threat isn't over becomes obvious when a young girl in the village nearby dies from a neck bite. And soon, Marianne is engaged to be married...

The plot of The Brides of Dracula starts strong, but descends into a frustrating muddle by the second act before hurtling towards an outright nonsensical conclusion. If Van Helsing had told anybody except the village priest (Fred Johnson) about the vampiric goings-on lives might have been saved, but I'd forgive that contrivance if  The Brides of Dracula didn't also feel like two separate stories stitched together: one about a lonely mother who keeps her vampire son locked up, the second about a hypnotic vampire who draws young women into his coven. Most frustrating are the half-developed characters. Freda Jackson (from Nottingham! fist bump) turns in an outstanding performance as Greta, whose sour-faced demeanour hides a fanatical devotion to Baron Meinster. She's rewarded with a terrific soliloquy early on; thereafter, the script decides she'll be a cackling goon, and she is eventually killed off in a decidedly underwhelming fashion.

Jackson is splendid, but she's far from a lone standout. Hunt's Baroness Meinster is as impressive, all austere aristocratic dignity covering desperate love for and fear of her monstrous son. Cushing turns in another excellent performance, settling into the role and beginning to hone his characterisation of Abraham Van Helsing, battling the forces of evil with science! Yvonne Monlaur, drop-dead gorgeous in a very sixties way and working an adorable French accent, hits all the right notes; it may not be a performance for the ages, but it's enough to regret Monlaur retired from acting only a few years later. The problem, really, is the villain: Peel is good as a brash young baron but never develops a take on monstrous bloodsucking, and he absolutely lacks the astonishing physical presence of Christopher Lee. Where Dracula was a terrifying battle against evil, its sequel just has me rooting for Cushing to beat up a blue-blooded punk.

The lack of a compelling villain means The Brides of Dracula is ultimately a notch below its predecessor, but in other ways it surpasses that film. Take the production design. Where Bernard Robinson's work in Dracula was a little musty he goes gloriously over the top here, sticking dragons and gargoyles all over the already impressive Neo-Gothic architecture of Oakley Court; and since in Gothic horror 'crazier' almost always means 'better', this is a very good choice indeed. There's more action too, awkward in places though it is; and we get the most rocking Peter Cushing moment yet, in which he neutralises the effect of a vampire bite by cauterising his own neck wound.

Despite being a bigger, sexier and more action-packed sequel The Brides of Dracula also makes some significant adjustments to the series mythology: shapeshifting, explicitly ruled out in the 1958 film, enters the series here, with a not-terrible giant bat effect. Vampires now need human servants to watch over them during the day (they learnt from what befell Dracula's original bride, I presume). Elsewhere, what was hinted at in Dracula is more fully developed, first and foremost the notion of vampirism as 'the cult of the undead', 'a survival of one of the ancient pagan religions and their struggle against Christianity'.

Certainly, Baron Meinster's coven has the character of an extremely patriarchal religious community, and in portraying it as supernaturally wicked The Brides of Dracula inadvertently ends up critiquing patriarchy even while exploiting it to pander to the audience. It's a good film, is what I'm saying in a roundabout way: it doesn't blow the roof off the horror film, but it's a very fine example of the developing Hammer template.

Horror... from beyond the grave!

Faced with the mythic stature of Hammer Film Productions in British pop culture, it's amusing to consider how little the company's rise had to do with stodgy English reserve. Hammer's first real horror film, 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment, was so named to cash in on the X certificate, and that was a sign of things to come: for the next two decades Hammer churned out lurid low-budget films that aimed to titillate as well as terrify. The closest analogue is the Italian film industry of the same period, which has a similar track record of sleazy horror films made quickly using the same actors again and again, to tremendous profits.

But where the Italian horror industry - at least in retrospect - was centred on directors, Hammer Horror is most firmly associated with its stars: and no stars more famous than Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, first working together in 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein (as Victor Frankenstein and the creature, respectively) and teamed up again in the following year's Dracula, because that's how Hammer did things.

That intro may not sound like Dracula is a great work of art, but it is: as a B-movie and as a film qua films it runs laps around the tedious and overpraised Lugosi film, which it absolutely refuses to be shackled by. As such, Jimmy Sangster's screenplay adapts Bram Stoker even more freely than the reworked-for-the-stage approach behind the 1931 film, into something that shares some names with Stoker's novel but little in the way of locale or plot.

Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) arrives at the castle of Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) in Transylvania. Ostensibly tasked with reorganising the count's library, Harker is on a secret mission to destroy the vampires. He succeeds in staking Dracula's bride (Valerie Gaunt) but is overpowered and turned by the count. Anxious about the fate of his confederate, Abraham Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) just walks into Castle Dracula during the daytime (in this film, everybody hangs out at Castle Dracula like it's a popular stop for a picnic during a Sunday afternoon stroll) and dispatches the newly vampiric Harker, but finds Dracula himself gone.

Meanwhile in Germany (or, you know, somewhere: see below), Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) and his wife Mina (Melissa Stribling) worry about the worsening health of Arthur's sister Lucy (Carol Marsh). The well-meaning but inept Doctor Seward (Charles Lloyd Pack) is unable to determine the cause of her ailment. Van Helsing arrives to tell the family of the death of Lucy's fiancé Jonathan Harker, but stays to look after Lucy. When his cryptic instructions are ignored, Lucy dies and is buried, but it isn't long before the revenant begins preying on her niece Tania (Janina Faye).

Having been told what's going on, Arthur joins Van Helsing in hunting Lucy down, but rejects the professor's suggestion of using his sister to find Dracula. (Arthur's conflict - let his sister's wretched undeath go on and endanger others in the hope of catching Dracula, or put her to rest at once? - is played to the hilt; it's a terrific plot element invented wholecloth by Sangster.) Instead, Lucy is staked. But it isn't long before the count has selected his next victim - Mina - and Arthur and Van Helsing are engaged in a desperate race against time to track down the count and take him out once and for all.

That's quite a lot of changes: some characters disappear (poor Quincey Morris, forever cut out until Francis Ford Coppola had a heart in Bram Stoker's Dracula). Others are changed radically and relationships restructured (Seward as a GP, Harker as a vampire hunter, Arthur Holmwood as Mina's husband rather than Lucy's fiancé). The geography of the film is likewise different; none of it takes place in England, but where it is set is not quite clear. Given all the border business the Holmwoods presumably live somewhere in southern Germany; but it's best to assume that the whole story takes place somewhere in the composite Europe of the British imagination, a land full of medieval castles and superstitious peasants. Certainly, considering all the locals speak in clipped British stage accents despite being (a) peasants and (b) German, it's not easy to pin down.

Cushing, too, doesn't bother pretending to be Dutch. But it's a great performance: driven and professional, he is far more scientist than crazed medicine man. And if his talk of biology (it's an exposition-heavy film, with Cushing's scenes doing the heavy lifting of explaining the series mythology) weren't enough, there's hardly a clearer indication of Van Helsing as the champion of scientific modernism than the fact that the film assigns him Dr Seward's phonograph. Carol Marsh's Lucy is another very good performance, but Lee of course is the standout, despite the fact that he doesn't even appear very much. But director Terence Fisher makes his scenes count. From an iconic gallery entrance quoted by George Lucas in Revenge of the Sith to a latex-heavy disintegration scene, he's an all-round terrific villain: a real monster only incidentally inhabiting a human body, instead of Lugosi's aristocratic twit.

Dracula isn't perfect. The relatively grounded production design can't keep up with the terrific matte paintings and surreal castle interior of the 1931 film: all things considered, the film looks a little bit too much like a 1950s postcard of rustic holidays on the continent. If those holidays occasionally ended in a bloodbath, that is: Dracula thoroughly earns its notoriety with fairly gut-churning violence. Ultimately, what Fisher does with the limited resources at his disposal is impressive. Fifties horror films, let's be honest, tend not to be all that scary to us enlightened moderns. But the combination of Lee's animal menace, Fisher's fantastic horror direction and James Bernard's awe-inspiring score turns Dracula into a genuinely terrifying experience.

A taste of evil

Yes, it's lazy to just plunder a film's tagline for my title. You expect better: you expect execrable puns. But exploitation films often boast terrific marketing. Much like I could never hope to better a giallo title, I'll never match the tagline of a Russ Meyer film. Best, I think, to admit that and bow to the anonymous genius who came up with that gem.

Not that 1965's Mudhoney actually lives up to that wonderfully Puritan slogan. Instead, it's pretty positive towards romance and sex, which it treats with an almost reverent tenderness. Well, excepting the vivacious denizens of the whorehouse next door who occasionally wander through the frame. But that's neither here nor there, and how did I get wrapped up in meandering sentences in just two paragraphs?

Anyway, it's a fact that while I'd never run out of online resources on Russ Meyer's most famous work, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Mudhoney is less well known, and discussions of the film are mostly found in academic literature and the director's fervent but not exactly large fandom. Which is my excuse as to why I've seen the film but am not exactly flush with production details or historical observations.

Such as, for example, whether the film was actually shot where it's set, that being Missouri: it sure looks like an egregious case of California Doubling, but what do I know? Anyway, it's the Depression era (God's word declared it would be so!) and Calif McKinney (John Furlong) is walking through rural Missouri in search of work. He meets Maggie Marie (Princess Livingston) and her buxom daughters, deaf-mute Eula (Rena Horten) and lascivious Clara Belle (Lorna Maitland), who inform him that the folks at the nearby Wade farm are looking for a farmhand. Calif is almost immediately hired by old Lute Wade (Stuart Lancaster) and his niece Hannah (Antoinette Cristiani), but is continually menaced by Hannah's husband, Sidney Brenshaw (Hal Hopper), who is prone to alcoholic rages.

The perpetually broke Sidney is looking forward his father-in-law's death, since Hannah will inherit the old man's farm and money. But his plans are complicated as romance blossoms between Hannah and Calif, who is now seeking to protect her against Sidney's frequent violence. When Lute changes his will to make Calif his sole heir, Sidney feigns religious conversion and teams up with local fire-and-brimstone preacher Brother Hansen (Frank Bolger). Together, the violent alcoholic and the good reverend 'investigate' Hannah's alleged adultery with a view to organising a lynch mob.

Plotwise, Mudhoney is uncommonly down to earth for the Myers oeuvre, yet oddly disjointed. Maggie Marie's Brothel of Exposition is hermetically sealed from the rest of the film, except for two important functions: it's where Mudhoney's men go to canoodle with nubile young plot details, while Eula and Clara Belle provide the film's titillation. Apart from that, it's a freakish mash-up of Frankenstein and Of Mice and Men, if either of those works featured more large-breasted women with an aversion to clothing.

I realise I've made the film sound bad, so let me clarify: Mudhoney is an absolute blast, the most purely entertaining picture I've seen in months. Lancaster, Bolger and Hopper all give brilliant over-the-top performances, but Hopper shines most brightly. Despite being the villain, he is far and away the most complex character and focus of the film, especially compared to the bland Calif. As a character drama about greed, hypocrisy and authoritarianism, Mudhoney is almost as successful as it is as high camp.

And heck, there's a whole lot of message here. Meyer critiques rape within marriage at a time when that was legal and still sometimes seen as normal, and treats a romance that is adultery on paper with a dignity and respect one wouldn't expect of the 'king of the nudies'. Then there's the film's status as a left-wing attack on the intolerance bred by destitution in the Depression-era Midwest, and a criminal justice system that breaks a man's spirit in prison for accidentally killing a scab.

Stylistically, Mudhoney has a whole lot going for it. The most iconic sequence is the opening, where Meyer's camera does not show us anyone's face, but conveys the action by focusing on people's boots - snazzy boots at that, but let's not get into my mad lust for Mudhoney's footwear. It's a film of exaggerated angles, plenty of face close-ups, and some cartoonish anatomy; in the first two respects at least, Meyer is far more Italian than American. In the Italian genre cinema of 1965, he could likely have enjoyed a healthy career, but he continued labouring in grindhouse obscurity until he struck gold a few years later. And we'll get to that.

Andalusia, Arizona

The spaghetti western exploded onto the American market in 1967, when Sergio Leone's Dollars films were released stateside in quick succession. But even before that, the genre had acquired a reputation for reinvigorating careers. When Clint Eastwood advised his friend Burt Reynolds to take the lead in a new Italian project, Reynolds - then fresh off a three-year stint on Gunsmoke and keen to make his transition to the big screen - said yes.

Unfortunately for the actor, Navajo Joe (1966) was produced by legendary B-movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis in his first foray into the western genre. By the time Reynolds realised that the film was to be directed by Sergio Corbucci, not Leone as he had been led to believe, he could no longer back out of his contract. So Reynolds had to grit his teeth and bear his season of indentured servitude on location in Almería before fleeing back to the States.

Released to the withering reviews American critics enjoyed lavishing on Italian genre films in the sixties, Navajo Joe has never quite been rehabilitated in the way of Corbucci's other pictures. Reynolds regularly refers to the production as his worst experience in the business: true, no doubt, although the feelings of the star of such latter-day masterpieces as In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale shouldn't be mistaken for critical judgment. Because Navajo Joe isn't just decent: it's a damn great spaghetti western, and far from Corbucci's least.

A band of peaceful Navajos (who live in tepees in the film's imagination) are massacred and scalped by bounty hunters led by Duncan (Aldo Sambrell). Pursued by a lone Indian warrior (Burt Reynolds), the killers make it to the nearest town, where they are informed that the state will no longer sanction their murder of Navajos. (This does not work out for the local sheriff, who is shot by Duncan in cold blood.) An alternative source of income opens up for the bandits, however, when Dr Chester Lynne (Pierre Cressoy) hires them to intercept a train carrying the sum of a million dollars to the small town of Esperanza.

The robbery goes to plan at first, but the Navajo warrior manages to steal the train Duncan's men have secured from under their noses and take it to Esperanza, whose citizens he offers his help in fending off Duncan. The townsfolk, however, prefer to trust in sending the secretly treacherous Dr Lynne for help. Joe sticks around, meanwhile, for revenge and to help Estella (Nicoletta Machiavelli), Mrs Lynne's half-indigenous servant.

Pace some critics, the plot seems rather good to me: straightforward but with clear stakes, and kicked off with the effective trope of a man seeking revenge for the murder of his family. The problem, really, is the characters. Machiavelli's Estella is awfully underdeveloped, and her importance to the plot seems to fluctuate wildly from scene to scene. Worse, Sambrell's Duncan has little in the way of clear motivation. He hates both Indians and white people because as a 'half-breed' he was ostracised by both - well and good; but that motive only appears here and there, and for much of the film he behaves villainously because it's expected of him. We don't come to spaghetti westerns for characters with a compelling inner life, but a little more wouldn't hurt.

That would matter less if Reynolds's performance was better. A gruelling shoot can translate into compelling cinema - see Apocalypse Now, or every Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski collaboration - but here Reynolds's misery just shows in every scene. And the wisdom of casting him as a Native American could certainly be questioned, part-Cherokee or no: at a time when blackface had thankfully been consigned to the past, a white person with copious fake tan and an awkward wig was still thought a good enough approximation of a Native American. (Case in point: the even more Aryan Machiavelli.) Of course, given structural racism in the industry there weren't exactly many high-profile indigenous actors, but someone had to break that vicious cycle.





At the level of script and acting, then, Navajo Joe is certainly not above reproach. But hell, Corbucci's direction is another thing entirely. Full of terrific compositions and stark angles, Navajo Joe is even more aggressively stylised than Django, achieving a rough-hewn poetry that was not surpassed until Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West two years later (and which, arguably, Corbucci himself never achieved again). Occasionally the flourishes threaten to tip the film into ridiculousness, but all in all Corbucci manages the balance.

Even inventive direction can't stop the film from sagging a little in its third act, but for most of its running time Navajo Joe is basically perfect by spaghetti western criteria: amazing visuals, taciturn badasses, and nihilistic violence. Oh, right: this film is brutal by the standards of the sixties. Corbucci just about has the decorum to turn away during the scalpings, but the gruesome trophies themselves are waved about gleefully, and bleached skulls make frequent appearances. It may be a coincidence that Ruggero Deodato, whose infamous Cannibal Holocaust (1980) reduced the human body to bloody pieces, worked as Corbucci's assistant director on this film; but it certainly feels as if there should be a connection.

Gotta get that feline

Everyone agress there is a whole lot of lesser Argento: most projects the man has directed in the last three decades, say. 1971's The Cat o' Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code) is commonly reckoned among the director's minor works, despite attempts to make it part of a poorly defined 'animal trilogy' with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

All things considered The Cat o' Nine Tails deserves its for-completists-only reputation. As an attempt to push the envelope at a time when the classic giallo of the sixties was running out of steam, the film is overshadowed by Mario Bava's violent Twitch of the Death Nerve. But it's still full of interesting ideas that Argento recycled in later masterpieces like Deep Red.

Franco Arnò (Serbian-American actor Karl Malden), a blind man, and his niece Lori (Cinzia de Carolis) are out for a walk at night when they overhear a man in a parked car talking about blackmail to an unseen companion. Arnò, disturbed by this, is up at his home later solving a crossword when he hears the sound of a guard being struck at the head at a nearby research facility. The next day, it turns out that somebody broke into the Terzi Institute, but apparently stole nothing. The police, led by Superintendent Spimi (Pier Paolo Capponi), suspect industrial espionage, especially as the institute was spearheading research into XYY syndrome.

The case turns uglier when one of the institute's researchers, Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero), falls off a platform at the railway station and is crushed to death by a train. Arnò suspects foul play and teams up with the journalist working on the story, Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus). Realising that Calabresi was pushed they begin to investigate the owner of the institute, Fulvio Terzi (Tino Carraro), his scientists and Calabresi's paramour Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov). Nine leads in all - hence the title. But that number goes down quickly as somebody starts bumping off possible witnesses to their crimes...

It's a weak plot. And not in the 'Whee, let's have fun with crazy surreal murders!' way we're used to from Bava's films, but as if Argento ran up against a deadline, could not figure out his own mystery, and tried to cover the unconvincing reveal with a tremendously abrupt ending. And that's without the whole chromosome nonsense, inspired by sensationalistic misreporting of men with XYY syndrome at the time. It's not just silly now that public understanding of genetics has moved at least somewhat beyond 'it's magic, and also rigid biological determinism'; it's also pretty insulting to those who were vilified as likely delinquents on the basis that they had an extra chromosome. (Full disclosure: as far as I'm aware, I have just forty-six chromosomes. There's a sentence I never expected to write in a film review.)

The characters are much better, as much as Argento's screenplay attempts to make mincemeat out of any arcs. Giallo heroes tend to be foreigners, but as a blind man Arnò is an outsider of another kind. If his impairment is mostly rendered stereotypically (enhanced hearing, that sort of thing), Malden elevates the character to something much better than the script had in mind. Franciscus's Giordano is a far more milquetoast character, although he's never less than likeable and gets something of an arc through his affair with Terzi's daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak). But the film's treatment of its co-leads is wildly uneven, with early hopes of an unconventional protagonist dashed as he is increasingly upstaged by Giordano. Argento would get the balance of a journalist-and-amateur team right the second time around in Deep Red - by demoting one of the characters.

Like many of Argento's films The Cat o' Nine Tails touches on risqué themes. Here it's homosexuality, presented sensitively for its time (as would be the case in Deep Red). Then there's the police, who are more competent here than they are in a lot of gialli but are fully aware of their reputation for reactionary politics. When Giordano insults him, Spimi agrees nonchalantly: 'Cops are all bastards. We beat confessions out of people. Take bribes. Oppress minorities.'

As is standard in the giallo, plenty of people die between announcing they've solved the case and actually passing on that information. The role of the telephone is one of the strongest links between the giallo and its North American bastard child, the slasher. (It's also a neat way of separating the two distinct traditions that I've argued can be found in the American slasher: if it's obsessed with the telephone, it's a giallo-style slasher, not a descendant of the countryside-revenge film.) In both subgenres, the telephone connects and isolates at the same time, as characters are able to speak to one another but are physically alone and vulnerable. As such, conversations interrupted by the murderer can be a key event (Halloween) or even the whole concept (Scream).

Stylistically Argento begins to move beyond The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, arguably the apex of the classic giallo. That means experimenting with Bavaesque colour, an enterprise he subsequently abandoned until the later seventies. Above all, though, it's by escalating the violence. While less extreme than Twitch of the Death Nerve half a year later, Cat pushes the envelope in nastiness with unflinching death scenes. Surrounded by a better film, that might be impressive; but here it leaves a sour aftertaste, especially paired with an underwhelming, synth-heavy Ennio Morricone score. The Cat o' Nine Tails may have been a cul-de-sac, but thankfully the director learnt from it.

We don't like your kind around here

By most measures the 1950s were a pretty appalling decade. The world was haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation. Women weren't allowed to open a bank account or get a job without their husbands' permission. In West Germany, where I'm from, upstanding citizens decided we'd all best move on and not talk about the recent unpleasantness, and so Nazi civil servants carried on in their jobs. In the US, Jim Crow laws enforced white supremacy. Meanwhile, Western empires fought rearguard actions that left millions of people dead from Algeria to Malaya, Kenya to Viet Nam.

It's really no wonder conservatives love the fifties.

Snark aside, it's much easier to criticise the decade for those of us who don't have positive personal memories of it. To my grandparents, who'd lived through the war, it was a time of peace in which previously unimaginable luxuries - cars, televisions, washing machines - were suddenly available to a far wider share of society than ever before. From the vantage point of the rebellious and crisis-ridden later sixties and seventies, fond reminiscing was all too natural. Hell, I came to pop-culture consciousness in the late nineties and early 2000s, a demonstrably awful age that is nevertheless getting the nostalgia treatment now.*

That's a really long-winded way of explaining the fertile ground for the nostalgia craze that swept Hollywood during the seventies and much of the eighties, when films like American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978) celebrated the youth culture of a bygone age. Macon County Line (1974), though, doesn't do that. In fact director Richard Compton, latterly of a lot of TV series, pretty much sticks up two fingers to nostalgia as he goes out of his way to show the racism, moralism and general ugliness that was in danger of being forgotten (by middle-class white people, anyway). At the same time, there's more empathy and intelligent critique here than we'd expect of an exploitation cheapie. It's really sort of brilliant, even if it's not a very good film.

First, though, there's the gimmick: Macon County Line claims to be a true story In reality, the filmmakers are following the seventies trend of selling an entirely fictional story as real, popular in low-budget shockers like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), that reached its apotheosis with 1980's Cannibal Holocaust. But Macon County Line is more grounded than most of those films, and is careful to include a text crawl at the end informing us of the surviving characters' entirely made-up fate.

In 1954, Chicagoans Chris and Wade Dixon (Alan and Jesse Vint, real-life brothers) drive through the South in search of wine, women and song before enlisting in the army. In Louisiana, they pick up pretty hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters), but when their car grinds to a halt with a broken fuel pump they have to make camp in the countryside, unable to comply with the instructions of Deputy Sheriff Reed Morgan (Max Baer) to leave the county post-haste. Morgan, a practitioner of the busted-taillight school of law enforcement who nevertheless loves his family, is shocked when he finds his wife murdered the same evening. Believing the Dixons responsible, Morgan takes his son Luke (Leif Garrett) along to hunt the culprits down.

On paper that sounds pretty exciting, but in reality Macon County Line spends about four fifths of its running time treading water as we're introduced to a bunch of characters, some of which turn out to be largely irrelevant, like slow-witted comic relief Hamp (Geoffrey Lewis). It's not that Chris, Wade and Jenny are obnoxious, they're just not interesting enough to justify all the time we watch them doing very little indeed; and that goes twice for plot points that are raised but left unresolved, like Jenny's shady past. The film's final fifteen minutes, after Deputy Morgan snaps and goes on his vendetta, are taut and suspenseful, but they could be twice as long without losing steam.

Reed Morgan, though, is a fantastic character, and that holds the film together despite its ungainly shape. As portrayed brilliantly by Baer, who also produced and wrote the screenplay, Morgan is obviously in love with his wife and immensely proud of his son. Yet he's also the sort of Southern lawman that held the racist order in place, and the film brings that to the fore in a scene in which Morgan tells his son, as kindly as he knows how, to stay away from the black friends he's made. That people who commit evil acts tend to think of themselves as good citizens is a banal point, but it's more subtlety than exploitation cinema tends to muster, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Macon County Line is neither a horror nor a countryside-revenge film in the mould of Deliverance (1972), but it incorporates elements of both. An emphasis on children's potential for evil is shared with Halloween (1978) while the final showdown in a riverside cabin finds visual echoes in Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981). That vicious and suspenseful climax has Compton going into horror filmmaking that seems far ahead of its time; the sound of somebody repeatedly pulling the handle on a pump-action shotgun in a futile attempt to chamber another shell is absolutely harrowing. The film's closing redeems much earlier boredom, but ultimately Macon County Line is interesting less for what it is than what it prefigures.

*Ironic appreciation of a bygone age of irony is more meta than I can handle.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence

Russ Meyer is well known as the king of sixties sexploitation. And by 'well known', I mean that until a week ago I'd never heard of the man. That isn't the sort of thing we bloggers are supposed to admit, especially of a figure with Meyer's cult clout, but there you go. For me, 1965's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! served as an introduction both to Meyer's work and a particular strand of exploitation cinema in general.

Faster, Pussycat! is a pitch-perfect showcase for Meyer's idiosyncratic obsession with large-breasted women driving around the Mojave Desert. The film accounts for much of his lasting influence on creators from glam metal bands to Quentin Tarantino. But in some ways it's atypical, too. For one, it isn't sexploitation: it aims to titillate, to be sure, but it's no more explicit in that respect than a Michael Bay film. Neither is it crypto-feminist, pace what Wikipedia claims Jimmy McDonough writes in a book I can't afford.

But it is hilarious. Look no further than the spoof of titillation in the guise of public service that is the gloriously purple prose of the opening monologue. An uncredited John Furlong, clearly in on the joke, chews the scenery like there's no tomorrow:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence - the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora [good word, unlikely to show up in film today] of disguises, its favourite mantle still remains sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn't only destroy, it creates and moulds as well. Let's examine closely, then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained in the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakeable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, at any time, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist or a dancer in a go-go club!

Here, women defined by their direct subordination to male authority (receptionists, secretaries, go-go dancers) hide a wilder side that both entices and frightens the presumed-male audience of exploitation films. The plot proper begins as the go-go dancing trio of oversexed Billie (Lori Williams), vaguely Italian Rosie (Haji) and their violent, domineering leader Varla (Tura Satana) are out in the Mojave Desert. Racing their sports cars against clueless suburbanite Tommy (Ray Barlow) turns to violence in which Varla kills Tommy with her bare hands.

The girls kidnap the man's girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), but their plans change when they observe a wheelchair-bound old man (Stuart Lancaster) at a local petrol station. Informed by the station attendant that the old man and his sons, faithful Kirk (Paul Trinka) and hench but dimwitted The Vegetable (Dennis Busch), are fabulously wealthy but live by themselves in the middle of nowhere. Varla and her minions immediately decide to drive down to the old man's farm, using Linda as their cover, and get their hands on the cash by any means necessary. But it turns out the old man is less harmless - and a great deal less sane - than he appears.

Crazy murderers versus crazy murderers is a fantastic exploitation premise, and it helps that everyone involved gives it their all. B-movie stalwart Lancaster in particular gives an absurdly fun over-the-top performance, making an unhinged, misogynistic rapist and seriously abusive parent the most compelling character in sight. But the actresses who portray the girls aren't far off. Santana's black-gloved evil and propensity for gleeful violence is portrayed in such an entertaining fashion that we go along with her being both protagonist and villain. But she doesn't upstage her companions, particularly the ditzy, playful Billie, who in Varla's eyes is overly distracted from crime by her fawning over every man she sees.

Only the most curmudgeonly reviewer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! could avoid consulting his thesaurus for synonyms of 'fun'. It's a brilliant project that concedes not an inch to reason, taste or reality. Meyer directs with an enthusiasm and panache - see left for a typical heightened contrast in size between two characters, something Sergio Leone would develop into his stylistic signature. At the same time, Meyer is more restrained here than he was in his earlier 'nudies' or post-Hays Code sexploitation flicks. While gratuitous shower and wrestling scenes abound, there is no outright nudity. Faster, Pussycat! does quite well without it.

That leads us to the question of Meyer's portrayal of his central trio, for here we have three active, physically strong women. But that is not at all the same as asserting they are strong female characters. For one, they're fantasies, obviously conceived as different but equally buxom types to cater to various tastes in a presumed-male audience. (Meyer famously preferred buxom women to the petite build characteristic of sixties icons like Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway, but the fact that we can discuss the man's muses in the same terms we might a prize racehorse tells us everything about the male gaze in his films - never more than a funhouse mirror of patriarchal society, grotesquely exaggerated but springing from the same fount.)

They're also shockingly one-note: designed not to appear as full human beings but as dangerous and exotic circus animals, as the prologue's use of zoological language all but announces. The real characters are men. Kirk and the Vegetable actually develop over the course of the film. So any claim for Meyer as a feminist, inadvertent or otherwise, is pretty much bogus. That doesn't diminish the film's achievements, but it helps us subject Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to critical appreciation, not fanboyish whitewashing.

Or, death in the woods

When Friday the 13th was released in 1980, the slasher had been around for a while. Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (both 1974) had pioneered the subgenre, while Carpenter's Halloween (1978) had codified its tropes: masked, silent killers with blades, young people murdered rapidly and swiftly, the Final Girl, and a reactionary moralism that constantly punished its own transgressions. Although the template existed, the floodgates had not yet opened.

Just a couple of years later, though, cheap horror flicks had absolutely overrun cinema, and Sean S. Cunningham did it. It makes sense, somehow. Cunningham had collaborated with Wes Craven on the latter's seminal Last House on the Left (1972), but in the second half of the seventies he'd turned to by all accounts wretched comedies. After Halloween he sensed an opportunity in the slasher and rushed Friday the 13th into production with an unfinished script, a budget of barely over half a million dollars - and special effects makeup wizard Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead (1978).

We open at Camp Crystal Lake, in 1958. Two counselors get away from the group and into an attic where they begin making out, watched by an unseen figure who proceeds to knife the bloke and attack the girl. The frame freezes on her terrified face, then the franchise's logo fills the screen. It's a brazen and wildly unsuccessful attempt to rip off Halloween's immortal killer's-point-of-view opening sequence, and it's symptomatic of the film to follow.

In the present day we meet Annie (Robbi Morgan), a chirpy twentysomething who's been hired as a cook at the soon-to-be-reopened Camp Crystal Lake. Despite being warned by the locals, including Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), that 'Camp Blood' is cursed, she accepts a lift to the camp from an unseen stranger, who very deliberately misses the exit to the camp. Annie, realising something is wrong, leaps from the car and limps through the woods, only to stumble and find herself at the feet of her pursuer. She pleads for her life, but the killer brutally slits her throat.

Depriving us of a sympathetic character we've been led to identify with is cold, nasty and shockingly effective, but that early peak means the rest of Friday the 13th is a rote stalk-and-slash bore with a bunch of people who never rise above tolerable. Preparing Camp Crystal Lake for the arrival of the campers are owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) and his hirelings: macho Jack (Kevin Bacon), his sensitive girlfriend Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), not-Kevin-Bacon Bill (Harry Crosby), strip Monopoly aficionado Brenda (Laurie Bartram), insufferable prankster Ned (Mark Nelson) and sensible Alice (Adrienne King). In the course of one night, the killer whittles this group down to just the Final Girl.

It's a wonder that a formula that had barely been established can already feel as stale as it does in Friday the 13th: if I didn't know any better, I'd guess the film was released well into the slasher boom, not right at its beginning. Cunningham is the most inelegant of directors, moving his camera as if he's read about how to do horror in a book, but without any practical experience. This artlessness extends to the way he composes and structures his scenes, inevitably going for the blandest and most obvious visual cues. Barry Abrams, Cunningham's go-to cinematographer who disappeared into well-deserved obscurity with his patron, shoots the whole thing in the flattest manner conceivable, although nature gifts him some pleasant images.

The film isn't bereft of grace notes. There's Ron Millkie absolutely delightful cameo as an out-of-his-depth policeman ('We ain't gonna stand for no weirdness out here'), not to mention Betsy Palmer's pleasingly hammy turn. But Friday the 13th never relied on its script or performances. The film stands or falls with Tom Savini's craftsmanship: and heavens, Savini is at the top of his game. The practical effects - including the throat-slitting mentioned above, an arrowhead through Kevin Bacon's throat, and an axe blow to someone's forehead - are top notch, equalling if not outdoing the best the Italian gore masters had to offer at the time.

Tim Brayton has argued that Friday the 13th kicked off the slasher deluge where earlier films could not precisely because it was hackwork, painting-by-numbers horror filmmaking instead of the sometimes fiercely personal creations of Tobe Hooper, Bob Clark and John Carpenter. Cunningham, the line of reasoning goes, was readily imitable. Brayton, I think, is right on the money: F13 is middle-of-the-road in every way, but it demonstrated that you needed little craftsmanship except in the special effects department to make wheelbarrows full of money. So they did: Hollywood's underbelly spewed forth hacks' dime-a-dozen horror films, setting off the wild boom-and-bust of eighties horror. It's not a pretty story, but it befits its progenitor - a film visionary precisely because it is so mediocre.

Italian Horror Blogathon: Deep Red (Argento, 1975)

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies.

Dario Argento's fifth film is perhaps the most famous giallo of them all, but in hindsight it emerges as a transitional effort. Bridging the gap between excellent but ultimately meat-and-potatoes gialli and the surreal fever dreams Argento directed in the late seventies and eighties, Deep Red (Profondo rosso) flirts with the supernatural without ever quite losing its mind in the manner of later films.

At a 'scientific' conference in Rome, Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) attempts to prove the existence of telepathy with the help of German medium Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril). The presentation goes awry, however, when Helga is overwhelmed by the evil presence of a murderer somewhere in the room. Disturbed, she returns home, but not before announcing that she knows the killer's identity, unaware the scoundrel is lurking in the shadows of the red-curtained theatre.

Cue the inevitable: Helga is murdered by a figure wearing a dark raincoat in a scene that pays homage to Hitchcock's Psycho, but plays Italian cinema's permissive attitude towards gore to the hilt. From the street below, the killing is witnessed by Marc Daly (David Hemmings), an English jazz pianist. Marc struggles to remember a painting he is convinced the murderer has removed from Helga's flat, while the police devote their time to mocking him for being a penniless artist instead of solving the case. He's aided in his investigation by his depressed alcoholic friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), a self-proclaimed 'proletarian of the pianoforte' who performs for bored society types wearing 1920s fashions at a local bar. He also teams up with extroverted reporter Gianna Brezi (Daria Nicolodi), and the two begin an affair.

After remembering a children's song he heard during the murder, Marc is told about a book describing a past murder connected to the same piece of music. He tracks down the author, Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), but the killer gets there first, stabbing Righetti in the spine and killing her by scalding her face in the bath, because in Italy the taps apparently run boiling water. (This death was ripped off, with similarly terrific make-up effects and preposterous logic, by Halloween II.) Marc is nevertheless able to identify the haunted house pictured in Righetti's book and goes to investigate...

Deep Red has a pretty terrific plot, but it's the central conceit I like best. The murder spree is kicked off by Helga's public telepathic discovery that somebody in the room has killed before; if it were not for that single coincidence, the past would have remained buried and the killer wouldn't have had to bump people off to protect his secret. It's much better than the standard 'psycho killers kill because they are mad, and also because of sexual perversion' the giallo favours, and it grounds the film psychologically even as Argento incorporates elements of the supernatural.

Then there's the fact that Argento is a stylist of genius: not as compelling in his use of colour and contrast as Mario Bava, but his eye for space, blocking, and utilising the frame surpasses that of the father of the giallo. And Deep Red doesn't disappoint. There are plenty of creepy props (terrifying children's dolls, dead birds, etc.), but the greatest scares are derived from the Baroque stylisation in Argento's arrangements, using his actors' faces to the greatest effect while creating plenty of negative and off-camera space where threats might lurk.

Where Bava made his way from Gothic horror to inventing the giallo, Argento moved from screenwriting to directing films in a subgenre that was already fully formed at the turn of the seventies. To the giallo at its height Argento brought a keen focus on the corruption of Italy's social elite: the side-by-side of luxury, high culture and murder - blood and art, blood as art - distinguishes his work. It's unsurprising, then, that Deep Red touches on controversial or risqué subjects like homosexuality, women's liberation (Marc is a fairly chauvinist hero), and the impact of politics on the police (who seem to be on strike when they're not busy bungling the investigation).

Beyond its focus on lurid subject matter, Deep Red is also really damn gory. Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve had opened the floodgates in that respect, but let it never be said Argento was not a keen student. With the brutal death of Righetti, mentioned above, special effects wizards Germano Natali and Carlo Rambaldi outdo themselves. Their work on other scenes - including an infamous decapitation - is less brutally realistic, but Argento more than picks up the slack with unflinching direction. When Giordani is repeatedly smashed face first into walls and sideboards we keep expecting Argento to cut away, but he never does.

It's not a perfect film: even in the Italian original there is plenty of irritating overdubbing, suggesting the director's dissatisfaction with some line readings. Then there is the soundtrack, which improbably seems to have a cult following. Argento fired composer Giorgio Gaslini half-way through the job and replaced him with musical collective Goblin. Their progressive rock score isn't bad per se, although it suggests Goblin spent too much time listening to Tubular Bells and In Search of Space. It's just not very giallo: I want screeching strings, damn it, not space rock.

But those flaws can't damage Deep Red's status as one of the best and arguably the most famous giallo. As a giallo with supernatural elements and a mid-point in Argento's oeuvre it isn't a great introduction to the subgenre: that honour belongs to the director's own Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But, importantly for a horror film, Deep Red is no less terrifying than it was in 1975. Gialli, after all, age more gracefully than slashers because of their psychological themes and the general lack of stupidity.

3rd Annual Italian Horror Blogathon: Torso (Martino, 1973)

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies.

After making his way from sexploitation 'documentaries' to feature films, Sergio Martino dedicated much of his considerable energy to the crowded space between horror and thriller. Directing gialli and other B-movies at the breakneck pace typical of the Italian film industry, the Roman churned out two or more pictures a year throughout the first half of the seventies.

By 1973 Martino was thus a veteran of the giallo despite having worked in the subgenre all of two years. It was certainly an interesting time. In 1971 Mario Bava, the godfather of the giallo, had decisively abandoned procedural elements in favour of lurid violence with Twitch of the Death Nerve (Reazione a catena), although most of his colleagues would not follow this shift for a number of years; and North American filmmakers were beginning to notice Italian horror, resulting in the first slasher, Black Christmas, in 1974.

But I'd be lying if I claimed it's just its place in history that interested me in the first of Martino's 1973 films (and the only one to be released in North America the same year). It's the title. I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence) distils the contemporary appeal of the giallo to its essentials: blood and sex. It's not all there is to the film: although Martino was one of the sleazier giallo directors - which is saying something -, he was no hack. The promise of I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, anyway, is not quite conveyed by the English rump title Torso - although that moniker is pertinent too, as we shall see.

In the film's opening shot Martino's camera travels from a woman's face down her bare upper body to a doll, whose eyes are gouged out by the man she straddles. Then we go to a ménage à trois between a man and two women, while their partially out-of-focus sex is photographed by an automatised camera. The creepy sex and clinical focus on viewing and recording anticipate the film's themes. It's undoubtedly sleazy, but the music by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis is sufficiently urgent and creepy to drain the scene of all potential titillation.

Cut to a university in Rome, where Franz (John Richardson) lectures on Renaissance art to a mixed group of Italians and American exchange students. Jane (Suzy Kendall) and her friend Daniela (Tina Aumont) reject the unwelcome advances of creepy coursemate Stefano (Roberto Bisacco). Meanwhile, their friend Flo (Patrizia Adiutori) and her boyfriend (Fausto di Bella) are strangled by a masked assailant after making love in a car. Later Carol (Cristina Airoldi), another student, is murdered in a swamp by the same cloaked figure.

When the police seek the help of the student body, Jane is conflicted. She knows that she has spotted somebody in the piazza the previous day wearing the distinctive red-and-black scarf used to strange the victims, but there is a detail she struggles to remember, a detail that might crack the case... After she receives a threatening phone call, she is more than willing to accept Dani's invitation to come out to her uncle's country manor for a couple of days to recover from the shocking events, along with friends Katia (Angela Covello) and Ursula (Carla Brait).

Up to that point Torso is a bog-standard giallo, featuring all the expected elements: a foreigner embroiled in a murder case in an Italian city, repressed memories, a killer in a mask and dark coat. On the trip to the country, however, it becomes something altogether darker and more lurid as Martino amps up both the titillation and the gore. As a murder mystery Torso does not satisfy: Stefano is such an obvious red herring that I began to wonder if Martino might be double-bluffing, while the true identity of the killer is easy to figure out by a process of elimination well before the reveal.

But by 1973, the giallo had broken free of its procedural roots, and the latter half of Torso is a thoroughly effective blood-and-nudity shocker, though one that asks uncomfortable questions of the audience. Although he does not use the murderer's point of view excessively, Martino's lingering, often deliberately overlong shots implicate the audience in his act of watching, and he does not flinch: where you'd expect the camera to cut away, it doesn't. I shan't claim that as seasoned an exploitation director as Martino is deliberately rubbing the audience's depravity in their faces, but something is going on here. Nor is his objectification of women as straightforward as expected, with close-ups more disorienting than titillating.

As common in the giallo, the killer suffers from psychosexual hang-ups that don't necessarily make sense, but are disturbing as all hell. And that's where the English title comes in. The killer has a habit of stripping his victims half-naked, groping their naked torso and attacking their chest and eyes with a knife. Martino thankfully cuts to a flashback of a doll's eyes being gouged out to spare us those gory details, although he does not hesitate to kill off several victims at once, shockingly wrongfooting a viewer who expects them to be offed one at a time; and in a scene hinted at by the film's US poster, we watch through Jane's eyes as the murderer saws his victims to pieces. It's bloody violent stuff, but Martino works hard to offset blatant titillation with disturbing subtext.

Torso also parodies left-wing student culture, albeit in the somewhat befuddled and clueless fashion common at the time. As usual in sensationalist coverage of counterculture mockery and leering projection go hand in hand, from a student's pseudo-Marxist dismissal of Perugio as a 'common-sense bourgeois' to a comically overdrawn hippie commune, complete with drugs and free love. For me, though, the peak of the film's humour is a police officer's suggestion that after helping him solve the murders, the students 'can protest and riot when we're a bit reluctant to let you dismantle the state', a line so dated I laughed out loud. Not that rebellious students like me aren't trying to dismantle the state anymore: we are. But the uncomprehending rhetoric dismissing us as lazy troublemakers just ain't what it used to be.