Pile of Bodies

Tomorrow Kino Lorber’s Redemption line will be releasing two films – his last and his third from last, as it happens – by director Vernon Sewell: The Blood Beast Terror from 1968, and Burke & Hare from 1971. Burke & Hare is, of course, about the notorious grave robbers in 19th Century Scotland who sold fresh corpses to doctors, who purchased them in the name of science, donated corpses being rare at the time, until they decided people weren’t giving up the ghost fast enough or in sufficient quantities to satisfy their financial needs and therefore resorted to murder. I’ve now seen five different films inspired by this piece of criminal history, including John Landis’s recent non-remake Burke & Hare, Freddie Francis’s not great but still not bad adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s screenplay The Doctor and the Devils, and Val Lewton and Robert Wise’s The Body Snatcher, for which the Burke & Hare story is only a loose inspiration, but which remains the gold standard for this sort of thing.

Anyway, these Kino Lorber releases are instructive of a certain non-Hammer, non-Amicus strain of late 60s, early 70s British horror, that strain being of the “Well, this stuff’s pretty popular, so…” school of thought. Which is not to say, or even imply, that either film lacks entertainment value, but I have yet to figure out if they’re any good or not. It would also seem to be helpful that while The Blood Beast Terror is ostensibly a serious horror film, Burke & Hare is intended to be something of a black comedy (as is Landis’s film), but the lines between the two films and the two approaches can become rather blurry. The Blood Beast Terror, in particular, is a strange film. It stars a somewhat weary-looking Peter Cushing as a police detective investigating a series of deaths that could be the result of wild animal attacks, or possibly murder – whichever it is, the bodies have been almost drained of blood. Meanwhile, there’s this doctor named Menninger (Robert Flemyng) who is interested in moths, and is conducting strange experiments, and who has a weird, possibly lusty, daughter (Wanda Ventham), a doctor who very clearly is at the center of this whole thing, though what “this whole thing” actually is won’t be made clear, or clear-ish, until near the very end. But it has something to do with a moth creature. That much we find out way earlier.

The strangeness of The Blood Beast Terror doesn’t come from its story or visuals – although, in its way, that moth creature is quite something -- or anything like that, but rather from Sewell and screenwriter Peter Bryan’s strange way of stringing everything together. For instance, a character, another scientist played by William Wilde, is introduced at the very beginning finishing up a trip to Africa. When he returns to England he goes to see Menninger, a man he’s never met but with whom he shares certain professional interests. But this man who you’d think is going to have all sorts of impact on the story winds up being nothing more than a clue. More intriguingly, from a structural point of view – if that is the point of view being futzed with here – is a scene about a third of the way through the film involving a play being staged by Menninger’s medical students in his home. This is all part of a larger soiree, but we’re told this play is going to be having a full dress rehearsal, and the rather amazing thing is that Sewell shows us…well, for a little while I wondered if it wasn’t going to be the whole damn play. As it happens, we’re shown the entire last scene. I should have timed how long this lasts, but I’d guess it to be a good five minutes. We never even cut away to any other action going on in Menninger’s home – it’s all about the play. And the play doesn’t actually matter. The contents of the scene do give Menninger an idea for his mysterious experiments, but he could have gotten that idea anywhere, and it is in no way essential that we know how he got there anyway. I mean, it’s a mad scientist play, of the horror variety, so it’s got parallels or whatever, but it doesn’t mean anything. The rinky-dink nature of the play also requires that the scene be played for laughs (not unsuccessfully, it must be said). And so…what is this doing here? The most interesting thing about the play scene is that it reveals either that the playwright, a young medical student, is plagiarizing Mary Shelley, or that in the world of The Blood Beast Terror, Shelley’s Frankenstein doesn’t exist.

The relative goofiness of The Blood Beast Terror’s play scene is stretched to feature length in Burke & Hare, only this time it’s been slathered in bawdiness. Or “bawdiness.” Well, okay, bawdiness – I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the heart of the film’s good-natured salaciousness, Francoise Pascale, wasn’t easy on the eyes. But while I haven’t yet seen any films from Britain’s famously ribald Carry On series, from what I do know about them, if they’d ever gotten around to making Carry On, Burke & Hare it would have looked a lot like this. The story is well known, and anyhow I already pretty much summed it up earlier, but this time along with the grave robbing and murder, Sewell and screenwriter Ernle Bradford have thrown in a brothel that is frequented by doctors and medical students. So you have Burke (Derren Nesbitt) and Hare (Glynn Edwards) selling bodies to doctors, and then over here what you have is the brothel’s madam (Joan Carol) also selling bodies to doctors. But in a different way! Metaphorically! As opposed to literally! It’s not a very funny movie, is what all those ironic exclamation points are meant to convey. It does have a catchy theme song performed by The Scaffolds, a band that, I’ve gathered, was sort of like The Monkees if The Monkees had been a performance art project, which maybe they were.

So that’s Burke & Hare. It hits some good notes along the way, such as the scene where Burke and Hare, having murdered only the one person at this point, find themselves talking with their respective wives/girlfriends about where all this money suddenly came from, and gradually, but eerie ease, picking up as a group the idea that murder really might be the way to go with this, permanently. It’s sort of chilling in how unadorned the whole scene is. But again, crucially, it’s never funny. The music by Roger Webb seems to filtered in from the next studio over, which was recording music for Tom & Jerry. And I love Tom & Jerry (the original ones, not the later ones where they’re friends, or the weird-ass “Dicky Moe” ones), but using that style of music to accompany the madam going from peephole to peephole, watching all manner of crazy bedroom hijinks, all of which are essentially the same thing, and then shaking her head as though to say “What a world!” is, I have to say, ill-advised. Not that this tone paired with occasional callousness towards the fates of the film’s characters isn’t interesting, in a way, but it all piles up into a weird sort of airy mass of non-Amicus, non-Hammer silliness.

Capsule Reviews Which Are Actually Rather Long

The Hunter (d. Buzz Kulik) - What would have been terrific is if Steve McQueen's last film before his death in 1980 at age 50 had been really great. Or that he'd not died in the first place, but keeping our wishes manageable, The Hunter could have been a tense and gripping, stripped down thriller in the The Driver mode, but instead it is, in fact, quite thoroughly bad. Based, I have to think with a great sense of freedom to stray from the known facts, on the career of real-life bounty hunter Ralph "Poppa" Thorson (McQueen, of course), The Hunter feels exactly like the kind of made-for-TV movie that was so common and popular back in those days, and in fact director Buzz Kulik's best-known and easily most enduring work was on the made-for-TV Brian's Song. There's a loose, yet stitched together quality to The Hunter, as it clumsily tries to weave together elements of Thorson's private life -- which includes a former bounty, played by Levar Burton, he let off the hook because the young man is gadget-oriented and can fix things -- as an old-school macho fellow caught up in his modern-day lady's (the ever-delightful Kathryn Harrold) requests to accompany her pregnant self to this new thing they have called "Lamaze classes", and his life as a hardboiled skip tracer.

To underline the disparity, Kulik and his screenwriters (including Peter Hyams who, say what you want, wrote some good shit for Hal Holbrook to say in Capricorn One) toss in a lot of comic relief, mainly of the slapstick variety. The problem is, unlike Paul Newman, McQueen, who at this point was starting to age into Richard Widmark, did not possess a natural gift for comedy, so there's lots of mugging and clownish weariness. Add to that some of the most tedious action scenes, which stem from the weirdly anemic "bounty hunter" portion of our plot, I've ever seen, to the point where a chase through the city made me think "Shit is this still going on?", and you, like me, will soon find yourself feeling sort of depressed.

Hunger (d. Steve McQueen) - There's a -- I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a formula of movie dialogue that involves one character asking another character to explain something, usually a motivation, and the character being asked responds with an anecdote meant to hint at an answer without directly answering. So you'll have somebody say "Why did you become a cop?" and the cop will respond with something that begins "When I was seven years old, my dad got me a dog..." Although I don't doubt that writers I like have used this construction, I nevertheless hate it pretty profoundly. It doesn't have the stones to be stylized, and doesn't have the ear to be naturalistic. It pretends to be the latter, without realizing that nobody speaks in such naked metaphors, nor are they typically able to dredge up wonderfully illustrative childhood anecdotes for any occasion.

Whether I'm alone in hating this or not, I don't know, but I do think it's significant that it turns up in Hunger, a completely different Steve McQueen's 2008 film about Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and the hunger strike that ended his life in 1981 while he was imprisoned by the English government for...well, Hunger doesn't really worry about what for. It's rather more interested in transforming Sands' suffering into something religious -- the wasting away of his body (and what did Michael Fassbender do to himself here!?) takes on the holy aura of thorny crowns and spear wounds in the side. What Sands was in prison for had to do with his work in the Provisional IRA, the most brutal wing of Ireland's Republican terrorists through the late 60s, all of the 70s, and much of the 80s. No actual violent acts were ever pinned to Sands, but many gun charges were, and if anyone thinks that Sands wasn't at least an accomplice to violent terrorist acts, well, they'll probably be walking into an open manhole pretty soon.

None of this much matters, I guess, or according to some, as Hunger is less about politics than it is just a series of mostly quiet emotional imagery that records the build to Sands's decision, and the falling away of his body as he carries through with it. Except that all the clips of Margaret Thatcher speaking, it would seem, coldly about the hunger strike, in what is very nearly a silent film, is clearly about something else again.

Why the suffering on display in Hunger, the very explicit martyrdom, did not ping in the brains of critics as another example of what some of them regarded as crazed masochism in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I couldn't say, because the religion that was once at the heart of the Troubles, though subsequently got fogged up by centuries' worth of other things, is by no means absent from Hunger. But here there's a political element to the core story, without adding a filmmaker's bias, that is easy for some to hang their hats on. And when a priest (Liam Cunningham) pushes Sands for the basic truth behind his decision to starve himself to death and Sands responds with some creative writing bullshit about a foal he had to put out of its misery, an act of mercy which got him in trouble with a schoolmaster, everything just starts to make sense, doesn't it? Or doesn't it? The problems of Northern Ireland did not get easier as time went on. An easy moral stance changed over the decades so that a noble end was being sought through monstrous acts, and to defend the cause started to feel like you were defending the acts. Meanwhile, Hunger is a film that tries to impose on that time a very ugly clarity.

Dark of the Sun (d. Jack Cardiff) - On the subject of morality, legendary cinematographer and occasional director Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun, adapted from a novel by Wilbur Smith, immerses itself in the very rich moral swamp of mercenary armies. Made in 1968, the film is the kind of "men on a mission" movie that Quentin Tarantino claimed was his inspiration for Inglourious Basterds, even though that's not what that movie turned out to be. As deeply as I love Tarantino's film, there is a part of me, the part that routinely looks gift horses in their mouths, that wishes I could see a film all about the Basterds and their various adventures, because brother, films like Dark of the Sun ain't nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, Tarantino did go so far as to borrow parts of Jacques Loussier's score for his World War II epic, not to mention Dark of the Sun's star, Rod "Brief 'Im" Taylor, who not only costars here with Jim Brown, but reunites with his Time Machine costar Yvette Mimieux. The Taylor/Brown pairing turns out to be more significant, as Taylor's Captain Curry is hired by shady government and business types to ostensibly save a group of Congolese civilians from bands of marauders, but also to maybe grab that bag full of millions of dollars worth of diamonds while you're at it.

As someone who has a particular interest in cinematic violence, I'm fascinated by that curious part of the late 1960s from which Dark of the Sun comes, when an action film might include a shot of someone spraying a crowd of bad guys with a machine gun, each of whom clutch their chest and fall bloodlessly, no more traumatic to audiences than anything you might have seen from post-Code Hollywood, and then one second later show a guy getting stabbed in the face with a burning torch. If the violence in this film settles into anything, it settles into brutality, as was becoming the style at the time. Along with that, of course, must come the moral hand-wringing. On one hand, there's a good reason for that, as Jim Brown's Ruffo, Curry's right-hand-man, actually originally hails from the Congo, and would like their mission to be about something more than making money, and wants his willfully cynical friend to understand that. On the other hand, one of the mercenaries that hitches himself to their mission is actually an ex-Nazi, and when he causes the film to take a tragic turn late in the story, this leads to one of the better examples of someone clouding up and raining all over somebody else I've seen in a while, it also asks me to feel regret after the fact. Which is a little bit disingenuous, actually, and regardless the regret never took hold in me. But even before any of that happened, I wanted to know why in the world the team needed an ex-Nazi who was not just willing, but eager, to murder people with a chainsaw?

Still a good flick, though...

Night Creatures (d. Peter Graham Scott) - I've always been interested in the lesser known horror films from Hammer Studios, and this one certainly counts, despite starring Hammer stalwarts Peter Cushing and Oliver Reed. Reed, for once in his life, doesn't seem like he's about to start foaming from his mouth and smashing whiskey bottles over his head, and in fact plays the romantic lead in this rather curious story about a small English seaside village, during the 18th century, whose peaceful existence is disrupted by government officials, headed by Patrick Allen's Capt. Collier, who believe the village is smuggling hootch. Mix this with a subplot about the Marsh Phantoms, a wholly-unconvincing looking hoard of night-demons, I guess, who reportedly bring the unwary to a marshy grave, and the dishonorable Mr. Ash (Martin Benson), whose willingness to do whatever he needs to do to get what he wants, be it money or Imogene (Yvonne Romain), Reed's fiancee', jeopardizes the whole village. Which is smuggling hootch, by the way, as overseen by Rev. Blyss (Cushing) which is an interesting early revelation, and what's all this about the pirate, Captain Clegg, who is often heard about but never seen?

Certain plot elements function sort of as twists but are not at all hard to see looming, but none of that matters. Night Creatures seems to be about too many disparate things in the beginning, but winds up as entirely entertaining, and even unpredictable, obvious twists notwithstanding. What transpires as a result of those twists is both organic and emotional and somehow unforeseen. The damn thing just comes together. It does not aim as high as the best Hammer films, and what it is, in the end, is a yarn, but it's a damn good yarn, told by a crew of professionals, and boasting that great dusky blue stone look of, say, Brides of Dracula. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (d. Edgar Wright) - Edgar Wright's third film is simultaneously not as good as his previous two, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and miles more ambitious in terms of its visual style and scope. Based on a comic books series, my unfamiliarity with which somehow proves to me that I'm too much of a geek, and not enough of a geek, to really belong anywhere in this crazy, lonely old world, by Bryan Lee O'Malley, it's about Scott Pilgrim's (Michael Cera) love life, the turmoils of which are ordinary at their core, but heightened into the world of superhero comics and video games so that in order to cement his relationship with Ramona Flowers (a, let's face it, completely fetching Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, as far as he knows, he has to defeat her seven ex-significant others in Mortal Kombat-style battle. Much of this is quite funny (this may seem like nothing to you, but Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World includes the funniest washing of a character's hands after they've urinated that has ever been put on screen), and the film, not just shot but also set in Toronto, has a nice, unique look that is both snowy in an everyday sort of way, and in the mildly stylized way of a comic panel. Wright really knows what he's doing in terms of transplanting the feel of reading a comic book, moving one's eyes across the panels, to film, with such seemingly simple ideas as using sound effects that you both hear and "see", which arc into the next scene. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

But the film also does sort of wear out its welcome. The "seven exes" thing loses its verve after a couple, or a few, or anyway that verve is scattered, to the point that they arbitrarily and even wearily double up on the exes towards the end. And while some of the humor is delightfully anti-hipster (every character in the film being a member of that species), it is occasionally as tone-deaf as any hipster you might imagine. For instance, ironic Bollywood is never going to be welcome. Still, Michael Cera, whose casting was the cause of some controversy by the comic's fans at the time, was very good. Maybe my ignorance is helping me immeasurably here, but in terms of the movie, it's the movie that counts, right? And anyway, if you think Cera in this film is simply rehashing George Michael from Arrested Development, then you might be losing your ability to tell the difference between two different things.

As a final kudos, I would like to note that Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, with the following exchange from Scott and Ramona's first date, captures male thought patterns about as well as I've ever seen:

Ramona: I think an act of God is as good an excuse for a bad date as any.
Scott: This was a date?
Ramona: Did I say date? It was a slip of the tongue.
Scott: Tongue...

Collection Project Capsule Reviews: We Knows What We Knows and We Keeps it to Ourselves

From Beyond the Grave (d. Kevin Connor) - This was the last of Amicus's series of anthology horror films, and it's a classic, in its way. I wouldn't claim that From Beyond the Grave is as consistently involving as earlier such films, either by Amicus (like, say, Asylum) or not (Dead of Night, which probably has yet to be beat, in this horror subgenre), but it sticks to a strong and proven formula by pulling its stories from the work of a single horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Robert Bloch seemed to be Amicus's go-to for this sort of thing, but not here), and gluing everything together with a thin, but still intriguing wrap-around story, which features Peter Cushing as the proprietor of an antiques shop who seems to judge people based on whether or not they wish to talk him down in price. Either way, though, if you buy something from his store, or even plan to buy something, then your goose is most likely cooked.
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The quality of the stories is a bit sporadic, with the worst coming in the third out of four -- it stars Ian Carmichael as a man who talks Cushing down on a snuff box. As Carmichael leaves the shop, Cushing says "I hope you enjoy snuffing it", which gives a hint that this story is going to be the "funny" one, which was unfortunately part of the routine, more often than not. The gist is that Carmichael now has an elemental hanging around on his shoulder. An elemental is an invisible and malicious spirit, and Carmichael's, upon his return home, tries to murder his wife (Nyree Dawn Porter). They call a clairvoyant (Margaret Leighton), who Carmichael met on the train home, and whose warnings about the elemental were blithely dismissed. Well, now who looks stupid. Leighton is given the sorry role of trying to be funny without having anything actually funny to say, and much of this story, breezy as it is, comes off as a chore. What's strange about it, though, is the ending turns out to actually be quite creepy, shifting from a light-hearted tale of haunting to, in its final moments, one of genuine demonic evil. It's hard to tell if this tonal shift really works, but it's nevertheless appreciated, as it makes From Beyond the Grave's weak middle-to-end pretty bracing, in a chilling sort of way.

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Meanwhile, the best story, and by far the strangest, comes just before, and it stars Ian Bannen as a sad-sack office worker whose wife despises him. He shows kindness to Donald Pleasance, an old soldier selling a meager trade on the corner, and even seeks to impress the old man by claiming a military past for himself. This lie draws him to Cushing's shop, where he tries to buy a medal to prove his past, and claims, to Cushing, that he's replacing a medal he lost. But he needs a particular certificate to show he's due such a medal, and not having one, can't buy the medal. And he never gets it, but that doesn't stop the curse of Cushing's shop from dragging this already sad man down even further into the weird and blackish world of Pleasance and his daughter (played by Angela Pleasance), a grinning, big-eyed void of a girl who somehow draws Bannen to her, due likely to her general niceness and availability.

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This one, the Bannen/Pleasance story, is, as I said, quite strange, and beautifully played by Bannen and the two Pleasances. There is something about Bannen that makes him seem particularly undeserving of his fate, and the idea that Cushing's shop might only punish those who've sinned (however small that sin might seem to us) is smashed to rubble here. Cushing's shop is called "Temptations, Limited.", but poor Bannen is tempted only to go outside of his family to find someone who might be nice to him. He just didn't know how deeply within his family the bad blood actually ran.

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Spider (d. David Cronenberg) - Speaking, as I was recently, about transitional films in the career of David Cronenberg, Spider, his adaptation of the Patrick McGrath novel about a deeply disturbed husk (Ralph Fiennes in the film) newly released from an insane asylum only to find his past rising up to remind him why he was locked up in the first place, strikes me as especially important. If you've read McGrath's novel, you know that it's not entirely lacking in the kind of grotesque imagery that a younger Cronenberg would have made a meal of: for instance, there's a potato that, when you cut it, bleeds, and a jug of milk in which Spider finds a tiny, shriveled, lifeless fetus (he drinks the milk anyway). McGrath has said that when Cronenberg signed on for the film, he was very excited to see how the director would execute some of those images, but Cronenberg fooled everybody by not filming any of it. Instead, Spider is almost relentlessly quiet and patient, because while co-stars Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson, both excellent, kick up a storm playing two or three versions of their characters, every so often in the same scene, Fiennes barely speaks. At least, he barely says anything you can understand, instead communicating largely to himself in whispered mumbles, and scribbling in his diary, in an alien alphabet. His hallucinations are almost functional in that they deal specifically with who he is and why he is where is, and where that is. Cronenberg has stripped away the strong indications of madness McGrath supplied him with, and instead focused on evidence that is somehow both more clear and more obscure.
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Spider is the kind of story that has a twist, but in this case, instead of rendering what's come before irrelevent, everything seems so much sadder at the end. Fiennes' stunning performance isn't a show-boat "I'm crazy!" piece of acting, but instead so completely removed from general humanity that unless the camera is pointing right at his face or nicotine-stained fingers, you might think he's simply bled out into the background. Cronenberg has dotted the film with a number of strong supporting actors -- such as Lynn Redgrave as Spider's unsympathetic landlady, and John Neville as his eternally fascinated and also-mad fellow tenant -- and has even made room for some of his often ignored humor ("I got a letter today from that Sophia Loren." "Oh, and what did she want?"). But most interesting of all is the realization that Cronenberg's previous film was eXistenZ, which was full of meat guns that shot teeth and fleshy game controllers whose penises you plugged into your spine. With that film, he seems to have washed his early work completely out of his system. I'd say "for better or worse", but Spider is one of his very best films, so I'm not sure there's an answer to give, or a choice to be made.