The Escapees: or, a women-in-a-mental-asylum triple-feature

It all started a few months ago when I had the opportunity to watch John Carpenter's new flick The Ward and it has come around to a little-known (to me, anyway) Jean Rollin flick called The Escapees, when I came across the Salvation UK DVD quite unintentionally in a little place off of Charing Cross Road in London. Not only was I not looking for this particular DVD, I actually had no idea the film even existed. I was intrigued, but not quite enough to delve into a blind purchase. Well, not immediately, anyway.

It was early this November when I saw Carpenter's The Ward, and it was a decent enough experience. After the disappointing Ghosts of Mars (his last actual feature film) and the completely unrecognizable-as-Carpenter Pro-Life, I went into The Ward with an understandable amount of trepidation. What was interesting, right off the bat, is that this is the first John Carpenter flick I can remember seeing that wasn't shot in Cinemascope. Nope, this sucker was 1.85:1. That seemed alright to me because the last thing of Carpenter's I'd seen and enjoyed was his Masters of Horror television episode Cigarette Burns, and what the opening scenes of The Ward felt like to me was that he was capturing the more intimate, smaller-aspect feeling of Masters of Horror. However, it did not end there... The story of The Ward is basically about a young woman (Amber Heard) who is committed to an insane asylum where some pretty strange goings-ons are transpiring amidst an alarmingly lengthening list of missing female patients. Set-up as a horror mystery, this turns out to be one of Carpenter's best films of recent times – certainly since the killer In the Mouth of Madness (which is, oddly enough, another flick about people going insane). There are some truly inspired scenes in The Ward, even evoking such Carpenter classics as The Thing and Halloween. However, before I get too carried away, The Ward won't be for everyone. Even as it evokes classic Carpenter is isn't classic Carpenter, it's an amiable enough effort that some people (myself excluded) might find predictable and somewhat by-the-numbers. I thought it was a good take on a classic Ten Little Indians scenario. Of course, the sub-plot of the film is leading lady Amber Heard trying to get the fuck out of there. Much like the opening premise of Jean Rollin's The Escapees...

And this is basically the only plot-thrust in Zack Snyder's otherwise completely plotless Sucker Punch, which I had the pleasure of viewing just this December. After reading some horrendous reviews of his first self-penned directorial effort, I steered clear of this sucker for ages. So what changed my mind? Well, that was thanks to discovering the existence of The Escapees, of course. I couldn't get it out of my head that this overblown Hollywood mega-budgeted film had essentially lifted the plot from a little old Jean Rollin flick from the early eighties. I'd say Snyder's flick is even more exploitive than Rollin's, at least Rollins has a gorgeous dreamlike narrative that swings it into the usual realm of arthouse fantasy. Snyder's film, for all its cold awesomeness, is pure exploitation fantasy as a handful of forgettably-written young female characters spend the entire film swinging from one reality to the next in order to ultimately escape the mental asylum they've all been committed to. It's a non-linear symphony of war machines, burlesque performances and fetishistic Bedlam narratives, intertwined with no real purpose other than eye candy. The film exists as a video-game puzzle, and while it is mostly cool to sit through, it's a puzzle that exists only because it is a puzzle (with eye candy), with no satisfying characters, plot or conclusion. In fact, the conclusion not only does not make sense, but it fails to justify the entire film. Still, I might give this one a second chance in the future. In the meantime, there area better things to experience...

Like Rollin's film, where two girls committed to an asylum decide to escape. This actually happens pretty much immediately, so this isn't quite the girls-trapped-in-a-mental-asylum adventure I had been expecting. However, much like Rollin's earlier (and highly awesome) Requiem for a Vampire, this is a two-girls-on-the-run odyssey. After fleeing the asylum, they hook up with a band of traveling musicians/strippers who put on stripping road-shows behind railroad tracks. They eventually befriend some of the biker audience members, and the two girls, whose personalities clash and are extremely at odds when the road adventure begins, become friends. That's really it, there's not much more to say about this subtle, mature and surprisingly sweet story. The Escapees is not bizarre like Requiem for a Vampire, it's actually a straight-ahead road story about the two girls' growing friendship. In fact, there's barely even any nudity in this Rollin picture, and the brief scenes of sex are mild and non-exploitative, serving to contribute to the characters and the story. And in fact, this might be Rollin's best work. It's an engaging film and wonderfully shot. At nearly an hour and fifty minutes, one of Rollin's longer flicks (ignore the printed running time on the back of the Redemption DVD box 'cause it's wrong), the time really just flew by as I wallowed in the lushness of the movie. At the end, in true Rollin genre style, it does get wacky as a botched lesbian rape attempt (featuring Rollin regular babe Brigitte Lahaie) turns into an all out machine-gun shoot-out with an army of cops, and somehow, winds up with the two girls walking into the sunset. I'd have to say that this is probably the best acting I've ever seen in one of Rollin's films as well. I'd like to call The Escapees a minor gem, but to me, it's much more than minor. A hidden gem, or a criminally neglected gem, seemingly forgotten about in Rollin's usual catalogue of the fantastique. But a real gem. I urge Rollin fans to check it out.

-V.

Behind Convent Walls

..Is Walerian Borowczyk's simple nunsploitation film worth writing about? What could I say that isn't going to be said better on the special features of the most recent DVD release (uncut from Nouveaux Pictures)? Well, nothing critical, really. But yes, the film is worth talking about, for several reasons, and there are things to say.

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Something on the more interesting side of this erotic showpiece (besides the erotic showpieces, I mean) is the film's narrative structure, which for nearly the first two-thirds is purely nunsploitation, though arguably this is the fetishistic sub-genre at its finest. Because thankfully, Walerian Borowczyk is a master at cinematic eroticism; he knows what to shoot, how to shoot it, and has it play like true erotic cinema, never cheap pornography. He and Tinto Brass are probably the only two filmmakers with this deeply embedded talent of bringing charged sex to the cinema screen on such an affecting level, something to give Eyes Wide Shut a run for its money. Walerian's films are not slick, yet they have that same commercial quality that comes from talent rather than textbook, much like the early films of Scorsese or Romero. In fact, Behind Convent Walls even has a slight documentary feel to it, in spite of the fact that the last 40 minutes actually moves from its zone of sheer sexploitation to suddenly delve into a comic-book story of corruption, church politics, and Catholic repression, and that it seems a perfectly natural transition in Walerian's film, which makes it appear that this story shift had been the intention all along. Cinematically, much like Mean Streets or Martin, the film otherwise feels somewhat improvised.

At the end of the day, this film, like others of Walerian's and Brass', is really a joyous celebration of sex and the human condition. And as a storyteller, his feature films, like Convent or The Beast, are far more successful than when his talents are put out towards shorter anthology segments (as in Immoral Women). Borowczyk's talents shine in longer contexts, where as a filmmaker, his satirical voice is much more confident instead of purely jokey in his shorter narratives. Conversely, fellow erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass generally displays the opposite talent when it comes to narrative length.

The funny thing is that generally, when it comes to cinematic erotica, these aren't really the types of films that I bother to commit characters' names to mind. Either they stand out visually (The Frightened Woman) or they blend into the group shenanigans, and that is especially true here, where the story concerns an entire convent of nuns who are all dressed –or undressed— the same way. And what goes on behind those convent walls is slightly distracting, as well...

Much like The Beast (and even Immoral Women, which was a little too cutesy-poo for my liking) the erotica is true and beautifully handled, the camera movements in Convent specifically, while docu-esque, was handled by none over than the cinematographer of Suspiria, giving Walerian's film a gorgeous voyeuristic personality.

And speaking of gorgeous, check out this convent...(!) The beautiful nuns serve not only the film's eroticism, but manage to bring this flick into the realm of pure fantasy and nunsploitation while maintaining its verisimilitude, exactly where it wants to be.

.-V.

Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

Well, after some build-up, I finally had the chance to watch Jess Franco's Lorna: The Exorcist. Okay, now, where to start...? Perhaps I should mention – then again, perhaps it goes without saying – that there is nary an exorcist to be found in the film. Nor any attempt at an exorcism. There is a Lorna, however, and we first see her in a ten-minute lesbian romp with Franco muse Lina Romay (as Linda). We soon discover that this is some sort of lesbian fantasy on Linda's part, and as the plot thickens, we find that Lorna is capable of bodily possession. The first clue to this comes from the poor girl who spends the film half-naked in a hospital for the insane, locked in a room and watched over by a doctor played by none other than Jess Franco himself, in scenes that could have been lifted from a handful of other Franco films. The insane girl rants her nights away calling for Lorna. Lorna, we find out, has a direct connection to Linda and her parents in the film, and Lorna soon appears in the flesh to Linda (in yet another lesbian scenario, the third one between the pair at this point) while somehow placing a curse on Linda's mother. Lorna then doesn't so much jump from body to body as she does lesbian encounter to lesbian encounter. And there is plenty of heterosexual scenarios, too, as Linda's father Patrick has more sex in twenty-five minutes than most of us have had all week. As watchable as all these shenanigans are, sadly, this is not one of Franco's more elegant nor graceful efforts. The camerawork is sloppy (okay, no surprise, right?) and the editing is just grating (again, not a big shock), but this is a real shame because Lorna (the film) boasts some of the finest locations Franco has ever filmed at, both exterior and interior. With more care, this could have been a gorgeous entry in the euro-smut genre, and possibly a minor gem. As it is, there are far too many technical distractions, even for a Franco film, as the subject matter, as well as the performances portraying the plot, are not nearly as charming or kitschy as some of his more famous efforts. That being said, the one thing that does make the film worthwhile is Lina Romay herself, who has rarely seemed more sensuous on screen. If nothing else, Franco certainly knows how to shoot a girl.

-V

A Lady Above Suspicion, A Frightened Woman.

About a week ago I went down to London's Roxy Bar & Screen for Filmbar 70's presentation of Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion. Although I consider myself a fan of Luciano Ercoli's films, I had not seen this one in particular, dispite having owned the Blue Underground DVD since 2006. This was one of those “lost in the collection:” titles. Strangely enough, I did bring a digital copy of it along with me to London this summer, but when I saw that Filmbar 70 would be hosting a big-screen presentation of this giallo, I saved my first viewing for this event. I was a little surprised to see actress Susan Scott (Nieves Navarro) take second fiddle in this arthouse-giallo, as she's the typical (if not the epitome) giallo female, and as I'd first seen her having lead roles in husband Luciano Ercoli's latter films, Death Walks at Midnight and Death Walks in High Heels. That being said, her role in Forbidden Photos is definitely striking and even, dare I say, slightly more memorable that Dagmar Lassander's lead performance (though she's pretty awesome, too), in this Lenzi-esque early giallo entry. The idea for Forbidden Photos relies on the trendy sixties-style Italio thrillers, where corrupt people try to drive each other insane with twisted, convoluted plots – films which were far more influenced by Les Diaboliques than any of the later gialli from the seventies, which focused more on sex and flamboyantly bloody murders (see again, Death Walks at Midnight). But even with the earlier giallo entry, Luciano Ercoli displays a profound flair for bringing in a cheap thriller disguised as stylish art, something that I'm coming to have more of an appreciation for each time I watch his films.

Strangely enough, I'd come across leading lady Dagmar Lassander a second time in as many weeks when I finally took a couple of hours to watch The Frightened Woman. On the surface (or rather, the DVD cover), Piero Schivazappa's film looks like a pseudo-psychedelic sixties sado-masochistic sex romp devoid of plot and drama. Boy, was I wrong. Sure, there's plenty of sexual (not sex) set-pieces and the entire design of the film is pretty effin' groovy, like Danger Diabolik if it had been designed for early Penthouse, but dammit if this film didn't actually have a story, and it was sincerely engaging. Okay, so chalk this one up to the surprise of the week.

I'm excited now to revisit, or discover, some of Dagmar's other works now that she's in the front of my mind. I must've seen her in Fulci's The Black Cat or Bava's Hatchet for a Honeymoon, but to see this Prague actress really kick some ass, you can't do better than Forbidden Photos and The Frightened Woman. Or possibly Werewolf Woman.

-V.

The cause of being erratic

I do have to apologize for the erratic (read: not too damn many) postings this summer, and now fall. It wasn't my fault! No, actually, it was my damn fault, I just wanted to say that while picturing John Belushi on his knees in a tunnel begging for his life to a pissed-off AK-47 swinging post-princess-leia Carrie Fisher. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you likely need to sort that out immediately and quit reading this blog. Okay, for those of you still with me, again, my apologies. I intend to dedicate far more time to this blog in the coming months and to expand the dialog to some other filmmakers as I had with the Immoral Tales retrospective many moons ago. Upcoming, I'm intending a thorough re-examination of She Killed in Ecstasy and as well we'll have an exclusive look at Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion as screened by Filmbar 70 at London's Roxy Bar & Screen. That's later this month. As for now, with Brivido Giallo, we're in the midst of principal photography on a new experimental Euro-thriller feature film, to be wrapped by November 5th and starting post-production later this year, or early January.

-V.

Scala Forever season in London

Or: "A look at some London culture by someone from somewhere else".

In London, 2009, I was hunting around an HMV store when I found a Blu-ray release of Richard Stanley's "Hardware" I've always been strangely attracted to this film, something about it's post-punk, post-apocalyptic attitude, I guess. I didn't pick it up immediately as we were about to be heading back to Vancouver in a couple of weeks. I checked it out on the internet and found that Severin Films was set to release this gem a few months ahead, anyway, so I waited. (incidentally, this is one of the few titles I'd seen on VHS, and then was never able to track it down again until the Blu-ray release - totally skipping a whole media generation!) When I did finally get to watch Hardware again, I was excited all over again, it had been a long time. What was great was that Severin had also included a documentary on the days that Richard Stanley had worked at The Scala theatre at King's Cross in London. This was the first time I'd ever heard of it, and it seriously changed my life.

Unfortunaly, after this prompted some further wikipedia searching which unearthed some sad news. The Scala had never re-opened after a string of bad luck, starting with the suing by Warner Brothers at Stanley Kubrick's insistence, in 1993. Now it was just a night club.

Two years later, June 2011: I find myself back in London. Somewhat indefinitely, I guess you could say. After six days of re-orienting myself, I made it down to the Roxy Bar & Screen where a couple of amiable fellas named Justin and Adam, who run the Filmbar 70 screenings in London, started chatting with me as I hung out at one of the tables outside the front doors on Borough High Street with a pint. Adam told me that they were going to be launching a massive six-week screening schedule for something that they were calling "Scala Forever". I knew what The Scala was, or had been, and I'd thought I'd heard him incorrectly, so I asked him if he could spell it while I made a note of it. S-C-A-L-A ..."Oh, Scala!?!" "Yeah," he said, "Scala Forever." I asked if The Scala had re-opened as a theatre, my voice surely filled with hope and excitement, and he told me no, that the screenings were in honour of the old Scala, which had indeed come to a finalizing demise in '93.

August 23, 2011: I went to my first of the Scala Screenings (the whole schedule is now about a week and a half in) and London writer David L Hayles was talking about the old experiences there, and his experiences with Russ Meyer. We were about to watch a double-feature of Meyer films, Mondo Topless and the classic post-sixties-culture-shocker Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It was at this screening I met, for the second time only, a friend-of-a-friend named Tony. Turns out Tony used to run the Psychotronic store inside the old Scala and now has a store up in Camden, where you might be able to catch him once in a while. The man is a huge Jess Franco fan. He's been to Jess Franco's house, watching Franco's own flicks with him, and had dinner made for them by Lina Romay. He told me a lot of other stories, too, and with us both having an affinity for whacked-out sixties culture, we were able to quickly chat the time away until our other friends arrived and the screening began.

When I visit Tony and his Camden shop, at some point in the near future, I plan to give a full report on his seemingly immense collection of worldwide Jess Franco paraphernalia (depending on if I can get some good photographs or not). He's been collecting Franco's films since the 80's, and has acquired some strange titles on foreign videotape. These I would like to see!

But until then-- well, I don't know what. I'll try to survive more of the Scala Forever season. And I do mean survive. There are some screening sets that run from seven at night until eight the next morning. I'm going to give the 80's all-nighter a try.

-V.

Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden

Yes, alright, this is a.k.a. “Succubus”, and I know I wrote about this flick upon my first re-discovery of it a few years back when Blue Underground re-released this sucker on DVD. If any Jess Franco film is primed to be re-released in HD it's this one. A lot of the cinematography is soft, but it's also lush. Actually, a lot of the photography in this film, right from the start of the opening credits (over various shots, some repeated, of various artworks), is pretty tongue-in-cheek. It's like a sexy psychedelic comedy of perversions.

After the artwork the first actual shot of the film is star Janine Reynaud in a sado-masochistic sexual performance set-piece (dressed in black vinyl whipping a semi-nude blonde strapped to a wooden X), something Franco would repeat several times throughout his career in the far more famous “Vampyros Lesbos”, and far more explicitly, in “Exorcism & Black Masses”. This may have been pretty controversial in the swingin' sixties (maybe) but it really just comes off as cutely-sexy now. Of course, the fact that the scene cuts away to an applauding audience just contributes to the fun side of this flick.

Janine Reynaud had a sexual androgynous look, but she's definitely filled with sex appeal. Jack Taylor walks in on her lounging on his couch:

“What are you doing here?”

“I was bored, so I came to your apartment, do you mind?”

“No.”

To which she then gyrates into a semi-tease dance in front of the record player. Pretty awesome. And she definitely had a set of legs on her. She can be a real heartstopper even when she's not actually taking her clothes off, and I know I've said this before, but Franco really knew how to shoot the best of his attractive actresses. His leading ladies were often (fuck that, ALWAYS) the best asset his films had. Even within the Ed Wood-esque “realism” of Franco's cinematic world, the leading actresses shone out like bright diamonds and gave most of his films a timeless charm. Reynaud does eventually disrobe, but then that's where the melodrama seems to start – while the movie retains it's initial tongue-in-cheek quality. Around this time (we're about 13 minutes in at this point) the film also veers off into its intercutting of beautifully soft psychedelic photography. Almost a cinematic rambling by Franco, it's nevertheless hard to peel the eyeballs away from the screen, thought it might be out of sheer campy curiosity as opposed to any kind of driving narrative, but that, what would one else expect? It's these sequences, actually, that really give Succubus a life and identity of its own, which is actually somewhat important for a film contained in a director's repertoire that is as vast as Franco's. Like Euginie De Sade, however, I feel like this movie would've benefited greatly from a driving soundtrack as opposed to the running voice-over narrative during these lengthy psychedelic sequences. But the, that might've been too artsy even for Franco. It's within this narrative we learn more of the association of the idea of the film to it's original title: Necronomicon. And while the film's original title in an obvious Lovecraft reference, leave it up to Franco to inject the idea of Marquis De Sade into his story, clearly making it more about the sexual than the satanic. (Yet there's even reference to Poe's works later on in the film).

In Succubus, Janine Reynaud seems like an all-in, assured, and confident actress exuding her hypnotic charm throughout, whether doing a strip tease, wandering through a psychedelic fog, or crawling around on the floor in the midst of a partly in her panties while the other guests intimidate her like a (literal) pack of crazy dogs. But she's also a commanding presence, easily commandeering the viewer's attention in spite of the terrible English over-dubbing and seemingly in the face of the film's sporadic overt cheesiness – or at least until we get two-thirds in where we get to some heavy and far-out Twilight Zone territory, with the requisite trippy/groovy soundscape. This is all sort of a Jess Franco allegory on the sixties drug/fear-of-drugs culture that was also portrayed in several American Roger Corman productions circa the same era. And amazingly, there's a shot at the hour-mark that's actually been aped by Luc Besson in “Subway”, and re-aped for Spielberg's “Minority Report”. Though I could never say with complete confidence this was at all intentional aping.

By the end of the film, we wind up back where we started (in a manner of speaking) with Janine Reynaud lying in Jack Taylor's pad, where he finds her sprawled out on some cushions following her psychedelic journey that may or may not have at some point turned homicidal. Succubus is actually quite a charming and clever little gem of a film.

Janine Reynaud is best known for this Franco film, as well as his “Two Undercover Angels” and “Kiss Me Monster” back-to-back female-Bond-esque kitschy comedies; and for Sergio Martino's “Case of the Scorpion's Tale”, and she appears to have quit acting somewhere around 1975-1978. There is a vague rumor that she had married an American millionaire and retired to Texas. Not much else is known about this sometimes stoic and always alluring talent.

Here's to you, Janine Reynaud! And to what is, for the moment, my favorite Franco film.

-V.