And now, an Unused Article originally written for Absolute Underground...

Cabin Fever (and Streaming the Horror)

No, not Cabin Fever the film, cabin fever as in cabin fever – being locked up indoors for long periods of time without much relief from the situation. Anyone experiencing the wet cold winters in Canada (or those who have seen The Shining a thousand times) will know what I'm getting at. Many years ago, barely into my double-digits age, there was a long summer that was just as wet as any winter Vancouver had ever seen, and I'd spent my days – quite literally, every day that August month, walking back and forth to the local video store and spending a few dollars on one or two tapes at a time, trekking through the rain to bring them back to my house where I'd hole up in the basement den and watch movies like Out of Bounds and Friday the 13^th Part V. The downstairs den wasn't really in a basement – not quite. We lived in one of those architecturally unique Vancouver homes where the foyer was the only part of the house that was even close to ground-level. Then you'd have to choose your destination: upstairs, a storey-and-a-half over the driveway, or downstairs, half-buried into the ground, where all the windows were half-height and set closer up to the low ceilings so that you could see over the grass on the front lawn. Anyway, it was down in that sort-of basement that I'd spent that wet summer getting an education in exploitation cinema. However, it isn't 1985 anymore, and you should consider yourself lucky if you still have an actual operating video rental store near where you live.

And now some really good horror can be found on most of the mainstream VOD streaming services now – the only problem, I find, is often how the search algorithms are set up on these platforms (not very horror-fan-friendly, in my opinion), but we'll get to that soon. For right now I thought it might be cool to feature some of the horror gens I've found streaming directly into my own home, especially for those downpouring days where you really don't want to leave the house.

Taking Netflix for a spin, while I have come across a few said gems, this is actually the streaming platform that I find the most frustration when it comes to its search options. However, the ones that I have discovered have been unexpectedly good – the Netflix “Original” slowburn gothic horror film I Am the Pretty Things that Lives in the House has a palpable Stephen King / Shirley Jackson literary-horror feel to its central ghost story and outlaying flashback scenes, making for a worthwhile entry in the haunted house canon. Another good haunting lies in the indie arthouse horror film Darling, a quick Larry Fessenden-produced romp that gives us its ghost story laced with madness and generous helpings of dark humour. The Bottom of the World, unavailable on any physical home media format in North America so there's no other choice but to stream it, stars Jenna Malone (from Neon Demon) in a similarly hallucinatory narrative as she becomes wrapped in a maze of subconscious and other-worldly realities; it's another quick arthouse genre film (around 80 minutes) that feels like an inspired collision between Twin Peaks, Psycho, and Jacob's Ladder. Bottom of the World is actually one of my favourites from Netflix, along with the weirdly erotic and murdery Sun Choke, which stars classic genre fave Barbara “Re-Animator” Crampton in what I think is one of her best screen performances ever. One of the best straight-hitting horrors on Netflix, though, in terms of sheer intensity and suspense, is Hush, which takes place all in one night when a deaf and mute woman is terrorized by a violent and clever home invader.

The streaming platform Crave TV is, as you'd probably guessed with the name, focused on television series – some old, and a lot that are very new. Here you'll find the Stephen King / JJ Abrams supernatural horror series Castle Rock, and while Stephen King did not write any of the series' episodes (it's based on a world created by King in his horror literature), the first 10-part season is, appropriately, very Stephen King in feel and atmosphere, as the 10-part story rolls out itself much like a novel. But it was David Lynch's return to Twin Peaks that really floored me – this 18-episode limited series from 2017 takes place 25 years after the last time we were invited to visit the town of Twin Peaks, and everyone one of those 18 episodes was directed by Lynch himself. This hallucinatory, genre-bending return to Twin Peaks does boast a couple of episodes that are outright horror, and horror underlies most of what's going on in a very emotional level where Lynch brings us his subconsciously deep view of loss and agony, to an ultimately haunting conclusion. One professional critic had opted to maintain that the return to Twin Peaks was some of the best “cinema” of our time, stating that in this age of digital streaming, the lines between “television” and “cinema” continue to blur closer together.

Continuing my recent TV-series obsession, Amazon Prime has the first seasons of Preacher, which I've been wholly addicted to (based on the graphic novel series by Garth Ennis). I have a preference to the Amazon VOD platform for two reasons: 1. Unlike most of the titles available through Netflix, there are tons of horror and giallo films that date earlier than 2015, and you can also find a slew of wild independent genre films like the over-the-top Peelers, and the giallo-inspired Glass and The Editor. And reason number 2, the search-links are similar to what we're used to seeing on Amazon's shopping website, so if you see a title that looks interesting, it's easy to open up a whole line of selections that other “Customers Who Watched This Also Watched”, and thereby accessing hundreds of titles that may have gone unrepresented in the initial homepage categories. Through this somewhat intuitive browsing mode, I found a couple of inspired independent horror films – from 2012, a German take on the cannibal subgenre titled (very appropriately) Cannibal Diner, which admittedly does not have a high rating on the imdb, but I personally found it to be fast-paced and very enjoyable with an engaging (and nearly all-female) cast of characters, and it relies so heavily on the genre's tropes that it's almost impossible not to find it bloody charming. Not a lot of violence until near the end, which I didn't mind, and what there was was fairly gory – the story is basically a young woman who finds herself lost in the woods runs afoul of a Texas Chainsaw-type of family in an abandoned chemical factory.

I feel compelled to mention that Amazon Prime is one of the only places you'll find Spike Lee's gorgeous and thoughtful vampire remake of the 70s cult film Ganja and Hess – Lee's version re-titled Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Also on Amazon's streaming service we'll find another Larry Fessenden indie film (actually, we'll find a lot of things, from the films of Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci to the crazy flicks of Charles Band's Full Moon) – called Silver Bullets, and despite what Amazon will tell you, Silver Bullets was not produced in 1970; rather it's a modern low-budget erotic and existential movie from 2011 that eventually turns into a horror movie, after folding dream- and nightmare-fantasies over its own neo-realism and into the fantastic cinema of, well, werewolf films.

A lot of the independent horror films featured on these streaming services came from film festivals like SXSW, and now without the video stores of yesteryear to bring them in front of genre audiences, a lot of them are leaping directly from the festival circuit to Video-On-Demand platforms. And while it's probably abundantly clear that a large chunk of these personal horror selections lean towards the kaleidoscopic, I have found something hugely engaging and even inspiring with each of them, whether they're 75 minutes or 18 hours long. Follow this list and you'll certainly be in for a mindbending end to your winter months.

-Vince D'Amato

https://darksidereleasing.com

(Cannibal Diner)

(Da Sweet Blood of Jesus)

(Darling)

(Hush)

(I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the Walls)

(Silver Bullets)

(Sun Choke)

(Twin Peaks -- Revisited)

Issue #69 - The Absolute Underground Papers

(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #69 - originally published April, 2016)

It was the summer of 1994 that I walked into the little corner store – an independent retailer – at Richards & Pender Street in Vancouver. It was primarily music, a used and collectible record store; the proprietor also had a lot of CDs – but in the far back corner of the store, as far away from the summer sun streaming in through the large glass windows as physically possible, was a small wooden thrift-store bookshelf that held, in no discernible order whatsoever, used VHS tapes of all genres. Interestingly, there were no mainstream Hollywood movies there on that shelf. There were a couple of 80s horror films that starred a very young Bill Paxton, and a weird-looking horror-thriller that starred Sting and was directed by celebrated filmmaker Robert Altman with I title I have never again come across since that day (and can no longer remember what it was). Attempts to find this film on the internet have been fruitless, as well, and possibly the VHS cover was using an alternate title; this happened quite a bit in those days. I still remember Uumberto Lenzi's Nightmare City and its Canadian-release VHS cover from the early 80s – a naked woman hanging upside-down with her nipple torn off, and the alternative title “City of the Walking Dead” partially obscuring said ripped-off nipple. Also long forgotten was the name of this little corner used-record shop, the shop itself has been gone for decades now, replacing by an ever-increasingly dilapidated convenience store that is somehow, inexplicably, still in operation to this day. I do remember, however, having a lively conversation with the proprietor when I brought the used VHS tape of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator up to his counter to purchase. He was a tall, young-ish man with a sore-looking condition of skin psoriasis all over his otherwise pale face. I was about to pay $9.95 plus tax for this used Re-Animator tape that had be re-packed in a black Amaray clamshell by some unknown video store long before it ever wound up at this guy's shop, and he proceeded to explain to me why the VHS videotape in my hands would never become valuable to any collector.

“Look at this,” he said, removing the videotape from inside the clamshell case and pressing the tiny black release button that allowed the back of the tape to swing up, exposing the magnetic tape and all of the thin silver and white reels the tape had to wind around in order to get from the right side to the left while playing through a VCR. “All these moving parts. Records don't have moving parts, and that's why they can become collectible. Something like this, all these parts and components – it will never become collectible. These tapes won't ever be worth anything to any collector”. I paid for my Re-Animator tape and left. 

 

I still have that tape to this day, almost 22 years later.

Funnily, I was not the only one to hold onto a couple of my old VHS horror tapes. In fact, I literally only held onto a couple of them when the DVD revolution hit. Now, though, it's astoundingly clear that VHS tapes have indeed become highly coveted collectors items, some going for hundreds of dollars on eBay and Amazon, in a time where we've gone even further beyond the original DVD revolution of the new millennium into HD and 4K Blu-ray disc media, creating something of a treasure trove for collectors of all types of media from magnetic standard definition to digital hi-def picture quality; and often, fans of niche and genre film fare are the ones benefiting; many genre (horror) titles have survived the advances in film media technology, and it's not unusual to see titles that have made it across all the home video formats: Betamax, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray (and I'll include digital streaming in this sentiment, as well). Of course the biggest impacts were made by the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray formats specifically, clearly defining the technological generations in home video history. And with these defined generations, we see that there are also titles that had skipped a generation, and it's amusing to me when I happen to come across a horror or cult film title that had run out its print in the VHS days only to make a surprise comeback on a hi-def 1080p Blu-ray disc, while missing out on the entire DVD generation altogether. 

 

Most recently, Slasher//Video (through an output/imprint deal with the Blu-ray distribution company Olive Films) has begun to release niche and sought-after horror and slasher videos on Blu-ray while incorporating the nostalgic aspects of the VHS days. These Slasher//Video releases were not entirely imagined by design – often, Slasher//Video (Olive Films) could only track down a Betacam SP tape master to provide us with the digital transfer to their Blu-ray discs – Betacam SP is a large videotape master, in standard definition (or Standard Play, SP), that was the standard delivery master to broadcast television and often to direct-to-video distribution in the eighties and nineties. In the case of the direct-to-video films, while they were nearly all originally shot on film, they were cut together and mastered only onto standard definition Betacam SP tapes in that bygone era of film and video production. The very name of these tapes – Standard Play – signified the maximum video quality that the technology had produced at that time. So now, mixing these distant generations of video technology, Slasher//Video has given us niche horror and genre fans a bit of an unusual and offbeat treat – we can see these wonderfully strange, gory, exciting, and low-budget originally direct-to-home-video horror movies in their original video/VHS anesthetic, but on a Blu-ray disc that will never wear down, no matter how many times the film is played at home. In the VHS days, god forbid you would fast-forward to your favourite part of the tape (an explosion of blood, a couple of boobs, a kickass werewolf transformation and subsequent gory slaughter) more than a couple of times; the tape would soon develop tracking issues and interruptive glitches, constantly changing the way you could see your favourite scenes. Admittedly, this is one of the charming aspects about VHS to some collectors. But for those who are keen on reliving the nostalgia of the VHS aesthetics with their 1980s horror obscurities, Slasher//Video and Olive Films have fallen on something very unique for horror fans, by delivering that VHS aesthetic on their Blu-ray and DVD releases. I'm curious to see how Slasher//Video's new mixed-technology retro-releases will be received by fans down the road. For me, it gives me the chance to see some of these films that I missed before the VHS tape went extinct, and I'm personally loving it. 

 

Issue #70 - The Absolute Underground Papers

(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #70 - originally published June, 2016)

“The Cinema Fantastique (Sex & Horror)”

by Vince D'Amato

I was recently in Netherworld Collectibles in Burnaby, BC, when I overheard a customer chatting with the proprietor and telling him, rather loudly so that most of the store could accidentally overhear him, that he “doesn't watch new horror movies at all because most of them seem really cool but they just disappoint”. Well, to be perfectly honest, this was a sentiment I shared for along time, until about a year and a half ago... One of the problems with new horror cinema was the perception that the genre itself was precipitating over its intended audience – new filmmakers were either pushing forth pretentious projection of their work that they considered high-brow, or to use the term some if these filmmakers were using five years ago, an “upper echelon” of horror cinema. Which basically meant cool-looking horror flick with no sex or nudity, which throughout the eighties and nineties had been required tropes for the genre, along with the blood, guts and scares. These “upper echelon” films, like House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, Mulberry Street, and to half this degree Your're Next, also barely delivered on the guts and gore aspect, usually saving such frivolities to the very end of their respective films (as I said, You're Next was somewhat of an exception, and as added bonus points it had Barbara Crampton in it!). On the flipside, if a horror fan did want a little nudity or eroticism included within his genre fare (artistically, of course), one would be forced to turn to the ridiculous – indie films like Call Girl of Cthulhu or the exploitive (and yet vapid) Hollywood remakes of the aforementioned 80s horror films. There was nowhere for us to turn to the seriously good side horror cinema that wasn't afraid to be sexy as hell as well...

In December last year I wrote my first Absolute Horror article; and the inspiration for that article had been the recent releases of independent horror films that had finally started to change the face of indie horror into something more sophisticated, more energetic, more suspenseful for audiences (such as myself) who have learned (i.e taught ourselves) not to rely on the studio PG-13 output for their morbid frights. We have been ushered into an era, by these new indie horror filmmakers, of films that may have originally been inspired by the likes of Friday the 13^th or the films of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Sam Raimi, but films that nonetheless do not care to wear these influences outright on their sleeves – instead, these filmmakers are now often twisting and flipping the influences to such a degree as to design some very intense, visceral, and even darkly comedic low-budget scares. And they're pretty clever about it, too. And thanks to the critically and commercially successful Scarlett Johansson sci-fi horror/thriller Under the Skin and the hugely popular indie horror hit It Follows, we're starting to see a little sexiness reappearing in our horror fare – following these two commercial releases it seems to all be suddenly okay once again for a horror movie to be sexually aware, instead of pretending that people don't have it. (Meanwhile, Brain DePalma remained cemented in the gorgeously sexy slasher/thriller genre with his latest outing Passion, most criminally under-screened on this side of the world). But before we fully get back into sexy, allow me to talk about a very clever realization of the horror film that I came across about two days before writing this piece – a little film called The Last Shift which is an hallucinogenic mindfuck regarding a lone young female police rookie hired to guard a defunct police station the before it's permanently closed. It gets off to an edgy start and just gets totally intense from there, as our protagonist becomes trapped in the tomb-maze of the old station while running into some quite literal ghosts of the past who are hellbent on driving her insane. This small-scale horror flick calls up the intensity of the modern horror classic It Follows, as does new director Benjamin Moody's Last Girl Standing, which had its inspirational roots in the aforementioned Friday the 13^th, but takes the idea of “the final girl” into dizzyingly outrageous and wholly intense territory. Last Girl Standing has been a festival hit in 2015 and 2016, and will be screening at this summer's Cinemafantastique Fest in Vancouver (July 8-10) along with some other amazing contemporary horror films that are far more steeped in the sexy, hallucinogenic, and the psychedelic: from the Burlesque-noir Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man and L.A. artist Anna Biller's erotic 60s throwback The Love Witch, to the erotic Lovecraft homage Harvest Lake (which incidentally is a far cry from Call Girl of Cthulhu). But the funnier side of genre cinema is also celebrated in b-movie maverick Ron Bonk's She Kills, and Canadian Ryan LaPlante's Holy Hell; and Hell Town – which is an astoundingly witty homage to Lynch's Twin Peaks. Alongside these films is the more intense Last Girl Standing and the neo-giallo The Red Man, but sexy does tend to reign supreme in this lineup, as it does with the collection of short films selected for the film fest also range from the off-the-wall bloodfest El Gigante (from Luchagore productions) to the very sexy First Love and Mistress C. The sexy and the funny (the bloody funny) collide in the French short Bitch, Popcorn & Blood. Indeed, the international collection of very sexy nightmares that populate this year's Cinemafantastique Fest are the films you're not apt to see at other film festivals on the west coast. With any luck, most of the films here will find some sort of distribution, but we're living in a funny time now when it comes to cinema culture. Hard media really is dying and has been niche for some time now. It opens up the opportunity for theatrical exhibition for films like these, but cinema has been crawling along towards a slow death, too, despite there being more film festivals in the world than any other time in history. Our venues are disappearing, and film festivals have dared to go digital, like the media itself. Despite this, there are die-hard cinema fans (like myself) who actively participate in the lumbering medium, who love to discover obscure on under-distributed gems. With horror filmmakers no longer settling for the easy low-budget go-tos of the zombie or vampire sub-genres, it is inspiring to see that so many independent genre films released over the last fifteen months have supplied us with some real, visceral thrills. So here's to filmmakers keeping the sexy, the erotic, the nudie-cutie, the fun, and the intense, in our serious – and darkly funny – horror cinema. Cheers!

(Cinemafantastique runs July 8-10, 2016 at the Norm Theatre at UBC)

Issue #68 - The Absolute Underground Papers

(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #68 - originally published February, 2016)

Cult Epics, Barrel, and German Arthouse Horror

Over the last few months, the independent retrospective genre label Cult Epics has released some of Germany's best and unflinching horror films onto Blu-ray – starting with Jorg Buttgereit's NekRomantik, the limited-numbered Blu-ray disc also included the impossible-to-find-in-English short film Hot Love, which if you can believe it, is actually more twisted than the necrophelic shenanigans of the director's first feature film. For a while in the early 2000s, one could purchase a European Hot Love DVD from the online retailer XploitedCinema.com, which is sadly long out of business. This online retailer was the first place I was able to find a reasonably priced DVD copy of Jess Franco's Exorcism (the one released by Synapse Films) and they had for sale many great out-of-print or unavailable (on this side of the water) genre films on DVD and VHS. Around this time, there was another distribution company called Barrel Entertainment. In the early 2000s Barrel was shaping up to become the niche of niche genre DVD distributors; releasing some brilliant cult oddities into the new and exciting retail market of DVD. Indeed, they were the first distributor to bring Jorg Buttgereit's films to North American audiences via home video – NekRomantic, NekRomantik 2, and Schramm all received glorious special edition DVD releases, as well as some stellar, nearly forgotten, independent films like Roger Watkins' bloody experimental 1970s horror Last House on Dead End Street and Leif Jonker's slightly awkward but exciting 16mm vampire gore-a-thon Darkness. In 2005, Barrel Entertainment announced that they were about to release a hugely anticipated first North American release of Gerald Kargl's German serial killer masterpiece Angst as a special edition DVD... And then suddenly (or gradually, depending on your point of view), the release became bogged down in constant delays. Nobody really knew what was happening over at Barrel Entertainment, as a small independent DVD distributor it was not uncommon for their DVD releases to experience some minor delays when it came to their projected release dates, as packed as they were with new special features and fantastic film transfers, but in the case of the ultimately doomed Angst release, these delays stretched out to nearly two years before Barrel's antsy fans were starting to give up hope of ever seeing this German arthouse horror film released in Canada and the U.S. And sadly, it had been right to give up on the continual waiting – the release never happened. What none of us fans knew was that Barrel Entertainment was going through some strenuous financial hardship, mostly due to director Roger Watkins' suing them over a spat he had with their special features on the Last House on Dead End Street double-DVD release. Ironic, seeing as the whole reason Roger Watkins' film had been available for years on VHS and had developed a cult following without his knowledge was because the original distribution company had quite literally stolen the film from him. Now here was a legitimate distribution company finally putting due care and attention into a new release and special edition DVD of Watkins' film, and he ends up getting in a snit and suing them. This lawsuit was sadly the nail in the coffin for Barrel Entertainment, a company far too small to deal with any costly lawsuit. But as half-cocked as this lawsuit may have been, it was nevertheless truly sad and unfortunate to learn of director Roger Watkins' passing in relative obscurity in 2007 – something that left a bit of enigma in its wake*. As for Barrel Entertainment, their last release was in 2006, and they were not only working on Angst at that time, but also the first-ever North American release of Jorg Buttgereit's masterpiece Der Todesking. Barrel Entertainment official folded in 2007, the same year as Roger Watkins' death.

During the exciting dawn of genre DVD distribution, Cult Epics had also been releasing cult and then-obscure international films onto special edition DVDs, most notably the double-disc version of Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer and the triple-disc release of Walerian Worowczyk's The Beast (La Bete). Nowadays, with Barrel Entertainment nearly a decade gone (gone three years longer than they'd been in business for), Cult Epics has managed to finally pick up where Barrel had to leave off. After presenting NekRomantic and Hot Love in a newly-restored high definition transfer, Cult Epics has moved ahead to give us his gender-flipped follow-up NekRomantic 2 and his aforementioned masterpiece Der Todesking on a Blu-ray that also included the feature-length Buttgereit documentary Corpse Fucking Art; and most recently, a hi-def (and English-subtitled) version of Gerald Kargl's Angst.

I, like most people in North America, got to experience Angst for the first time thanks to Cult Epics' commercial Blu-ray release. To say this film is stunning would be an astounding understatement. It brought to mind another largely unheard-of German arthouse horror film released earlier in 2015 by Mondo Macabro; the fanatic killer thriller The Fan. Both of these highly stylish German horror films were produced in the early-to-mid 80s, and both are amazingly groundbreaking in their depth and explorations as psychological horror cinema. Both of these Blu-rays (as well as the Blu-rays of Jorg Buttgereit) are currently widely available to purchase online in North America, and I would highly recommend a purchase or two in support of these amazing independent distribution companies who are passionate enough to bring these cult films to North American audiences – because who knows how long this might last in our volatile, and dying, environment of home video distribution.

SIDEBAR: THE ROGER WATKINS ENIGMA.

Roger Watkins' 1977 indie arthouse horror film has left behind a seared imprint on my mind since I first borrowed the Barrel DVD from a good friend of mine back in 2004. I think the DVD itself had been released a year or two earlier. In 2009, with Barrel's DVD woefully long out-of-print, I was able to find a different DVD copy quite easily (and cheaply) in the UK through a different distribution company. Watching that film for the second time, I was no less impressed than on the first viewing. There was something so rebellious, so fucking art, so bloody horrific in its low-budget drug-addled production values... It was actually kind of profound in a way. It was then that I began to wonder about the man behind the film – Roger Watkins. So I did what any slave to the immediacy of the internet would do... I Googled him; and discovered forthwith that he'd died in 2007. But this was just the beginning of my curiosity; it quickly piqued higher when I stumbled upon a comment thread following an obituary published online by papermag.com (the comment section has since been deleted and disabled as of 2011) – here reprinted verbatim:

• Elizabeth Watkins: "I am Roger's oldest daughter and I want to thank you for posting this article and paying tribute to him. I really miss him. He was the smartest guy I've ever met..."
• Jo C. Schwarz: "Elizabeth, I am an old friend of your dad. I am sadden by the news of his passing. Roger was the smartest man I have ever met myself. His wit and charm will sorely be missed. He often talk about how smart you were as well."
• Bob Arturi: "Elizabeth I had the pleasure of working with your dad at Bill Kolb Ford in Blauvelt, New York. He was one of the wittiest, smartest people I ever met. I lost contact with him for a while after he left the business, but found him a little later at another dealership. He then totally left the business to move upstate and I didn't have the opportunity to speak with him before he passed away. I can't say enough good things about him, his sense of humor, our long conversations about his life in the cinema world, and of course his tales of his family. He will always be in my thoughts."
• Barry Koch: "Elizabeth, Your Dad roomed at my house for a while back in the late 1980s. He was a brilliant, creative, and maddeningly mercurial human being... and remains unforgettable to those who knew him in to any degree. Despite the tempests that seemed to swirl about his restless mind, he always spoke lovingly of "his girls", you and your sister.
• pedobear: "I loved roger too we hung out together looking for young girls. i will miss you. Pedophilia died with you. R.I.H"
• anonymous: "Pedobear, It is very important that I speak with you. You hold the key to a very important puzzle. Please, please, please email me at this address. [Email withheld] I will make it worth your while."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

RIP, Umberto Lenzi.

Holy Christ, this has been a sad year for genre cinema fans, as another quiet icon of genre cinema passed away earlier this week. Italian director Uumberto Lenzi may not have been a household name, but many fans knew the name of this hugely prolific commercial Italian genre director – more specifically, Umberto Lenzi actually specialized and made his entire career out of Italian sub-genres, from Poliziotteschi the Italian cannibal “gut-munchers”, the latter with which Lenzi has actually been credited with inventing upon the release of his cannibal classic Man from Deep River. Indeed, he explored this sub-genre further with his equally important Eaten Alive (my personal favorite of his cannibal films), and his most popular, Cannibal Ferox.

In 2002, several years before the advent of the smart phone and any traffic law preventing the use of cell phones while driving, my friend Josh (now from GBW Podcast) and I got into an argument while driving down a freeway as to whether or not Umberto Lenzi had directed the zombie-virus movie Nightmare City. I insisted that he had, Josh maintained an argument to the contrary. Neither of us letting go of our arguments, he finally phone one of those friends who knows everything about everything to do with genre cinema, one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding his flip-phone up to his ear. “Yo, who directed Nightmare City...? No... No...! No!!” he exclaimed before slapping the phone shut. “What?” I asked. “You were right,” he said. “That's why you're pissed off?” I asked him. “No, I'm mad because Lenzi's so much better than that!”

Okay, so that was the second thing I'd disagreed with during that drive. Incidentally, we were coming back from a DVD warehouse where we'd loaded up on genre DVDs, as was our passion. But Nightmare City was an Italian genre movie I was actually extremely fond of. Despite Umberto Lenzi's hugely significant contributions to the Poliziotteschi and cannibal-horror sub-genres of Italian cinema, my favourite films of Leni's career actually fell within the giallo and the popular 80s zombie genres. Along with the exciting and original Nightmare City, I was also a huge fan of his brilliant gialli Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Spasmo, and the revenge-giallo/thriller Hitcher in the Dark (which was actually an American production starring a pre-Melrose Place Josie Bissett). Lenzi's importance as a groundbreaking genre filmmaker did not stop with merely having invented an entirely new horror sub-genre for Italian cinema, his work had also been copied by his more famous colleagues (Brian DePalma and David Fincher using key sequences from Seven Blood-Stained Orchids), and in the 70s his movies had even been re-worked by American filmmakers for the North American releases (it has been rumored and at one point confirmed by Lenzi himself, although he truly hadn't wanted to believe it, that George Romero had shot added footage for Lanzi's Spasmo for the American theatrical/drive-in releases).

Finally, though, as contemporary maverick filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez sought to create new works based on or influenced by pioneers of popular Italian genre cinema, Umberto Lenzi got some mainstream North American recognition via Robert Rodriguez' Nightmare City-inspired segment for the pair's genre throwback film Grindhouse. Rodriguez and Tarantino both celebrated Lenzi's film as the key idea behind Planet Terror. Since then (2007), a portion of Lenzi's insanely massive genre output had been restored and re-released in the Blu-ray catalogues of British distribution companies Arrow and Shameless and the Italian/American distributor Raro, following in the DVD footsteps of the old Anchor Bay and Shriek Show releases of the early '00s.

Lenzi was one of the quieter, and most under-appreciated talents of genre cinema; but quiet or not, he was no less a giant in the arena of genre cinema, and the body of work he has left behind will no doubt be appreciated for years to come. RIP, Umberto Lenzi. 

~V.

 

RIP, Tobe Hooper!

So, this is actually a reprint of the celebratory and somewhat angry rant upon the death of one of my personal all-time favourite horror film director, Tobe Hooper. As first published on Facebook last night (uncensored, warts and all...)

#RIPTobeHooper, the second of the horror film giants to have passed this summer and the third over the past two years... To me, his work was so underrated (post-1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre), from his satirical Chainsaw sequel to his Lovecraftian Invaders From Mars to his batshit-crazy vampire sci-fi epic Lifeforce. Someone once asked if you were to create a "Mount Rushmore" of horror directors, who would you pick? Tobe Hooper, for me, would have definitely been in there, sharing space with George Romero and Wes Craven. To me, Tobe Hooper always had a discernible cinematic style, a style that was just as in evidence in Poltergeist as Spielberg's second-unit work was, and I thought it was pretty shitty that some old Hollywood crew members were "coming forward" to purportedly declare that Hooper had not directed his film at all, which I choose to call bullshit on, and not just because there's a face-ripping scene mid film. Hooper's style and mis-en-scene are evident even in the family banter scenes and neighbourhood squabbles. The opening

to Hooper's Eaten Alive inspired one of the most memorable lines in Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1, and his Texas Chainsaw themes became go-to horror movie tropes for the next three decades. Hooper's horror cinema influence has been as widespread as it has been quiet over the past four decades, at times lost in his lesser films, while at other times these seemingly "lesser" films, like Night Terrors and the Toolbox Murders remake, were actually quite a bit better than some fans and critics would have us believe. Hooper's films always slanted towards the unusual, weird, and often the daring, and at times they were downright freaky; and if anyone thinks he lost his touch after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre then I would point them towards Poltergeist, Body Bags, That Damned Thing, Eaten Alive, and Salem's 'Lot.


Writer's Note: I would also like to mention Tobe Hooper's excellent 80s-90s made-for-cable-television films, I'm Dangerous Tonight and the incredible The Apartment Complex.