1972@50: DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING

A number of child murders in a small Italian village brings a media circus to town, in the wake of some hot shot detectives from the city. The killings fire a population both disturbed by them and ready to obey their superstitions, leaving some local characters vulnerable like the crazy witchy girl Maciara and debauched urban siren Patrizia. Too many suspects and too many doubts. One news photographer teams up with the dodgy Patrizia when it looks like the cops are at their wits' end.

Plot twists and sudden swerves, red herrings lead to a climax that is both unpredictable and unsurprising. Add some very nasty violence and you've pretty much got any Giallo movie. These bloody and intriguing adaptations of crime fiction speak for generation of Italian cinema ('60s-'80s) and number more than a few high points along the timeline from the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento and, here, Lucio Fulci.

Lucio Fulci's rap sheet lists a lot of movies from the '50s to the '90s and they're a big mix of genres; westerns, comedies, Gialli, etc. However, what he has become known as a horror director for the bunch of  titles in no genre but that made between the late '70s and early '90s. A major reason for this is that when he turned his hand to horror he brought a signature surrealism to the tales. Very few, if any, play like straightforward genre pieces and fewer still offer much attention to plotting. Even Zombie/Zombie 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Woodoo, though it replaced the magic/religion that Romero had famously removed in his own influential Dead films, this one still plays like a nightmare rather than a survival tale. From there he put zombies of increasingly strange powers into other acid-gothic films like City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. But back when his next job was whatever genre was on offer he made Giallo films with precision and force.

Duckling begins, middles, and ends the way all Gialli do but Fulci, up against a formidable field, adds a compelling eye, way with deep focus, magnetic colour pallet and performances that survive the awful growling English dub on my old Anchor Bay copy. If these thrillers put violence forward, Fulci delivers ghastly chain whippings and their results on the human body, a shiveringly spectral light to the victims when they are discovered, the toughness of the knotty landscape that looks like it's resisted argiculture from the Etruscans on, canny hiring of a composer for a solid score and a strong sense of lens placement and motion. The scene where Maciara is hunted down by the local dog squad is told largely at canine level and comes across as a hunt rather than an arrest. A later scene sets some extreme violence to some bland soul hits on the radio in an ironic juxtaposition that Tarantino would have noted in letters of fire when he most certainly saw it.

Gialli don't have to do any more than show violent crime and its detection but many do take on social or political themes. Duckling aims squarely at credulity, here, not sparing local folklore nor the mighty Catholic Church itself whose power was felt strongly by his immediate Italian audiences. The best of this in this film has to do with the equivalence of both streams, the household level of ancient magic and the reach of the Church.

In stark, raving contrast to this is one of the film's most notorious scenes which, even just described, might put many off. Patrizia the debaucher is introduced lounging in her loft completely naked (though posed on a lounge to conceal her pubic region. The son of her housekeeper is sent up a jug of orange juice she's ordered. The boy (about twelve) is confronted by the sight of the woman who playfully flirts with him. She remains gleefully uncovered, enjoying the effect on the child and even leaves him with a vague promise for the future which he takes with him down the stairs, never to part with its images.

Before you say something like, well, it was 1972 and things were different, you should know that Fulci was arrested over the scene on charges of endangering a child. He was able to prove that the boy was never actually in the same place as the woman while shooting, that he had used an adult actor with dwarfism for the two shots that contained both figures. Even so, what are we to make of this scene? Could Patrizia have teased the boy fully clothed? Of course, and it might have made for a more complex scene. But the bit about it being 1972 and things being different is that the shock value of her nakedness and creul glee would have outranked a subtler approach. The scene still feels edgy, pushing well up against the ick barrier. For me, it forms a depth-giving contrast with the character's later humaneness. In a later scene it makes one character's smile a crushing misconception. Her playfulness is cruel but there is no suggestion that it was the prelude to physical abuse. It is another tarry patch in a film pushing against its generic constraints.

The movie was blacklisted but not for that scene. The pokes at the Church meant more. Would this be reversed today if made anew? You don't have to be a humourless puritain to find the woman and child scene uncomfortable but, without onscreen nudity the cause celebre that it was, might the attempt itself feel desperate, old fashioned or just twee? Whatever, in the time capsule of this fifty year old movie, it does work, it's intentionally disturbing rather than leery and provides another aspect to the story of a series of particularly dark murders that the community on screen, for their religion and superstitions, have permitted.

1972@50: THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Large cruise ship sails along under the credits and then when they're done the executive crew on the bridge are all "steady as she goes" and "cork up the ballast, there" and in the midst there's a lounge lizard type in a normal suit who's giving the process a massive dirty look. Cue corporate stooge with his, "you might be captain but I own you" dialogue. 

On deck, in cabins, in ballrooms and the rest of the ship we get little vingettes to introduce us to our cast o' characters with the kind of keynote writing that everyone who's done a creative writing course has taken away: ex-cop with ex-sexworker bicker but it's out of love, young hip priest roars about God for the strong with a patient older priest who comes back with a loving God, little boy knows more about the ship than its designer ... you get the idea. You do this when you are building up a big shared experience like a seige, a hijack or in this case a shipwreck.

Disaster movies have as many cliches as any other genre and they're all here but most of them are here for the first time (or near, only Airport came earlier) to play social types against each other in the great tapestry o' modern humanity. Leslie Neilsen who plays The Captain (that's his name in the credits) went on to ridicule this genre in the Flying High (or Airplane) movies by playing things as straight as a die. But the array is on show here, as it must be for this newly fashioned epic. Someone to lead, someone who would rather lead, the old/infim/hysterical dragger who threatens the whole journey and either (if noble) sacrifies themself for the good of the many or (if narcissistic) will sacrifice everyone else for the good of the one. The way out of archetypes to prevent them from being a pageant of cutouts is done with casting. 

This was the beginning of the era of the starstudded poster as current A-listers were set in beds of know-the-face stars of previous decades. Gene Hackman leads the ensemble in a form fit role following from his hard boiled Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. He leads his dwindling flock upto the bottom of the hull of the upturned ship having to shed his God favours the winners approach to the religion of love as people keeping proving him wrong. Ernest Borgnine, tears his tough guy type from the air, managing to regain the heights of Marty, his impressive first starring role. Shelley Winters had reached the certain age and body type (as well deliberately putting on weight for the role) that would keep her in side roles for the rest of her career but she takes that and triumphs with it, mixing pathos with pragmatic heroism. Her self-awareness is disarming. Her swimming stunt was not a double. That goes for all of them, high or low, they did their own stunts. Recently when Tom Cruise held on to the wing of a plane as it took off for real it was a selling point of the film. Back in 1972? Eh, it's a living.

The art direction is stellar and serves as a constant reminder of the survival situation as well as the more holmilitic journey of descending for ascent. At the outset we have a cruise ship, mighty and dependable with lavish interiors here and cosy reassuring cabins as well as a clean and orderly bridge for the provision of order. But when the tsunami hits and the leviathan rolls over all of that order and finery rolls with it. The passengers escape the ballroom by climbing a metal framed Christmas tree and move, after a major poltical dispute with the Purser's faction who want to stay put, head into the fiery bowels of the ship where there is no silver cutlery but plenty of skin frying surfaces and shin shattering steel doorways. Ordeals await in every chamber, some infernal and deadly, others tests of human capacity, and the higher/lower they go the tougher, more refulgent and hostile it gets. The tagline on the poster was Hell Upside Down and that's what it looks and feels like.

John Williams provides a solid orschestral score as he would until he delivered bombast for Lucas and Spielberg and spawned generations of bombastic copyists. The tune he did write, though, was the one that became a hit single. It was the era of the movie hit song which also meant it was the era of the movie hit song taught in music class. I can clearly recall having to wrap the tonsils around Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head and One Tin Soldier and then, after The Posdeion Adventure, it was The Morning After. It was on the radio like those others and, while I was deeply into classical and early music at that age, I loved it and appreciated its baroque finish and remember noticing (without knowing the term) that it had a middle eight. In the movie it is voiced by Renee Armond and mimed by Carol Lynley. It was made a hit by Maureen McGovern who looks a little like a cover version of Carol Lynley.

If your American '70s at the cinema is led by the likes of The Godfather or Taxi Driver, the movie brats Coppola and Scorsese et al (aka New Hollywood), you might want to spare a thought for things like this. The big bucks mainstream might have felt challenged by Easy Rider but it stuck to its M.O. and kept churning out lavish productions that raked it in. Disaster movies became as much a theme as noir had been in the '40s or serial killers in the '90s, with entries like The Swarm, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno appearing regularly with fiery poster art and explosive taglines and ever more massive casts of extras and Hollywood luminaries. It's also the era where the war movie did the same, growing from the '60s epic The Great Escape, and even whodunnits like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile had castlists that read like Who's Who. 

The big is beautiful end of town kept the snowball running as the money learned again to absorb. Disaster movies, though, began big, by definition and stayed big until they faded or morphed into action movies etc. If they also planed out into more basic cores than this one they also piled on the effects. On that, does the long shot of the Poseidon just look like a model in a swimming pool? Yes. Should that bother you? If you suffer from a lack of imagination it should outrage and strike your funny bone at once and you should never watch another movie again. I noticed without caring as I understood what it was meant to be without trouble. The scenes, however of the ship capsized in the water are terrifying enough for me not to notice. When they include sparking explosions blowing from the smoketacks my blood runs cold. And that's the point. The Poseidon Adventure shouldn't be a guilty pleasure but its insistence on the social basis of its survival story and delivery of such a convincingly hostile setting earns it points beyond what you might normally afford a blockbuster based on an airport novel. Works.

BLUE VELVET @ 35

Geoffrey comes back to his sleepy logging town halfway through term. His father has had a heart attack or stroke (unclear) and Geoffrey is needed for the family hardware business. After one desultory hospital visit, Geoffrey walks through a vacant lot and finds an ear. "A human ear" asks Detective Williams at the cop shop. They take it to the lab and are told that it has been cut off with scissors. Cut to a length of tape being snipped loudly by a pair of scissors at a crime scene. This is not hte Lumberton Geoffrey grew up in but he's hooked by the mystery.

Restless, he goes for a stroll and passes Det. Williams' place. They have a chat about the case, as far as is permissible and Geoffrey leaves with a even more aroused curiosity but asks for them to say hi to their daughter Sandy, known from high school. In an entrance for the ages the  Sandy emerges from complete blackness under the trees of the footpath to reveal herself to be fashioned from living gold and silver. They catch up with some shared memories of school and he asks what she knows of the case. She takes him to the apartment building where one of the main figures in the case lives, a haggard urban block from the '40s. Both of them feel a little more of the thrill of it but part ways, going back to their homes.

He picks her up from school the next day in an open red car made of pure '50s rock 'n' roll, takes her to a soda joint and tells her his plan to get into that apartment. Weirded but intrigued she agrees. Geoffrey goes up dressed as a bug spray guy and gets through the door of Dorothy Vallens, a femme de film noire who is made of dark edible colour and porcelain. After a close call with a threatening interloper, Geoffrey escapes with a set of keys.  The pair of scooby doobies go out that night and see Dorothy singing at her night club where she performs a melting breathy rendition of the title song. They hot foot it the apartment before she can get off stage and agree on a signal when the others get there. The dark rooms reveal more questions than answers and when Geoffrey misses the signal he is caught, hearing the key in the lock. 

He springs to the closet as Dorothy enters, exhausted from the set. She takes a freaky sounding call which tells us through half a conversation that her husband and child are being held hostage. As she is preparing for a visit Geoffrey stumbles in his hiding place. Instead of screaming or running, Dorothy fetches a shark knife from her kitchen and drags Geoffrey out, nicking him when he tries to evade her questions. Then things turn stranger as she seems to seduce him at knifepoint. They go to the sofa but there is a knock on the door and Dorothy is transformed by pure terror. Geoffrey springs back to the closet and Frank walks in.

Frank who is made of vintage sports coats and knuckles enters like a supple bulldozer, barking commands at her. He sits at the couch and downs a whiskey and a gulp of something from a gas cannister and leaps on Dorothy in a ritual assault that crashes bizarre language and even stranger sexual moves, all the while bringing a pair of rasping scissors close to her body. After this, he stands over her and tells her to stay alive, to do it for Van Gough. And with his exit, the pretty but daggy town Geoffrey knew as a boy with its breezy, kitsch radio jingles and '50s billboards, has become one of the circles of Hell.

That's about ten times more plot than I usually supply in one of these articles but there's a reason for that. Blue Velvet is so very entrenched in living cinematic memory that we are often inclined to remember it by soundbite and extreme scene. That it is so strongly narrative and tightly constructed leaves our impressions until we see it again. If you have any inclination toward it as a film and have only distant memories of it I urge to to get in front of it again. By the way, the reason I'm not counting it as a 1986 release is that it didn't come out in Australia until 1987 and influenced the conversation of everyone who saw it for at least that year. A little time after its release a pair of friends gave me a large poster of the film as a birthday present. It's still on the wall of my living room, just above the fireplace.

Geoffrey's arc takes him from a confident young adult to someone whose revealed darkness and destructiveness leave him crying in his childhood bed. Unlike with the consistently awkward Dune, Kyle McLachlan found space to move in Geoffrey. He sheds his boyish curiosity early but trades it for the unknown within himself. By the time the monster Frank says to him, "you're like me," and gets punched for it the act seems at first like heroism but I've always taken it as guilty recognition. His personal task is to work himself into a new Geoffrey who can accommodate such things while still developing.

Speaking of developing the arc that's even more profound is that of Dorothy as played by Isabella Rosselini. We meet her living in a state of shock. Her family is imprisoned by the man who visits to violate her to humiliating damage whenever he wants. She is allowed to continue her career at the club but he turns up there, too. She is being kept in a state of emotional chaos and physical pain that she knows only that she can placate her tormentor with shows of pleasure. In his absence she implodes, responding to Geoffrey's increasingly motivated kindness with a kind of repeat bullying.  Her moments of lucidity bring memories of trauma and a constant touch point of despair. Although her journey back is not as detailed as Geoffrey's when the film ends on her it is to show her in strength and at peace. It always makes me well up.

Dorothy's counterpart, Sandy, is young enough to believe in her dream of cosmic Robins bringing peace but she is by no means The Girlfriend role. She is as drawn by the mystery as Geoffrey but has the sense to keep herself from the darkness of its power. Laura Dern had already impressed in her role just before this (far from her first but among her first as a young adult) in Smooth Talk where she played her effortless allure against her recognition of the threat of the intruder, her uncertainty of caution vs impulse needed experience to resolve it. Geoffrey is no rock 'n' roll bad boy, for all his confidence - she frequently exposes the flaws in his thinking - but she has every reason to believe he will lose control of himself with only a little flick of circumstance. Later, when gutted by a confrontation with his "adventures" she restrains herself in front of him, showing him how that's done. It's a harder sell as an arc as it inolves the least trauma, but an arc it is.

The character without arc is the beast of the story. Frank is everything that everyone in Lumberton and all of the world beyond it fears, unbridled in his sexuality, sensuality, violence and will and always, always on. His first scene sets the tone of every subsequent appearance with the dread on ten. You only need to see he's there when he and Geoffrey meet to start wanting to watch through your fingers. Dennis Hopper was still crawling from his swamp of Hollywood exile when he took this role. From a notable return role in Coppola's Rumblefish and soon to impress again in Tim Hunter's River's Edge, he reinvented himself as a character actor with a jagged edge. Famously he called Lynch personally, after reading the Blue Velvet screenplay, saying: "I have to play Frank because I am Frank."

Frank Booth became one of the few characters who could be quoted and named in full by movie buffs or almost anyone after a night of drinking with the gang. His constantly swearing dialogue was attributed to undeclared Tourette syndrome which neither Lynch nor Hopper ever bothered denying or affirming, just another weird quirk for the bad guy. This will seem unremarkable to anyone young enough to have seen Tarantino and clones' efforts in the '90s first but he's the only character in Blue Velvet who does talk like that. It's the song of the force and the driving of his id and clears the table before him. Also, it means little without Hopper's injection of animation. When he yells "Let's Fuuuuck" as his gang are about to drive off again it's not because he meant to say "let's go" or even "let's rock". He means "let's fuck" but that has its own meaning which can only be communicated through his nerve shreddingly unpredictable actions. Frank is the thing that comes out of the night and takes everything he sees and turns it into himself or garbage. And yet, sing or even just mime an oldie by Roy Orbison and the intensity of it makes him explode. In the club his face screws up and he strokes a length of Blue Velvet manically while those very words are being sung by Dorothy. Even his tenderness is terrifying. 

Back in the late '80s a version of Blue Velvet was prepared for prime time tv. I taped it to get some kind of copy of my own. Frank's dialogue had been substituted to the point where it sounded like dadaist prose: "Let's freak!" "I freak everything that moves." "I'll freak you, you freakin' freaker!" I could put that on as a kind of parallel universe version. I taped over it eventually and when it became available on DVD that was the end of that. Still wish I'd kept it, though.

Blue Velvet rests in the catalogue of David Lynch as the one that broke him through. Famously hated by Roger Ebert but championed back into the mainstream by Pauline Kael, it felt like a point of honour to its generation the same way that his debut Eraserhead had done to its own as a midnight movie. It succeeded in the cinema and enjoyed a growing reputation as a VHS essential in share houses and couples on the dinner party circuit along with the Nine and a Half Weeks, Fatal Attractions and Betty Blues of the time. But none of those others had a David Lynch who would give us a prologue that went from naively perfect neighbourhoods, to building tension with a tangled garden hose to a dive beneath the lawn to a world of warring insects within minutes to the sweetness of Bobby Vinton's version of the title song. And then when the violence first broke to show it as chaotic, only barely held together by a nervewracking kind of Stockholm syndrome. And then to make us tear up at the sight of a wind up bird with a bug in its beak. Lynch's team gave us colour pallettes out of dreams and soundscapes that blended low, uneasy hums with Bernard Hermann style orchestral scoring. And his cast gave us performances from nightmares as well as awkwardness from our own world and told a tale of deliverance impossible to forget.

This film marks the beginning of David Lynch's profile in  mainstream culture and when the term Lynchian began to be used to refer to anything bizarre in cinema and even daily life. He had a brief run at this height with the hit tv series Twin Peaks but this resulted in a slide from mass favour with the lower quality second season of the show, the films Wild at Heart and Fire Walk With Me which garnered criticisms of weird for its own sake (however undeserved). His career found a more erratic path through the anomalous The Straight Story (a blind spot among his fans) and the fugue trilogy of Lost Highway, the celebrated Mulholland Dr., and the gingerly handled Inland Empire. Most recently, he returned to Twin Peaks and created a tour de force that slapped the wrists of fans expecting service and invited the adventurous to follow through to a heartrending conclusion. It might have seemed muted and obscure but still had the freshness and energy of the early work that got him into cinema to begin with. It was Lynch coming out of the ears and it was difficult but it had a real point.

Back in 1987 I had been waiting for the release of Blue Velvet since I saw Leonard Maltin review it on tv. I'd been a fan of Lynch for life from the twin punch of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, providing worlds that only existed in one mind and then a version of history that lived there, too. I cringed at Dune, the more so since I'd presuaded my brother in law to join me at the cinema for it. Then again, its look and sound and some of its shocking violence gave me hope that Lynch hadn't just sold out to big-time town. Dune was too big for him. Eraserhead is set in Henry's head and John Merrick's life is told in close quarters getting horrifying when he is out in the open. Blue Velvet appeared to be progression but within a manageable pallette. 

I had taken up with a fellow flatmate whose taste for the unusal and obscure were in good health. We went to see Blue Velvet together. It was on at Hoyts as Dune had been. I reasoned that even if it did go to difficult places its mainstream venue suggested they wouldn't be too hard. We settled in and rolled with it until Frank's entrance. My own shock at the assault was put in a vice of what my companion might be thinking. I couldn't look away from the screen however grating its violence. It felt like it was really happening in front of me. The cinema's air conditioning could not keep up with my sweating. We both watched to the end of the credits in silence and I wondered if she would even talk to me afterwards. We slowly made our way out through the foyeur, numb. In the light of the morning outside she whispered: "that was incredible."

I sighed. It felt like the first breath in or out for two hours.

1982@40: NIGHT SHIFT

Chuck is so intimidated by life that he quit his whitecollar job in investment broking to work in a morgue among the silent dead. His timidity has developed so far that he is bullied by everyone he encounters. That is until, bullied off the day shift so the boss's nephew can take the job, he meets his new assistant Bill. Bill is constantly engaged with the life (and non-life) around him to such a degree that when he's not talking or riffing he's dictating new ideas into a Walkman. And then, through a series of domino effect events from the crime movie prologue to a victim identification scene in the morgue, he meets Belinda, a sex worker whose pimp is on the slab. She's also his neighbour in the apartment down the hall from him. She's also in straits now that the management has gone, turning up one night injured by an aggressive client.

Putting two and three together, the trio come up with a scheme to organise the sex workers more corporately with job tracing, much better percentages and maybe even dental plans. You know how plots like this go and so does this movie. The point is in the people. Of course the relationships between them will turn inside out, break and be mended, this is a comedy, the fun is in how. And that is supplied by casting.

And what casting! Ponder this: Fonzie as a nebbish, Diane form Cheers as a worldly sex worker, and Micheal Keaton as a proto Beetlejuice (he was about to have a busy decade on screen). Against type, development of type and type in progress all in one movie. And it is in the writing and performances here that we get a comedy significantly against type for its time.

Henry Winkler is beaten by life, accepting the ugliness that acts on recognising his vulnerability. Intelligent and sober he is yet not written as a straight man of foil for Keaton's mania. The times would typically have him an exaggeration, a walking anxiety machine. Winkler, though, gives us something far more real, a person on the verge of implosion. In a way this is exaggeration, though: if the public wanted another Fonzie they didn't get the one who selected songs in the drugstore by punching the jukebox, they got the one who broke his hand trying. The tension between Bill and Chuck is not the clown vs the jumpy guy but a hyperactive toddler whose japes and turns are absorbed by an unimpressed void. What happens when it fills and pushes back? It robs the film of easy comedy but gives it durability. Also, it allows us time to suspect the sadness beneath Bill's mania, the terror that if he isn't making noise that there will only be the silence of space. Between these two comes Shelly Long's sobriety. Breaking the unironic privilege she brought so effectively to Diane, she gives us someone aware of the ugliness of her profession and respect for it. Like Winklers, her performance's power lies in its restraint.

The trailer for this movie at the time (not the one on IMDB) played up the comedic tells, Chuck getting bullied, Bill being crazy and Belinda being sassy. It looked like an m-rated sex romp like Porkies. The only reason I went to see it at the cinema was the recommendation of a fellow student who said the trailer was completely misleading. It is. There is sex in this film but it is shown by aspects. It's Chuck's ritualised coupling with his self-obsessed fiance as well as a service for sale on a shifting scale from exploitation to a more protected systematisation, a function of  consumerism either way. The only leering here is diegetic, of Johns and authority figures, the film itself refuses to snigger.

This is down to the hand of Ron Howard (Winkler's cast mate in Happy Days). This is not his cinematic feature debut but it's a very early one and already shows his willingness to go against type within the bounds of industry standards. The opening pastiche of Taxi Driver is not a send up but a use of an iconic streetscape. It's not meant to be clever, just effective. The interplay of the central trio  is kept delicate until it can finally break into broader comedy by which time it's much more than slapstick. How intentional this was I don't know but the same quality led Howard from this through things like Splash, Cocoon and Backdraft from comedy through to a highly respected and oscar winning allrounder status. Perhaps it was just something that happened from job to job but the refusual of Night Shift to play to the norm and dish up a saucy satire and concentrate instead on its characters and their complexity gives it a lasting strength. Maybe fewer laughs than Bachelor Party but it still feels good after the credits. 

1982@40: THE SENDER

A young man walks through the country to a lake. It's a sunny afternoon and lots of families are out enjoying it. The man starts loading his pockets with rocks and keeps walking to the water. He gets head high before he's dragged out and placed in psychiatric care. They can't get his name out of him because he can't recall it. When someone jokes that he could be anyone, even the messiah a doctor jokes back that they already have one of those and you can't have two in one place. And then the patient that does think he's Jesus begins to get very protective of his neck with the sudden conviction that he's about to have his head chopped off. 

After her shift Gail, the doctor in on the joke goes home to hear sounds of an intruder. It's the John Doe whom she glimpses in one of the rooms. When the police arrive there's no sign of an intruder nor even of a broken window. She calls the hospital. John D's in his bed, sedated and snoring. A few more incidents and Gail is convinced she has come across someone with the power to project hallucinations on to anyone he wants. That's the super power I want! Someone bothers you and suddenly they think they're dying in an industrial accident. Anyway, while this and control of it might be enough for a decent sci-horror plot there is an extra dimension brought in that really deepens it.

There are some great set-piece scenes like when they try to administer electro shock therapy to John Doe and he gives everyone in the room their own hellish scenario. The theme of self-control and questioning the methods and limits of psychiatry are clear and persisted with through characters like Gail and Zeljko Ivanek is impressive as the tortured central figure. But The Sender stays where it starts as a decent stab rather than a breakthrough. If you have any interest in science horror, especially of the fruitful early '80s and some very impressive effects like bodies flying around rooms, then this is essential viewing and not just for completion's sake. It seems flawless on paper and the performances are well above adequate.

Perhaps it's just too long. That's strange to say when it behaves itself with a 91 minute running time but the thing it reminded me most of was something that came a lot later, The X-Files. This same story, with its later plot developments would fit very snugly into a 44 minute episode. I can't think of anything from the time that would have accomodated it, though. Perhaps it's just surrounded by tighter fare like Videodrome or Brainstorm and can't compete with the refulgent first rush of some of fantastical cinema's finest. Then again, this is Quentin Tarantino's favourite of its genre and year. Then again, having seen this at least three times now I struggle to remember it.

Review: HELLBENDER

Someone's gittin' hunged out thayr in the mountains. It looks like the 19th century. The accused isn't dying, even when shot in the head. Instead the figure blasts off, soaring into the sky as a kind of humanoid fireball. Ten a face with a worried look. Was she dreaming this? Maybe but the day's started to time to get up and play some gothy metal with the daughter. When mum announces she's going into town from their mountain retreat she asks if daughter Izzy wants anything. Drumsticks. Later, Izzy goes on a hike along the local watercourse and comes across a stranger who's lost in the woods. They have a stilted conversation during which he wants to show her a photo he took with his phone of a strange symbol he came across. She stops him coming closer saying she's sick. Mum appears on the bank high above, tells Izzy to git home and deals with the stranger herself. The conversation goes to the same nowhere that the stranger ended up and she renders him into a scattering mass of ashes.

Hellbender is a film by a family called Adams (yes, they use the more famous order of those words but are still missing a 'd'). Everyone of them chips in on camera, writing, music, acting etc. with the help of a crew. This is their second feature. I haven't seen the first but judging by the skill with which this one avoids horror movie cliches I'm going to seek it out. The mother and daughter in this story are a real life mother and daughter and this tale of parent/child rifts forming and widening as the child grows and ventures progressively further away from the family idyll is the focus. The horror and the magic, when they appear, spring from this gravity which is how all that genre avoidance is done and feels so effortless.

Toby Poser's Mother (not given a name) offers a mountain woman wary of the world that snakes through the woods towards her daughter and will take recourse to dark forces (supported by some credible effects) Zelda Adams walks so lightly through her days she seems to glide. When she meets strangers (admittedly in a situation in which she is isolated within a remote location) she all but collapses into the vulnerability and powerlessness of a ten year old (she's about eighteen in the film). When she smiles at a joke or in a moment of parent/child warmth her face lights up with such a natural artless joy it almost makes you feel guilty to keep looking.

As the credits rolled on this enjoyable and enjoyably serious film I wondered what kind of film my family might have made if we'd tried anything like this. There were enough of us to fill the cast and crew of a Spielberg blockbuster but I think that, rather than this lean and elegantly drawn fable of a child learning her own powers, it would have been more like Hey Dad as a severe corporate training video. That the forces that put this together were from people more used to each other than on almost any other set in history and kept it so disciplined and single-voiced is a marvel. It is cine-literate without being childishly referential. It is warm without being maudlin. It offers clean pitch on the pain and euphoria of change.

It is on Shudder.