BLOOD AND BLACK LACE @ 60

A model is killed for knowing too much. When her incriminating diary is discovered both suspicion and potential victims pile up. On the trail of murder we'll know too much about the guilty and the innocent right up to the last bloody minute. This is a giallo. It's one of the first. It's one of the best. For optimum results, assume that whatever happens during a scene fits in at the time, regardless of what the film has already told you. This is sometimes intentional red-herringism and at other times sheer lack of concern.

Mario Bava, maestro of genre, fresh from inadvertently making the first giallo proceeded to break the rule book for this one. While his gothic horrors could be shot in lurid colours, thrillers and dramas were expected to be in monochrome. This one is in edible lurid colour from start to finish. By the time you notice how long some of the takes are you might get a little dizzy. If you get confused between characters and mistake the motives of one for those of another just wait until one of the pair gets offed. If you're expecting Hitchcockian suspense you might have to relax into the cruelty of the violence instead. There is gun play on screen but gialli developed more along the lines of revenge tragedy where murders involved more sadistic and lingering torture: people are more likely to die from prolonged and severe scalding or the claws of suits of armour than a bullet.

Does that sound terrible? Would you prefer a logical plot that tied up after a thrill ride? You have plenty of options. If you like the idea of wading through a bloody mire of threat that, if you let it in, will begin to feel more like a real dream. Even the credit sequence to Blood and Black Lace encourages this. The cast are seen posing in settings of the fashion house. A committed Hitchcockian might have established character traits or suggested relations between them but here they are like mannequins come to life, awaiting the programming to move and act in a gallery that presages the lurid colour pallet they'll call home. There's an American version of the opening credits which is far more direct about revealing the progress of murder and violence we're in for but, while it is more accurate, it is less effective in conveying the tone. This is a dream, if not ours than someone's.

As a further layer, a between meal snack, if you will, Bava gives us a kind of opinion piece on the commodification of beauty and in abstract form its logical extension through class and capitalism in the parade of workers left to bicker among themselves while their user group in management can pick and choose which to keep and which to replace. The idleness of the rich and controlling is almost always centre screen as the murders appear to increasingly relate to the stratification keeping this corner of the fashion industry up.

If you've made it this far you will understand how hard this film is to describe and how harder still it is to entice viewers to it. Remember that it was a precursor to a genre that became as much a staple of a national cinema as J-Horror did in its time decades on. The trait of loosening the details toward a dreamlike feel while keeping the violence confronting and difficult is more fully developed here than in Bava's OG giallo. You might even find the investigation by the detective annoying rather than thrilling but it does feature some sensational breakthroughs and intriguing setbacks. 

At the end of its decade, new blood like Dario Argento took the baton to produce ever tougher gialli as the genre took wing with audiences, the violence getting more extreme and the overall look more beautiful. But here, back in 1964 with these strange scenes of murder and fear in settings of extraordinary colour we are looking at a prototype that, for all its spiky edges and ugly duckling tries, carries the beauty of invention.

Review: ABIGAIL

A precision hi-tech kidnapping in which the perps don't even know each others' names. The little girl is taken to the hideout (a large country mansion) and they are told by their host that they now just have to take care of the girl while the ransom is negotiated. There's a bar and a kitchen and rooms they can use. He even gives them nicknames so they can call each other something. He leaves them to it and when they hit the bar they get both loose and restless. There's already a simmer, no one likes the others, and it looks to go all the way to boil. But there's something else: that girl really might not be what she seems.

The trailer for this spoils one of the major plot points of this film and I'm not going to repeat it. If you can go in without it, do so and this will be a lot more fun. Suffice to say, once the thread is taken up it's held tight in this high action comedy thriller. With nods to Agatha Christie (very funny reference in the kind of library shelf that makes an appearance in Christie novels) and caper crime movies of the '70s and '90s as well as a few horror tropes, Abigail yet holds its own in being neither self conscious nor overly generic.

A cast that includes Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens (in great form) and Kathryn Newton offers a unit of types with just enough individuality to tell them apart and expect behaviour from them. The real turn, though, is Alisha Weir in the title role, who takes her character from heart rending innocence to raging terror, handling both physical gags and well wrought monologues with a grin that could freeze at twenty paces.

Apart from that there's not a great deal to say about this film but by that I mean that it does its job. If there's a flaw it's a needless stodging of the pace in the second act that has a slight dampening effect on the final scene. It's not that serious but if you know (which you do, now) that this is the same Radio Silence team that made the dizzyingly wonderful Ready or Not you might wonder where that commitment to constant energy went. If Abigail had done a skerrick more to justify this by deepening the theme or adding weight to the action the problem would be unnoticeable.

However, the charm of this movie is that it really doesn't pretend to be more than it is and what it does provide that works, works a treat. After the bludgeoning of ironic filmmaking of the last thirty years which pushed its winks and nudges at its audiences, it's refreshing to find more recent fare free of such burdens. Abigail, like the little girl dancing to an empty auditorium during the opening credits, a luxury version of ballet practice, is happy just to
entertain.

ELECTION @ 25

Jim loves being a high school teacher. He really seems to have found a vocation nurturing young minds. Tracey has such a mind but lacks the social pallet to see the border between being bright and self propelling. When she runs unopposed for student president, Jim, losing sight of borders himself, persuades the goofy and popular Paul to run against her. When a bizarre love triangle irritates his adopted sister Tammy, she runs for president, as well, stunning everyone with a platform of apathy and contempt for politics. It brings the house down. Vote early, vote often.

Alexander Payne's breathlessly energetic and idea-rich satire broke his name after the still obscure indy Citizen Ruth. While his directorial efforts have remained toward the indy margins, his work is well enough regarded for movie-goers to get a ticket on the name alone. 1999 was a great year at the marginal mainstream cinema with the likes of Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Being John Malkovich and many more (which I be revisiting throughout this year) so Election, just as those titles do, has a lot of weight pulling to do if it is to linger in the memory.

One of the forward features of those titles and even mainstream fare like the Matrix was a quirky freshness that made it feel like the medium was getting a reboot. So, for Payne to take a new bestseller and bring it to the screen with this mix of faith to the source and divergence from it, meant that this was a cinematic workout. His hand at this, though, was so firm but light that it not only flies by but the number of concepts bombarding the viewer is both great and unburdensome. 

First, he keeps the multi-narrator structure from the novel. We just don't get time to settle too comfortably as Jim's matter of fact voice gives way to Tracey's strident one, Paul's goofy optimism and Tammy's teenage anger as their voiceover accounts play over Simpsons/South Park like montages. The speed and energy of this prevent it ever getting too samey. When it's time to slow down it goes deep (e.g. Jim with a bee stung eye peering around the corner of a room in his house to see the worst thing his wrongdoing could have served up).

Matthew Broderick gives us a Jim trying to do good but struggling with a conscience that won't quite leave him alone. Reese Witherspoon, already a child and then indy actor, strikes gold with Tracey Flick, accentuating her skull like face with the piercing blues, die cut diction and spasmodic motion. Chris Klein brings the same daggy popular guy he'd add to the American Pie movies which is perfect here. Jessica Campbell shines as the awkward adolescent explosion of Tammy. Between these and a solid supporting cast there really isn't a false note heard.

Payne shot the novel's ending but chose his own instead. By doing so he sealed the film as cinema rather than a tv adaptation (that distinction was already on the blur with the likes of The Sopranos) and gives the conclusion a timeless feel that might just as easily be from the end of the '60s as from Broderick's own Ferris Bueller '80s. This was significantly produced by MTV and if you saw it at a cinema in 1999 the logo animation might have caused a few stirrings of unease. Were we about to see a sellout teen comedy with incomprehensibly rapid editing, less substantial that the air between the nuggets of our popcorn? 

It didn't turn out that way. Payne made sure he gave a shot of wit in the first few minutes and kept it up. If you look now at his rap sheet you might be struck by the kind of middle aged social realist comedy taking up most of the list. Sideways, The Holdovers, Nebraska. There's not great contradiction, here, Payne is interested in the depths of his characters' humanity, he just started young.

Election is available through Stan, Paramount+ (subscription), online renters like Prime, Apple or Google. 

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE @ 50

After a solemn crawling title and voiceover announces that the story we are about to see is true, we fade to black with flashes of gruesome images of rotting corpses and a rising radio commentary about the discovery of a sculpture found in a cemetery of a body fashioned from corpses. We move back from the spectacle slowly, taking in the weird artistry of it and pounding questions about the kind of mind that would do such a thing. 

Cut to a roadkill armadillo. A group of young adults is driving a Kombi van out to the country to a disused house in the family of two of them. They stop for petrol but the servo has run out (they do have barbeque, though) and go on to the house. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker who was too edgy and weird to continue in the community of Deliverance who talks about animal slaughter and creeps them out so much they cast him back on to the road. Unsettled they get to their place and explore the house while wheelchair-bound Franklin has to listen while staring at the symbol the hitcher has left in blood on the side of the van.

Kirk and his girlfriend Pam go off in search of a water hole and see a house in the near distance. Maybe they have petrol. Kirk goes in first, finding the door open. He sees the bizarre wall through another door, which is clothed entirely in animal heads. Curious, he goes to take a closer look. In the interest of being spoiler free I won't go on but I can say that what happens to him is sudden and shocking and that he doesn't get out again.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 shocker is one for the ages. On one hand it doesn't mess around, starting with an ominous warning and following up immediately with a visceral payoff, starting the tale proper with a memento mori before diving into some of the nastiest violence seen on screen to date. Add to that the seemingly ever deepening sources of cultural commentary and you have a movie you can just watch as a scream fest and something you can talk about for years. There are five separate commentaries on the copy that I watched, as well as an analysis so dense it needs a second listen or even a third before the sound of the voice can be smoothed into receivable meaning. And that's just about the mask.

Having just watched it for the unknownth time, I am all but out of things to say. That was how I get to the end credits last night and then sampling some of those commentaries (some of them were revisits). I just watched a movie that deserves its status as an influential cinematic icon, and is just a bloody effective horror movie, and I had nothing to add. So I slept on it.

I'm going to start very personal and say that everything I see set in places like Texas reminds me of growing up in North Queensland. The Kombi, the roads shimmering with heat, the glare, the smell of the long, dry grass, walking around the big wooden country houses. Apart from the accents, this film feels like it could have been shot around where I grew up in Townsville. This means that there is an extra sheen of creepiness I sense whenever I watch the movie. I never knew of any of the corpse mutilations that the film starts with locally but my memory of the kind of heaviness I'd feel outside the city limits, the sense of things going wrong without warning, is very strong. Growing up, the tales of hitch hiking always turned a little weird from either hitchers getting into bad cars or bad hitchers getting into straight cars. 

If you think that my pre-internet childhood would have exacerbated this effect of the great lore of hearsay I can only offer that no instrument spread urban myths faster nor more widely than the online world, it's just that hearing it without the claim of it exposed did make it feel authentic. If you'd told me the plot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a few local place names thrown in I, at twelve or so, would have believed you. That uneasy surface carries nostalgia with it.

That nostalgic recall of believing the worst of people beyond the sway of the family home is what struck Tobe Hooper when he wrote the screenplay in memory of hearing about Ed Gein, killer and bodysnatcher whose house was filled with repurposed human remains. Hooper remembered the case from people gossiping about it (he stayed with relatives in Wisconsin where the crimes took place). That's about as close as this film gets to its claim about being a true story but, as such claims are still made, regardless of their veracity, I think we can give him a pass on that. The act of it, though, impresses me, like those dream accounts you hear that flow far more freely and vividly than anything you yourself can muster. Tobe Hooper found something in his memory, under the school days and first dates, that haunted him to see again, and made a cinema classic from it. I'm simplifying this but I'm doing that to bring it closer to me and push it further away from more formal criticism.

One of the features of the film that would later become a staple of teen slashers was the mask. I was surprised to be reminded that Leatherface is referred to by that epithet in the film itself (it's also used in the cast list in the end credits). I'd thought this was a fan invention like Hellraiser's Pinhead but there it is, from the off. I digress. Leatherface is one of the most frightening baddies of any horror movie. He has no lines beyond a kind of disturbing whimper when stressed. He never reveals the face below the human skin masks he wears and the only indicators of what lies beneath it are the slightly bucky teeth and impenetrable coal eyes. Apart from the masks he adopts different costumes, assuming changing personae. He's brutal here and cowing and whinnying at his brother's chastisement. He could hammer you like a cow in the slaughter house, lower you on to a meathook or chase you with a screaming chainsaw or he could curl up like a roly poly bug in a corner if he thinks he's done the wrong thing. There is no history given, it's just how he lives. And that's before you meet his brothers and grandpappy upstairs whose age has given his own face the look of a desiccated corpse. 

The thing is that this isn't really that much like hick horror when you think about it. The Duelling Banjos scene in Deliverance goes a lot further along that sleazy road. Some of the scenes showing the locals talking a little crazily in the sun do more. The family itself are only durn rednecks by their accents, their culture of meat life, extended carnivory and advanced barbeque technique say more about the overall culture. When Sally's non stop screaming ordeal at the table takes place, its base is butchery.

Hooper and co. are inviting us to examine what's on the end of our forks, how the sausage is made. When the crew in the Kombi go past the slaughterhouse they talk of things like head cheese. Franklin says to his sister that she'd probably like it if she didn't know how they make it. One of the others wants them to stop talking about slaughter methods because she likes meat. The interspersed shots of cattle in metal enclosures contain no violence done to them but there doesn't need to be any shown. We know what's going to happen to them. As a result the sight of them is profoundly eerie.

And that's the thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: eeriness. For all its violence (only a little of it actually done with a chainsaw) and screaming nightmarish panic, it remains a film of shivers. There is no bargaining with the family; they are on a course of generations' standing and will not change. The realisation that their celebratory slaughter is only an slightly sharper point poking from the national culture, is a shiver. The blood is just the colour of the makeup.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Second Sight's fantastic 4K disc but it is available for free through Brollie, by subscription through Shudder and rentable form the usual spots.