1971@50: DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS

Stefan and Valerie, two eloping newlyweds avoid parental disinheritance by faffing about Europe in the off season, settling on a guest free hotel in Ostend. Hey, the place to themselves, hot and cold running room service, not a bad honeymoon at that. There is an unsettled edge to their relationship in Stefan's itchy violence. It takes him to nearby Bruges where the couple rubberneck around some recent ghastly murder sites before getting the jolly bus back to the hotel. 

When they get back they find they have company. A platinum blonde Countess Barthory, a kind of Dietrich at her peak but a vampire and her young and beautiful companion Ilona. The concierge has already nutted out the Countess' identity and danger and tries through her glamour to send this message to the newlyweds who only see sophistication and style. Sounds like a holiday worth at least one good postcard. What can go wrong does and that's this movie.

Daughters of Darkness is a chapter in Belgian director Harry Kumel's bridge from documentary to feature films. At first glance it might remind the Eurogenre fan of the likes of Jess Franco or Jean Rollin with its lush visuals and confident erotica. While there is the Sadism of both and the melancholy of the latter, this stands out from both as an entry in the lesbian vampire side genre (sound like a joke but it's true). The seduction at the centre of the film is not just a path to the actors shedding their kit as much as a fable of the violence or parasitism of the act. A scene in which the Countess literally massages an account from Stefan or the ugly deeds of the ancestral Countess Barthory shows her tasting and savouring Stefan's violence while his new bride screams for them to stop the story. And her reaction is not just for the details to end but the clear carnality in the telling: she's furiously jealous.

And this is not that generic a genre piece as becomes clear as soon as we realise that we won't be seeing how they do the fang thang. There is more trauma in the call Stefan makes to his ex and it is made of deadly conversation. As a battle of wills or good and evil there's less goth on screen than personal politics: it's less Count Yorga and more Knife in the Water. And while ploit details might seem sparse here I won't go further than I have with them. In any case the strength of this horror of manners piece is the atmosphere that allows the multilingual cast to perform capably in English.Around them is the freezing beach and the big, hibernating resort they are in. It might even be an exhausted Europe. A long direct look by the Countess later in the film straight into the camera and into us suggests that her own bloodied immortality might be weighing a little too heavily, like a supermodel or a rockstar who has heard one too many nitpicks about her advancing years taking her from her trade.

This film sits comfortably beside a reef of arthouse horror from its time that steered a reckless course between cinephilia and exploitation. The best of these are easy to rewatch and the worst are forgettable but for a good decade filmmakers in that niche of Europe were staging a gentle stylistic coup. Compare and contrast the past fifteen years of the belly slashing and skin flaying screams of the New French Extremity. Those ones pretty much never get (or need) a second view. Meanwhile there's a swag of these, as beautiful as they are troubling which never stops being a flavoursome mix.

Review: AN UNQUIET GRAVE

Ava meets her brother in law Jamie at his wife's and her twin sister's grave. She is bratty and callous and their conversation is fragmentary. As he is about to go she asks if he really can do "it". He nods and walks off. Months later the pair are driving along a country road at night and they talk about the accident that ended Julie's life. They stop when he recognises the scene of the tragedy, get out and perform a midly unsettling ritual. At the other end of this Julie has reappeared and Ava has vanished.

This extension of the Monkey's Paw story does two things well: it keeps everything lean and keeps to its conceit, however odd. By lean I'm talking minimal settings, sparse dialogue, no more effects than needed and room for the viewer's mind to move around the words and deeds of the characters. There is too much to spoil here for me to reveal any more plot but it if you were iffy at that description about the motivations of Jamie you should be. Also, you'll probably guess that the occult trick does not go as planned. But what might entice you is how committed the performances are. There are three characters only on screen and two of those are in the same body at different times (or are they?) and the sense that the black magic of it could not only happen but be enacted by these people.

The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs (who on earth gives their child a double late alphabet name?) is a wish story and wish stories go like this: wish 1 is solely to prove the power, wish 2 is more than wanted and wish 3 is to undo wish 2 and the lesson is "don't meddle". In the case of the old couple in the Jacob's story you might add "get over it". We have all grieved for something but what if your grief was so debilitating that it drove you to the impossible to ease it, to actually wish the dead to live again? For now, imagine the hurdle of that actually happening and ask what your real motives might be. Would you genuinely want the foreshortened life to continue or are you just wanting a vanity shot, a lifelong affirmation, someone to come back alive to thank you at every moment for their deliverance? What pain could be relieved by that? This film doesn't just go beyond The Monkey's Paw lesson to examine this it also avoids the overstatement that a big budget, high concept Hollywood reading would make. This is a quiet film with a big loud heart.

Currently on Shudder

1971@50: LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

A woman sits in a rowboat near the shore of a lake. She faces away from us and we hear her thoughts ask if what she has just been through is real or imagined. Cut to days before as she, Jessica, is being driven along with her husband and a friend to a family house in the country for some rest and rec. Authentic rest n rec, actually, as Jessica is just out from a spell in a mental health facility and needs some seriously fresh air. Along the way and on approaching the house she has glimpses, phantasms, of things that make her doubt herself. Figures in the landscape that disappear on a second look. Something just under the surface of the lake. When they get to the house she sees a pair of legs at the top of the stairs that run off. Her husband, Duncan, assuages her, "I saw it, too" and runs after the intruder along with the friend, Woody. They catch up with a young woman, a hippy drifter who was just going to stay until she rested up. She's not so threatening so she stays for dinner and the morning after the vote is to let her stay. Oh, she's Emily.

The rest of this is detail as we find out more about Emily and why someone in a family portrait from generations before looks exactly like her. Oh and why the locals are bandaged and blissed out as well as honking rednecks. Oh and who the eerie girl from the turn of the last century is trying to get their attention. This film does not claim to be anything other than a horror movie but the lack of tension as some of the more violent moments happen, whether through ineptitude or by design, gather a numb (not numb-ing) mesmerism.

What tension there is lies in how much of this is taking place in Jessica's fragile awareness as her head gets louder with whispers. Emily who might be a strange form of vampire or succubus is also disconcertingly of the present time and convincingly everyday, however seductive. Duncan does seem to care deeply for Jessica but a few phantasms later also seems to be using that as a mask for his steady drift into lust for Emily. The pace is slow. Sometimes that feels like art and sometimes it feels like inexperience. 

But then there are aspects which are deliberate. The electronic score variously shrieks, charms or weighs down with a stark drone or pulse, nothing like you'd expect from the rustic setting, however steeped it is in genre. The somatised yokels in the town seem to value their plasters and bandaids like a village of proto-Cronenbergian  new flesh zombies. Bingo! That, as I write it, is what I'm looking at: this film from 1971 looks like Shivers, Rabid or Videodrome from years later. 

It's on par with another anomalous horror film from the same year The Brotherhood of Satan which blended a pre-Exorcist occultism with a rough realism to great effect. The sense that this population-wide malady or cult effect will just keep spreading is only barely suggested but is present on screen. But then we end with Jessica still wondering about what she just experienced and if she didn't just concoct it with her brain chemistry. And you feel, when you see it that it only needs the tiniest flick of a Cronenberg for this tale to bloom into proto body horror - the close ups of the wounds you do get to see are ghastly for looking genuine rather than like fang punctures - and a cinematic revolution, however quiet.

CITIZEN KANE at 80

Reputation is a damper. It either kills or overfeeds and when the mighty arbiters at 3 a.m. party corridors pronounce upon a thing with a reputation it is to gain advancement for themself by doing damage to something else. And is Sgt. Pepper crap or touring Europe just Toy Town or are mocha coffee beans for wankers? Not objectively, no. If you came across that album and liked it, enjoyed yourself in the Czech Reuplic and love the aroma and taste of mocha keep it up; you're no closer to being wrong knowing what some git has thought of what you like. 

I didn't realise when, a year before my twentieth anniversary of being alive that I was about to watch the reputed greatest film ever made on something like its fortieth anniversary. The most I knew was that my Nanna had called it controversial. I was at Uni and saw the movie as part of my course on a crisp Brisbane winter morning with a cup of common room urn coffee. And was wowed by it from start to finish. The camera floats through a neon sign and down through a broken window. A scene of an argument on a stairwell is not accompanied by a bombastic orchestral accompaniment and feels as uncomfortable as it should. And that's before you get to the performances which vary from showy period-correct bluster to surprising naturalism. And that's before you get to the heart rending epic of grand American wasted life that is the tale of Citizen Kane.

The story goes like this: Charles Foster Kane is born to a poor rural couple in the frozen midwest but comes into a fortune when a deed to a mine put in his name turns into a ... gold mine. Removed from his parents by the family lawyer he grows up in loveless privilege in the big city, goes wild at university, getting expelled from each and then notices a newspaper business is part of his assets and on the hunch the it might be "fun to run a newspaper" takes it over and builds a massive media empire over the next decades, making fortune upon fortune. He marries once for a mix of love and connection (the president's niece) and then again for a mix of love and abusive control and finally breathes his last word, "rosebud" as a lonely man in a desolate palace.

That's not quite it. You get a few versions of this story from different sources and the timelines overlap and details in one can contradict others. From the snakelike camera tour of the faded grandeur giving an expressionistic idea of the man to the brash newsreel with its flat account of a life delivered in a vocal boom to the aged friends, colleagues and spouse still alive to tell their tales to Thompson the reporter. While they are all aged and slower and creakier than their youthful selves in their flashbacks, Thompson, standing in for us, is seldom more than a silhouette, shot from behind or in deep shadow, faceless and common, receiving just like us but asking the questions we would, empty until we pour our own personalities into him. This series of interviews takes up most of the film's screen time and through them we are given a great deal of information. Finally, we stand with Thompson (or he as us) on the floor of Xanadu piled with objects that might be a priceless classical statue or a two dollar snowglobe and we still know little more of Kane than we did after the intentionally superficial news story at the start. Thompson says what we think, that a word won't cut it to explain a life any more than a piece of one of the heaps of jigsaw puzzles on the floor. Finally, we do see what rosebud means and know that it was a moment of pure uncluttered joy, something that cost little but offered much including a brief escape from a hard moment into a brief sigh of peace. Credits.

Citizen Kane was not the first to do a lot of the things that people have claimed for it. If you want to see a ceiling in an interior (very unusual at the time) you can see The Wolfman beat Kane by almost a year. The architect of the still-impressive deep focus that characterises much of the look of the film made others before and did the same thing in them. The late thirties and early forties were a time of great innovation in cinema even at this mainstream level and any one of Kane's moments of virtuosity can be debunked as "Simpsons did it". If that were the point then Citizen Kane is an overrated impostor. But, that should never be the point. The point is the tale of a human whose fortunes and power grew faster than he did. It's a story of the America that Oscar Wilde spoke of when he said it had gone from barbarism to decadance without ever going through civilisation. That it was fashioned from the life of contemporary mogul William Randolph Hearst is worth knowing but it's better understood to be an act of modelling rather than portraiture; it's the type that's important, not the name (though there's one from our day we could put in here). Celebrations of the technique on screen in this film are less about firsts than how many. Welles, in setting out to scare the living daylights out of his country's radio listeners had already used everything he could find to bring War of the Worlds to the air as a kind of Ur found footage piece. Citizen Kane? Just add cinema.

But the flashy virtuosity is only part of the package. The fable of power's gouging force was in the screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles (and not just the former as propounded in the recent Netflix original Mank) that told a story that Welles drove with his real virtuosity: strong performances. Citizen Kane is a cinematic acting bonanza. Yes, Welles dominates this, that was Orson, but he fills the screen with a wealth of skill from his experience in New York theatre where his cast of colour McBeth (no, he didn't star in blackface, he just directed) and Julius Caesar set in contemporary fascist Italy delighted, engaged and outraged. He had a big loyal and energetic gang and you can see them on the screen. 

Ok, you might gag at the pantomime bluster of the Thatcher montage but that is treated as a kind of music hall sequence that leads to Welles's entrance in the film as the exact opposite (and you don't get the panto after that). Great scenes like the barnstorming campaign speech, the drunken sparring between Jed and Charlie after the election, Bernstein as an old man recalling the power of a glimpsed beauty from his youth (which is both writing and performance in equal measure), Susan Alexander's every scene as she develops through Kane's abuses from an artless but kind young woman into the shrieking trauma victim she is at the end. On that, there is a moment toward the end where, she is about to leave Kane who has started apologising and entreating. She's at the door. A smile forms on her face as though ihe might mean it this time. Then he destroys it with a pugilistic phrase and every harmonic of affection she had kept till then is silenced as she finds her resolve and tells him what he needs to hear. Afterwards, but soon, he goes back to the bedroom that he decorated with childlike illustrations and his old man's idea of what young women like, and tears at every piece of furniture, every drape, and does as much damage as he can. And there is not a note of musical score as this plays out in real time. The effect is brutal, its violence shouts out through time.

The more you see Citizen Kane the less you notice the whiz bang technological feats and the more you notice things like this, the acting, the telling of the tale. You might, assuming you were looking for it, notice the quite deliberate disposal of the three act scheme. We are looking at how the mess on the floor of the palace at the end came to be and however well meant the placing of each component it was only ever going to be a mess with Charlie Kane at the wheel. Is Charlie the loneliest emperor in that history? Is he what an American emperor might be? If we make it to the end we might wonder if we have just seen a message from history about the importance of remembering things.

So, is it genius? Well, like Eraserhead, Mozart's 40th, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Guernica, Hamlet, I don't care if it is or isn't. Citizen Kane works, it says (a few times) what its job is and does it. Is it perfect? Is anything and why should you want perfection? When Welles keeps nodding in one scene into the lap dissolve and it always feels too long does that really spoil a two hour film? What about the cartoon bats in the picnic scene? It was 1941, who was wrangling bats? Did you ever think of just sitting down and forgetting how long the title got shoved at the top of the pile of the "greatest ever made"? Still doesn't work for you? Fine, move on, just don't tell me that something I feel when I watch it isn't happening. Don't pretend you being iconoclastic by taking the easiest shot there is at something revered because you aren't the first and you are highly unlikely to be the best. Now that Citizen Kane has been toppled in recent polls by Hitchcock's Vertigo it might get a well earned breather but then that just means Vertigo is going to get it in the neck.

Another thing that occurs to me is that Welles's youth seems to be beneath more than a few of the attacks on his most famous film. He was twenty-six when the film was released. He was younger still when he caused such stirs in New York theatre and radio. If you've ever heard someone go on about the simplicity of early Mozart composition or Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen "for a reason"  then you have heard the saddening attempted first strike of a person guilty about their own lack of achievement in youth. Sad but true. Envy's gonna envy. Welles was twenty-six then and is long gone from us but Citizen Kane has turned eighty. So I've invited it into my living room tonight with reverance due its age and my own admiration and we're going to have a fine old chat. 

1971@50: BILLY JACK

A western town at the dawn of the '70s. The local honcho rustles mustangs with the aid of some good ole boys and a local deputy. Well he would if Bill Jack would let him but the trim ex-green beret peacenik who appears on horseback with a particularly persuasive manner and shuts it all down. Not before the big guy's son has humiliated his dad in front of the totin' rustlers by refusing to take a shot at one of the horses. Meanwhile that deputy has to take delivery of his runaway daughter, back and knocked up from a year in the post-Manson Haight Ashbury. Her dad is so enamoured of her plight that he slaps her around and she's a runaway again. This time she heads to the local free school in the desert, initially to hide out but soon gets into the groove of the place. It's run by an old earth mother called Jean who both lived through the '60s and remembers it. That's why she is running the school. Vietnam is still on and the draft is still on. Nixon's in the White House and the '70s are about to rewrite America.

Over the credits comes a staccato flute figure which blooms into a pop fable about a brutal village that wages war with another for a treasure that is just a piece of paper that says "peace on Earth". We've already seen Billy Jack and we've also seen the guy who really runs the town and even his malcontent son. The song tells us what to expect. So, the plot here is a lot less to the fore than its character elements. Hippy vs straight, if you like. Rebel vs conformity. New vs old. 

And this is just a hair past the Woodstock generation and its more grounded than the freedom trek in Easy Rider. There are things at stake. Sometimes they are drawn with a broad and sloppy brush but sometimes we get nuance, detail and some real cinema to tell the story. Billy Jack is like a lot of loner western heroes in that he seeks his own way but is drawn into others and has to confront that with violence. As with Shane he does it to protect the vulnerable. But it's 1971 not 1871 and there's no way of getting on a chestnut mare and riding over the horizon. It's the era of war and unrest on the news and iconic demons of the establishment in faceless riot gear. We can cheer all the small victories we want (and there are some glorious such moments on screen here) but we know how the battle ends and that, like the war that never seemed to end over in South East Asia, the big guns are backed by big money and power. That admission is what lifts Billy Jack from the mass of hippy vs cop exploitationers that rubbed shoulders with the bikie movies and the rest of it. Antonioni had had a decent stab at suggesting a new kind of American legend in the then recent Zabriskie Point but this one dragged the old mythology from the screen that gave birth to it and placed it around the corner on the day you saw it.

Which is why Billy Jack survived the worst of my uniform anti-hippy stance during the punk wars: it works and keeps working despite me wanting it to fail. I saw it as a kid in a family that seemed to be half hippy (upper middle class hippies, like they all seemed to be but still...) and the notions of social justice were welling up around us. I was indulged to grow my hair enough to be taunted by a pair of pencil sharpened local kids who taunted me with the word hippy as though that was going to work. I can remember stopping in the holiday Kombi by a beach and a posse of the local crew cuts came to stare at us longhairs in the front seats. The appearance of being on the other side was enough for them. We were the flagrant enemies of the great Australian way and our punishment was to receive the stares of cretins for the term of our natural lives. Well, that lasted until the late '70s when all of them had long hair to go with their neat casual attire and I started cutting mine to declare myself gleefully back in the margins. It wasn't just hair, of course, it was the whole damn culture and that's what got us roused in the cinema when this movie was on and then again when it ran on late night tv. You can get rady to scoff at the hamfisted message of peace but as soon as you see how it's really turning out you have to ditch all that.

I hung around the radio if One Tin Soldier came on and I wished you could get it played more. My sister sang the song that even in my not-yet-ten mind was a cringe: "When will Billy Love Me?" And now, most recently, watching it again as a fifty year old movie, I sat up and followed the moments of the story, the acting that was better than I recalled and the fable that worked a treat however much it was compromised by hokey ritual or vintage jive talk. The two stoners skit and the role reversal improv with the town elders are still funny. The end is still sobering. And way back, the sound of my voice along with everyone else in the hip Miss Samson's music class on a lazy afternoon at school as the glare burned out the North Queensland scenery:

Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of heaven. You can justify it in the end

There won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after 

One tin soldier rides away

Nothing, whether I admitted it or not, got me readier for punk rock than that hippy chorus.

Review: CAVEAT

A room in a decaying mansion. The lampshades are knocked askew and the wallpaper is either peeling or bruised. A young woman enters carrying a toy rabbit with human looking eyes and a drum. As she presents the toy to various doors she passes them by but when she comes to one the toy rabbit starts drumming. She opens the door. It leads to a basement. She descends the stairs and listens as the rabbit's drumming variously stops or starts up. She approaches a fresh looking section of wall, finds a tool to saw into it and looks through. Titles.

A young man who seems to be in mental health care is being given a job minding the niece of a dodgy older man. Sounds easy and the pay is good. The closer they get to the site the worse it looks. The house is on an island in a lake and the woman (from the opening sequence) is in a withdrawn state, sitting at the end of her room on the floor, her hands covering her face, seemingly catatonic. Oh, there's something else, the young man, Isaac, has to wear a brace that is connected to a chain that limits his reach in the house. After an argument he relents and puts the brace on as the dodgy man locks it. Ok, see you in a few days.

The rest of the film is a pitted contest between the intense creepiness of the setting and the unnerving actions of the woman, Olga, as she moves around the house in search of something undisclosed or freezes into motionless denial in her room. With nothing beyond this, Isaac tries to work out what the real situation is. As a light but effective electronic score swells around them they are both in for some dark discovery.

At its best this serious and unsettling film works as a strange melange of classic horror writers like M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood and the freezing eeriness of Samuel Beckett plays like Rockaby or Footfalls. This odd mix doesn't lessen even when the more generically horror scenes take place. If anything they are intensified by it. The sense of dread swelling through the rot in the walls mounts by the minute. This is enhanced by the stark and very deliberate high resolution video look which allows a rich colour pallet through does so with such clarity that the detail of it adds to the overall creepiness. The art direction would be overdone in a more generic film (it can look like a horror VR game at times) but here it just adds a painful rawness to the film.

The one aspect that detracts from all of this is the exposition. There are a number of twists which force the film into more conventional genre territory and they feel clumsy by comparison. While these are not as annoying as the exposition scene in Suspiria (which all but crushes the strongly wrought nightmare logic of that film) I wish they'd been under composed. That aside Caveat does rediscover its strength in the silence of its statements and ends with a quiet weight. Did you see and like last year's Relic? You should see and like this.

Currently on Shudder.