Calling All Police Cars (1975) & Footprints on the Moon (1975)

Calling All Police Cars - 8/10
Mario Caiano, who directed Nightmare Castle with Barbara Steele, shows himself to be a very competent director with Calling All Police Cars. It's not an amazing film. It's just very skilled. It is never heavy-handed with the exposition, shows you all you need to know, gives you intelligent characters who have depth and conflicts of interest, and the dialogue occurs only when needed, never falling into dull Americanisms (you know, like cops who say all these witty things at crime scenes). Calling is actually just a police procedural investigating a missing and eventually found-murdered girl for the first 72 minutes, then it becomes a giallo of sorts. This transition is smoothly handled--no Rat Pfink a Boo Boo here. There is a generally mature mindset at work that presents quite a lot of full-frontal nudity of teenage women without seeming gratuitous. Overall, a surprisingly good film.

Footprints on the Moon - 6/10
Florinda Bolkan stars in Last Year in Marienbad. No, wait, Last Tuesday in Garma. Basically a woman thinks she was in a place but she doesn't remember being in a place and she thinks other people remember her being in that place but they don't think so then they remember but she thinks they don't remember then she thinks she remembers but some guy tells her she doesn't remember and then someone dies. Oh yeah, and she has recurring nightmares of Klaus Kinski performing experiments on astronauts and leaving them to die on the moon, which she thinks are scenes from a movie called Footprints on the Moon (isn't that this movie?).

It's not a terrible movie. It is definitely intriguing to see Florinda attempting to solve this mystery of why she forgets three days of her life and her relationship to this town and the people in it. But its ambitions--or pretensions--strike me as not having been realized and the answer to the whole film is both mundane and left unexplained.

I watched this movie with high hopes based largely on the comments section right here on imdb. It is called a giallo--one of the most innovative gialli, no less. Well, it's no giallo. It isn't even a thriller. It is a psychodrama mystery film and nothing more--no horror here. Comparisons to David Lynch are unjustified. This is not the intellectual headgame they will have you believe. It is just a mystery film. It's pretty enjoyable while it's going on, mainly because Balkan can carry the film and manage protagonists like this (Flavia-types).

One huge bonus does come from watching Footprints on the Moon. You know that creepy red-haired girl from Deep Red and Baron Blood? Well, Florinda goes all Polanski's The Tenant on her and slaps her in the face--hard!

Lurking Fear (1994)

I actually saw the poster for Lurking Fear in a video store back in '94 and was desperately curious. I never did get a chance to see it. I wish it had remained that way. Lurking Fear is a bad movie. It's not an amusingly bad movie. It's a frustratingly bad movie. It insults your intelligence and doesn't deliver much on the fun.

A handsome, muscular man gets out of prison and goes looking for his criminal father's stash of money. It's in a cemetery in some town where, we learn, the population has been steadily shrinking due to some monster's living underground. Why don't the people just evacuate the stupid town? The only people who seem to be left are Jeffrey Combs, Kirsty from Hellraiser (Ashley Laurence), a priest, and a pregnant woman. Enter Mr. Beefcake, trailed by some caricature mob goons who want the money. All of these thoroughly unpleasant characters bicker, play tough-guy, mouth-off to each other, point guns at each other, take guns from each other, while the monsters occasionally reach a hand up from below.

One hopes and prays the monsters will consume these miserable pieces of human refuse. Only Jeffrey Combs is really likeable--because he's Jeffrey Combs. The rest are just annoying. Ashley Laurence is the most annoying of them all. The tough guy act just never stops with her. If you thought Wolverine from X-Men was annoying, hoo boy, she's got him beat. Speaking of which, Beefcake resembles Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. He also finds an excuse to go shirtless, which had me thinking, "Ah, so this is how women must feel when there is gratuitous T&A."

Long story short: the characters are heinous and poorly written, the monsters are boring and largely ineffectual, the plot is incoherent to put it lightly, and at 76 minutes it still runs too long. Most people here know I like nearly everything I watch. Lurking Fear beat me. It is bad and insulting. Stuart Gordon had actually been set to direct this. I think had Charles Band let Gordon write and direct, Lurking Fear may have been good. Perhaps what makes me hate the movie so much is just that the raw material is good; it's the execution that is repugnantly bad.

Castle Freak (1995)

Stuart Gordon doesn't get his due. Sure, the Re-Animator is a classic of sorts, but what about Gordon the director? Gordon the horror auteur who is always trying for something really new? With each horror film, he departs more from formula and invents his own way, a new way, of delving into the macabre and frightening the audience. He's not as intellectual as Romero, but he's formally a more innovative director.

With Castle Freak, Gordon reveals a particularly mature approach to horror that sort of works and sort of doesn't. It is has the salacious and scandalous seriousness of the more sordid works of gothic literature. Also like gothic novels, the film is predicated on the theme of family, particularly dark family secrets. It also takes place in a castle. Yes, indeed, Castle Freak is a salacious and sensationalist piece of gothic storytelling.

The plot concerns a husband (Jeffrey Combs), his wife (Barbara Crampton), and his blind daughter coming to the castle he has just inherited from his aunt, the duchess. They get more than they bargained for when the chronically abused, mutilated son in the cellar breaks free and wants sex, lots of sex--like Shakespeare's Caliban. In the meanwhile, Combs and Crampton are constantly in emotional conflict because his drunk driving took the life of their son.

The term 'mean-spirited' is often used as a dismissive term. Castle Freak is mature--there's no funny stuff, the themes are serious, the emotions of the characters are given room to be expressed and explored in earnest--but as I noted, also salacious. The combination gives the film a mean-spirited edge. One particular scene gives a whole new meaning to the expression 'eating a girl out.' It is unpleasant, but not unnecessary.

The film deals very much with the theme of sexual frustration. Just as Combs is forever denied by his wife, the freak from the cellar lacks a sexual organ to do anything with the women he captures. Where Combs takes out his frustration in more peaceful ways--or by going to prostitutes--the monster becomes violent.

Castle Freak is actually a very good, thoughtful movie. There are a few stupid moments. For instance, one wonders how a mutilated man kept in a cellar for decades is suddenly strong enough to break down doors and overpower a rather hefty police officer. One also must endure seeing the freak's ballsack a lot, because it's naked during the entire latter half of the film--I suppose that's a touch of realism I should be applauding, but I could have done without monster balls in my face. However, all that aside, one is left really with a mature approach to horror that has largely been neglected due to the general immaturity of the times. Had it been more playful like The Reanimator, it might have satisfied our juvenile tastes better. As it stands, it may be appreciated in times to come. But I myself found it a bit mean-spirited and the drama between Crampton and Combs annoying.

Spielberg's Duel and the Masculine Threat

What is a duel? It's a type of fight. Not just any fight. Were this film called 'Fight,' it would lose a lot of its force. A fight doesn't have the implications a duel has. A duel has stakes of honour and power. The winner is superior, the 'better man'; the winner has shown he has the more powerful hand, the swifter blade. The duel is about two things: power and speed. And Duel the film is about power and speed as well.

The bulk of dialogue in Duel occurs in the opening fifteen minutes. This section serves as a sort of thematic introduction. It gives you the conceptual tools to understand just what's going on in all you witness from there on in. The radio conversation we hear as David Mann drives along is of a radio DJ calling the census bureau and jokingly giving a story of how he can't claim to be the head of his household even though he's the man of the house; how this is humiliating for him; and how he is a 'househusband' who wears a dress and slippers all day. We also get a glimpse into David's life as he calls his wife to apologize for a fight. It seems they were at a social gathering and he didn't stop a man from hitting on his wife--she describes it as practically attempted rape. There are clear implications here that David is henpecked and not able to stand up for himself. He's a wimp. He doesn't drive fast and is probably destined to remain in middle management. He is probably not terribly respected, otherwise men wouldn't try to seduce his wife in front of him. Defending his wife shouldn't have been a point of treating her like property; it should have been a point of fending off a serious breech of respect and not allowing himself to be humiliating and overpowered. So that's David and those are the themes.

Then the duel begins, over an hour of the movie dedicated to the one cat-and-mouse game. Duels in swashbucklers were with swords; duels in westerns were with guns. Yes, duels really were carried out with those items, yet they are clear phallic symbols. These instruments of the duel are themselves symbolic of what's at stake in the duel. One has a cockfight in both meanings of 'cock'. What could be even more phallic than a gun and a sword? Why, vehicles of course! David's bright orange car against a semi: can David out-power or out-run the semi?

The stakes of this duel have been set up in those opening twenty minutes: David's masculinity, his power. When he overtook the truck, he was just trying to escape the fumes. Clearly the driver took this as an offense. He took it as a statement of power. The driver then overtakes David to reassert himself. Later when David waves him past, the driver seems only more furious and repeatedly taunts David with the wave-past throughout the film, because it implies a giving of permission. The whole film works by power dynamics.

David has an interior monologue running throughout the film. At the mid-way point, after his first failure in the duel, he stops in a truck stop and ponders approaching the people he believes might be the driver. He's still very meek but is considering standing up for himself. His thoughts on what he should do generally illustrate the effects the events are having on him, but otherwise the visuals do the work of illustrating the plot. Still beyond the mid-way point he can only ineffectually tell children not to sit on the hood of his car. Nor can he help successfully give push to a bus that the trucker has no trouble pushing. It is not until the end that he finally decides he can't run or hide any more, he has to fight using his wits. The decision to fight is probably more important than whether he wins or not.

It would be a stretch to call Duel a bildungsroman. This is really all one event taking place in a few hours. I'd label Duel a 'turning-point film'. Turning-point films generally consist of meek people going through extreme situations and gaining the inner strength to be more assertive. While She Was Out is an example of a turning-point film. In While She Was Out, we are treated to a before and after, seeing how the heroine of that film uses her experience to take control of her life and dominate her abusive husband. Strangely, Matheson doesn't give us that satisfaction: after seeing David win the duel, we never get to see him go home and kick ass. We are left to imagine what sort of impact the event will have on his life. I think that is a wise decision.

So, Duel is about as masculine a film as one could ask for; its themes all directly concern men and the power dynamics between them, the psychosocial implications of those power dyanmics, and the symbolic representations of these dyanmics in cinema (swashbucklers, westerns). Hopefully anyone watching the film comes away a little less innocent, a little more aware, and with a new hair on his/her chest.

The Devil's Rain (1975)

I'm not going to write much on this film, since it's pretty well-known ('infamous' might be the term). The main draw is the idiosyncratic cast: Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Ida Lupino, and Tom Skeritt. I think the film is actually cast perfectly if you're willing to let go of the oddness and take it seriously. Borgnine is really menacing as a villain, especially when he goes all he-goat on you. Shatner as the blustering, gun-toating son isn't a far stretch from Captain Kirk and is therefore thoroughly believable.

The main fault of the film is the plot. It's not that the idea for the plot is bad in itself. However, it seems more like the plot for a video game: the villain wants a book (the Holy Book of McGuffin, in case you're wondering), kidnaps guy's mom, guy goes after villain with gun. Then the other son (Skeritt) goes to rescue mome and bro. I've seen games on the NES with a plot like that! The problem is that either Fuest or the studio cut the film badly, very badly, and things don't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. The film rushes through things and the haste shows in how the characters are forced to behave.

What does work for me is the atmosphere. That's one thing Fuest gets right. When Shatner first arrives in the ghost town, no music plays; it's just silence. He speaks to Borgnine in mostly silence, with just the sounds of the wind breezing through the remnants of a former community. The film has a few moments rich with atmosphere like this and they're beautiful. But they don't save the film from the general incoherency.

It'd make a great double-bill with Argento's Inferno.