Hold the Mystery - ABSURD

In the evolution of horror cinema, the American Slasher sprang from the roots of the Giallo. Directors like Bob Clark (BLACK CHRISTMAS) and Sean Cunningham (FRIDAY THE 13TH) took the hyper-violent Italian thriller, stripped down the plot, ditched the (sometimes) sophistication and wild colors, and moved the usual urban setting to a more isolated one. Initially, however, they kept the mystery, especially concerning the killer. Even though we know the identity of the killer from the very start of HALLOWEEN, Carpenter maintained a sense of mystery by keeping Michael Meyer’s true face, and motivations, hidden away.

It was only a matter of time before Italian cinema, masters of the knock-off, would bring things full circle. In 1981, renowned horror/porn/anything-he-could-get-his-hands-on director Joe D’Amato took a stab at making his own American Slasher. Upping the gore and completely ditching all hint of mystery, the result was, fittingly, ABSURD.

The Capsule:
On the night of the big football party—which is regular football and not soccer because this is clearly America—the residents of a small American (not Italian) town are shocked by the appearance of a disemboweled stranger (George Eastman) pursued by a foreign priest (Edmund Purdom). After making a miraculous recovery in the hospital, the stranger escapes, leaving a trail of bodies behind him. The priest confesses to the police that the stranger, Mikos Stenopolis, was the subject in an experiment that gave him amazing healing powers and drove him homicidally insane. Mikos’ rampage through the town leads him to a villa—sorry, house—where a nurse from the hospital (Annie Belle) is looking after Katia (Katya Berger), a teenager confined to a hospital bed, and her little brother Willy (Kasimir Berger). Is there any way to stop this monster’s absurdly violent killing spree?

I’ve heard a lot of criticism that this is a cheap knock-off of HALLOWEEN, but I´ve never seen it that way. The basic theme is similar, a mute killer starts bumping off the residents of a small (supposedly) American town, followed by an older man who knows his story. Yes, he menaces a babysitter, and the little boy does refer to him as the boogeyman. The big difference, though it isn’t clearly expressed in the first movie, is that Michael Meyers seems to have an agenda. 

D’Amato doesn’t have time for bullshit like subtext. Everything you need to know about ABSURD is right in front of you. Who is the killer? It’s this guy right here, the one killing everybody. His name is Mikos. Does he wear a mask? Only if you count his beard. Does he have a tragic backstory that is gradually revealed? Not really. What drives him to kill? Medically induced murder mania. Does he have a secret motivation? To stop people from being alive. Why did he choose this town? Proximity.

The most mysterious element is the priest in pursuit of the killer. For some reason, the priest is the only person who Mikos fears. The middle aged Purdom is hardly an imposing figure, especially when he pauses mid chase to catch his breath. It might be because not only is Purdum a priest, but a bio-chemist as well, and the man responsible for scrambling Mikos’ brain.

The bigger question is why the hell make Purdom a priest in the first place? The bio-chemist angle lets him layer on scientific gibberish to explain how he made the monster (something about coagulation), but at no point does he do anything remotely priest-like. He offers no prayers or asks for divine guidance, I don’t think he even makes the sign of the cross. He does experiments on humans, accidentally turns an innocent guy into a vicious murderer, and then tries to fix his mistake by trying to murder the murderer he created. He´s a pretty lousy priest. I’m not Catholic, but I’m fairly sure the Church looks down on that sort of behavior. 

At least Purdom was better at being a priest than he was at being a Dean in PIECES. 

The fast healing gimmick is the only innovative bit of storytelling to be found, but it’s a good one. It can’t even be considered a rip off, because it came out before unkillable horror villains were a thing. The medical experiment angle immediately reminded me of SILENT RAGE, but it beat that movie to the punch by a year, and is way better because it doesn’t star Chuck Norris. It isn’t exploited nearly enough, but it adds an extra layer of menace.

I like that D’Amato makes no attempt whatsoever to obscure the killer. No POV shots, no masks, no ominous shadows, nothing. Who needs gimmicks when you have George Eastman? At 6’9, Eastman (real name, Luigi Montefiori) is imposing enough in full daylight. He has played some of the greatest villains in the Italian genre film scene, from the ridiculously over the top warlords in numerous post-apocalyptic ROAD WARRIOR knock offs, to the suffocating, hyper-masculine psychopath in Mario Bava’s RABID DOGS. His raw, dangerous charisma often outshines the movie’s heroes (see: IRONMASTER, no really, see it). Eastman even manages to give a malevolent spark to Mikos, who is written with about as much depth as the shark from JAWS (the first one, not the revenge plotting one from JAWS IV).

Rich character development is not a strength of this movie. However, there is a throwaway subplot that I kind of love. Mr. Bennett, the father of the creepy kid and his bedridden sister, accidentally hits Mikos with his car just after the killer has dispatched a biker. Bennett thinks he has just killed a regular guy, panics, and drives away. While his kids are being terrorized at home, he is with his wife are at a football party, in a moral quandary about what he has done. The movie keeps cutting away from the carnage to the party, where everyone is laughing and enjoying a bowl of pasta, as we Americans do at our American football parties. All except Mr. Bennett. Finally, he and his wife agree to face the consequences and confess to the police, only find out at the climax that the victim was a super freak maniac, so it doesn’t count. Phew! I’m off the hook! Wait, are my children dead?

ABSURD made it onto the infamous Video Nasty list in the UK, which meant it was not only banned, but people could be prosecuted for selling it. Unlike some of the more arbitrary additions to the list, this one really lives up to its moniker. D’Amato isn’t on the same level as Lucio Fulci as far as innovative splatter goes, but he is no slouch when it comes to the red stuff. There is a great deal of head trauma throughout; a drill through the temple, pick axe through the skull. One poor guy gets shoved head first into a band saw (he was bald, making it extra cringy). The worst is a protracted scene when Mikos forces someone’s head into an oven, made especially hard to watch since it is a very likable character. Likable for a D’Amato film, at least.

Most of the movie is just a framework to hang the gory set pieces together, but the final act at the Bennett house is a solid nail biter. Ever the master of exploitation, D’Amato menaces not only a child (all Italian horror movies must have at least one creepy kid), but also a completely immobilized girl in a hospital bed. Emily, the feisty nurse/babysitter, manages to get rock stupid Willy out of the house, but leaves Katia desperately struggling to undo all the restraints locking her down as Mikos bashes his way into her room. There is no reprieve to the tension even after she is on her unsteady feet. D’Amato keeps ratcheting up the intensity until the very last scene, in a shot both wonderful and, appropriately, absurd.

Joe D'Amato showed the world that you don't need mystery to make an American Slasher. And the world replied, "Yes, we know, we saw Friday the 13th Part 2, and every slasher after." At the very least, he showed the world, or Italy, that you don't need America to make an American Slasher. Go, Football Team!"

C Chaka

Off the Rails - NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR

Do you ever read Judge Parker?  It’s one of those serialized comic strips in newspapers, sort of a three to six panel soap opera.  Unlike the stogey, stuck in the past strips like Mark Trail or Mary Worth, Judge Parker is a modern, fast paced thriller.  It has storylines about kidnapping, international hitmen, and factories collapsing into sink holes.  Someone is always yelling about being betrayed or set up, usually while pointing a gun.  I’ve been reading it religiously for five years, and it’s great.  Because I never have a clue what the fuck is going on.

See, Judge Parker is a daily strip.  I, however, only read it on Sunday, so I’m only catching 1/7^th of the story.  This strip moves fast and has no time for bullshit like recaps or narration.  It doesn’t even have a cliffhanger style where they save the action for the color, six panel spread on Sunday.  Nope, it just jumps right in to someone screaming about some ridiculously convoluted yet exciting sounding topic and bam, it’s gone!  Additionally, since the world of Judge Parker has a cast of, roughly 12,000 characters, and all of them have different, rarely coinciding storylines, I am not only clueless about what these people are talking about, I have no idea who they are.  After five years, I don’t even know who Judge Parker is.  He may not even be alive anymore.  This technique is brilliant if you love surprises.  It’s like being the dude from MEMENTO for 45 seconds every week.

There is only one movie I know of that comes close to replicating this bewildering experience.  Astonishingly, it’s not even Italian.  No, this kind of magic comes from taking three unrelated low budget horror movies, chopping them down to twenty minutes each, and squeezing them in between footage of God and Satan having a contest (maybe?) while riding on a celestial train that is also just a regular train, that is also a music video for an 80s band you’ve never heard of.  There is no preparing yourself for the exquisite madness of the 1985 horror anthology, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR.

The Capsule:

In a train bound for destruction, God (Ferdy Mayne) and Satan (Tony Giorgio) engage in a friendly competition to see who can confuse the other with random nonsensical stories.  The first tale involves a hypnotized playboy forced to supply a horror hospital with fresh lady bodies.  Tale two is the romantic adventures of two kids in love and in a suicide cult.  Finally, there is the eternal struggle between Catholic surgeons and the Antichrist.  Warning: contains excessive break dancing, multiple Richard Molls, and gratuitous confusion.

I’m not one to shy away from a confounding narrative, but NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR almost broke me.  The shear speed at which this movie hurls gibberish can give you whiplash.  It all starts with the ‘80s-ist of ‘80s rock bands performing a music video in what looks to be a set from a middle school auditorium but is supposed to be a train car.  They are performing a catchy little tune called “Dance With Me,” which apparently goes on for hours, because they are still playing it every time the movie cuts back to them.  At first, I assumed that they were already dead and the train is actually Hell, but no, they are still alive and on a physical train.  The train is scheduled to crash at dawn, so it’s not a regular service, although the crew may have scheduled it to stop the song.

I love the audacity of making the excuse for watching three, sleazy, incomprehensible gorefests be a congenial conversation between God and Satan, or Mr. Satan, as the conductor refers to him.  They seem like they are on the same train, except there is a starfield streaking by out of their compartment window.  This isn’t the kind of movie to use metaphor, so I guess it’s supernatural, or perhaps a screensaver, since the window is where they watch the “cases.”    They never explain the point of it, but afterwards they divvy up which souls go where.  God probably shouldn’t have let Mr. Satan choose all the cases.

The first case is the litmus test for whether you can cope with this level of mindfuckery.  We are introduced to newlywed Harry Billings (John Phillip Law), in the middle of drunkenly driving his car over a bridge.  His wife is killed and never mentioned again, while Harry wakes in a mental hospital.  Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff) assures him everything is fine, then gives him shock treatment.  You can tell right away that there is something odd about this hospital, mostly from the large number of naked women tied to gurneys, and that Otto the orderly (Richard Moll) spends his entire shift kidnapping, molesting, or butchering patients.  If he changed a bed pan, I did not see it.

Soon, Harry is given an injection to hypnotize him—because that is how hypnosis works—and instructed to…  Well, he’s never specifically instructed to do anything, but he is told that slipping a pill into a drink is only one way of doing whatever he is supposed to be doing.  I think Harry is supposed to be drugging women to bring them back to the hospital, though you never see this happening.  Harry goes to a bar and pretends to drink a bunch of shots (which he pours out on the table), and cut to the next scene.  Harry meets a woman for dinner, and cut.  In the best one, he sings hymns with a woman in church and doses her communion wine, which seems especially flagrant.  Oh, and the church inexplicably had a giant pentagram on the front window, but inside is completely normal.  I have no idea what that was supposed to mean.    

You know that visual trick in movies where they show a jumbled flash of violent, disconnected images to indicate how a crazy person thinks?  This is exactly the same, except for twenty minutes.  Thank God (Ferdy Mayne) for the unknown narrator who suddenly pops up and explains that the nefarious doctors are in the lucrative business of chopping up women and selling their parts.  Not organs, mind you, put body parts.  Legs, torsos, and such.  Apparently, there is such a demand that there is a conveyor belt inside the body storage freezer so Otto the Orderly can send boxes of limbs straight to the waiting trucks.  A disassembly line, if you will.

The doctors’ well-oiled mass murder and appendage selling scheme comes crashing down when Dr. Fargo falls in love with Harry (who can blame her) and accidentally misses a hypnotism injection.  The now cogent Harry frees the remaining women and dukes it out with Otto while Dr. Fargo is operated on by her doctor business partner who she lobotomized early in a hostile takeover.  After the blood settles, Satan says to God, “Wasn’t that lovely?” rather than the more reasonable response of “I’m terribly sorry, I’m not sure what that was supposed to be.”  

The second segment, The Case of Gretta Carson, is far easier to follow.  Wild child Gretta (Merideth Haze) hooks up with wealthy, middle aged sleazebag George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers), who makes her a lounge pianist/porn star.  Clean cut college square Glen (Rick Barnes) falls in love with Gretta after seeing one of her films.  They hit it off, but Youngmeyer, a man whose “insides burn with revenge,” isn’t going to make it easy.  To get close to her, Glen is forced to join the Death Wish Club, a gathering of aristocratic death fetish weirdos.  

Club meetings consist of sitting in a circle, cheating death (or not) in the most absurd ways possible.  Imagine the end of THE DEER HUNTER, except replace Christopher Walken’s revolver with a giant, glowing eyed, stop motion bug.  The trick here is to remain perfectly still to escape the attention of the “Tanzanian Winged Beetle”, which is a surprisingly innocuous name given that its sting makes your face explode.  

Each meeting introduces a new, ridiculously complicated chance of fatality.  My favorite is when they hook themselves up to the state-of-the-art Electrocution Computer, which sends out increasingly powerful shocks according to a random pattern of colored lights.  Sort of like combining the game Simon with an electric chair.  Oh, and I cannot stress this enough—it is a talking Electrocution Computer, needlessly explaining the rules in a slow robot voice.  Someone really put a lot of effort into this one.  Justifiably, because the payoff is spectacular.

There are a few scenes of Glen trying to lure Gretta away from the reckless world of random suicide, but that kind of traditional drama is not driving motivation for this segment.  This is obvious from the final game, where everyone is tucked into sleeping bags beneath a swinging wrecking ball as its rope is slowly cut.  The second the ball squashes someone’s head, bam, case over!  Back to God and the devil, who explain in the most dismissive way possible that Glen and Gretta left the club and lived happily ever after or whatever.  Moving on!

The last segment, The Case of Clair Hanson, ends the fun on a regrettably conventional note.  You know the old cliché, a devout Catholic surgeon (Faith Clift) who is married to an atheist Nobel Prize winning author (Richard Moll) is told by a priest that she must cut out the heart of an ageless demon Nazi who looks like Shawn Cassidy in Cabaret makeup (Robert Bristol) and put it in a box made of wood from the true cross.  Essentially, it’s an incredibly bad THE OMEN knock off.  Nothing makes sense, but you can at least follow the plot, which, for this movie, makes it pedestrian.  I am also disappointed that neither God nor Satan mentioned how the atheist looks just like the psychotic orderly from the first case.  Brothers, I suppose.

Two things save this segment. One is the appearance of late-career period Cameron Mitchell as a hard-nosed cop named The Lieutenant.  Mitchell showing up in a low budget movie post 1980 is a guaranteed good time, because he rarely seems to know—or care—what film he is in.  He just rolls in, belts out some heartfelt, disconnected dialogue that he may or may not have just made up on the spot, and he’s gone.  Instantly classed up your crappy movie. You’re welcome.

The other highlight is the huge disparity between the detailed and creative stop motion monsters and the laughably terrible human Claymation that often share the same screen time.  It looks like H.P. Lovecraft meets Gumby.  

As the last case ends, Satan claims victory because of the overwhelming evidence that humans are a bunch of assholes, but God overrules the decision because he’s God.  Satan is cursed to walk the Earth forever and God gets all the children forever.  Seems a little unfair, since no one mentioned the stakes for the competition.  I get the feeling Satan thought they were just wasting time while waiting for the train to crash.  Satan gets the last laugh, though, because God also takes the souls of the rock band, which means “Dance with Me” will be playing nonstop in heaven for all eternity.  Hell suddenly seems more appealing.

Cynics might say the whole purpose of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR was to squeeze a few extra dollars out of a few underperforming or unfinished movies.  And they would be right.  Whatever the intent, though, the result was a monumental achievement, arguably the most baffling film ever made.  Certainly, the most baffling anthology.  Hats off to directors John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas for making something truly special.  And for reminding us that while Satan can only laugh, God can laugh and cry, at the same time.  So, suck it, Mr. Satan.

C Chaka