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

The Video Nasties: Part 1

I just got back from a two week camping road trip (I did not follow the warnings).  Since it left little time for movie watching or writing, I figured this would be a good time to start a little series I’ve been planning for a while but never got around to writing.  So sit back and enjoy (?) the first plunge into the world of The Video Nasties.  

For those who don’t know, Video Nasties is a term coined by the British media in the early ‘80’s.  Specifically, the term refers to a list of 72 (mostly) horror movies that were banned by the British government for being "obscene".  More generally, it refers to the entire misguided moral crusade to save England’s children (and adults) from the damaging and dehumanizing effects of horror movies.  The movement is roughly equivalent to the PMRC’s fight against rap music and obscene lyrics in the States. In other words, it was a witch hunt designed to give the appearance that the government was looking after the public without actually having to help in any way.  It all began with the rise of the VCR and the sudden availability of gritty, post-Vietnam era horror movies like DRILLER KILLER and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.  Stuffy, old, moral conservatives like Mary Whitehouse heard about these films(she certainly didn’t watch any of them) and started a movement that led some equally conservative (and opportunistic) members of Parliament to create a list of movies deemed so obscene that retailers could be prosecuted for selling them.  All of their research was unscientific and biased.  For instance, they would poll a small group of kids on the playground and ask them if they had seen any of these horrible, forbidden movies.  Of course they are going to say they have seen them.  They want to sound cool and brave in front of their friends.  The researcher might have well asked if they were scaredy pants little babies who do everything their parents tell them.  No matter that the kids couldn’t recount the details of the movies or even get the names right.  They were clearly being corrupted by works of fiction.

As with most moral crusades like this, the Video Nasties scare just sort of petered out after a while as society’s values and priorities changed.  Most movies on the list are now available in the UK completely uncut.  About the only thing it succeeded in was to leave a sense of mystique and social disobedience surrounding the original 72 films on the list.  In many cases it’s way more than the movies deserved, but there is something undeniably cool and transgressive about being singled out by an ultra-conservative government as being bad for society.  They were like Pokémon for the serious British horror movie fan in the ‘80’s, you had to collect them all.

Being an American kid, I missed out on all of this first hand.  I only became aware of the phenomenon in the late ‘80’s after watching an episode of The Yong Ones (kind of a small screen UK version of ANIMAL HOUSE) in which the lads rented a VCR and planned to spend the night watching an orgy of sex and violence.  They never got the chance to watch any movies, and the only one they mentioned by name was fake, but it was enough to make me curious.  I was just getting into horror at that point, and the idea that there were movies that the government (or a government) didn’t want me to watch was irresistibly intriguing.  This was pre-Internet days, so for the longest time, I had no idea what films were on the Video Nasties list.  That just made the mystery sweeter.  It was probably for the best.  I was a lightweight back then, and watching something like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST would have left me rocking in a corner.  Not that I would have been able to find it even if I knew what to look for.  Living in a small Southern town with only a couple of video stores, the best I could get was the censored Blockbuster version of EVIL DEAD (unbeknownst to me; I did a legitimate spit take when I saw the full strength vine scene years later).  

Even now, it’s relatively hard to find all the movies on the list.  Thanks to niche market distributors like Shout Factory, Synapse, Arrow, and Code Red, a lot of the films have fancy Blu Ray releases, but there are still a few that aren’t readily available in any format.  I haven’t even seen all of them.  I thought I had, but it turns out what I assumed was Jess Franco’s WOMEN BEHIND BARS was in fact, Jess Franco’s BARB WIRE DOLLS, which he made at the same time with the same people, pretty much about the same thing.  Jess Franco did that a lot.  

These movies may be a kind of cinematic Holy Grail for me, but even I have to admit, some of them are garbage.  I’m not talking about the entertaining kind of garbage, either.  I think that’s why I’ve seen so many people start a Video Nasties review project only to let it go to seed five or six films in.  There are a lot of total bummers on the list.  Worse yet, there are a bunch that are straight up boring.  Taken as a whole, the Video Nasties list is a fascinating subject.  Movie by movie, it can be a slog.  That’s why I’m breaking them into easily digestible chunks.  Actually, a few of these chunks I wouldn’t recommend digesting at all.  Maybe just give them a sniff and slide them directly into the trash.  

It’s not all bad, though.  Not even mostly bad, really.  There are more than a few legit masterpieces on the list.  I already mentioned Sam Rami’s debut film, EVIL DEAD.   Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION is a Cannes Film Festival award winner.  Believe it or not, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is actually a very well made movie.  It’s really hard to make jokes about it, though, so I’m not about to write a whole piece on it.  The crazy, unusual, or fun films will get their own posts eventually.  Several already have (CANNIBAL TERROR, DON’TGO IN THE WOODS, INFERNO).  The rest will get a sentence or two in this series.  That is at least one sentence more generous than some deserve.  

Let’s get the worst offenders out of the way first: Naziploitation.  I have a question, History of Cinema:  What the fuck, dude?  Can there possibly be a more unseemly subject?  Naziploitation films are essentially Women in Prison films, but with even less dignity.  They are all about Nazis doing terrible things to almost exclusively women concentration camp prisoners.  Movies about talking anal warts would be more wholesome than these.  The sub-genre has it's roots in the much more artsy and narratively complex Nazi movies like THE DAMNED, THE NIGHT PORTER, and the utterly revolting SALO.  The success of those movies led to cheap knock-off versions which ditched the pretense of art and just went for the subterranean sleaze.  Four of them made it to the Video Nasties list: SS EXPERIMENT CAMP, GESTAPO’S LAST ORGY, LOVE CAMP 7, and (shudder) BEAST IN HEAT.  The titles alone are enough to make you feel unclean.  The only redeeming factor is that they are so incompetently made that they are not the slightest bit realistic.  Prisoners are tortured by rats which are clearly guinea pigs painted black.  German Shepherds look more eager to play fetch with inmates than terrorize them.  Peter Seller’s Nazi scientist from DR. STRANGELOVE comes off as nuanced and understated compared to the overacting nitwit villains in these movies.  The bad guys always get their gruesome and well deserved comeuppance in the end, but it’s not worth having to suffer through the first hour to get there.  Unless you are a completest, and a seriously dedicated one at that, there is no reason to ever subject yourself to these movies.  This comes from a person who owns CANNIBAL TERROR on Blu Ray.  If I’m saying don’t bother.  Trust.

On the bright side, that is the bottom of the barrel.  Everything else on the list is a cake walk.  I’m not guaranteeing the quality of the cake, but at least it is not covered in filth and rats.  Or guinea pigs.

That’s four scratched off, three previously reviewed, and sixty-five left to go.  Tune in for Part 2, whenever I get around to it.

C Chaka

Surprisingly Bad, the Joys of Cannibal Terror

I love the unexpected.  In movies, at least.  The unexpected in real life usually boils down to shit like “why isn’t the air conditioner working?” or “what is this bill for?”  It’s not as fun.  In movies, it can be a thrill.  A well-executed surprise can disrupt your equilibrium, get your heart racing, keep you interested.  Those are easy to appreciate.  Then there are surprises that are less “I didn’t see that coming” and more “what the hell just happened?”  They can be off-kilter bits of dialogue, wildly inappropriate reactions, or stupefying twists.  The pleasure comes from wondering what crazy shit is going to pop up next.  It takes you out of the moment, but some movies you don’t watch for their immersive, nuanced plot.  With some movies, the crazy shit is the only thing going for them.  Take for example, CANNIBAL TERROR (1980).

The capsule:

Two incompetent thieves and an unsuccessful prostitute have had it with penny ante schemes and decide to kidnap the young daughter of a prominent businessman (or something, he wears a suit).  When one of their associates gets hit by a car because he is literally incapable of crossing the street safely, the kidnappers are forced to hide out in the lush jungle region of Spain.  Unfortunately, it also happens to be “cannibal country” (the warning is given as casually as if it were “bear country”).  Even though their guide is attacked and eaten by a pack of cannibals hiding in the tall grass (as cannibals do), the kidnappers still think it’s the best place to lay low.  They stay at the parrot and rifle filled house of Antonio.  Everything is running smoothly until one of the kidnappers inhospitably decides to rape Antonio's wife.  Antonio gets revenge by tying the rapist up in the backyard and actually whistling for the cannibals, who again happen to be loitering in the tall grass.  The wife gets word to the police about the kidnappers, and a rescue party consisting of the parents, Antonio, an unidentified old guy, and one policeman grab guns and rush in to save the little girl.  The remaining kidnappers push deeper into cannibal country, where, to their surprise, they encounter more cannibals and are captured.  Things do not go well for them.  But since the cannibals only eat morally ambiguous people (as cannibals do), the chief returns the little girl, unharmed, to the parents.  Though she may be a cannibal now.  Jury’s still out on that one.

Alain Deruelle's CANNIBAL TERROR (not to be confused with Jess Franco’s CANNIBALS, which was filmed at the same time, in the same location, using the same cannibals) is an absolute mess.  It does not contain a single iota of competent filmmaking.   No one behaves the way actual human beings behave.   There is zero continuity.  Some shots have mysterious hands tapping at the edge of the frame.  Unidentified people appear and vanish randomly from scene to scene.  This is exactly why I enjoy this movie.  The plot itself, what there is of it, is predictable, but everything else is completely insane.  It’s like watching a drunken clown at a kid’s birthday party, there’s no telling what will happen. There’s a scene where the wife is talking to a couple of weird Manson Family looking hippies that live on her property for some reason.  One of them is cleaning his gun and it accidentally goes off.  It isn’t part of the script, I think it was a real, loaded gun that accidentally fired.  And they just left it in.  You don’t see that kind of thing in THE HUNGER GAMES.

The weirdest aspect is that the criminals, even the out of the blue rapist, are very doting kidnappers.  I don’t believe the little girl is ever aware that she has been kidnapped.  She acts like she is on a field trip with her aunt and uncles.  The actual kidnapping happens off screen, one minute the criminals are coming up with the idea, the next the girl his hanging out in their apartment, laughing and playing with the prostitute.  She is tickled, given piggyback rides, and even kissed goodnight.  The criminals all seem to genuinely care about the little girl.  They should have hung up the kidnapping plot and become au pairs.   It’s like SAVANNA SMILES, but with cannibals.

And speaking of cannibals…   

The film never specifically indicates what part of the world it is set.  They talk about the “jungle” on the other side of “the border”, but really it’s Spain, a land not typically known for either its jungles or its cannibals.  Thus, the cannibals cast in this movie don’t so much resemble remote tribes in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea as they do a bunch of local Caucasians with mustaches, sideburns, and Scott Baio haircuts.  One of them has a tattoo of his girlfriend on his chest. They do wear face paint and dance around a fire, so the illusion is mostly intact.  I’m fairly sure one is an uncredited appearance by Steve Perry of Journey.   

Like most movie cannibals, they are very messy eaters.  There is a lot of reaching into chest cavities (which look suspiciously like pig carcasses in jeans) and pawing at intestines.  Luckily for them, the human body is apparently also filled with cooked kielbasa sausage, so it’s not all gnawing on raw liver.  Apart from eating ne’er-do-wells , they enjoy decorating their village with plastic skulls and pookah shell necklaces.  They are not the reclusive type of cannibals, though, since you can clearly see cars passing by just on the other side of the tree line in the village. They are centrally located.  I hope the transportation department at least puts up some of those yellow animal crossing style warning signs along the road.  Caution:  Hitchhikers May Want to Eat You.

CANNIBAL TERROR is audacious in its badness.  It does not bow to logic or traditional storytelling.  It shoves its ridiculousness in your face like a fistful of guts.  If you can stomach its unintentional hilarity, go on and take a bite.  Don’t worry, it’s probably just sausage. 

C Chaka