Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10    

Scarecrows (1988)

William Wesley’s Scarecrows opens in media res.  Curry (Michael Simms) and his band of commandos have just robbed a military base of three-point-five million dollars.  They have also taken hostage Al (David Campbell) and his daughter Kellie (Victoria Christian), and, of course, they’re dog Dax (Dax Vernon), and they are using the family as getaway airplane pilots (let’s never mind how the Unites States military is completely unable to track the aircraft; it doesn’t matter).  After Bert (B.J. Turner) robs his fellow robbers of their loot and parachutes out of the plane, the gang give chase.  But the secluded, rural area they land in is watched over by something that doesn’t take too kindly to their intrusion (okay, it’s the titular scarecrows).

I’ve thought about robbing a bank.  I’m positive just about everyone on Earth has at some point or another.  I’m sure it’s not easy, but it also has the allure of being better than real work (or at least the kind of work where you have to punch a clock for eight or more hours a day and answer to The Man).  The thing that holds most folks back from doing it is the danger (coincidentally, also the reason it’s attractive to some).  It’s a risky business once you point a gun at someone and demand all the money in their vault.  Will they acquiesce, or will they resist and attack (doubtful, but there’s always that wild card)?  Then there’s the whole angle of the money being traceable, the ability to actually make good your escape, the resources needed to hideout and possibly even have to assume a new identity (on paper, if nothing else).  A person, therefore, has to weigh the risks versus the rewards, because even if you get clear with the money, there will always be stumbling blocks, big and small, any of which can wind up with you either spending time in the pokey or spending time in a grave (but only one of these has the possibility of your eventual release, except in horror films like Scarecrows).  And that’s why, for me, I’d rather just work some overtime to make ends meet.

Scarecrows are looked upon as being several things, symbolically speaking.  They are primarily protectors in most of the public consciousness.  They guard crops from scavengers, but they also guard (or used to guard) villages from pillagers, because they give the illusion of a live person standing guard.  Their motionlessness has an offputting quality when viewed from a distance, and their slack, faceless heads can be just as disquieting for what a viewer projects onto them.  Scarecrows are also regarded, according to Carl Jung, as belonging to The Shadow aspect of the human psyche.  This is a part of our personality that lies in the unconscious, and what it reflects, in part, is the darkness within us (I’m really, really simplifying here).  Both of these facets are at play in this film.

On the one hand, the scarecrows in the film are guardians of the Fowler land (I don’t recall the family actually being named in the film, but they are listed as such in the credits).  Their house, their ancient Ford F100, the ground it’s all built on, is sacred to them.  There are three crosses, supposedly indicating where the three Fowler men are buried, and at least one scarecrow stands vigil at this site (we’re never given a clear geography of where all of the scarecrows are, whether they circumscribe the property or are interspersed throughout it, et cetera).  When the bank robbers land on the premises, they violate the sanctity of the Fowlers’ property (the fact that the family is also buried there only magnifies this violation).  Nevertheless, unlike actual scarecrows, the ones in this movie aren’t there only as visual deterrents.  They are punishment for wrongdoing, and the commandos have transgressed fourfold.  First, they stole what didn’t belong to them.  Second, they killed military personnel during commission of their crime.  Third, they kidnapped innocent people to aid in their escape (probably the least serious of their offenses).  Fourth, they trespassed where they didn’t belong.  All of these things are punishable by death in the film, but the last of them is the most egregious from the perspective of the antagonists.  The reason I say this is because even Al and Kellie are candidates for victimhood, though they committed no crimes in the eyes of the law.  The Fowlers are just protecting what’s theirs, but they also serve tangentially as retribution for injustices outside the scope of their land.

On the other hand, the scarecrows are totems of the bad in humanity.  There is some reference to the Fowlers possibly being into Satanism or some other occult hoodoo, and the scarecrows are avatars of this evil, unable to die, cursed to inhabit their estate for eternity.  Similar to their role as executioners for the guilty, they are also reflections of the Shadow within the human characters.  After all, the commandos are not especially nice people, and their inner ugliness is essentially projected outward, manifesting as the scarecrows which hack up their victims and transform them into scarecrows as well.  The scarecrows make concrete this unconscious aspect of the characters’ psyches.

I remember seeing this film way back when it first hit VHS, and at the time, I really liked it.  Viewing it today, through more critical eyes, I can see its flaws much more clearly.  The acting is a little sketchy (with Simms basically imitating Joe Pilato from Day of the Dead) but not as horrendous as it could be.  The characters themselves are individuated enough to be distinct, though they’re really not too terribly interesting (and I was surprised that of all of them, Kellie, the one who should be the most sympathetic, is the one who is the most one-dimensional).  But my biggest problem with the film is its first half (actually closer to first two-thirds).  It has a decent setup that draws you in, but once everyone hits the ground, the film becomes a series of scenes of the cast wandering around in the woods talking and not saying anything of any consequence whatsoever or propelling the minimal plot forward.  These scenes are punctuated (I suppose you could say bookmarked, but they really feel more arbitrary than that) with many (many, many) closeup shots of the scarecrows just hanging out.  These moments are meant to build dread and to mount anticipation for the ineluctable jump scares/kill scenes, but they honestly just become tiresome after so much screen time is wasted on them.  That said, the final half hour or more of the film does begin to pick up, and the filmmakers finally do start to give us some intriguing scenarios and interactions.  If only they had worked harder to do the same for the rest of the picture leading up to this point.  Scarecrows is still a mildly entertaining horror film, but its strengths also serve to heavily underscore its weaknesses.

MVT:  The makeup effects in this are impressive, and the scarecrows each have a look that is visually striking.  The gore also works quite well, and there are some truly gruesome moments that help keep things a bit lively.

Make or Break:  The opening sequence on the plane nicely sets up what’s going on and what’s coming up, even with some silly moments like a grenade that would have exploded long before anyone is able to get to it and a character casually playing his harmonica while smoke fills the plane’s interior (as you do).

Score:  6.25/10

Four For All (1975)

I like turkey.  Every Thanksgiving (or any time that it’s served with my family), I get chosen to carve up the bird.  It’s not that I’m especially adept at it, I believe.  I think it’s more that I’m willing to do it than anything else.  The carving itself is actually quite simple, once you understand how to take the breast off the bone, and know where to crack off the wings and drumsticks.  It can get a little messy, however.  I should probably invest in a pair of turkey-handling gloves (I assume that this is something that exists), but normally I just use a little tin foil to hold anything steady (any tips or tricks you may have would be appreciated).  At any rate, while I enjoy turkey, I don’t like gravy.  Like, on anything.  I guess this is the same proclivity that makes me dislike condiments (with the exception of possibly ketchup [or catsup, depending on where you’re from]) on hot dogs, hamburgers, and so forth.  There’s just something about gravy that turns me off, but what can you do, right?  What the hell has this got to do with Giulio Giuseppe Negri’s (credited on screen) and Yilmaz Atadeniz’s (credited as co-director on IMdB) Four for All (aka Dort Hergele aka Fighting Killer)?  Well, the film is an Italian/Turkish co-production and was filmed in Istanbul, Turkey.  But really I was just grasping at straws for an introduction this week.

Members of The Organization are murdered at the command of the villainous Joseph (I love the genericity of foreign language genre film character names, don’t you?), who wants total control of the crime world in Istanbul.  The unlikely-named Tony Tiger (Irfan Atasoy, also a co-writer on the film and a man who perhaps enjoys Frosted Flakes a bit too much) and his family are targeted soon thereafter, but Tony survives, thanks to former flame (no pun intended; when you read further you’ll understand) Olga (Feri Cansel).  Calling upon three buddies he bonded closely (perhaps intimately) with during “The War,” including Nick (Richard Harrison) a gambler, Gordon (Gordon Mitchell) a Judo expert, and Brady (Fikret Hakan) a crooner, Tony plots his vengeance.

Four for All is, first and foremost, a revenge story, and in this it is, like so very many films from Turkey, both straightforward and quite insane.  Tony certainly has good reason to be out for blood, as I think almost anyone who is tortured and whose family is ruthlessly murdered does.  But the four killers really go the extra mile for Tony.  They beat his son Nino (and I have to say here that the actors actually do throw this kid around and smack him up a bit, unless the boy was in reality an amazing stuntman, and the scene was extraordinarily blocked out, but I doubt it).  They rape his wife.  They tie Tony up, spread eagle and face down, hanging over the carnage.  Then they light his house on fire.  Now, that’s a total “goon service” package, if ever there was one.  What this all does, of course, is gives Tony a reason to go on living, a singular purpose to his now-miserable existence.  Characters like him cannot move on or find closure like normal human beings.  The retribution beast must be fed (maybe this is why his surname is Tiger?), and nothing else matters.  Olga offers him solace (kind of), and while he stays with her, there is no indication that the two ever reignite (no pun intended…again) their former relationship (and the handling of Olga throughout the film is something I’ll let you discover for yourself if you choose to watch this movie).  His friends are there for him, but Tony is myopic in his obsession.  He has to be.  He has no other raison d’etre, now that his family has been destroyed.  I think that the interesting thing about this drive in cinema is that it can end in death for the hero as easily as he can walk away from it at the fade out, but, either way, he will not emerge unscathed, and quite often, the protagonist finds that his revenge, though cathartic for characters (and audiences), ultimately is meaningless.

The film is also an Assemble the Team story, and the camaraderie between the four men (referred to directly as The Four Musketeers, though I think that reference is fairly superficial here) is heightened to an unrealistic degree (this in a film rife with unrealistic touches).  In the flashback scenes to their time in “The War” (I assume this is a reference to Vietnam [though possibly not], since all the guys are the same age then as they are in the present), the men are shown laughing and having a good old time (as you would expect of soldiers during wartime).  Nick, Gordon, and Brady are also shown running (practically skipping with glee) from different sides toward Tony (who inhabits the camera’s POV), calling out his name, because Tony is the center of the group and of this story.  This will be revisited as a visual motif when the four meet up again before and after their “mission.”  Tony stands on a silent hilltop.  As he turns, each of his friends approach from separate (yet deliberately geometric) directions.  These men are so dedicated to their bond, they actually stack hands to display their solidarity with one another (I always think of the origin story of The Fantastic Four when I see this type of visual, but that’s just me).  

Nevertheless, the film, its characters, and its structure are distinctly comic-book-esque.  The cabal of gangsters is straight out of a James Bond film.  They gather at a long table, sneer at each other, and discuss their business with the polished casualness of executives delivering quarterly budget reports.  They all dress like they were peeled off a Dick Tracy cartoon with a glob of Silly Putty (and it should be said, I believe this film may have the most magnificent collection of mustaches ever assembled under one roof).  They wallow in their cruelty, chuckling and grinning as they go about their work.  

By that same token, our heroes’ story is divided up in such a way that I was immediately reminded of the longtime structure for DC Comics’ early Justice League of America books (and others like The Sea Devils and so forth, but the JLA stands out for me and is the most recognizable to folks for our purposes here today).  In the comics, there would be a basic threat introduced (say, Starro or Despero, it doesn’t matter).  The characters would then split up and each would tackle some aspect of the peril in individual chapters before they would all gather again at the end to finally vanquish their foe.  The same thing happens in Four for All, where each of the boys tracks down and roughs up one of the four assassins (Gordon chases Bob from a Turkish bath house, Brady busts up Johnny’s wedding day, Tony lures Brahma [Brimmer? Brummer? Who the hell can tell from the various pronunciations heard in the movie] to a remote locale, Nick goes skiing in pursuit of Charlie).  Funny enough, this is one of the most entertaining aspects to the film, since it helps keep the pace moving, gives us varied setups (while still sticking strictly to a formula), and showcases just how outlandish this whole affair is.  Tony’s plan is utter nonsense from stem to stern, and no one with half a brain would agree it, but like reading an old JLA comic, it’s enjoyable nonsense, and in this I can honestly state that I didn’t mind the gravy so much.

MVT:  The action in the film is practically non-stop, and it’s all goofy fun.

Make or Break:  The classic underworld meeting that kicks off the film lays all of this picture’s cards on the table.  S.P.E.C.T.R.E. would be proud.

Score:  6.5/10