Something Creeping in the Dark (1971)

It was a dark and stormy night.  Ten jerks find themselves in an old, dark house, and weird things start to occur.  This is the premise for Mario Colucci’s Something Creeping in the Dark (aka Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio aka Shadows in the Dark), and this set up, if nothing else, is one of the most clichéd of the horror and mystery genres.  The reason is obvious.  Storms act as visual portents, bad omens of things to come.  They also give dramatic tension to scenes, because the characters are usually a bit stressed from the effects of the storm (the dangers of driving, being stuck out of doors in the rain, etcetera).  Maybe they bicker more than usual.  Maybe they’re a bit more anxious or cranky.  But, assuredly, they reveal themselves, because the strain and tumult of the tempest makes them forget their normal polite facades.  The director opens this film with his characters driving through the rain, and many shots are obscured by it, keeping the viewer off kilter, never quite sure of what they are seeing while still being recognizable enough.  Like the characters, the audience becomes embroiled in the restlessness of the environment in this way.

Storms also act as a means to gather a disparate group in one location and see what happens when things go south.  Here, the characters wind up in the manse of the late Lady Sheila Marlowe (a clear reference to Christopher Marlowe, the author of Doctor Faustus, played in portraiture only by Loredana Nusciak), a place that looks as ornately musty yet still kind of like a medieval dungeon as any ever put to film.  Rather cleverly, the film gives us an Agatha Christie-esque layout, and the expectation is that any oddities that happen will be explained away by the end as the doings of a human.  It’s a classic weird pulp framework, those stories that, essentially, became the formula for every episode of Scooby Doo (and quite a few gialli).  However, Colucci takes a sharp right turn and brings the actual supernatural into the mix, and the film plays both sides of the fence up until its conclusion, even while it tells us flat out that a specter is involved.  This is done by the introduction of Spike (Farley Granger), a “homicidal maniac” whom Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) has captured and is bringing to justice.  This means that the characters can act out some of their darker impulses, because they have an easy scapegoat.  For example, Joe (Gianni Medici), the housekeeper, threatens his girlfriend (Giulia Rovai) with murder, knowing he can lay it off on Spike, who makes a habit of escaping throughout the film.  Sylvia (Lucia Bosé) fantasizes about seducing and then murdering Spike, a sharp contrast to the dull, bitter relationship she has with her husband Don (Giacomo Rossi Stuart).  Basically, the storm washes away all but the innermost desires of the film’s characters.

Something Creeping in the Dark is a brooding film, filled with a sense of doom, and it contains much superficial philosophical musings on existential matters.  The characters recognize their flaws, and the inescapability of their situation traps them inside themselves (in much the same way that they are trapped in the house).  They are left to act out their repressions or be consumed by them (possibly both).  The ghost of Lady Marlowe is the impetus for this.  She passes from character to character, possesses them for a time, and either kills them or shows them up for what they are.  Susan West (Mia Genberg) is the flinty assistant to Doctor Williams (Stelvio Rosi).  The doctor was en route to perform an emergency surgery, something which he quickly gets over when he finds out that he won’t get there in time.  Susan clearly harbors unspoken feelings for him, and Marlowe provides her the opportunity to express them.  Yet, after they consummate, Susan doesn’t feel freed of her emotional constraints.  She feels violated instead of satisfied, and she rejects Williams’ attempt to console her.  Rather than bring them together at long last, the playing out of Susan’s desirous impulses may keep them apart forever because her agency was taken away (or was her “possession” an act she now regrets?).  

The filmmakers portray Marlowe’s ghost via a high angle tracking camera (with fish eye lens) that floats down hallways, extinguishing lights as it approaches.  It is an omniscient viewpoint, and Marlowe is, virtually, God (and a capricious God, at that).  She toys with her playthings, enjoys making them dance for her amusement.  It is also conceivable that Marlowe’s possession of various characters is her own attempt at breaking out of her purgatorial/existential prison, of finding some meaning to the spiritual torment she is in.  Finding no satisfaction in this, it’s just as easy to kill her toys in a spiteful, childish lashing out against ineluctable circumstances.

The film is difficult to recommend, though I really would like to.  It takes tropes and plays with them, juggling between the corporeal and the preternatural.  It is loaded with style, and Colucci dives into some psychedelia, but he makes it work by anchoring it within his characters’ minds rather than as some overwrought visual display to take the audience on a “freak out.”  The director also takes about a half a page from Robert Wise’s book (i.e. his direction of the superlative The Haunting), using suggestion as much as he does directness.  It is entirely possible that human hands are behind the film’s nefariousness.  It is entirely possible that the human hands behind the film’s nefariousness are being manipulated by a supernatural force.  It is entirely possible that a malevolent spirit alone is behind the film’s nefariousness.  And Colucci allows that it may be all three simultaneously.  The major problem with the film is that it is both repetitive and sluggish.  Spike makes off into the nearby woods and has it out with the cops not once, but twice.  The Spike character is also, in my opinion, underutilized, considering his potential (and Granger’s talent; he does give his all here).  When the characters aren’t standing in the living room talking circularly or shooting barbs at one another, they are in their individual rooms talking circularly or shooting barbs at one another.  Interesting ideas are brought up and then left floating, and the climax is both predictable and a bit silly in its aftermath.  Something Creeping in the Dark is a film worth seeing (I finally made up my mind), though maybe not on a dark and stormy night, because you may fall asleep during it.

MVT:  Colucci brings a thoughtful sense to his direction.

Make or Break:  The séance scene is tense and creepy, while being distinctly Italian and a little goofy.

Score:  6.5/10

Tarkan Versus the Vikings (1971)

Even though Conan the Barbarian had been around since his first appearance in 1932 in the pages of Weird Tales magazine, it was a little more than thirty years before the most iconic depiction of him appeared in art form.  In 1966, Lancer Books got the rights to reprint Robert E. Howard’s original tales (edited, revised, and/or completed with the assistance of L. Sprague de Camp), and the painted covers were handled by the late, great Frank Frazetta.  Frazetta’s visuals solidified the Cimmerian’s look for all the years to come, and they encapsulated perfectly what the character was all about, being as beautiful as they are savage.  It can be argued that all barbaric characters created after have followed in Conan’s image, both as written and as drawn.  Now, I can’t say I know all that much about Turkish comic books (okay, I know nothing at all), but I believe that I can state confidently that Sezgin Burak’s Tarkan character is likely one that does.  If nothing else, Mehmet Aslan’s Tarkan Versus the Vikings (aka Tarkan Viking Kani aka Tarkan and the Blood of the Vikings) does a solid job of capturing the flavor of barbaric adventure stories and adorns it with enough garish, comic book accoutrements to make for a singular viewing experience.

Bloodthirsty (and I mean BLOODTHIRSTY; they gleefully slaughter infants) Vikings led by the bathroom-mat-wrapped Toro (Bilal Inci) attack a Hun Turk fortress and kidnap Yonca (Fatma Belgen), the daughter of Khan Attila (who is never seen) and her squadron of female warriors.  During the assault, loyal friend and loner Tarkan (Kartal Tibet) is wounded, and his “wolf” Kurt is slain.  Together with Kurt’s son (also named Kurt, apparently), Tarkan sets off to exact bloody revenge, more for the murder of his pet than to get Yonca and the other Turks out of captivity.

Tarkan Versus the Vikings is about as wild a film as you’re likely to see.  The emphasis is on energy, though it’s not something I would call competent, per se, and combined, they form the wealth of the film’s charm (from what I’ve been able to glean, this is the entire modus operandi of Turkish pop cinema).  This movie looks like it was edited in a blender, but here this is a strength not a detriment.  The lightning fast, almost nonsensical cuts form a montage akin to the layout of a comic book page (the key difference being that, in a comic book, the reader paces the story in tune with the artist/writer; with this film, the viewer is thrown in and left to his own defenses).  It jams as much as it possibly can into every minute (nay, second), then tries to pack it all down to stuff some more in.  There’s more action and convoluted plotting in this film’s initial thirty minutes than in the entirety of the last three Fast and Furious films combined.  

Additionally, the movie is as hyper-stylized and scintillating as any four-color comic book (or comic book movie, for that matter).  The Kraken-esque octopus that the Vikings sacrifice their captives to is as ridiculous as the titular beastie from The Giant Claw (also, I couldn’t help thinking that Robert Altman saw this film before making his adaptation of Popeye back in 1980).  The Vikings’ hair almost universally consists of poorly attached, vibrant wigs (one of which flies off an extra’s head when Tarkan gives him the business).  Those whose hair was merely dyed for the production are even more unnatural than those wearing hairpieces (they’re not blonde, they’re yellow).  Their shields are dotted with radiant puffs of fur.  The female Vikings are decked out like the flag for the Rainbow Coalition.  To wit, Viking King Gero’s (Atif Kaptan) daughter Ursula (Eva Bender) is togged in lustrous pink fur, and so on.  This whole review could simply be a list of every gaudy, slapdash bit of costuming, scenery, etcetera, but I’m comfortable with stopping at these.  Suffice it to say, this film isn’t merely a comic book projected on screen; it’s a cartoon in live action (ironically enough, the polar opposite of every blockbuster action film made today).

The film takes an odd perspective on women.  They are generally regarded as strong and strong-willed.  Yonca’s platoon of female furies that guard the fortress are described as worth ten men each.  Ursula and her shipload of female Vikings bear as much responsibility for plundering as any other boat full of seamen.  The Chinese villainess Lotus (the breathtaking Seher Seniz) commands her minions with ice cold practicality.  She also uses her sexuality prominently.  She beds down with men she either respects for their masculinity and/or wants to put in a vulnerable position to drug (something she loves doing).  Her death strip/dance in the film’s back third is equal parts tense, bizarre, and titillating.  Since these women are posited as equals to the men in the film, there are zero qualms about killing them in the same brutal fashion as a man would be.  Needless to say, many a hatchet is planted in a woman’s cranium throughout the picture.  By that same token, women are also very much sex objects to be used and abused.  Women are hung by their hair for hatchet-tossing practice (sometimes over a pit of vipers, sometimes not).  On the Vikings’ big festival day, the Hun Turk women are brought in to be raped and killed at will (and often at the same time, as women are stabbed and then groped and kissed as they writhe in their death throes).  Women are whipped often (but, in fairness, so are men).  Despite what power they are allowed to wield, the women in this film still cater to the prurient interest of both the male characters and the audience.  It’s an uneasy balance (if a balance is even struck).

If you thought that the motivation for revenge in John Wick was a bit farfetched, you’d best strap yourself in for Tarkan Versus the Vikings.  His wolves, Kurt and Kurt, are, in Tarkan’s mind, true Turks, as worthy of respect and loyalty as any human.  The elder Kurt teaches the younger how to be a good Turk, training him on table manners (and these dogs…sorry, wolves…eat up at the table the same as any person would).  Kurt’s son helps Tarkan heal (I assume by finding herbs and shit around the area).  The wolves are so equivocated to man, there’s a sequence where Tarkan and the younger Kurt attack a group of Vikings, and the viewer is treated to an entire sequence vacillating between Tarkan lopping off men’s heads and Kurt ripping out their throats.  It feels a bit like a fight scene from the 1966 Batman television show sans the hard Dutch angles and onomatopoeic effects overlays.  

For all its disjointedness and ludicrously po-faced absurdisms, Tarkan Versus the Vikings is a damned good time.  Obviously, it will never make a hall of fame for technical prowess, but every moment of its runtime is dynamic.  It’s a constantly moving predator, like the myth about how sharks can never stop swimming.  I was just a bit reluctant to dive into this film, but having come out the other end of it a different man, I feel the need to indulge in as much Turkish pop cinema as I possibly can.  Will it be as entertaining and worthwhile as this little gem?  Absolutely not, but the first step in finding gold is to just start digging.

MVT:  The energy of the film is infectious.  It sweeps you along like some half-crazed, drunk idiot friend who wants to hit every bar in a ten-mile radius.  And somehow manages to do so.

Make or Break:  The attack on the Hun Turk fortress.   It fully illustrates where the film’s bloody heart lies, veins and all.

Score:  7/10 

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1971)

Scorpio is my favorite sign of the Zodiac, and not just because it’s my sign.  It’s not something silly like a fish or a crab or a scale.  Scorpions can sting you, and, in some cases, those stings can be fatal (my understanding is that they’re typically closer to a bee sting unless you’re particularly sensitive to their venom).  Real men get tattoos of things like scorpions with daggers and skulls and banners with sayings like “kill ‘em all” or “death before dishonor” or “Mom” on them.  Even outside of the appeal of its immediate, monstrous symbolism (but very much because of it), Scorpio is a favorite of hardasses and villains alike (and often both).  The psychopath in Dirty Harry is called Scorpio.  Nick Fury’s archenemy is called Scorpio (he even leads a team of supervillains based on the Zodiac, thus proving that Scorpios are tops).  Albert Brooks’ brilliant Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons is a pure James Bond supervillain with a go-get-‘em charm.  Robert Scorpio from the soap opera General Hospital is a smoldering pile of masculinity (okay, I might be stretching it with that one, though I’m sure there are plenty of folks who would vehemently disagree with me).  I’ve never heard of a character named Phil Pisces or Danny Sagittarius (and by the way, those names are now copyrighted by me, so back off).  Nevertheless, it’s with a much more un-macho perspective that Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (aka La Coda Dello Scorpione) approaches my beloved arachnid archetype.

As Lisa Baumer (Ida Galli) is busy making sweet, sweet love to her back door man, her husband’s plane is busy exploding in midair.  Turns out, hubby left Lisa with a one-million-dollar insurance benefit, but she has to travel to Greece in order to cash it out.  Enter Peter Lynch (George Hilton), the insurance investigator sent to keep tabs on her.  But a mysterious killer may soon put a stop to Lisa’s (or anybody’s) enjoyment of all that cold, hard cash.

Like so very, very many gialli, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail deals with things like infidelity, and it does so with an air of suspicion (because these films are entirely predicated on the notion that everyone, including the protagonist, is a suspect).  Did Lisa have her husband killed, and if so, why take out so many innocent people to accomplish this?  Did she do it to spend time with her lover (who, coincidentally, is a flight steward)?  Does her former lover, a junkie who, bizarrely, only wants a pittance from the inheritance to feed his habit, have enough goods on Lisa to bring this gravy train to a complete halt?  Lisa and her husband haven’t been close for some time, and this emotional distance is the same thing that allows these types of characters to do the things they do.  These movies aren’t about love in a traditional sense.  Yes, sometimes the characters actually care about each other, but by and large, they are primal beings desperate to feed their carnal desires.  They are also the type of people who will have sex with someone just to get ahead or to place someone in their thrall.  Indeed, sex is a rather large cornerstone in all gialli, both as an exploitable element and as a plot device, and here it’s no different.  Every woman in the film is in a state of dishabille at some point or another, and the camera always accentuates and/or ogles them, bringing the audience into the mindset of the male (and sometimes female) characters.  But casual sex in gialli is also many times dangerous, luring murderers to their victims like the scent of pollen to bees (or a better analogy would be like the bait of a Venus flytrap to, well, flies).

Similarly, this film is heavy with the motif of following and being followed.  The opening credits roll over various shots of Lisa strolling through London in her bright red hat.  Sometimes the camera follows behind her, sometimes it observes her from afar (and this is a shot type repeated several times in the movie).  Likewise, Peter follows Lisa, journalist Cleo (the gloriously bountiful Anita Strindberg) follows Peter and Lisa, and the killer follows them all.  This concept works (and different gialli play it up to different degrees, though I can’t think of one off the top of my head that doesn’t have it to some extent) for two reasons.  First (and most obvious), from a narrative perspective, it produces some level of tension.  The character being followed may or may not know they are being followed.  The character following them may or may not intend them harm, but we don’t discover this until these sequences resolve themselves (and, okay, they’re often red herring style, jump scare payoffs, but not always, and therein lies the suspense [like Hitchcock’s time bomb setup, we know there’s going to be an explosion, we just don’t know whether or not the characters will be caught in it]).  Second, they allow the audience to become a purer strain of voyeur (something very prevalent in this film).  Frequently, these sequences wind up in a  character’s (99.99% of the time a female character’s) home, where said character simply must disrobe.  Meanwhile, the camera watches, unbeknownst to the character.  It satisfies the prurient interest of the audience in the same way that it enflames the libido of the spying character (otherwise, why not simply kill them the instant they walk through the door?).  It links sex and death with the anxiety of being caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing (in a What Happened to the Inquisitive Janitor kind of way; notice how often these scenes involve a peephole POV or keyhole-shaped matte).  And if nothing else, gialli are all about doing something you shouldn’t be doing.

These genre requirements, however, are just that in this film: requirements.  There is nothing particularly outstanding about the film’s plot, nothing all that compelling about the characters.  It satisfies the generic necessities and nothing else.  In fact, both plot and characters simply maunder along, as these things can have a tendency to do, until they hit the moment of “the big reveal” and then finish after some pat exposition labors to connect all the dots for us (though I’m of the opinion that the better ones are those that leave us just a little stupefied).  Unfortunately, in a genre where garishness is preferred, just hitting the beats in four/four time isn’t enough, and that’s all this film does.  Martino does bring a strong sense of style to the murder set pieces, but otherwise the film doesn’t make any attempt to distinguish itself from the pack.  The effort brought to the table in The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is largely workmanlike, and sometimes that’s enough, but when you’re appearing onstage with Bootsy Collins, you may want to wear something a bit more striking than a sweatsuit.    

MVT:  Martino does manage to shine here and there with some nifty flourishes, but it’s kind of like spangling a day-old mackerel.

Make or Break:  There’s a murder that comes a bit later than would normally be expected, and it entices the audience with a hint of a “no rules” attitude that doesn’t materialize.

Score:  6/10