Dark Waters (1993)

Directed by Mariano Baino
Run Time: 94 minutes


The word that's used a lot describe this movie is Lovecraftian and it does check just about every box on themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. There's a creepy forgotten island, a cultish group hiding a secret, something evil and menacing just lurking out of sight, and the always necessary book of occult knowledge. However this movie has more in common with Argento's Suspiria and Inferno and Fulci's The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery than any of Lovecraft's works. As the overall feel and look of this film has more in common with a supernatural gaillo with Lovecraft elements than a film about horror and terror beyond human understanding.




The movie opens in the early 1970's with a group of nuns standing on a cliff holding crosses. These are nuns belong to the order of the artist nuns and will be found through out the film holding crosses in scenic locations. The focus of the scene is on a nun who's a fan of upside down crosses and a priest who looks like a low budget young stand in for Harvey Keitel. The nun is given a creepy mcguffin plate (like the one in the image at the top of the page) by a young girl and the priest is reading a book of forbidden lore during a violent rain storm. These actions cause a point of view killer to hunt down the nun and the priest in quite beautiful and grim ways to die. The room where the priest is in becomes flooded due to the violence of the rain storm and dies either from the point of view killer or a floating cross.

The nun, being the smarter of the two character, waits until the rain stops and then becomes point of view killer bait. Hoping that high cliffs may scare off the pov killer, the nun holds the evil mcguffin disk and shows it to the ocean. However the pov killer is a quick climber and shoves the nun off the cliff to her death.

Jump twenty years later and we are introduced to Elizabeth. A young woman who grew up on this strange island but after her mother's death left with her father to live in London. Upon her father's death she discovered that her father had been making payments to the order of the artist nuns. So Elizabeth decides to kill two cliches with one action by ignoring her father dying wish and visit the island where she was born. This sends her on the path to pull apart the mystery of the nuns and the terrible secret they hide.

On one hand this is a beautiful and dark film to watch. From the first to last frame this movie is full of memorable moving imagery. Along the lines of Salvator Rosa's Witches that are alive. Then there is the other side of this movie which is made of bullet riddled scraps of paper that masquerades as the plot. Mariano Baino clearly was inspired by Lovecraft and Argento but the narrative is all over the place. The nuns are a menacing force through out the film but it is never clear why. The point of view killer has nothing to do with the plot and just seems to be there to kill people at random. Which leads to the most unforgivable part of this movie, Lovecraft threats are at their best when they are not seen. I can't go into detail without spoiling it but this movie would have been better if the nameless evil was seen less.

That being said it is a solid rental movie and enjoyable dark gothic visual ride with a few bumps here and there.

MVT: The location and (I assume) the residents in the area were the movie was shot. It went a long way to selling feel and atmosphere.

Make or Break: The scene with Elizabeth in her bright red raincoat climbing up a rain swept stairs towards the monastery went a long way to selling me on this movie.

Score: 5.8 out of 10

Curse of the Dog God (1977)

I don’t know much about Folk Horror other than that, whenever it’s brought up, most people simply point meaningfully to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, and their audience nod their heads in enlightened agreement.  And fair play, because that is the ne plus ultra of the subgenre.  From what I understand, Folk Horror is rooted firmly in European traditions, but, when I look at something like Shunya Ito’s Curse of the Dog God (aka Inugami no Tatari), I have to wonder why films from other cultures can’t be included?  Maybe they are, and I’m simply ignorant of the fact, but a lot of Asian Horror that involves itself with the supernatural tends toward the struggle between modernity and tradition.  Perhaps proper Folk Horror’s ties to religious themes is the key, since they specialize in Christian/Pre-Christian ideologies in conflict, and Christianity isn’t the religion that most think of when they think of Asia.  Even in Ito’s film, the only religion represented is Shinto, but the eponymous Dog God is an ancient, rural force taking revenge on a man who is contemporary and interested in exploiting a small village for its Uranium deposits (that is, something which brings more modernity, both good and bad).  Still, this man, Kano (Shinya Ohwada), quickly embraces the concept of the Dog God and the old methods employed to try exorcising it.  Also, there is no ancient sect at the heart of the plot, just some paranoid, superstitious farmers (who happen to be half-right).  With that in mind, I can’t say that the film is Folk Horror by definition, but it is in spirit, at least to some degree.  But, hey, I could be wrong.

Kano and his co-workers race around the countryside looking for Uranium to refine.  On their way to the village of Kugamura, they pull a trifecta of transgressions.  First, they spy on a pair of maidens skinny-dipping (this is really the most innocent of the three, though the women play a crucial part in the remainder of the story).  Then, they run over a shrine (guess who it’s devoted to).  Then, they run over a young boy’s dog, and then they split.  No amount of business success is going to save these guys at this point.

Outside of the Folk Horror shadings, Curse of the Dog God is a story of supernatural revenge that stems from several sources.  First, it is pure vengeance, as the outsiders take advantage of the villagers and their land.  Granted, the villagers are paid for their property, but the fact that this company rolls in and starts digging in the mountains, despoiling its natural purity is important.  Kano marries Reiko (Jun Izumi), daughter of one of the men whose land Kano wants to lease.  Despite Reiko and Kano’s statements that they are genuinely in love, it still feels exploitive, or maybe it was at first, but true love developed (we’re never shown this progression, so we have to fill in some blanks).  Therefore, on the one hand, the Dog God is attacking to protect its home turf and for the disrespect it has been shown by these outsiders.  On the other hand, there is the angle of human love and jealousy.  The Dog God, apparently, does not invoke itself but rather is invoked through someone else in a Pumpkinhead sort of way.  The person accused of this is Kaori (Emiko Yamauchi), Reiko’s longtime friend and daughter of a farmer who refused to lease his part of the mountain to Kano and his cohorts.  Kaori also loves Kano, and since she didn’t win his favor (because her dad didn’t acquiesce to Kano’s business dealings, most likely), she wants to remove the competition.  

Yet, even this doesn’t completely explain the mechanics of this sinister force.  In fact, it’s never entirely discernible exactly what, who, or why the Dog God is what it is or does what it does.  There is no exposition clearly detailing what the Dog God wants, what will sate its appetites, or why it chooses whom it does to possess.  It is nebulous and fickle, like the natural world from which it springs.  The one thing it definitely desires is the destruction of Kano and anyone in contact with him.  Even when Kano makes a strong connection with the village and becomes genuinely concerned for the welfare of its inhabitants, he is still a target.  Kano becomes the redemptive hero once certain events and facts come to light, but the Dog God truly doesn’t care.  This encompasses a level of innocence corrupted, not only of the land but of its people.  Young Isamu’s (Junya Kato) innocence dies with his dog, Taro.  The boy is bent on making Kano’s life miserable, going so far as to pelt him in the face with a rock at Kano’s wedding.  The villagers themselves become corrupted, physically by the byproduct of the Uranium mining and spiritually by the superstitions to which they cling.  The turmoil of their traditions vying with their more mercenary desire for money and what this allows into the village breaks them down.  They do not accept that their choices caused any catastrophes they experience.  It has to be caused by the Dog God, so the obvious thing to do is attack the only family in the village who didn’t join in selling out, and that would be Kaori and Isamu’s.  Interestingly, their family were outsiders before any of this happened.  When things go tits up, they are only further ostracized and persecuted.  Finally, there is Mako (Masami Hasegawa), Reiko’s younger sister.  She is friends with Isamu, and she alone tries to bridge the gap between the oddball family and the rest of the village.  Nevertheless, there is a secret in her own family that marks her as corruptible as well, and the Dog God is, if nothing else, an equal opportunity defiler.

Ito brings a nice sense of style to the proceedings, just as he did to no less than three of the famous Female Prisoner Scorpion films, including the arguable best of the bunch: Jailhouse 41.  There are Dutch Angles galore, and Ito does some truly haunting things with lighting throughout the film.  My main problems are twofold.  First and foremost is the point that none of the characters are interesting, with the exception of Mako.  Confoundingly, she also gets the least development and/or attention paid to her until the very end, but by that point, anything that happens to her feels like it’s brought about simply because she’s one of the last characters in the film.  Kano is a slab, and both Reiko and Kaori’s fawning over him is inexplicable, even moreso since we have seen none of how their relationships grew to start off.  There’s no real reason for the audience to care about them.  Additionally, is the fact that the Dog God appears to play by a set of rules we are not only not privy to but that change at a moment’s notice just because.  While this part of the whole setup, it makes for some chaotic viewing.  Thus, Curse of the Dog God is mildly intriguing for how different it is, but this is also the same reason it just doesn’t succeed like it should.

MVT:  Ito’s professionalism and devotion to his craft shines through.

Make or Break:  The big finale plays it as straight as the film ever will, and this part, at least, works like gangbusters.

Score:  6.5/10           

The Stick (1988)

So, today, in a fit of ridiculous candor, I've decided to tell you all about a dream I had recently.  I never remember my dreams, so this is, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.  Anyway, it went a little something like this.  I just moved somewhere new with my family.  It was somewhere sort of desert-y, maybe Arizona or somewhere in California (why I would move there is beyond me; nothing against the denizens of California, but it just ain't for me).  The apartment building we moved into was somewhat rundown, in a seedy area, but the apartment itself was like a one story, austere, white adobe kind of house on the inside, with windows soldered together like stained glass that leak like sieves in the rain.  Some young woman was there, a friend of a family member, and she was very flirty.  Nothing, naturally, came of this (it so rarely does in my dreams, boo hoo). 

Next thing I know, I'm coming home from being out somewhere, and I passed by an apartment with an old school stereo setup playing some decent music (garage style stuff I’ve never heard before) outside it.  The door was open, so I wandered in to tell the owner I liked the music.  Inside the apartment was like some ancient, independent publishing outfit (and by that, I mean it was like a closet with files, and folders, and papers stacked everywhere).  As I talked to this guy (did I mention I almost never dream about people I know?), the apartment became a small bar (not much larger than the original closet apartment).  It had a nice atmosphere, and the people filtering through were interesting.   I guess you could call them hipsters, though they felt earnest to me.  So, the actual owner of the bar/apartment (not the same guy I initially met) comes around, and he's very Eye-Talian and very wacky.  He brandishes a knife at me, but it's more absent-minded, not menacing.  He says some crap about finding myself or somesuch and throws a bunch of disparate toys on the bar for me to "assemble" like some 3-D Psych test.  I do something or other with the toys, and the owner gets elated.  He offered me a job.  As the day turns to night, some Mario-Adorf-ian fella comes in saying everyone at home is waiting for me.  And then I woke up.  Make of that what you will, but it's a bit like the semi-dreamy atmosphere of Darrell Roodt's The Stick, a film as ethereal as it is politically barbed (by the way, not that I’m saying my dream was political in any way).

The film takes the perspective of Cooper (Greg Latter), a soldier in apartheid-torn South Africa.  He's the sole survivor of a surprise attack by native rebels painted (or are they?) white like ghosts.  He's sent back out with another stick (read: squad) on a search and destroy mission.  But Cooper and his new team are in for some unpleasant surprises from within and without.

The Stick is as much a Vietnam film as it is an anti-apartheid film as it is a fantasy film.  The first two of these go hand-in-hand.  Naturally, Vietnam was not a race war, per se, but some of the soldiers in it did allow their bigotry to get the better of them.  It was a hopeless conflict against an enemy that didn’t “play by the rules.”  Now, I completely admit my ignorance of the exact intricacies of apartheid other than that it was an odious practice better off dead.  I know there were uprisings, but this film posits an outright war that has lingered far too long, its soldiers dead inside, disillusioned and desperate for escape from the grind of senseless killing for a future full of nothing.  This is reflected in Cooper and his antithesis, the unhinged O'Grady (Sean Taylor), a soldier whom the war has defeated but wrongly believes that he still has some control.  He displays this by being insubordinate and bloodthirsty.  He fronts that he's a cold killing machine (and partly he is), but his actions clearly derive from fear and exhaustion of a world that is insane and drives those who partake in to insanity.  He joins in the senseless slaughter of women and children, but he holds Cooper to blame for the frightened killing of the local Witch Doctor (Winston Ntshona).  O’Grady tries to abrogate his complicity in the events that now haunt and threaten him by putting it on someone else for the killing of this very special villager.  The soldiers are picked off by the spirits of those they persecuted and executed.  Even though Cooper did kill the Witch Doctor, he himself is left alive, not once but twice, to bear witness to the madness this world has become as well as to exist under the burdensome nightmares hands like his have conjured.

Roodt's direction is sharp.  He orchestrates the film's action dynamically, and his compositions encompass the grandeur of the locales, isolating the soldiers against the backdrops, making them small and petty.  One could argue he overdoes the crane shots, but it's for a purpose.  It symbolizes the ghosts of South Africa omnisciently bearing down on those who attack it.  The director also does an exemplary job of balancing the war and supernatural elements.  It never throws the audience into pure fantasy.  There's almost always a possible explanation for what's going on.  But by depriving the viewer of that explanation, at least partially, he strengthens the power they have.  Much of the film is a bit too predictable to fully elevate it beyond very good.  But it's message is strong and delivered with enough violence and action to make the bitter pill go down a little smoother.  It's just a damn shame it's something that needs to be said at all.

MVT: Roodt's direction is strong and sure-handed.

Make or Break: The opening ambush gives you a taste of everything the film has in store. 

 

Score: 7/10

The Norliss Tapes (1973)

***SPOILERS***

Journalism, as a career for cinematic and television protagonists, isn’t in favor like it once was.  This could be because technology has changed how news is both reported and absorbed.  It could be because journalists aren’t as trustworthy as they used to be (which also ties in with how technology has changed the landscape).  Outside of social issue films, journalists just ain’t sexy no more.  The only two recent exceptions to this that I can think of are Clark Kent in any given DC Comics film featuring Superman and Sam Turner and Jake Williams in Ti West’s The Sacrament.  While I’m sure people are still inquisitive, there is also a bold streak of cynicism that pervades most people’s attitude toward everything they hear (I’m no exception).  If anything, this should provide a hardboiled edge to any contemporary journalist characters, marrying the nobility of truth-seeking and the gruff edge of film noir.  

On television, we still have cop shows, lawyer shows, doctor shows, etcetera, but no shows about reporters spring to my mind.  Gone are the Lou Grants, the Murphy Browns, the Les Nessmans, sequestered off to discreet retirements though they’re sometimes whispered about in nostalgic reveries of when reporting was a noble cause worthy of pursuit.  It can be argued that most protagonists on the boob tube are truth-seekers; the police who solve crimes, the lawyers who defend the wrongly accused or prosecute the wicked, the soldiers and agents who fight amorphous menaces that threaten our existence, the doctors who must find the cure for a mystery illness.  But the main difference is that the reporter sheds light on things so the whole world can see, and while the other archetypes sometimes strive for a sense of transparency, their findings are often isolated, given weight in how they affect even only a few lives.  If they do carry more widespread ramifications, they are likely hushed up or spoken of only in muted tones.  Characters like David Norliss (Roy Thinnes) in Dan Curtis’ The Norliss Tapes shouts his findings from the rafters, and this narrative deals with the consequences of that.

Norliss is a man with a problem.  He’s become despondent, and his book debunking paranormal charlatans is long overdue.  When the worrisome word scribe goes missing, and friend and publisher Sanford Evans (Don Porter) finds a pile of cassette tapes dictating the tome Norliss hasn’t yet finished.  The remainder of the film details the first chapter, wherein Ellen Cort’s (Angie Dickinson) sculptor husband Jim (Nick Dimitri) just won’t stay in the family crypt.

In The Norliss Tapes, the truth is something worth pursuing, but it comes with a heavy price (it has to, the truth being something the powers-that-be seldom want known).  As Norliss delves deeper into the mystery of Jim’s reanimation, people around him start dropping like flies.  This applies not only to Norliss and Ellen’s acquaintances but also to completely innocent bystanders.  Further than that is the possibility that our protagonist may not be able to save anyone at all, himself included (this is the basic premise of the series this film was intended to spin off and didn’t).  In a post-JFK assassination, post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate America, this type of foreboding ambiguity was popular.  It wasn’t enough that we didn’t trusted in our institutions anymore.  Our heroes had changed, too.  They were no longer stalwart supermen who always saved the day and got the girl.  More and more, they were everymen with flaws and doubts we recognized in ourselves.  They didn’t necessarily come out on top, and even when they did, they typically were left to ponder the aftermath of their actions.  They had become reflective of the cultural timbre.  Norliss is no different.  His attempts at stopping Jim are constantly stymied because he doesn’t fully grasp the monster’s nature, and though this doesn’t discourage his resolve, ultimately, he’s left with the realization that he’s in way over his head.  It was a common feeling for the era.

Another interesting aspect of this film is its intertwining of art and the supernatural.  While nothing new in and of itself, The Norliss Tapes deals specifically with the creation of art and, by extension, the creation of life.  Jim is known in the art world, though I can’t recall if it’s ever mentioned how successful or well-regarded he is.  At any rate, he makes a deal with a demon named Sargoth (Bob Schott) whereby Jim will be granted immortality via an ancient Egyptian ring after he completes a sculpture of Sargoth made from a mixture of clay and blood (hence Jim’s victims).  The sculpture provides a gateway (or a birth canal, if you will) for the demon to be born onto our Earthly plane.  Further, Jim’s sculpture, like Norliss’ writing, imparts another means to eternal life, assuming some portion of his body of work remains extant.  This is something which has forever fascinated me as a concept, to create something living outside the marriage of egg and sperm, and it begs quite a few questions.  Why do we create in the first place?  What does it say about us?  What does it say about itself?  Is the act of creation governed by us or by some external force?  What happens when what we create becomes bigger than us or grows beyond our control?  It’s a simple idea which leads to a labyrinth of things to ponder, and it’s here in this film, just not especially developed.

The Norliss Tapes followed hot on the heels of the Curtis-produced The Night Stalker, which gave us the character of Carl Kolchak, arguably one of the most enduring and beloved cult figures in genre circles.  It’s no surprise that this later film gets lumped in with The Night Stalker as it’s practically a carbon copy of it.  Norliss and Kolchak are both writers.  They both want to find the truth and disseminate it.  They both encounter the supernatural and attempt to overcome it with their wits, though Kolchak is a natural believer in the paranormal and Norliss is a skeptic.  They both must face the consequences of their actions.  They both start their films in a lowly state, and their tales are told in flashback.  That said, it’s clear to see why Kolchak got a (short-lived) series and Norliss did not.  For one thing, The Night Stalker dealt with a vampire, a popular monster even back then (its sequel, The Night Strangler, dealt with a slightly less standard boogeyman), while zombies hadn’t yet taken off like they have today (the demon aspect doesn’t crop up until the last act).  Also, Kolchak is a journalist, which naturally allows him to meet up with interesting characters in the course of his investigations.  Norliss, as a writer of books, is more solitary and internalized, but he tries.  Most of all, Darren McGavin played Kolchak as a charming huckster, right down to his seersucker suit and straw hat.  Thinnes, as much as I like him, is far too dry and brooding for audiences to want to follow him overlong in this mode.  It’s kind of a shame, because the final setup to the hoped-for series may have been just enough to overcome its failings.  We’ll never know.

MVT:  The story has enough familiar and strange elements to feel almost fresh, though the shadow of Kolchak looms large.

Make or Break:  The final scene is open to the possibilities this property could have been.  Plus, it eschews a classic, upbeat ending for something more sinister and nebulous.

Score:  5/10