The Sect (1991)

There’s something innately creepy about hippies, at least on film.  I don’t say this out of any hatred for them; it’s more an observation of their portrayals in cinema.  Even when all hippies do is cavort, and get their boobs painted, and smoke weed, there is a quasi-unsettling aspect to them.  I think this is because they are outside the mainstream life experience (for example, I never lived in a hippie commune, so the experience is foreign to me, though I understand the reasoning behind it).  Even though they are just people, they are still “other.”  They have no rules governing their lives, no restraints placed on them by society, but they espouse their beliefs with a casual zealotry also found in hardcore religious fanatics (though religious fanatics are hardly casual about anything).  Perhaps more than this is the thought that their utopian ideals are rather naïve and doomed to failure by dint of their being commonly unshared with the vast majority of the world.  Naturally, Charles Manson and his Family are held up as the exemplar of how hippie communities and religious cults can be distressingly similar.  They also played a large part in why the hippie lifestyle fell out of popularity as the Sixties drew to a close, I think.  The “experiment” (for want of a better term) was a failure, because the violence and darkness of the real world hippies seemed to want to escape from was inescapable.  

The only way for their culture to succeed would be if every single person on Earth thought exactly the same way (an idea that carries its own share of frightening implications).  But since their ideology is rooted in pure freedom, this means that not only does it allow for people with nebulous intent to take advantage of the situation, but also that the sense of anarchy engendered by their lack of rules makes for a certain vulnerability.  Their passivity leaves them open to attack.  In cinema, conversely, hippie communes are just one short step away from being radical cultists (in fact, they are often referred to as “hippie cults,” and their “gurus” or leaders or whatever often occupy the role of spiritual heads), and very little is scarier than a gang of steadfast ideologues with no societal boundaries coming at you (see the world of American political discourse for further research).  The hippies in the superfluous prologue of Michele Soavi’s The Sect (aka Demons IV aka La Setta aka The Devil’s Daughter) are not only of the victim variety, but they are also past their sell by date (1971 is the year given onscreen, and yes, there were hippies around after 1969, but after that year [being both the apex and the nadir of the movement] the herd was thinning out).

Robed Christ figure Damon (Thomas Arana) shows up at a hippie camping trip, rattles off some “deep” lyrics from The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (just in case there was the slightest danger of the film being subtle), and, with the help of his Satanic biker gang, carves up the young people for some ceremony which apparently just doesn’t come off as planned.  Leap forward twenty years to Frankfurt, Germany, where young Miriam (Kelly Curtis) almost nails hobo-esque (he wears a ratty cloak and sports fingerless knit gloves) Moebius (Herbert Lom) with her car, takes him to her house, and basically allows him to set into motion a chain of events that may bring about the Apocalypse with her as its nexus.

Just to get this out in the open, Soavi’s film (co-written with Gianni Romoli and Dario Argento) is essentially a bald-faced riff on both Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen films.  Even before the plot gets going, this is blindingly obvious.  With that said, the film is also loaded (and I mean loaded) with symbolism.  Clocks and time play huge parts.  The hippies in the film’s opening destroy a clock with their slingshots, trying to stop time (they are, after all, two years beyond the end of their movement).  People constantly state that “it’s time” or that they have to bide their time and wait.  There is a miniature paper house in Miriam’s home with a large clock drawn on one side.  Moebius turns his clock ahead before he sets off to “meet” Miriam (perhaps to move up his time table, perhaps because the clock was off and he is obsessed with accuracy, perhaps neither).  Moebius checks his pocket watch while talking to Miriam, always conscious of the schedule he’s on.  There is a sense that all of these machinations are planned out to the minute, because there is a confluence of events that must take place in order for it all to coalesce (the only indication we get that events have to occur at a certain time is a shot of an eclipse, though this is never addressed as anything other than a visual instance of a “cosmic” occurrence with no exposition or foreshadowing to presage it), but they are put into motion with somewhat less than military precision.  The clock and time are the fatalism of the characters’ ever approaching destiny.

There are also heavy fertility symbols throughout the film.  There is a well (maybe a sewer?) in Miriam’s sub-basement, and she will be submerged in it at a crucial moment.  It’s also a focal point for all of the characters which is returned to constantly.  The water is also turned blue at one point, and this ties into the connection between Miriam and Christianity’s Virgin Mary (whose name in the Aramaic language is Mariam), who is always depicted in blue robes as a symbol of her purity (we also get a shot of a mural with the Virgin Mary on it early in the film, in what is essentially superfluous prologue, number two).  At one point, Miriam lounges in a bathtub full of this blue water and submerges her head, becoming reborn and ready for her upcoming role.  There is a supposedly extinct insect which we are informed symbolizes fertility.  This insect is adorned with a spiral on its back, and this is yet another birth/rebirth motif, although a slightly more esoteric one.  The spiral (which is seen not only on the insect but also in the sub-basement’s skylight and carved into stone in a garden) carries the dual symbology of Miriam’s life spiraling out of her control and the expansion of the circle of life outward from birth (maybe from hers, maybe from the universe’s, maybe both).  Finally, there is the very obvious fertility symbol of rabbits.  Miriam has a collection of rabbit tchotchkes and a live rabbit she calls “Rabbit” (like how Columbo’s dog was “Dog”).  More than this surface metaphor, Rabbit is the insidiousness of Miriam’s fertility, evil wearing a kind face (a little like Moebius).  Rabbit is no mere rabbit.  It watches television while Miriam sleeps (yes, really), changing the channel (but always coming back to a magician pulling one of his kind out of a hat).  Rabbit follows Miriam around, lurking near her at all times, a portent of what is coming.

Of course, this being an Italian horror film, it thrives on its bonkers qualities and specious logic, and they are, in fact, what winds up elevating this one from the pack.  Soavi also knows his way around a camera (as does cinematographer Raffaele Mertes), and The Sect is pleasantly stylish in its visual aspects.  The camera zooms around the pipes in Miriam’s house.  Many shots are gorgeously thoughtful in their compositions.  There are Dutch angles aplenty as well as some interesting uses of closeups, most particularly a nice zoom in to Miriam’s nostrils (you have to see it).  So, even if you don’t buy that a rabbit wants to stay up late channel surfing or that an ersatz Shroud of Turin can smother people (did I not mention that?), you’ll have more than enough here to take in on a pure eye candy level to keep you happy.

MVT:  The look of the film is striking and, though I hate to use this word, sumptuous at times.

Make or Break:  The scene where a character comes back to life and goes nuts (who was basically nuts before death too, so there’s that) is really one for the ages, in my opinion.

Score:  6.5/10             

Project: Metalbeast (1995)

At the heart of all the great werewolf stories is the tragedy of the lycanthrope’s condition.  Usually, these characters didn’t ask for what’s happening to them (in fact, Oliver Reed’s character in The Curse of the Werewolf is just that; cursed by happenstance of birth).  Oftentimes, they are wracked with angst prior to their “infection”/transformation, and their lycanthropy amplifies this, creates a visual metaphor for dealing with it, and generates pathos which makes their typically tragic endings more impactful.  We feel bad when Lon Chaney, Jr is killed with almost Shakespearean poignancy in 1941’s The Wolf Man, because he’s basically a nice guy.  We feel bad when Dee Wallace sacrifices herself at the end of The Howling, because after all she’s gone through, we want her to live, but we know that she has to die.  Even villainous werewolves who are not the protagonists of their stories normally embody a certain sense of anxiety centered on their duality.  Just look at Everett McGill’s character in Silver Bullet who has nightmares about his loss of morality/control.  All of this is rooted in the injustice of these people’s situations.  They don’t generally deserve their lot in life (hey, who does?), so we sympathize with what they’re going through.  However, in Alessandro De Gaetano’s Project: Metalbeast, Butler (John Marzilli) was an unsympathetic piece of shit even before his self-inflicted transformation.  Consequently, his werewolf is nothing more than a lumbering beast we don’t care about as anything other than a killing machine, and I think it robs the film of the resonance it could have had.  Of course, none of the other characters are all that compelling either, so I suppose there’s some sense of balance in that.

After injecting himself with werewolf blood obtained in Budapest for a top secret super soldier project, Butler, a soldier working under the shifty Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick), wolfs out, is put down with three silver bullets, and is placed into a cryogenic deep freeze.  Twenty years on, his cadaver is thawed out to test Dr. Anna De Carlo’s (Kim Delaney) unstable artificial skin, called Bio-Ferron (just to reinforce this for you, they have an artificial epidermis that has the UNINTENDED side effect of turning into metal, and they called it Bio-Ferron), under the orders of the still-shifty Miller.  I wonder if Butler will awaken and go on some kind of rampage?

One of the more interesting things at play in this film is its combination of science with myth.  In the same way that some science fiction fantasy stories (a la Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories or Thundarr the Barbarian) merge grungy, bloody barbarianism with high tech, almost aseptic futurism, the dichotomy of juxtaposing science with the supernatural holds a certain appeal for me.  It’s the incongruities of the two, the core polarities that I find fascinating.  There is some de-mythologizing of lycanthropy in the film as the condition of werewolfism is treated as a rare blood condition rather than as a curse or disease passed from one victim to the next (even the military wouldn’t be foolish enough to purposely infect soldiers whose combat efficiency they wish to enhance with a known malady [or would they?], although this does call to mind the shameful Tuskegee Study [which took place over a span of forty years!]).  Werewolves are simply something that exist (and that they do so in secret bolsters the conflict between comprehension and the incomprehensible).  Yet, the filmmakers don’t deal with any of this in anything other than a superficial manner.  The elements are all there, but De Gaetano seems to be more intent on making a straight up creature feature (not that there’s anything wrong with that) than on exploring the depths of the sandbox in which he was playing.

There is also some toying with notions of morality, but even here, it’s essentially cursory.  Naturally, Miller has no moral or ethical code whatsoever (“morality has nothing to do with it”), because he’s both a government employee for an unnamed, clandestine branch as well as a soldier, and we know that these two things spell mercenary in cinematic terms.  The doctors (who are also government employees) are innately moral, because their stated purpose is to help cancer and burn victims and they work out in the open (more or less).  They want to heal people, whereas Miller wants to hurt people.  Even the soldier Philip (Dean Scofield) who works with the doctors is himself a doctor, so he shares their clear moral code, and General Hammond (William G Clark) is upfront about his distaste for the likes of Miller (“people in Washington have no regard for humanity”).  The doctors also hang out, drink beers, and play poker in their off hours, so the audience recognizes that these are regular folks just like them.  Despite all this, the doctors don’t display the courage of their convictions.  They raise token ethical/moral arguments, but they go along with Miller’s plan with little prodding, and then everything is business as usual for them.  Even after Butler comes back to life, they have very little compassion for the guy (granted, he doesn’t deserve it, but they don’t know that) outside of the frustration of snapping off needles while trying to give him injections.  

Nevertheless, when Project: Metalbeast is all boiled down, it’s by the numbers right down the line.  The characters are indistinguishable from one another and undeveloped outside of their designation as “the good guys.”  The same goes for Miller, who is a cardboard evildoer, always turning up to overhear some suspicious dialogue and deliver some vaguely menacing lines of his own.  The Metalbeast (played in costume by Kane Hodder) is a chunky, blank slate of a monster that looks more like a mutant hedgehog than an iron werewolf.  There are no unforeseen twists to the story.  There are no especially clever moments for any of the characters in their combatting of the monster.  

And speaking of the lack of cleverness, the film is rife with just dumb moments and decisions.  To wit: why does Miller suddenly think that Butler will obey him now simply because twenty years have gone by?  Why does he have no method to control what is basically a feral animal (it’s declared that the amalgamated soldier would have the brain of a man, but this is not in evidence anywhere) which he wants to use it in combat.  Why is Miller not armed to the teeth with silver bullets or have any underlings with him similarly kitted out?  Why does Miller show Butler photos of the initial werewolf eating Butler’s fellow soldier in Budapest, when Butler clearly didn’t give a fuck about that guy in the first place (and why is this so effective on Butler, then?)?  Why do they seem to keep Butler’s frozen corpse in the kitchen refrigerator?  Why does Chef Ramon (Mario Burgos) get third billing in the end credits (they’re only partially in alphabetical order) after a single, histrionic scene (which, by the way, wins the Robert Marius Award for the film)?  Even discounting any of this (or reveling in it, for that matter), the film watching experience with this one was basic in every aspect for me, not in an old school, throwback sort of way but in an ultra-generic one.  It was just nothing to howl about (and by the way, the Metalbeast never howls in the film).

MVT:  I like the Metalbeast, not because it’s in any way memorable, but because it’s a practical monster suit, and I’m a sucker for practical monster suit effects.  A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, I suppose.

Make or Break:  The Budapest werewolf attack has another practical suit monster, which I quite liked, and it was gory (I should state, there’s quite a bit of gore in the film that provides a tiny amount of satisfaction).  And that’s that.

Score:  5.5/10

Kafka (1991)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Runtime: 98 minutes

This movie is faithful love letter to Franz Kafka and his works. It is also nearly incomprehensible if you are not familiar with the author's writing. Unlike Naked Lunch, which was also released the same year, that can be watched without any knowledge of  William Burroughs or his work and not asking yourself every fives minutes what is happening. You are asking other questions about the Naked Lunch but you are not struggling for context with that movie.

Kafka's plot is taken from The Castle and The Trial, two unfinished novels by the author, and details from the author's life. The reason for this is because both novels are unfinished and spends more time going into detail about themes that make Franz Kafka's work unique. Themes such as alienation, bureaucratic insanity, and reality reacting to the absurd. So for something to tell a story Kafka's life was used to fill in any gaps.

The story of the movie revolves around Franz Kafka. A insurance clerk for the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) by day and a writer by night. He was content with this existence until a co-worker and friend of his is found dead in the river. Kafka starts to look into his co-worker's life and finds that nothing is what it appears to be. On his investigation he runs in to anarchists, artists, other authors, surgically altered people who kill people, and all manner of bureaucratic functionaries. Kafka's inquiries lead him to the go visit the castle and try to put everything back to what passes for normality.

Overall it is a beautiful film, rich in atmosphere, dark humor, and unexplained references to the author's works. This film lead me to hunting down Kafka's works and making him one of my favorite authors. Fans of noir movies and atmospheric cinema worlds will like this movie. The unexplained references can take someone out of the film but there is enough other things in the film to keep ones interest.

MVT: The cast of this movie and the subtle dark humor.

Make or Break: Jeremy Iron's performance in this film.

Score: 8.24 out of 10

Dawn of the Mummy (1981)

In my personal opinion, mummies have not been well used in cinema, generally speaking.  I’m talking about the shambling, bandaged (like a masking-tape-and-shoe-polish-decorated bottle a kid made for a grade school art project) monstrosities here.  When it comes to these creatures, I prefer the kind that stalk over the kind who scheme.  Make no mistake, I adore the hell out of Karloff’s turn as Imhotep in 1932’s The Mummy, but let’s face facts, all of us would have liked to have seen much more of Jack Pierce’s withered and enwrapped makeup in action.  Yet, mummies always seem to get short shrift in the movies.  Rarely are they much more than unstoppable hulks (hypocritical as that may sound based on what I just said), pawns of a more malevolent human with no distinct personalities of their own (part of my problem with some of Universal’s sequels to the Karl Freund film).  Christopher Lee managed to imbue loads of character to his turn as Kharis in Terence Fisher’s 1959 The Mummy, and even here, using only his eyes and body movements, his onscreen rapport with Peter Cushing is evident.  I’m also a sucker for Paul Naschy’s gory portrayal of Amenhotep in 1973’s The Mummy’s Revenge (aka La Venganza de la Momia), though if I really think about it, a lot of that film’s charm on me comes from the divine Helga Line.  But in Fred Dekker’s otherwise fantastic The Monster Squad (a movie I’m always surprised never elicits conversations about the 1976 television series from which it takes its name), the mummy gets a great character makeup which is barely seen at all and then is dispatched almost offhandedly (this pisses me off to this day).  Stephen Sommers’ 1999 The Mummy did try to develop their Imhotep into a more well-rounded character, but the film also undercuts any of the menace of the monster by focusing more on action and spectacle and cramming two pounds of horrid, computer-generated effects into the proverbial one-pound bag (I’m not a fan of these films in the slightest, and don’t even get me started on the same director’s Van Helsing).  Thankfully, the mummy Safiraman in Frank Agrama’s Dawn of the Mummy stays wrapped up and desiccated for the film’s entirety, and he even gives off a fairly creepy, evil vibe.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the film and its participants are so godawful, it detracts massively from the few (very few) good points it possesses.

In 3000 BC Egypt, the sadistic Pharaoh Safiraman is entombed with the curse that if his resting place is disturbed, both he and his army of slaves will rise up and kill.  Cut to the present where jerk/tomb raider Rick (George Peck) busts into said tomb, preparing to rob it of its riches.  What better time than now for a wandering band of fashion models and their photographer to show up and decide to use said tomb for a shooting location?  Needless to say, corpses are disturbed, and murder ensues.

This is one of those films (much like the previously-reviewed Maya) where the Ugly American characters are so insanely overblown, you can’t wait for them to die.  Gary (John Salvo) is a narcissistic pothead.  Bill (Barry Sattels) is a narcissistic slave driver/boss.  Melinda (Ellen Faison) is a narcissistic horndog.  June (Diane Beatty) is just a plain, old narcissist.  They push their way into the tomb and immediately set about desecrating every inch of the place in pursuit of their commercial interests.  Watching the photo shoots set against the musty crypt nails home the feeling of crassness these characters depict.  Their prioritizing of glamour and surface beauty only highlights their shallowness (especially considering how one-dimensional they all are), and this (more than Rick and his thieving cohorts) is what sets Safiraman off on his rampage, in my opinion.  The Americans bring with them nothing but abrasive self-involvement, and this deserves death in the film.  Worse, the Americans’ effect on the local community marks those innocents for death as well in a “guilt by association” way.

There are a couple of interesting things going on in the film aside from this aforementioned theme, but they are predominantly from a technical standpoint.  The shot where Safiraman rises is extremely effective, and, as stated, the makeup and performance for the monster create a mildly intimidating aura whenever he’s around.  Additionally, it’s somewhat refreshing to see a mummy film where the villain isn’t pining for some long lost love who just so happens to bear a striking resemblance to the female lead (yeah, it’s meant to give some depth to the character, but some on, the trope is way overused).  The scene of the undead army (let’s just call them zombies, since they behave like zombies of the Italian variety in every conceivable way, shape, and form) rising up is loaded with atmosphere.  There is a nicely edited sequence which intercuts zombies attacking and eating people and revelers dancing and partying at a wedding (the inconsequential character whose nuptials these are is given an inordinate amount of time in the story).  The gore is disgusting in the best possible way, and the score by Shuki Levy strikes a nice balance between traditional orchestration and funky pop.  

Nonetheless, there’s far, far more in the film to warrant passing on it (unless you truly savor garbage and can stay awake for the duration).  A lot of this comes from the thespian skills of the cast which vary from moribund (funny enough, this criticism doesn’t include the mummy and his army) to Renfield-ian (in purest Arte Johnson mode).  In fact, I would be hard-pressed to choose only one winner for the Robert Marius Award in this movie, because the entire cast is truly worthy.  Everyone seems to be mugging like Harpo Marx at almost every instant, and when they’re not doing that, they’re grinning inappropriately at each other like they’re wasted out of their minds (and hey, maybe they were).  It gives the film an unhinged quality, but it stinks more of incompetence rather than planned cinematic texturing.

And then there are the things which simply boggled my mind.  For instance, how do set lights make a mummy’s body melt and wake him from his eternal rest?  How did the models pack all of the shit they have with them on two horses and a jeep?  If Safiraman’s slaves were originally killed in his burial chamber, why are there no remains when the tomb is opened, and why are the zombies rising up out of the desert rather than from the sepulcher?  Why does some random Egyptian guy take to Gary and invite him to his wedding just because Gary shows up to smoke some weed at this guy’s café?  Why does Rick wake Melinda up in the middle of the night to get some after she’s fainted from stress a very short while ago (okay, this one I could kind of understand, but it’s placement in the film is just odd)?  Why does Rick allow Bill and the models to boss him around when he could merely kill them all and bury them in the desert (or let the scavengers pick them apart, which also brings up the question of how a Bedouin’s decapitated head managed to last as long as it did without being gnawed at or buried in the shifting sands)?  It’s not so much that the film raises questions like this in a viewer’s mind; it’s that these questions become more intriguing (and distracting) than the film itself.  If you can answer any of these questions, or if you’re okay with what they conjure in your mind, this might be the movie for you.  Everyone else can leave this one buried.

MVT:  The untethered property of the film certainly makes it stand out as an oddity, for sure.

Make or Break:  By about the second or third scene involving Rick and his gang, I realized that the way these people were acting was intentional.

Score:  3/10