Once Upon a Time in Sweden: Skräcken Har 1000 Ögon (1970)

I guess Torgny Wickman's Skräcken har 1000 ögon (The Fear Has 2000 Eyes) still is one of Swedens most talked-about horror movies, or "erotic horror" as some would say. It's still one of the most bashed horror movies made here, which today seem a bit weird - because it's actually not that bad and not better or worse than some of the more trashier Italian and Spanish counterparts. Just a little bit more snowy and stiff. Shot on location in the north of Sweden and at the Europa Studio in Sundbyberg, outside Stockholm, this is one of the more interesting genre productions made up in the cold north...

The priest Sven (Hans Wahlgren) and his wife Anna (Anita Sanders) comes home after being away for a while. Anna had psychiatric problems, probably connected to her pregnancy, and now it's time to start all over again. But something has changed at home.... something sinister and dark. Their maid Hedvig (Solveig Andersson) has started to dabble with black magic and she starts causing trouble with her spells. Soon people around them is starting to die and Anna isn't sure if she's going crazy again or if there's something otherworldly terrorizing them...

While the story is very thin the atmosphere is thick and juicy, with lots of mumbo jumbo, nudity and stiff acting from a nice cast of stiff actors. Stiffest of them all is Hans Wahlgren, but I've always liked him. He's not that colourful, but his good looks and dandy-like style is enough for be to adore him. Solveig Andersson has never been much of an actress and can't handle the simplest line, but she looks good and has a dangerous aura that works better than I thought it would. Anita Sanders is the of the main actors, which isn't surprising considering her earlier works together with Pupi Avati, Tinto Brass, Bruno Corbucci and Federico Fellini. She also, in 1976, worked as assistant director on Fellini's Casanova and starred in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales.

I find it extra fun to see character actor Bertil Norström playing the happy and corpulent Vilgot, who dies after being affected by a piece of genuine Voodoo bread! Bertil is a great actor and in 1970 he starred in this one and Roy Andersson's masterpiece A Love Story - one of the best movies EVER made in Sweden. Talk about a variety of acting parts!

As a horror movie this isn't scary at all - and the nudity and sex doesn't make it especially erotic either, but its strength is the atmosphere. The tension, the very weird details (like the three-legged baby dress, the voodoo bread and the Hedvig's tries to scary everyone with a glowing, white hand!) gives Skräcken Har 1000 Ögon a very interesting and successful feeling of madness and loneliness. The small hints from one of the characters that Christianity isn't much different from the occult seem like a personal message from the filmmakers. What few know is that this is partly based on real events, set in the real house where the movie was shot - a real home of a priest!

Really?

Yes. In 1922 two witnesses saw a white, glowing hand floating in the air above one of the nearby graves. A couple of days later the priest himself, Beskow, saw the hand floating inside the house pointing at a closet! The priest and his wife, including guest, experienced a lot of hauntings - including one time when their dog walked backwards out from the house and the door closed violent after him! The legend of the haunted rectory continued over the years and had it's zenith in 1927.

Skräcken Har 1000 Ögon is released by Klubb Super 8 in Sweden, not English subs. The DVD includes an interview with Hans Wahlgren and the producer Inge Ivarsson plus fifteen minutes of deleted scenes. 

Once Upon a Time in Sweden: The Forgotten Wells (1994)

I promised myself not to write about bad Swedish movies during this week, but the other day I found myself watching Mats Helge Olsson's The Forgotten Wells (aka Jagad i Underjorden aka Grottmorden), the last gasp of the not so spectacular Swedish empire of low budget genre movies Mats Helge created when he needed money after a very, very, very big flop called Sverige åt Svenskarna (but that's a totally different story). During the end of his career he got involved with muscle-boy Anders Hellquist (here credited as A.R. Hellquist), who in a couple of "action classics" starred as the shirt-ripping hero. It was also during that time that Olsson's pupil, Anders Nilsson, started to direct more and more and this movie is credited to them both.

Hellquist is Pete Savage, an adventurous journalist sent out by his boss (played by Frederick Offrein) to investigate a system of forgotten... wells! Yeah, that's true! Many years ago a boy is said to have disappeared in the underground system and Pete and his team is set out to find him! But what the hell, at the same time - from a nearby mental hospital - a crazy serial killer escapes and hides out in the wells! Bad luck for our heroes! And even worse, the brother of the killer - a very rich man named Tanner (Taggen Axelsson) - sends out his henchmen to kill every witness to his brother's bloody mayhem!

No, this is not a good movie. Actually, it's very far from a good movie. I guess it's suppose to be a horror/slasher (which I always forget), but the tension is nada and the "actors" mostly seem interested in beat each other in different not so creative ways. It's very dark and hard to see what's happening which is a brutal contrast to the scenes in the beginning that looks like they're from an extra cheap porn movie. The strongest part of the movie is the editing. Confusing, yes - but during the sloppy fight scenes it's actually quite good and works fine - but that's always been a fact in the work of Mats Helge: action is interesting for the filmmakers, the rest is just to fill out between the crappy fights.

I might seem harsh on the movie - and yes, that's what I am. But as a collector of Mats Helge movies and odd genre flicks from Sweden it's necessary to watch everything I find. For several years I had contact with Mats Helge, but stopped answered the phone after he started to rave about how the homosexuals and the Jews controlled media and destroyed his career - men like that are best to ignore before they take over your life. But he was friendly anyway and my interested also made me get to know some of the actors involved in his classics - and I casted three of the stars from this movie in a movie I produced morethan ten years ago. Fun times.

But back to The Forgotten Wells. Another thing I like about it is the underground locations - both real locations and built sets. Pity they're so dark it's impossible to follow the action. Sam Cook, who have a much bigger part in yesterdays Mask of Murder, also have a very small part here. Do anyone know who he was/is? Let me know, I'm curious! Another odd casting is Gareth Hunt, the British character actor (The New Avengers and the failed Bond-spoof Licensed to Love and Kill) who slums as a bad cop during most of the movie. How the hell did he end up in this micro budget Swedish crapfest?

I can't recommend The Forgotten Wells to anyone, but it's an interesting and failed attempt to make another slasher in Sweden - and every try is a welcome try.

Once Upon a Time in Sweden: Mask of Murder (1985)

Arne Mattsson's Mask of Murder have never been a movie with a good reputation in the horror community. Even the most fanatic and open-minded fans out there seems loving to bash it. I think this hangs together with the bully-system that the Swedish film community - lead by Ingmar Bergman - started against Arne Mattsson, and both colleagues and critics joined the herd and continued to bash him for the rest of his career. Why? Well, first of all - Arne was an easy target. He was a sensitive man, he didn't like to be trashed and was out-spoken in the matter. He was also a controversial man who often, through what seemed like shallow entertainment, loved to bring up subjects that few others dared to touch. Another reason was his love for crime stories. He wasn't forced into movies about murder and mayhem, he loved it and sported his own impressive collection of detective novels. This "weakness" for the commercial part of culture made him an easy target for the fancy critics and pretentious colleagues. By 1985 his career was since long more or less dead, but he continued to make movies and Mask of Murder seemed to have been a smaller hit on video shelves everywhere. I hope Arne got some of those money...

In a Canadian wintery town a serial killer is on the loose. He's has a white rubber mask with red lips painted on it. Some locals spots the suspect and calls the police. Bob McLaine (Rod Taylor),  Ray Cooper (Sam Cook) and their superior Jonathan Rich (Christopher Lee) heads out to the house where he hides, but it all ends in disaster and Jonathan gets shot and Bob executes the suspect in cold-blood. Everyone thinks the killer is dead, but some nights after someone is back with the mask - slashing the throats of young women!

It's a lot more to the story, but the less said about the twists and turns the better. Mask of Murder is a cheap movie, it looks quite rushed - and believe me, it's not shot in Canada or anywhere close to that continent. It's shot on Arne's own backyard, Uppsala and nearby areas. Uppsala was Arne's favourite town and used in many of this movies, and it's always a pleasure finding the locations he used. The script could have needed one or two extra passes, but it still works quite fine as a bleak and nasty murder mystery. Arne's favourite camera techniques is still there and makes the cheap locations looks way more nice than if a less competent director would shoot the same script. Like Hitchcock, Mattsson knew how to tell a story without unnecessary dialogue and tells a lot of the drama just by moving the camera in the right moment or the use of logical and intelligent editing (an art form that's totally forgotten nowadays...especially in bigger, mainstream movies).

Mask of Murder is also a very dark and cynical movie with a lot of nasty and bloody murders on women plus some bloody squibs. There's very few - if none - sympathetic characters to root for which might be the reason why a lot of fans have problem liking it. Personally I think that's just fantastic, because movies like that is needed. The world isn't a happy place, so why fool the audience?

The trio of lead actors, Taylor, Cook and Lee, makes excellent performances - but I find the supporting actors even more interesting. For example we have Heinz Hopf, more famous for his legendary role in They Call Her One Eye, as a slightly unstable hairdresser. In two even smaller parts we have Legendary (yes, with a big L) Hjördis Pettersson in, I think,  her last part + another veteran from the screen and stage, the brilliant Sif Ruud.

Mask of Murder is out on an okay-looking DVD from Studio S in Sweden and I guess that's the best way to go if you, as a serious movie collector, wants this movie in your collection. 

Once Upon a Time in Sweden: Besökarna (The Visitors, 1988)

Maybe I'm lacking the imagination I thought I had when it comes to find interesting Swedish genre movies to write about this week, but the fact is that there's not much movies to choose from. Besökarna (aka The Visitors) launched a short-lived Hollywood career for the Ersgård brothers (including a couple of Charles Band productions: Mandroid and Invisible: The Chronicles of Benjamin Knight) and after that a couple of fiascos in Sweden. It might sound like I don't like them, but I do - I just think they should go back to make a classic horror movie - because Besökarna, their first movie, proves that horror is what they can do best.

A new family is moving in, it's Frank (Kjell Bergqvist) and Sara (Lena Endre) and their two kids, Lotta and Peter. The house needs a renovation and Frank starts fixing it up directly while he's longing to Monday when he's gonna present an idea for an advertising campaign and get rich. But it won't take long until strange happens in the house. The wallpapers falls down over and over again and Frank starts to hear odd sounds. It won't get better when the clients hates his idea and he needs to come up with a new concept in just a couple of days. But the ghostly visions gets worse and soon he brings a psychic investigator, Allan Svensson (Johannes Brost), to the house - and then when it really goes to... HELL!

It was many years since I saw Besökarna the last time but what strikes me the most now is how terribly the actors are. I mean, this is the crappiest acting of the crappiest acting I've seen in a Swedish movie. Everything an actors gets angry he or she starts to scream and wave a round like a madman. It's ridiculous! Nowadays all the actors are beloved and even Kjell Bergqvist and Johannes Brost have become decent actors (Johannes just got a comeback after a few years out in the cold). But here, oh lord. It's unbelievable! Not sure non-Swedish speaking audiences can notice the same way as we do, but trust me.

So, that was some whining and here's some more: I need to point out the almost overly simple storyline. Good in some ways, but also lacking imagination. It feels a lot like Amityville 3 - lots of noise but nothing is shown, which a movie like this needs. The main ghost/demon looks cool, for example, but is seen for less than one single second. And no, that's not good. When you don't have so much to deliver, bring on the monster instead - but the Ersgård brothers stay away from that also.

On the other side: the second half is actually damn effective as a ghost movie. The filmmakers goes all the way (except showing the demon enough) with moving objects, violent entities trying to bash in the door, kids in danger, visuals effects and pyrotechnics - and a nice sequence when one character is stuck hanging upside-down trying to reach the button to stop the demon from breaking free from it's mirror-hell. Stuff like that, I love it so much. There's also a good and very well-edited car chase that actually is quite spectacular in it's own discreet way. Maybe the only good car chase ever filmed in Sweden.

I will try to end on a positive note. Besökarna is probably the best haunted house movie ever made in Sweden - but it might also be the ONLY haunted house movie ever made here (I'm not even counting the awful Scorched Heat from 1987). Okay, I tried. It's still entertaining and delivers a lot of visual treats during the last half. I think I can recommend it to fans of obscure Eighties horror-nonsense.

Once Upon a Time in Sweden: Stenansiktet (The Stone Face, 1973)

This Swedish oddity was produced by sleaze-maestro Inge Ivarson (Bel Ami, Justine & Juliette, Flossie, Language of Love and a ton of other sex-classics from Sweden) and directed by edgy dramedy-director Janne Halldoff, shot on location in Skärholmen, the famous concrete-suburb to Stockholm. Stenansiktet is very far from Ivarson's other movies, but the themes is as usual controversial and stuff you would never see in a movie about young teenagers in the US (for example).

Jan Blomberg is Harry, a social worker deeply involved in trying to make Stockholm and especially the suburbs a better place for humans. After his baby boy died in a freak accident on a playground - the ground being asphalted and easy for the kids to hurt themselves on - his wife gets a nervous breakdown and is committed to an asylum. Harry wants to change stuff, but the politicians won't listen to him. One day, after getting attacked by a gang of 13-15 year old boys he realizes that they can work for him, kidnapping corrupt and evil politicians so he can kill them in the safety of his own home!

An idea that originated in the sixties (in Sweden) was to build enormous areas of concrete living facilities for the workers to live in. Only live in. Work during they day and then go home, watch TV, sleep and then work again. Everything should be concrete and asphalt. This, of course, turned out to be a very bad idea. People need something else than a cube to live in. They need to live also. Gone was the nature, the parks, the playgrounds - left was a miserable state of humanity. Bored kids turned to drugs and violence and the parents sat at home brainwashed by the TV. After this huge mistake the government tried desperately to fix this, but the problems still are there - which especially during the last eight years has widen the class inequalities to alarming levels. Culture and creating is evil, work and slavery is good.

Stenansiktet (which literary means The Stone Face) is a lot about this, but also a story about the kids, growing up more and more cynical. When watching Stenansiktet it reminded me of everything from Bo Widerberg's Mannen på Taket, Kids, A Clockwork Orange and Roy Andersson's A Love Story. The location in Skärholmen makes the movie almost look futuristic, in that realistic seventies way with big concrete walls and house, underground parking lots and big empty squares.

The acting is very uneven, but Blomberg is great as Harry - both oozing of friendly goodwill and a dark undertone of being a manipulating psychopath. Interesting enough the only ones how looks through is the kids, which gives hope for the future.

I'm not sure how much Stenansiktet could attract non-Swedish viewers, but if you find a way to see it, give it a shot. It's satire, social-realism and often also quite funny. It's not out on DVD what I know, but many years ago Klubb Super 8 released it on VHS.

And how is Skärholmen and the rest of the concrete suburbs today? Nowadays its a lot better, the criminality is still there but the people are fighting for making it a better places, the squares are filled with vendors who sells fruits, vegetables, everything you need - and here we can only thank one group of people: the immigrants.

Without them these places would be dead. 

Upcoming: Once Upon a Time in Sweden Week!

Yeah, good ol' Ninja Dixon will TRY to deliver a slate of Swedish classics - but I promise to stay away from the obvious one, The Call Her One Eye (you can instead read this interesting text I wrote once - or just check out this nice photo of me and Christina). I just added two photos of Christina Lindberg to make more people to read this announcement! I'm not even sure Christina will be in any of the movies I'll be watching this week!

I will instead try to review a couple of movies that is rarely written about or just plain under-appreciated. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this upcoming week and the concept of Once Upon a Time in Sweden!

/Ninja Dixon