Beyond the Grave (2010)

Beyond theGrave, or Porto dos Mortos, is something as unique as a Brazilian horror-western-drama hybrid from director Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro. Shot in the beautiful city of Porto Alegre, the movie looks gorgeous and has an attractive cast of talents but suffers from a slow pacing. Will that work when the horror nerds out there most likely expects a gore-ridden splatter-movie?

The seven gates of hell has opened and transformed most people to zombie-demon-thingies. The Officer (Rafael Tombini) is a police officer obsessed with his work and even now, after the apocalypse, he's searching the country for the dreaded serial killer The Dark Rider. During the way he picks up two teenagers (Ricardo Seffner and Amanda Grimaldi) and teaches them to defend themselves without wasting bullets. But the closer they get to The Dark Rider higher the risk, and not everyone is gonna survive the end of the day...

Beyond the Grave is a very ambitious movie. The digital cinematography looks excellent and the main actors, especially the John Savage-esque Rafael Tombini and the two teenagers has a lot of charisma and carries the story all the way through. Even if the movie starts of quite cheesy, in a good way, with a shoot-out (including a very nifty shadow with bullethole-gag) and a samurai, the rest of the story is very, very low-key and is more or less an existential road movie with heavy doses of Stephen King's The Stand and it's villain, Randall fall - also called The Dark Man (compared to The Dark Rider) and the Walking Dude, the latter is referenced in a message that's sprayed on a wall in this movie.

One interesting idea is that the zombies isn't that dangerous (which I guess could be a disappointment to the gorehounds!), unless they are in a larger group of course. In some scenes the creatures is just stumbling around a couple of meters from our heroes without anyone really caring about them. Like stray dogs. Director Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro wasn't interested in doing a normal zombie-movie - which is very obvious when watching the movie. It's more a drama with some supernatural scenes tossed in here and there and very low on the gore front (and I like gore), which could have spiced up the story a little bit.

I was expecting something else, maybe something more less serious and with more action, but if you read this review and plans to watch the movie: expect something totally different, expect more of a road movie. Well-acted, nicely shot and with more focus on characters and dialogue than pure horror. I think you will like it more with that knowledge.

Haunts (1977)

I need to thank Lars Jacobsson for tweeting about this movie, because if he didn't I wouldn't have hard about it and I would have reviewed yet another SyFy production that no one of you care about anyway! Haunts is directed by c-director (and former Rabbi!) Herb Freed, the maestro behind such classics as Graduation Day and Beyond Evil. He directed a couple of hundred TV-commercials before becoming a movie director and his second feature was this very interesting super-cheap thriller set far out in the American countryside...

May Britt Wilkens, the Swedish blonde Rat Pack-nymph who got her first start in Carlo Ponti's AND Dino De Laurentiis Le infedeli in 1953, plays Ingrid Svensson, a deeply religious woman living on an old farm who earlier belonged to her parents. Her only relative nearby is Uncle Carl (Cameron Mitchell) and the rest of the time she spends in church or taking care of her goats. One night a woman gets brutally killed by a masked man (wearing black gloves) and soon everyone is getting more and more paranoid. Who is the killer? The unknown psychopath is also starting to following and attacking Ingrid, and she gets closer to a nervous breakdown...

Haunts might be cheap, very cheap, and terribly slow - but this is actually a very ambitious, giallo-esque backwoods-thriller with a very fine cast. I've never been fond of these local productions, but Haunts stays away from the usual Bigfoots and monsters and goes directly for a complex psycho-thriller that gives the audience more than one twist. I'm surprised, because the directing by Freed is intelligent and arty with a wonderful score by the one and only Pino Donaggio (who the hell did they get him?!). The script, co-written by his wife Anne Marisse, is not that simple - but it's possible to connect all the dots even after the very haunting and cryptic ending.

Aldo Ray and Cameron Mitchell is two of the old farts giving Haunts some respectability, and both are doing it very well. They both starred in countless oddities over the years, most of the time probably just so they could pay the rent, but here both of them are low-key and uses a very realistic style of acting which tells me they probably cared more about this movie than some of the other stuff they did. But May Britt is the lead and with her strong Swedish accent (I'm not sure if that's her real accent or if she made it stronger for the performance) gives a lot of credibility to the story and she carries most of it by herself.

Don't expect any gore or sleaze, just expect a good and cheap horror/thriller with a script more clever than you can imagine.

Haunts is only released in shoddy, crappy releases, which is a pity. It deserves better, at least to make give more people a chance to see it. I have an Italian release with both English and Italian soundtrack, but the quality isn't much better than those 50 movies in one box that floods the net. But still, this is a movie worth watching - and when you've seen it, please come back to me and discuss the ending!

A Warning to the Curious (1972)

Here's a little BBC gem I never heard of until I found it on DVD at Monkey Beach, THE go-to DVD shop in Stockholm. I can't say I'm an expert, but British TV from the seventies in the horror genre was often something very special. From immortal classics like The Stone Tape to the excellent horror series Beasts, not to forget the predecessor, The Omega Factor - everything is so top-notch it's absurd. The budgets was almost low, but scripts and acting better than anyone could dream of. A Warning to theCurious aired on Christmas eve 1972, based on the famous short story by M.R. James...

An older man, just fired from his job since 12 years back, Paxton (Peter Vaughan) goes to the little town of Seaburgh to find a hidden treasure, a crown belonging an ancient king. He starts poking around in the history of the village and finds out that there was a family named Ager who was the guardian of the crown, but the last one died twelve years ago. Soon he finds some clues and locates the crown... but someone, a dark figure, is watching him. Guarding him, and wants him dead...

A Warning to the Curious is of course an excellent - and cheap - TV movie, just 50 minutes - but not one minute too short or long. The actors are few and most of the locations are some old streets, the exterior of a church and lots of forests. This is it, and it's hard to make a story like this better. What always surprises me with productions like this one is how simple the scares are. We're not talking jump scares, it's just something weird or out of place looking at you. And that's it. The filmmakers trust that the audience cares about the story and sits down and concentrates, more or less inhaling the atmosphere. You can't have breaks for TV commercials in a movie like this. You can't make it too long. You just need to tell the story and act with your guts. Yeah, if you using a flashlight in a room and you suddenly see someone staring at you, that's fucking scary. It would be scary in real life and if you just shoot it like it is, it's still scary in the TV.

I wish more director could understand that.

This is a genuinely eerie little fucker and if you can find on DVD (it's out in the UK on a very OOP DVD, but Sinister Cinema has released a quite good looking version in the US) it's worth a purchase. Just don't expect shocks, gore and action. This is way more complex than that.

The Card Player (2004)

The CardPlayer, the universally hated giallo from maestro Dario Argento is probably his most personal movie since Tenebrae in 1982. It's personal because it once again takes another route in his visual style, away from the overloaded set-pieces and complicated camera-movements. Deep inside I think Argento is tired of what the fans claim to love him for. Remember when he tried to connect to the fans again with Nonhosonno? It ended with a shallow pastiche of his old movies, a simple best of. The Card Player is actually more inspired than Nonhosonno and closer to really good storytelling.

Stefania Rocca is Anna Mari, a police inspector in Rome who one day is contacted by a man who calls himself The Card Player. He has kidnapped a British female tourist and want to play a game of internet poker over her life. Anna Mari, in cooperation with her colleagues and superiors, agrees - but it all ends with the victim being killed in front of their eyes. A British cop, John Brennan (Liam Cunningham) joins the hunt and tries to stop the Card Player to kidnap and kill more girls...

Yeah, the story is pretty basic. Some critics has compared it to CSI and other US crime shows and the format feels a bit television, I can agree on that last thing - but the rumour also says it was originally made for television. The rest is typical standard giallo, but shown from the side of the police. There's not much crime scene investigation and the story concentrates a quite much at the love affair between Anna and John. A love affair that feels both honest and real, and one of the best ever told in a movie by Dario Argento.

What feels clumsy is the internet poker-thingy. At least for us who lives a lot on the web and understands how games like this work. For a normal joe, turning on the telly a dark evening, it means nothing and seems realistic enough. But a good fan always ignores the plot holes in Argento's movies, because all of them have something that actually could destroy the whole story if analyzing it too much. So I choose to just accept that this is a movie and nothing else.

But why is this such a good movie? Well, it has not much gore and blood (but more than Bird with the Crystal Plumage for example!) and the story is just OK, but here's why it's so effective: when I first got it on DVD I showed it to a friend. He was just visiting me and I was preparing to watch the movie and he stayed because he had nothing else to do. This guy is a normal guy. He likes movies, but is no collector. He can't tell an Italian thriller from an American, so here he is: pure. Untainted. We watches the movie and when the credits start to roll in the end he turns to me and say: "Fred, this was a really thrilling and scary movie!".

He don't know who Argento is and he doesn't care. It was a damn good movie. And it's for people like him Argento makes movies. Because of Argento would be making movies for those few fans that think he never should make another movie after Inferno he wouldn't make any movies at all. He's a commercial director, he makes movies for the big masses. Entertainment. Bloody entertainment.

The Card Player has several excellent set-pieces. When the killer attacks Anna in her apartment it's one of the best sequences Argento directed. It's actually, for real, exciting and scary. The actors are uneven, but it's Stefania Rocca and Liam Cunningham who carries the whole movie and makes great performances. Like with Tenebrae, almost a sibling movie when it comes to the style and design, The Card Player will grow and sooner or later be a favourite of many new Argento-fans.

Doctor Sleep (2002)

I have a fondness for non-Italian thrillers who have that Italian thriller-atmosphere. It can be great giallo-wannabe's like The Eyes of Laura Mars and Dressed to Kill to more esoteric productions, for example Roman Polanski's masterpiece The Ninth Gate. There's tons of more titles to list, but basically it's movies with twists and turns and who's rooted in art, perverted sexuality and with a splash of occultism. Not in the same movie necessary. Doctor Sleep is a slightly forgotten BBC thriller with Goran Visnjic and Shirley Henderson in the leads. If it was made in the seventies and by an Italian crew it would have belonged in the proud traditions of supernatural giallos/horror movies, because it has more or less everything such a movie should have.

Visnjic is Michael Strother, a hypnotist who's speciality is making people stop smoking. After blaming himself for a death of a patient in the US he's relocated himself, his wife and daughter to London to being a new life. After a few months one of his patients, a cop named Janet Losey (Shirley Henderson) notices that he sees stuff in her mind that he shouldn't be able to see, in this case a young girl traumatized by a kidnapping. She's the only one so far who escaped from the dreaded tattoo killer. Unwillingly Michael tries to help Janet with trying to get the girl to remember something and suddenly gets way to close to the killer than he expected from the beginning...

We should be happy that Madison Smartt Bell's novel never got in the hands of a greedy American producer, because gone would be the slow build-up, the sense of mystery, the low-key acting. It would have been a Se7en wannabe and we had enough of those already. It almost feels even more exotic to see a occult serial killer/murder mystery like this set in a realistic British enviroment. Gone is the rainy streets of New York or the Palm trees of Miami. That would have fucked things up badly.

Doctor Sleep has several details that I fucking love: serial killer who's face is always exactly out of frame, occultism and esoteric mumbo jumbo, some (for a BBC production) bloody killings, a man tormented by his psychic powers, a fun twist ending etc. It never goes totally wild like the Italian productions, but stays very commercial and never goes into that kinda boring British TV-cop drama that we're used to and that we all love so much. Actually, there's more or less no cop-work at all in this movie, just Michael and Janet trying to understand the symbols they find and the killer trying to stop them.

The twist is very interesting and I didn't expect it to happen, which is a good thing in my point of view. But the giallo connection doesn't stop there, because the composer of the score is none other than Simon Boswell, who's earlier works is Phenomena, Stage Fright and Delirium.

This is a very underrated thriller who I think many ignore while shuffling through the x-rental DVDs for sale in the store or just disappears in the flood of UK crime dramas eating up our TV channels.

Doctor Sleep deserves a better destiny. 

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Mario Bava, loved by many, overrated by some. I must confess I've always belonged among those that think he's slightly overrated. Not that he's a bad filmmaker - he's damn brilliant with amazing effects, stunning cinematography and very competent directing. The only problem has been the scripts, which in their way has hampered the pacing of most of his movies. He as a director should have seen this and demanded rewrites or maybe solved it during the editing. But he's dead and long gone and he can't defend himself from this terrible hating so just pretend everything is fine and that I haven't said a thing. Anyway, I decided to give Planet of Vampires a new go after a few years. A movie I've started to watch a couple of times recently but often got stuck and lost interest after the excellent first half hour.

Two spaceships travels to the mysterious planet of Aura because of an odd SOS signal. Well down on the planet something, or someone, takes over their bodies and it's an ancient alien race who wants to find a new place to live! The crew at Galliot already killed each other and have become mindless bodies controlled by the aliens, but the Argos crew decides to fight back! They discover another, giant, ship with huge fossilized aliens aboard. It was also one of them who sent the signal...

The less said about the story the better, but it's quite clearly that Dan O'Bannon was inspired by this movie (and the brilliant It! The Terror from Beyond Space) when he wrote Alien (his own and John Carpenter's Dark Star also, of course), at least the basic premise with. But what's really striking is the alien spaceship they find with the dead alien crew - that's so similar to Ridley Scott's Alien that there's not doubt about the inspiration. But where Alien goes dark and realistic Planet of the Vampires continues Bava's fascination for comic books and ultra-stylish colour extravaganzas. There's very few shades of grey, everything has a strong colour, or strong light. The sets are big and not even close to realistic. It's like stepping into a comic book, which isn't surprising at all - Bava loved comics and got his bloodthirst satisfied some years later with the excellent Diabolik. But it's all here, just as a horror movie in space!

Which is interesting, like Alien - who basically is a haunted house movie in space, Planet of the Vampires is a gothic horror movie in space. Complete with people crawling up from graves, tombstones, fog and dark mountains. It also works a lot better as a grim horror movie than the cheesy sci-fi flick it pretends to be from time to time.

Planet of the Vampires was a lot better now, when I finally managed to watch that quite slow middle section, and I see now how it works fine as a preparation for the good finale and great twist ending (which I didn't see coming actually, totally forgot the details after these years). I've just seen the American edit, released by MGM/Midnite Movies, so now I need to get myself the Italian edit and give it yet another shot!

Night of the Hourglass (2007)

In 2004 Salvation Films wrote this on their homepage: "Rollin says that his days are numbered. I don’t mean by that that Rollin is going to die tomorrow, but that he is going to die sooner rather than later, and because of this he is putting his affairs in order and tying up lose ends". In the same text his next movie is mentioned, titled "Transfiguration of the Night", "a dark, beautifully macabre, and in the circumstances, very poignant film. To be shot in France and Florence, and featuring the stunning and very special actress Ovidie, it promises to be a very surprising swansong to Rollin’s career."

In 2007 Night of the Hourglass came and delivered the promises above, a perfect swansong (he actually made one more movie, The Mask of Medusa - read an excellent review here) connected to his whole life, especially his cinematic life, starring French porn actress Ovidie. It took me a few years to see it, but today - five years after its released I finally took the time to see it. I felt it was something that could wake me up from the darkness, from the constant depressions that plagues my mind. I won't bother with explaining the story, it's not necessary. Night of the Hourglass is all about nostalgia, but that kind of good nostalgia that doesn't shy away from what Rollin's life was all about: telling stories. Ovidie walks through the french countryside, looking for the dead director Michel Jean (without being in the movie, Jean Rollin himself), but instead of finding him she's meeting his characters, those ghosts, vampires and oddities that inhabits his world.

We're meeting Dominique, Jean-Loup Philippe, Natalie Perrey, Françoise Blanchard and others from Rollin's past, now aged, but intercut with they young versions of themselves, from that time when everything seemed impossible. Familiar locations, props and houses appears. It's very nostalgic, but never to that point of crying and sobbing. Rollin was here well aware of his illness and obviously decided to treat his future death in a very straight way. Like he wanted everyone, including himself, to accept that this is the way it is, that damn life. In the last scene Ovidie is walking around, after burning the clock that leads to Rollin's world, and we hear a voice over how hard it is to find Rollin's grave, like it's almost lost. Maybe just a mystery like the world he created for so many years. This reminded me of Mr J's fantastic post about his search for Rollin's final resting place, a must read.

Night of the Hourglass is for the fans, those who appreciated and supported Rollin over the years. It's pure love towards us all that cared. It's also a sign of respect to his amazing crew and cast that followed him on his adventures since the late sixties. One actress, who I can't identify, also tells a story that she was in one of his first movies, a lost movie, as a girl stepping into a train. I love details like that. And I love the love that these actors and actresses is giving Rollin by participating.

Interesting enough he never visits the beach, "his" beach. It's visible in footage from his old movies, but there's no new footage from it. But they're talking about it, and Ovidie gets the opportunity to visit the beach by stepping inside the clock - but she refuses.

...And the beach continues to be a fairy tale, a place we only can visit in real life - outside the movies. I will, one day. I promise.

To drink a glass of red wine to the honour of Jean Rollin.