Broken Heart: David Raker #7
Page 11
The titles came up.
As the credits rolled, I sat there in the silence of the hotel room, unsure of what I’d just watched. Rewinding the film again, I played it from the moment after the killer was offed, when the movie seemed to switch tone, the camera began its slow dolly in towards her, and Korin’s breathing faded in, her heartbeat. Once it was past her and zeroing in on the television set in the corner, I inched closer, remote control in hand, ready to stop it. As soon as I had a clear view of the footage on the walnut-cased TV, I hit Pause.
Whoever had taken the footage seemed to be deliberately angling the lens upwards, only the heads of occasional pedestrians drifting into view. Nothing else at street level was visible, just the upper-floor windows on a road full of unrecognizable buildings.
I watched it again from beginning to end.
The whole scene lasted ninety seconds, the slow dolly in towards Korin so slow that it took two-thirds of that time before the camera actually passed Korin at all. A shot lasting a minute and a half was a long time when nothing was actually happening – no movement of people, no dialogue – and it seemed especially frivolous when it was tagged on to the end of a film whose total running time was a fraction above eighty minutes.
It was more than the weird dissonance of the footage too; it was the fact that it was so beautiful, elegant and composed.
I picked up the copy of Dia de los Muertos and skipped to the chapter on Hosterlitz, searching for anything related to the scene, any discussion of it at all. There was nothing; no mention of it. However, in the transcript of the panel that Korin had done at Screenmageddon, something caught my eye.
MODERATOR: Next question. Uh … the guy in the red shirt.
JOURNALIST: Hey Lynda, how you doing? I’m Bill Martinez from CinemaTechniques.com in San Diego. Big horror fan, big fan of your work. Huge, huge fan of your late husband as well.
KORIN: Oh, thank you. That’s really kind.
JOURNALIST: You’re welcome. Anyway, uh … my question is about a film you did with Robert in 1982 called Die Slowly.
KORIN: I remember it, yeah.
JOURNALIST: Great. I managed to get hold of a dubbed version of Die Slowly at a market in Barcelona, on a trip out there in May. What I wanted to ask you about, if you can even remember it, was one of the scenes in that movie.
KORIN: I’ll try my best.
JOURNALIST: It’s right at the end of the film, after the monster is dead, when your character is looking out from the cabin at all the dead bodies scattered in the forest. Anyway, there’s this amazing shot where the camera starts at the back door of the cabin and moves in towards you at the front windows. You’re side-on to the audience – you know, in profile – and the camera keeps on dollying in towards you, and then goes right the way past you, and there’s no music any more, just your breathing.
I stopped for a second and returned to the start of the question, double-checking that this guy wasn’t talking about Axe Maniac, the film I’d just watched. He wasn’t. He was talking about Die Slowly, which had come out two years after the release of Axe Maniac. I had to reread the same section a third time, just to be certain I’d understood it correctly: Hosterlitz had included a virtually identical scene in two of his films, two years apart – both featuring Lynda Korin.
KORIN: I think I remember that scene, yeah.
JOURNALIST: It just felt so odd – in a good way! The rest of the film is so frenetic and bloody, and then you’ve got that scene, which feels like it’s been transported in from a Hosterlitz picture of old. You know, like Connor O’Hare or something.
MODERATOR: So have you got a question for Lynda, sir?
JOURNALIST: Sorry. I guess my question is … Why wasn’t all of the film shot like that? It seems like that scene was singled out for special treatment – I was just wondering why, basically.
KORIN: I’m not sure.
JOURNALIST: There was no special reason for it?
KORIN: Not that I remember. It was a long time ago.
JOURNALIST: Do you remember the bit with the TV?
I could hardly rip my eyes away from the page now.
KORIN: The bit with the TV?
JOURNALIST: Yeah. That was also quite weird.
KORIN: No, I’m not sure I do.
JOURNALIST: The camera passes you and moves right into the TV in the corner of the room, which is playing footage shot from inside a car – it looks like a residential street maybe.
KORIN: Really? I don’t remember that.
JOURNALIST: There’s a similar section at the end of another movie you did with Robert, in 1979 – Hell Trip. People tell me there’s one in Axe Maniac too, although I’ve never seen that.
I was stunned.
If the journalist was right, that made three films now – Hell Trip, Axe Maniac and Die Slowly – each with the same scene of Korin repeated at the end.
The question from the journalist never really got properly answered. Korin apologized again and repeated that she didn’t remember the scenes, that she barely remembered a lot about the actual movies themselves, only the time she spent with Hosterlitz making them. It was hard to tell from the transcript whether she was sidestepping the question or answering it honestly, but I didn’t know why she wouldn’t have had a conversation with her husband about what exactly the scene was about.
Grabbing my pad and a pen, I started to make some notes, attempting to put my thoughts into some sort of order. The first two Ursula films were set during the Second World War, and the third just after it – before the advent of television in homes – so despite some trademark Hosterlitz moments, as the camera lingered on Korin alone, watched her, followed her, there had been no replication of the scene in Axe Maniac, or of the ones that the journalist had referred to in Die Slowly and Hell Trip. But what about the other eight films that Hosterlitz had made with Korin between 1979 and 1984?
I grabbed the copy of The Drill Murders, removed the wrapping and fired it up. I didn’t bother watching it properly, not least because it was in Italian and I wouldn’t understand a word of it anyway. I just kept my thumb on Fast-Forward and an eye out for anything that looked like an echo of the scene I’d watched in Axe Maniac. I knew if it was going to be anywhere, it would be at the end.
Which was exactly where I found it.
Korin, who barely seemed to have featured in the movie at all, was in the kitchen of a house, a knife in her hand. Her face, neck and vest were all covered in blood. Again, the final scene of the movie began with a slow dolly in towards her, across a kitchen this time. As in the others, there was no music – just her breathing and her heartbeat. Behind her, on the counter, a television was playing – and onscreen was exactly the same footage of the street, shot from inside a car.
What the hell is going on?
I unwrapped Death Island and did the same, fast-forwarding through the entire film. At the very end, just like the others, I found the same scene again. The fact that the movie was in Spanish made no difference; at this point, there was no dialogue anyway, just a near-identical sequence.
Pulling my laptop towards me, I went online to see if I could find any discussion of the repeated scene, because I had a hard time believing no one else except a journalist, maybe a few hardcore Hosterlitz fans, and now me, had taken note of it. His noirs got mentions on a number of forums, while his horror films were listed on a site that detailed every movie that made it on to the Department of Public Prosecution’s Video Nasties list in the 1980s – which included Hosterlitz’s Ursula of the SS and Savages of the Amazon. I found various mentions of him on Wiki and list sites, but none dealt with the particular scene I was interested in.
At the point of giving up, I finally stumbled across an American horror movie forum called Darker Screen. That was where I found something.
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A forum thread titled ‘Ursula of the SS, Directed by Robert Hosterlitz AKA Bob Hozer – THIS FILM ABSOLUTELY STINKS!’ had been created on 22 October 2008, and was set up by
someone who had clearly just watched the film for the first time, and whose exposure to Hosterlitz’s horror movies had been limited.
#1 | Posted by ListicalNinja on 10/22/08 | Member since 2002
Picked up a copy of ‘Ursula of the SS’ yesterday from a secondhand store close to where I live (Milwaukee). Has anyone else seen it? Hard to believe it’s directed by Robert ‘The Eyes of the Night’ Hosterlitz. It’s TERRIBLE.
I continued down the page. People were slow to respond, which suggested that either the forum didn’t get a lot of traffic, or the subject matter had failed to ignite the imagination of the people posting. When I took a look at some of the other threads, I quickly decided it was the latter. Hosterlitz wasn’t a big draw, and even among this community, neither were his horror films.
#2 | Posted by MickeyMooney on 11/03/08 | Member since 2003
Saw it ages ago and I agree it sucks a fat one. Have you watched any of the films he made AFTER that? They’re supposed to be even worse.
#3 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 11/03/08 | Member since 2000
I’ve seen ‘Axe Maniac’, but most of them you can’t even buy any more. Not sure about in the States. Maybe you can still get all of Hosterlitz’s Spanish-made films there, ListicalNinja …?
#4 | Posted by ListicalNinja on 11/03/08 | Member since 2002
Nah. It’s the same here too. I can only find a few of his films in English. There might be some dubbed versions available somewhere, but most of his movies are vapour – the original negatives have probably been lost forever.
#5 | Posted by PinheadMcTavish on 11/03/08 | Member since 2002
Yeah, those films are gone and they ain’t coming back. In fact, rumour has it that the last time anyone saw them, they were in a plain brown envelope being mailed to ‘XXXL Landfill Site, Siberia’ ☺
A user called MelissaA posted about the availability of Hosterlitz’s horror films, informing the thread that, of the movies he’d made after he left the States for the final time in 1970, only House of Darkness – which he shot in the UK in 1971 and whose troubled production Collinsky had referenced in his article – the Ursula trilogy and Axe Maniac were still available to buy in English. Four others were available in Europe – three in Spanish, and one in Italian – but most users on the forum seemed to agree copies would be rare, and difficult to locate. It tallied with what the guy from Rough Print had told me.
After MelissaA talked briefly about Hosterlitz suffering a stroke in 1974 and his addiction to painkillers in the years before he moved to Spain, the subject shifted to Lynda Korin – and, among male posters, the size of her breasts.
#33 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 11/05/08 | Member since 2000
Lynda Korin = ☺ AM I RIGHT?
#34 | Posted by PinheadMcTavish on 11/05/08 | Member since 2002
Yeah, she’s definitely a contender for a BREAST Actress Award. ☺ ☺ ☺
#35 | Posted by MickeyMooney on 11/05/08 | Member since 2003
She would have been great in a remake of The TIT and the Pendulum.
#36 | Posted by PinheadMcTavish on 11/05/08 | Member since 2002
ROFL. Wonder what a woman like that ever saw in Hosterlitz?
My gaze lingered briefly on that last post.
Pretty soon, the thread fizzled out and remained entirely dormant for over two years. But then, at the start of 2011, someone posted about Korin’s upcoming appearance at the Screenmageddon convention.
#58 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 01/22/11 | Member since 2000
If anyone out there is still interested in Robert Hosterlitz’s career, Lynda Korin is appearing at Screenmageddon in London on 7 July. She never does public events so could be worth a look. Tickets available here. I’m going!
#59 | Posted by PinheadMcTavish on 02/04/11 | Member since 2002
Shit! She’s still pretty hot. How old is she now?
#60 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 02/04/11 | Member since 2000
58, believe it or not. Hope my wife looks like that when she’s 58