by Andy Cox
Although partly inspired by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore’s graphic novel more than Stephen Norrington’s movie adaptation), John Logan’s PENNY DREADFUL (DVD/Blu-ray, 13 October) posits tales of Victorian heroes in fantasy horrors, instead of sci-fi/fantasy, and plays like a period version of short-lived TV series Demons (2009), reviewed in Black Static #11.
As we might expect from the screenwriter of The Aviator and Hugo (both directed by Scorsese), the period details of this BritisHollywood TV series are frequently a bit too colourful to be fully authentic, but there is a charmingly presentable grittiness to location shooting in Ireland that adds some visual poetics. With derivative gothic plotlines – where science and superstition collide – this eight-episode po-mo mash-up of Stoker, Shelley, Wilde, etc, is an entertaining batch of London legends boasting many deliciously uncanny images and splattery gore moments.
Timothy Dalton, as explorer Sir Malcolm, is the leader of an uneasy alliance with mysterious psychic Vanessa (genre goddess Eva Green) and American gunslinger Chandler (Josh Hartnett, 30 Days of Night). As plain-clothes superheroes they tackle all manner of gaslight stuff with as much flowery 19th century dialogue as will pass muster in a 21st century media production. Harry Treadaway as the young Victor Frankenstein and Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray are average TV actors, but most of the supporting cast (that silly girl Billie Piper for starters) really just aren’t up to scratch alongside the headliners.
Although heroine Vanessa appears subdued at first, second episode Séance gifts us with the full intensity of the amazing Miss Green taking on a spirit-channelling role (“If one is to engage with the primordial forces of darkness…expect a bit of social awkwardness”) that will not be forgotten easily. Alun Armstrong is very good as the amusingly polite Grand Guignol showman Brand who calmly recruits Frankenstein’s monster Caliban as his theatre rigger. A couple of episodes feature the very welcome presence of David Warner as Professor Van Helsing, who is consulted by Dr Frankenstein.
Closer Than Sisters is a great flashback episode guest-starring Anna Chancellor as Vanessa’s mother who struggles to cope with her tormented daughter’s bouts of catatonia and violent seizures. Again, Green turns in a haunting performance, especially during her character’s brutal, harrowing ‘treatment’, proving that she is a fearless, astonishingly expressive star capable of out-acting what few peers she has in the genre she’s made her own. “How dare you presume to speak to me of death?”
Later, when Vanessa starts suffering Carrienetic fits, perverse guilt and quest puzzles converge into a moral crisis under threat of our heroine becoming “the mother of evil” while she’s in urgent need of an exorcism.
With excellent production standards and storylines that critique but also celebrate a range of literary sources, this blows away all the cobwebs from costume-horror movies and most modern-day efforts, too. Of course, the season’s finale has dark pasts of the main characters catching up with them and drags unfinished business into the spotlight. But it exposes their flaws and shows us their strengths instead of simply following after clichéd patterns of fight-the-fantastic behaviour, and so revels in “the glory of suffering.”
Showtime has renewed PD for a second season of ten episodes. That certainly is something to look forward to!
The BFI boxset THE WERNER HERZOG COLLECTION (Blu-ray/DVD, 25 August) is not a complete overview of the filmmaker’s early career, but it is comprehensive, and covers his works up to the mid-1980s. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Herzog has continued to make short films and even TV-movie documentaries long after he won recognition and critical acclaim for his big screen features. This curious balancing act of cinéma vérité and fictionalised subjects means that his best movies often depend on a vividly composed and poetic sense of realism that draws upon a direct experience (usually of something in nature), especially if/when the movie’s content is basically an extended metaphor for a strange confrontation with otherness or challenge to humanity. However, it must be said that Herzog’s fondness for abstraction, and his acute dislike of academic learning, has resulted in tragically uneven misfires, from the start of his career to the present day. So, a few of his pictures – such as the experimental Fata Morgana (1971), a narrated myth of creation based on Saharan imagery, wrecked by awful Leonard Cohen songs – are, quite frankly, pretentious nonsense/conceited gibberish, and probably unwatchable for all but undiscerning art students.
Obviously, Herzog’s greatest successes are defined by his reportedly highly unstable partnership with Klaus Kinski (who was also Herzog’s best movie ‘subject’), formalised in their sometimes astounding combination of art-house styles and modern cinematic adventure shot on location. On an Amazon jungle quest for El Dorado, Kinski’s Spaniard, in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), charts a descent into lunacy that became a signature role for the actor, and clearly influenced Apocalypse Now. This visionary reach for the depths of humanity was replicated in Kinski’s further collaborations with the director.
Vanishing people are common enough in fact or fiction but examples of mysterious strangers that suddenly appear from nowhere are few, if not actually rare. The foundling in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is discovered, and soon rescued from imprisonment. “I am so far away from everything,” Kasper admits, once he’s learned how to talk to people. Was he the victim of a conspiracy (a theory this ambiguous biopic considers, if not supports) or was he simply a fraudster, manipulating the kindness of busybodies and the tolerance of authorities for unknown ends?
The still-unsolved mystery of his origins aside, Kasper’s blank stares and usually unresponsive behaviour plays much like a cruel satire today; a comedy of bad manners, with only its historical setting (early 19th century Nuremberg) and lack of obvious jokey routines to distinguish its tall story from a village-idiot farce. Physically, the actor Bruno Schleinstein, playing Kasper, just looks too well-fed and healthy for his role as a life-sentenced prisoner, but his deadpan clowning antics, in an odd performance troubled by society’s reluctance to accept somewhat childish viewpoints, is perhaps an interesting almost-Pavlovian character study (a Pygmalion variant?), or a philosophical riddle about an amnesia case, or a product of those tawdry absurdities popularised by sensationalism in travelling circus freak-shows.
Herzog’s affection for character studies of outsider figures continued in the comedy road-movie Stroszek (1977), starring Schleinstein, and the hurriedly-produced Woyzeck (1979), that boasts another performance of maniacal intensity from Kinski. These two pictures bracket the creation of what I think is Herzog’s masterpiece, Nosferatu, The Vampyre (1979). One of the greatest horror remakes, this updates the classic silent movie, and has a peculiar otherworldly quality lacking in most screen adaptations of Dracula. Setting aside his usual iconoclastic tendencies, Herzog mimics the original so closely at times that to the casual observer there appears almost no difference except colour and sound. He seems content with this homage movie. As in Murnau’s pioneering film, brooding imagery inspires dread. When the narrative dissolves into surrealism, and Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy offers herself as a sacrifice to evil, Kinski’s Count becomes zombified, in contrast to the suave seducer (Frank Langella) of Badham’s appealingly romanticised Dracula (also 1979).
Copied from Schreck’s gaunt Orlok of Murnau’s opus, Kinski’s coldly sneering rodent appearance is more accurately loathsome than fearsome. Unlike various Universal and Hammer interpretations, this Dracula is more of an embittered creature given to moaning about the futility of existence and his accursed immortality with a demeanour inviting pity. Gone is the frenzied vampirism popularised by Hammer’s Christopher Lee. The ashen-faced stalker of Nosferatu acts like an arthritic cat, pouncing on his prey in an almost parodic fashion, before he settles down for melancholic necking. The cadaverous Schreck makeup was recycled in a TV adaptation of King’s Salem’s Lot, also produced in the same year as this. A movie of numerous facets, Herzog’s immensely stylish Nosferatu has greater qualities than its contemporaries, as bo
th a skilled pastiche of Murnau’s virtuoso treatise on corruption and a remarkable model of haunted horror cinema, unmatched in its obsession with vampiric lore and the compelling virtues of old filming techniques until Coppola’s 1992 version.
Going back to the river-world of Aguirre, with another typically crazy scheme, Kinski’s cultural missionary Fitzcarraldo (1982) is fixated upon building an opera house in the Amazon jungle. His plans involve conveying a big riverboat over a little mountain. Claudia Cardinale provides welcome elegance in early scenes before the old ship’s departure on this journey of a lifetime.
In contrast to Bogart and Hepburn’s team-up for The African Queen, the presence of a female partner is unwanted on the voyage, and Herzog’s leisurely epic is essentially a two-and-a-half hour drama about the human folly of artistic ambition, characterised by its eccentric and immodest star shot against location backdrops of local colour. Italian tenor Caruso plays on a wind-up gramophone to quieten unseen tribal drummers heard along the cruise. Unlike traditional fantasy, this darkly modern variation lacks a clear morality as motivation. It’s about escaping from conventionality and overcoming the limits of common sense. “Everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Here, sanity is like a jinx upon a grandiose plan, and rationality is merely a burden that stifles imagination.
Having appeared in spaghetti westerns (such as The Grand Silence and A Bullet for the General), Kinski was perfect casting for Cobra Verde (1987), a taciturn bandit hired as overseer on a Brazilian sugar plantation. After impregnating his boss’ young daughters he’s banished to Africa, but granted authority to resume the slave trade. “I’ve never seen a white man work before!” Kinski’s leprous charm as ‘the Leopard’ offends warlord king Bossa. “Why did you poison my greyhound?” Captured, tortured, rescued, our shamed antihero trains a local army and assaults the palace, and wins a battle, but he cannot stop or delay the abolitionist movement.
Omitted from this collection is one of my favourite Herzogs, Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). A compelling Australian drama focusing on negotiations between a mining company and a desert tribe while exploring the mysteries of aboriginal culture, it stars Bruce Spence, the gyro pilot of Mad Max 2.
Most notable among the boxset’s abundance of extras is Les Blank’s frustratingly contrived Burden of Dreams (1982), a feature-length curio about making Fitzcarraldo. Partly documentary of a movie crew struggling against environment, partly a decidedly amateurish anthropological study, BoD shows us details of Herzog’s endurance tests without safety nets, but I couldn’t help think that its profile of the director and his accomplishment is presented as if the filmmaking process is just another extreme sport, so denying that cinema is the greatest artistic endeavour of the 20th century.
Herzog finds hypnotic moments of beauty and grotesquery between natural motion and theatrical/artificial stillness. As an artist, he seems to be engaged in an unstoppable search of a lost world, one that’s at least as ancient as Arthur Conan Doyle’s often-filmed ‘landscapes that time forgot’. But his demand for authenticity, including film crews going barefoot in the mud, means that his ongoing fascination with all the violence and disorder of a suffocating fecundity on the planet is a necessary daydream. Herzog’s creative job is surviving total immersion in long uncomfortable silences, or despairing inactivity, waiting for rare chances to calmly observe tumults of passion or brutality on his existential travails, whether savagely primal or cleverly orchestrated. His admiration for such raw stuff is its own reward.
NEGATIVEXTRA: ALSO RECEIVED
Greek drama MISS VIOLENCE (DVD, 7 July) starts with a family tragedy. An 11-year-old girl’s birthday suicide is ‘explained’ as an accident, but the sinister truth of child abuse is eventually revealed and dealt with here in a disturbing manner. Unfortunately, the postponed revelation and Euro arty approach to this taboo subject stifles interest. It is shocking but pointless.
Nathan Hope’s ELSEWHERE (Download only, 14 July) is directed without appeal for its small town mystery, and it succumbs, at every minor twist/predictable turn, to delivery of clichéd clues found online. Although produced in 2009, with a first star role for Anna Kendrick, she fails to rescue Hope’s wannabe ‘Nancy Drew’ subgenre-chiller from being forgotten again on the ‘nothing special’ shelf. Despite being labelled as comedy-drama, Rob Thomas’ more recent Veronica Mars, a kickstarter-funded spin-off movie from a TV show, is quite superior entertainment in every department.
Jeremy Gardner is the writer-director and star of THE BATTERY (DVD, 21 July), a road movie with shuffling zombies. Beware of horror tourism. Not sure if it’s the baseball-players-as-heroes story (not offbeat content, just a silly novelty), but this is the most boring flick I’ve seen so far this year.
Another month, another crappy ghost story… Laughable overacting under wretchedly artless direction sinks haunted house movie THE UNLEASHED (DVD, 21 July) faster than you can say ‘boo’. Inadvertent jokes don’t help.
A trend for stupidity as (black) comedy in American movies continues with CHEAP THRILLS (DVD/Blu-ray, 28 July), in which a pair of rich psychos take fun in betting what desperate poor blokes will do for money. Lacking a truly sympathetic character, this is just one dumb dare after another, so it’s completely boring, and utterly predictable, after fifteen minutes of infamy.
On the border between delirium and drivel, WASTELAND (DVD, 28 July), by mononymic director Kantz, is clearly intended to be a gag-packed post-holocaust western, with gunplay boosted by unarmed combat from a gang of kung fu girls (named Leigh, Lea, Leah, Li, and Lee). With plodding and ineptly contrived fight scenes, this is best avoided in favour of Machete.
Abducted by aliens, a redneck returns home two years later as a homicidal mutant intent on a Thing style invasion. Directed by newcomer Joe Begos, and set in 1980s Maine, cheap ‘n’ cheerless slasher flick ALMOST HUMAN (DVD, 4 August) is appallingly bad, even when it’s not being tasteless and moronic. Just watch Fire in the Sky and Xtro instead. They are far better.
Standard rural slasher THE CABIN (DVD, 11 August) is a re-titled release of Matt Thompson’s Bloodline. It is a dull muddle about a shaman’s curse and possession antics, as evil forces jump between victims, dead or alive, that runs for a lazy hour before it bothers to attempt some modest frights.
Jane is moody and nutty, and so an experimental subject. “The authorities were convinced she was possessed.” Yes? What authorities? Authorities in what? What kind of barmy authority could be convinced of a possession? We aren’t told, of course. John Pogue’s THE QUIET ONES (DVD/Blu-ray, 18 August) has the typical bogus-documentary style: shaky-cam, strobes, loud bangs off-screen, pandemonium on-screen whenever an interruption is required to distract viewers from rational thought. Stalwart Jared Harris does what he can to save this, but even his professionalism is not enough.
There’s a Halloween slaughter of cheerleaders in VARSITY BLOOD (DVD, 18 August). It is not scary or funny. All the victims are boring and lifeless even before their deaths. Recycling such 1980s’ clichés is pathetically sad. With no terrors, just torpor, this twitches and fidgets like a legless dancer.
Warhouse, the first movie by Luke Massey, is re-titled THE CAPTIVE for DVD (25 August). A royal marine named Budd (Joseph Morgan) is locked in a house where a masked alien attacks him every day…for years. As a prisoner in purgatory, Budd’s fate fails to interest as a psych thriller, and the movie never manages to make its black comedy scenes work. A kind of limbo-fable about isolation/repetition, supernatural weirdness like this was better in the Twilight Zone format, not dragged out to feature length.
Edward Boase, director of Blooded (Black Static #22), returns to haunt us with THE MIRROR (DVD, 8 September), about dangers of buying second-hand mirrors off the Internet. Don’t looking-glass now, or ever, if you can avoid it. This found-footage offering is awfully boring as domestic horror.
ATTACK ON TITAN (DVD/Blu-ray, 15 September) is an anime series of thirteen episodes. This is a fantasy
-horror about a walled city of post-holocaust humanity besieged by bloodthirsty mindless giants. As usual, background artwork is often better than the stereotyped characters and unimpressive cartoons deserve. A live-action movie, directed by Shinji Higuchi (Sinking of Japan, Hidden Fortress: The Last Princess) is due out next summer.
TV series Hemlock Grove has a few quirky characters, and plenty of gothic intrigue, but WEREWOLF RISING (DVD, 22 September) is plainly lifeless and its monster is unintentionally comical in both design and performance.