Anyone who has seen Django will have a pretty good idea about how that question is answered. It’s not clear whether Django, Prepare a Coffin is a sequel or prequel to Corbucci’s film–Django himself is a little less morose, although the story of his wife’s death here is different from the one in Django. The tone here is definitely a few shades lighter thanks both to Terence Hill’s slightly more easygoing take on the character and a consistently hilarious comic relief in the form of the old telegraph operator Horace (Pinuccio Ardia). Horace has a menagerie of mouthy birds (at least one of which appears to be an alcoholic) and is happy to pick up a gun in service of helping out his friends. The pace of Django, Prepare a Coffin is brisk, and with its fantatic cast of familiar faces it’s a great, fun film in its own right. It’s certainly leagues better than the vast majority of the low-budget Django knock-offs that flooded the market in the late 60s. It really doesn’t even need the “Django” branding, but it’s not a big problem considering how loose these films tended to be even among official franchises.
Director Ferdinando Baldi directed a number of interesting spaghetti westerns including the Greek tragedy in Western drag Forgotten Pistolero, Blindman featuring Ringo Starr, and the wild, ridiculous 3-D epic Comin’ At Ya! among many others. Django, Prepare a Coffin is a great example of his work in the genre, and while it has been released before on DVD, Arrow has given it a stunning new 2K transfer for this new release. As far as special features go, this is pretty light by Arrow’s standards: there’s a theatrical trailer (which looks like it was transferred from a VHS tape) and a fun 8-minute talk about the film by Kevin Grant, author of the encyclopedic Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns. The package has Arrow’s standard reversible cover art and includes a booklet with a new essay by Howard Hughes, author of Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult and Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. While it would have been great to have more in the way of special features, this is still absolutely a worthy upgrade to all previous releases of the film and well worth picking up for fans of Euro-westerns.
Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961)
Originally published on Film Monthly 8 December 2011
MGM’s Limited Edition Collection continues to unearth fantastic treasures from the vaults, and continues to prove itself as one of the best services the major studios have ever offered die-hard film fans. One of the latest crop is 1961′s Doctor Blood’s Coffin, a British horror film directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring genre favorite Hazel Court, perhaps best known in the U.S. for her starring roles in Roger Corman’s 1960s Edgar Allan Poe film adaptations. Furie rarely directed genre films, and has had a long career in cinema directing such films as The Ipcress File with Michael Caine (1965) and returned to the genre after a few films in the early 1960s with The Entity (starring Barbara Hershey) in 1982.
Doctor Blood’s Coffin has a distinct Hammer tint in its tone and style. Dr. Robert Blood (Ian Hunter) is the doctor in a rural village that has little contact with the outside world. The townsfolk tend to be healthy, leading the local funeral home owner to scold Dr. Blood for doing too good a job. Shortly before Dr. Blood’s son, Peter (Keiron Moore), returns from school, there is a mysterious disappearance in the town. While helping locals search some nearby mines, Peter deliberately leads them away from a strange makeshift laboratory. Why he does this is initially unclear, but what is clear is that Peter is not quite what he appears to be.
Dr. Blood’s nurse Linda Parker (Hazel Court), recently widowed, finds herself falling for the handsome young doctor. However, as Peter opens up to her, his behavior becomes more and more unusual, and she finally learns the terrible secret of Peter’s research and exactly why he has come home from medical school. There are a few scenes throughout the film of Peter at work that feature what would have been fairly graphic and shocking violence for the day, pushing the envelope even a bit further than Hammer’s famed versions of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories.
The film climaxes with a resurrection that is unfortunately somewhat spoiled by the promotional art, with a creepy and effective undead monster. The film looks and sounds fantastic on this new DVD, which is a notable improvement over previously available public domain releases of the film on VHS and DVD. This is definitely the best Doctor Blood’s Coffin has ever looked on home video, and again it’s a huge credit to MGM for taking the time to release the film with such care. The pace of the film is a bit slow, but thanks to great performances by Hazel Court and Keiron Moore– and some gorgeous location shooting– it’s certainly worth a look for fans of Hammer-style horror.
Dollface (2014)
Originally published on Film Monthly 17 September 2015
If you’ve been waiting for a sequel to Tommy Faircloth’s 1995 slasher parody Crinoline Head, your wait is officially over. A full twenty years after the first film, its sequel is out now on home video under the title Dollface (changed from Dorchester’s Revenge: The Return of Crinoline Head, the title under which it played on the festival circuit). The film received some enthusiastic responses at horror festivals, but some of that had to have been from its cult audience happy to see ol’ Crinoline Head again. The real question is how it might hold up for new viewers to the series who never saw the first film. Unfortunately, the answer is “not very well.”
Twenty years after Crinoline Head’s killing spree, survivor Paul (Jason Vail) is a history professor. Two of his students have decided to do their mid-term project on the legend of Dorchester Stewart, better known as Crinoline Head. Paul tells the students the story of his encounter with the killer and shows them his dossier of information on Stewart. After class, David (Christian James) steals the folder and plans to head to the abandoned Stewart lake house with his partner James (Gunner Willis) for research. Their classmates Shelby (Kirsten Ray) and Donna (Leah Wiseman) decide to tag along so Shelby can spend some alone time with David, but after a rude welcome from cantankerous caretaker Betsy (Debbie Rochon), the four students get some unexpected company. Scott (Nicholas A. Sweezer) and his project partners have followed James and David to the Stewart house to steal their project. But when Crinoline Head shows up, everybody suddenly has a lot more than homework to worry about.
Maybe the biggest problem with Dollface is the fact that it’s 2015. There have been a number of thoughtful and funny takes on the slasher film since Crinoline Head that require a “parody” to do a lot more than just shoehorn some “jokes” into a bog-standard slasher formula, which is exactly what Dollface does. The only thing that really stands out as any kind of updating of the concept for modern day is a completely pointless subplot in which three drag queens on the way to a performance get lost and end up driving onto Crinoline Head’s property. Not surprisingly, these characters are written as catchphrase-spouting cannon fodder, which could potentially be offensive if every other character in the film weren’t written more or less exactly the same way. They’re all one-dimensional at best, and the dialogue is never quite outrageous enough to qualify as parody any more. Instead, the characters just come off as really dumb and hateful, which is exactly what viewers expect characters in a slasher film to be anyway.
The only part of the film that works as intended is Debbie Rochon as Betsy. Her running joke is that she makes a very obvious sexual innuendo and then explains it in graphic detail, which is funny at first but even that quickly becomes tiresome. The best part is that Betsy is the only major character in the film who is given any shading at all, and Rochon is a solid actress who sells it effortlessly. Everything else here is just 80s slasher by the numbers: dumb college kids, a hulking silent unkillable monster with a mask, cheap makeup and blood effects (including a deeply unconvincing severed head), lackadaisical continuity, and a depressingly predictable ending that sets up another adventure for Crinoline Head. There’s just nothing here that any slasher fan hasn’t seen done countless times before, and considerably better. This might be a good introduction to the
form for anyone who hasn’t seen a slasher movie. But for anyone who has, Dollface doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
Don’t Let Him In (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 3 January 2012
The UK has turned out more than its share of solid low-budget horror films over the past decade, including some instant classics (like Christopher Smith’s Severance), some fresh takes on familiar material (see James Watkins’s Eden Lake), and plenty of basic slashers that defy audience expectations (such as Paul Andrew Williams’ The Cottage). However, for each interesting little horror film there are at least two dismal, unpleasant ones that may have clever ideas but are not well executed. Don’t Let Him In is one of the latter.
Paige (Sophie Linfield) and Calvin (Rhys Meredith) are planning a weekend in the country with Tristan’s sister Mandy (Gemma Harvey), but plans are already off track when Mandy invites her one-night stand Tristan (Gordon Alexander) to join them. Tristan is obviously a hateful bastard, and his reasons for joining the weekend out of town are clearly sinister. Once the foursome reach the cottage, a local policeman explains to them that a serial killer dubbed “The Tree Surgeon” has been stalking the locals and hanging up parts of them from trees (hence the name), so he helpfully suggests that none of them take a walk in the woods at night.
Don’t Let Him In opens with a sequence showing Paige tied up and hidden away in the Tree Surgeon’s lair, so the audience can already guess that the vacationers probably didn’t take the officer’s advice. It’s only a matter of time before Paige falls victim to the Tree Surgeon, but who is he? Is he the blatantly evil Tristan? The seemingly normal Calvin? The hippie girl who warns them to go home? The hitchhiker with the stab wound who shows up at the cabin in the middle of the night? Perhaps the most pressing question of all is: Does the audience really care?
Sadly, I could not answer that question affirmatively. Don’t Let Him In did not grab my attention, and its dull characters did nothing to help. Each character is barely shaded in so the film can introduce them and knock them off in 79 minutes (including opening and closing credits), so it’s tough to muster much interest in their fate. When the Tree Surgeon is finally unmasked, the acting gets seriously over-the-top in a way that does not match the tone of the preceding events at all. There are a lot of solid low-budget thrillers coming out of the UK, and they’re worth seeking out, but Don’t Let Him In is not one of them.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Originally published on Film Monthly 6 October 2017
There are few names in the pantheon of Italian genre directors that can instantly conjure an image for fans quite like Lucio Fulci. Like many of his contemporaries, Fulci directed a wide array of films over his long career. He may be best known for his gruesome and frequently surreal horror films like Zombie and his “Gates of Hell” trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and House by the Cemetery), but Fulci also directed a few well-regarded gialli. Perhaps his best Giallo (and arguably best film, period) is 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, in which Fulci gave the familiar genre a few grim twists that make it an unforgettable experience.
The small village of Accendura is terrorized by a rash of child killings. Locals suspect the “witch” Maciara (Florinda Bolkan), and as the body count rises the fear in the town threatens to boil over. Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian), a reporter, arrives in town and launches his own investigation into the murders. Terrifyingly, there is no shortage of suspects. Even Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), a young woman who joins Andrea’s search for the truth, has made a hobby of indecent exposure to minors. The police are useless, and the church is just desperate to keep the peace. But as Andrea and Patrizia begin to uncover the dark secrets of the town, they find themselves in a desperate race against time to stop the killer before any more children die–and before the townspeople finally snap and lynch Maciara.
Fulci brings the same preoccupation with violence to Don’t Torture a Duckling as he did to the Spaghetti Western (the brutal Massacre Time) and his infamous later horror films. But here, it’s played to a more powerfully queasy effect than usual, especially in a horrific scene of mob violence and a finale that is so outrageous it would border on comical if it wasn’t so cathartic. There weren’t many gialli that dealt with child murders, and Fulci’s other gialli were much more in line with their contemporaries. Perversion Story dealt with an elaborate insurance fraud scheme, and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin takes place among the idle and depraved rich. But this film followed Aldo Lado’s classic Who Saw Her Die? into theaters and may have been influenced by its success. Both are excellent mysteries that use a backdrop of terrifying violence against children to explore how adults deal (or avoid dealing) with the conditions in society and in their own relationships that allow such things to happen.
While Fulci is often dismissed as a trafficker in gore and cheap shock–an argument that his later work would do little to refute–Don’t Torture a Duckling is a genuinely intelligent and confrontational film. Due to its openly critical stance on the Catholic Church, the film was difficult to see for decades after its original release. Whether Fulci felt obliged to bow to market pressures and avoid such defiance in the future or whether he felt he had said what he needed to say on the subject is uncertain, but his work would never deal so openly with such topics again. Don’t Torture a Duckling absolutely deserves a place among the classics of Giallo cinema, and hopefully with Arrow’s beautiful new Blu-ray/DVD edition packed with special features will help increase its reputation both inside and outside the horror/exploitation community.
The Double (2013)
Originally published on Film Monthly 29 August 2014
Richard Ayoade’s debut feature film Submarine may have only had a brief theatrical run in the States, but it made quite an impression on those who saw it. While many critics dismissed the film as being too similar to the work of Wes Anderson, Submarine in fact deftly implemented its Anderson, influence with enough charm and style to carve out a unique voice of its own. It didn’t hurt that it was one of the few “coming of age” stories that allowed its lead character to be a relatively realistic teenage boy. In other words: not entirely likable. That film’s bright, exuberant color palette and original soundtrack could not be more different than Ayoade’s follow-up, The Double. When it was announced and playing film festivals, there was not much around like it; now that it’s being released on home video, it finds itself in the midst of a strange boom in doppelgänger films. It is to Ayoade’s credit that The Double stands well apart from those other films.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as Simon James, a socially awkward nobody who slaves away anonymously at an ill-defined office job. His workplace makes the offices in Brazil seem cheery: every desk is set in a pool of dim light, like torches set along the walls in an underground cave. Building security requires him to sign in every day, and his boss Mr. Popodopoulos (Wallace Shawn) constantly mistakes him for a new hire, despite having worked for the company for seven years. Even worse, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) the Copier Girl seems unimpressed by his presence at the copy counter every day, looking to make a single copy of his work on the company’s gigantic steampunk copy machine. Simon pines for her and spies on her with a telescope whenever they’re not at work. He’s the kind of guy for whom automatic doors do not wait to close when he steps in front of them.
Then one day a new hire appears at work: James Simon (also Eisenberg), Simon’s exact physical double. They look and dress identically, but James has completely the opposite personality. He’s charming, gregarious, flirtatious, and asserts himself to the point of near sociopathy. No one other than Simon seems to notice their resemblance, but since nobody noticed Simon much in the first place, that makes sense. James insinuates himself into the life of the people around Simon effortlessly: Mr. Popodopoulos praises him as a model employee (despite James having no idea what their company even does), Hannah is instantly infatuated with him, and even Mr. Popodopoulos’s hateful daughter Melanie (Yasmin
Paige) lusts after him. Simon’s life starts to unravel as James threatens to take over Simon’s existence completely.
There is a lot to admire about The Double, which features excellent work from everyone on both sides of the camera. It looks and sounds amazing: stark, ominous shadows out of the darkest film noir contrast with splashes of color straight out of Suspiria. The soundtrack and sound design create a unique sense of nightmarish disorientation. The bleak world of the film is tiny, claustrophobic, and always dark, and most of the humor here is shaded to match. It’s often very funny, and the cast is great. It is also dotted with so many unexpected cameos that it’s almost overwhelming. And yet building this film on the foundation of such a frustratingly ineffectual character–and one we have seen so many times before–leaves the film with a distracting emotional hole at its center. This is not to fault Eisenberg’s dual performances, which are impressive in creating the illusion of two completely separate personalities in identical bodies. It’s more a problem of a protagonist who never quite manages to earn the audience’s respect. Despite this (admittedly major) issue, The Double is absolutely recommended viewing to any serious cinephile, and it will improve with repeat viewings.
Dracula in Vegas (1999)
Originally published on Film Monthly 31 August 2017
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 21