Culture Shock 04.04.13: Jess Franco leaves polarizing legacy

The first time I saw "Vampyros Lesbos," I fell asleep, which is surprising on two counts.

Jess Franco

First, as the title indicates, this is a movie about lesbian vampires, and normally I never fall asleep during movies about lesbian vampires. Second, "Vampyros Lesbos" is a film by Jess Franco, and Franco's films are usually, if nothing else, interesting.

Franco, a Spanish filmmaker who directed, by some counts, more than 180 films, died early Tuesday. He was 82.

In America, Franco enjoys little name recognition outside the circle of cult cinema aficionados. Unfortunately, one of his worst major films is probably his most widely seen: 1969's "The Castle of Fu Manchu" became fodder for the third season of "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

It's hard to keep up with all the films Franco made because he made so many, often issued under multiple titles, and he directed many of them under pseudonyms. But his better-known films have made him a polarizing figure. Almost no one who has seen Franco's movies is neutral about him. They love him, or they hate him. The closest thing to a middle ground where Franco is concerned comes from those critics who divide his films into two groups: the ones they love and the ones they hate.

And Franco never made it easy. Even his most ardent fans admit he could go a little too far with his mania for zoom shots.

At best, Franco was an uneven filmmaker, but he was almost never boring. Except for "Vampyros Lesbos," but here I'm in the minority; most Franco fans regard it as one of his best films. You definitely have a polarizing filmmaker when even his fans disagree about which are his best and worst films.

Franco burst onto the horror and exploitation scene with "The Awful Dr. Orlof" in 1962. "Orlof" — sometimes spelled "Orloff" — was Franco's answer to Georges Franju's classic "Eyes Without a Face," released two years earlier. Franco would return to the character many times throughout his career, culminating in what was Franco's last good film, 1987's "Faceless" featuring Telly Savalas, Caroline Munro and Brigitte Lahaie.

For a director who seemed bent on erasing the line between art house and schlock, Franco collaborated with a lot of talented performers. He directed Herbert Lom in 1969's "99 Women," the prototype for the women-in-prison genre; elicited the most bizarre, over-the-top performance of Jack Palance's career in "Deadly Sanctuary" (aka "The Marquis de Sade's Justine"); and teamed with Christopher Lee on numerous occasions, including 1970's "Count Dracula," a tedious but unusually faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Franco also may be the only director who claimed to have had no difficulty working with Klaus Kinski, whom Franco cast in "Deadly Sanctuary" (as the Marquis de Sade) and in his surreal thriller "Venus in Furs," which, despite the name, has nothing to do with book.

In one interview, I recall, Franco said he simply shot take after take until Kinski, exhausted, gave the performance Franco wanted. Who knew the trick to dealing with Kinski was so simple?

Most of what I think are Franco's best films are the ones he made with producer Harry Alan Towers. They include "Venus in Furs," "99 Women," and 1970's "Eugenie."

Those three starred Towers' wife, Maria Rohm, but Franco's two muses were Soledad Miranda, star of "Vampyros Lesbos," who died in a car wreck in 1970 when she was just 27, and the woman who would become his longtime companion, Lina Romay, who starred most memorably in 1973's "Female Vampire." They eventually married and stayed together until her death early last year.

For Franco there was no stopping. He kept making movies until the end.

His last film, "Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies," opened in Spain last month.

Culture Shock 10.11.12: Bloody Bava bows on Blu-ray

Only in the past decade has Italy's "maestro of the macabre" begun to get the recognition he is due.

Throughout the 1960s and into the mid-'70s, Mario Bava's atmospheric films — mostly in the horror genre — played in drive-ins and other disreputable venues. Sometimes they were part of double or ever triple features of terror, dismissed by their distributors as disposable schlock.

That's the fate of a working director, which Bava was, grinding out movies on minuscule budgets. He was as much a craftsman as an artist. Bava often was his own cinematographer, and he always handled the bulk of his films' special effects. But he brought artistry to his craft, and that dedication has won him admirers as diverse as Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.
As Bava's movies began to appear on DVD in their original, uncut versions in the 2000s — two decades after his death in 1980 at age 65 — he began to attract a new audience and renewed appreciation. Most of his best films have been released in two DVD box sets, The Mario Bava Collection Vols. 1 and 2. Now Kino Lorber, which released a brilliantly restored version of Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis," is turning its attention to Bava, bringing three of his newly remastered films to Blu-ray for the first time.

Kino's releases include Bava's breakthrough film "Black Sunday" (1960) starring Barbara Steele; his most troubled, yet most personal film, "Lisa and the Devil" (1973) with Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer and Italian screen legend Alida Valli; and his 1970 thriller "Hatchet for the Honeymoon." Kino has released "Black Sunday" and "Lisa and the Devil" under its Kino Classics label, while opting to release "Hatchet" under its Redemption horror label. That's understandable because while all are worthwhile, only the first two are true classics.

"Black Sunday" is Bava's best known and most influential work, the one you're most likely to see on late-night television, especially at this time of year. It's also the film that made a horror icon out of Steele, whose large, hypnotic eyes convey malice as easily as they elicit sympathy, which led to her more than once playing good and evil twins, including here.

On the disc's audio commentary, Bava expert Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog magazine draws our attention to an exterior shot that highlights Bava's attention to detail. The shot lasts a just a few seconds, but it is almost absurdly complex, involving a partial model, matte paintings, forced perspective and in-camera lighting tricks, all engineered by Bava himself.

But for me, Bava's masterpiece is "Lisa and the Devil," which I rate as one of the best films ever produced. Yet this is a film that couldn't even find a distributor when it was made. Bava's producer, Alfredo Leone, commissioned new scenes and released "Lisa" a year later as "The House of Exorcism," successfully cashing in on "The Exorcist" mania, but sacrificing Bava's most heartfelt work in the process. (Kino's Blu-ray includes both versions, so you can judge for yourself.)

By turns creepy and whimsical, "Lisa and the Devil" is part murder mystery and part ghost story, with a dreamlike plot involving characters who may be dead or may be department store dummies or may be figment's of Lisa's imagination. The story, like the village in which Lisa (Sommer) gets lost, is like an M.C. Escher painting, folding in on itself.

And at the center of the proceedings is Savalas, clearly having a ball as the butler Leandro, bemoaning his menial fate while bearing a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a fresco of the devil in the village square.

This is how Bava's greatest films were meant to be seen, in high-definition glory and looking better than when they were first shown. Sit back, and let the maestro conduct.

Someone is remaking 'The Devil's Nightmare'

HorrorNews.net reports on an open casting call for a remake of the 1971 Eurohorror classic The Devil's Nightmare.

I consider the chances of this remake, now reportedly in pre-production, ever happening still very much in the air. The producers have a Kickstarter page set up to solicit funding, and they also have a Facebook page.

The original Devil's Nightmare is another one of the first Eurohorror films I ever saw. Like The Ghost Galleon, which I mentioned, coincidentally, in a post last night, I first encountered it on USA's late, lamented Saturday Nightmares show.

Remakes almost never turn out well, but I think I'd get a kick out of someone remaking a relatively obscure old favorite of mine like this.

Here's the spoileriffic trailer for the original:

Random video of the day

No time for a real post, so here's another random video. This time it's the trailer for The Ghost Galleon, the third film in the Blind Dead series. It's a lesser film in the series, and it has nothing on the original, Tombs of the Blind Dead, but it's a favorite of mine because it's one of the first Eurohorror films I ever saw, back when USA Network still aired Saturday Nightmares.

Horror master Dario Argento concludes 30-year-old trilogy

Just in time for Halloween, the final installment of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy has hit DVD. So, the question is: Was it worth the 30-year wait?

“Mother of Tears” completes a cycle that began with Argento’s 1977 masterpiece “Suspiria” — a film that routinely makes most “scariest horror movie” lists — and continued in 1980 with “Inferno.” Inspired by “Suspiria de Profundis,” a 19th century “prose poem” by English essayist Thomas de Quincey, the trilogy tells of three witches known as the Three Mothers.

Hundreds of years old and leaving only misery and death in their wake, the three are the Mother of Sighs, based in Freiburg, Germany, and the oldest of the Mothers; the Mother of Darkness, based in New York City; and Mater Lachrimarum — the Mother of Tears — who lives in Rome, Italy.

“Suspiria” and “Inferno” dealt with the Mother of Sighs and the Mother of Darkness, respectively. Now, it’s the Mother of Tears’ turn to unleash chaos on unsuspecting mortals.

And that’s just what she does, when she reawakens after an urn containing her relics is unearthed in a church graveyard and opened by two unsuspecting museum curators.

As he did in “Suspiria,” Argento opens with a grizzly murder that makes everything that follows seem almost tame. Without cataloging the — ahem! — gory details, it’s a new height of carnage even for Argento, who has never exactly been shy when it comes to gore and bloodletting.

One curator’s death scene is so brutal, it would probably be more at home in a Lucio Fulci film. If Argento is Italy’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, Fulci was Italy’s George Romero, except his films are even gorier than Romero’s.

The other curator, Sarah, played by Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento (“Land of the Dead,” “The Last Mistress”), escapes the slaughter only through the supernatural intervention of her dead mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother, Daria Nicolodi (“Deep Red,” “Tenebre”).

As Mater Lachrimarum’s influence spreads, Rome descends into chaos. People randomly commit acts of murder and destruction, while witches from around the world converge to celebrate the Third Mother’s rebirth.

Meanwhile, on the run from the witches and their minions, Sarah learns her mother was a white witch who died, not in an accident, but during a failed attempt to kill the Mother of Sighs. (She did, however, weaken the First Mother, leading up to the events in “Suspiria.”) Now, having inherited her mother’s supernatural abilities, only Sarah can stop the Mother of Tears before she can plunge the world into a new Dark Age.

While not perfect, “The Mother of Tears” is a satisfying conclusion to Dario’s saga. His films have always been more about visual flair than plot coherence, and this one is no exception. (If you’re looking for a flawless Argento story, you’ll have to go back to the one he co-wrote for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”) The script relies heavily on coincidence, starting with the urn just happening to be opened by someone already connected to the Three Mothers.

Some of the casting is also suspect. Unless ghosts continue to age, which would make the afterlife suck even more, Nicolodi is 30 years too old for her role. As for the Mother of Tears herself, Israeli model-turned-actress Moran Atias spends most of the movie naked, which makes up somewhat for her deficiencies as an actress.

But nobody watches Argento’s films for their plots, and “Mother of Tears” has everything you could want from the master director, from gorgeous cinematography to meticulously staged death scenes. Of course, the film also gives Argento’s critics plenty of new ammunition — especially critics who believe Dario really, really hates women.

Even if it isn’t a masterpiece like “Suspiria” or “Deep Red” (1975), “Mother of Tears” is still probably Argento’s best film since 1982’s “Tenebre.” And that makes it well worth a rental on a cool October night.