X the Unknown (1956)
Written by Jimmy Sangster
Directed by Joseph Losey and Leslie Norman
Starring Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, and Leo McKern
By the end of the film, it’s an ex-X.
Two years before The Blob creeped and leaped and glid and slid across the screen, Hammer Films surfaced their own crawling mass of goop in X the Unknown. After the success of The Quatermass Xperiment, they wanted another Quatermass movie. Creator Nigel Kneale was not ready to allow the Alan Quatermass to be used for a story he hadn’t written, so the good doctor got renamed to Adam Royston and production went forward.
That wasn’t the only change required. Original director, Joseph Losey, had been banished from Hollywood as a result of McCarthy’s Red Witchhunt. Purportedly, star Dean Jagger refused to work with him. Whether that’s the truth or Losey simply backed out, Leslie Norman was brought in to replace him. Considering all of these changes, the movie turned out amazingly well.
Here’s the premise, which is about on par for the standards of mid-century science fiction: The first life forms on the Earth were beings of energy. They also fed on energy, so as the surface cooled they moved deeper inside the planet. Every 50 years, as the Earth experiences greater gravitational stresses (?), a few of these creatures manage to crack the surface and escape. They didn’t used to stay long, as there wasn’t anything for them to eat, but now all of the radioactive materials on the surface are allowing one to stay… and to grow!
Like most movie science, it’s not very convincing. The solution that Dr. Royston arrives at is even less so. All of that is just excuses for things to happen on the screen, and what happens on the screen is pretty cool. The energy creature is essentially a mass of radioactive mud. This allows it to go anywhere it needs to, and it means we’re treated to a lot of shots of it oozing across the ground and over walls and such. These range from “okay” to fantastic, with the average being toward the high end.
It looks better when it’s moving.
Other great effects include the melting flesh of its victims. That’s right, “melting flesh”. Used sparingly, perhaps to avoid censoring, the effect is not so much convincing as it is startling. Prior to melting, the skin would expand as though roasting. Another effect that’s not terrific, it’s nonetheless disturbing. Where later movies would halt the story to revel in the decay of the body, this one emphasizes the horror by showing the sheer grit of victims struggling to live long enough to help other people. You want them to succeed, and you feel their agony and determination. It’s a chilling and effective approach that surpasses the ability of effects alone to achieve.
Blink and you’ll miss it. The camera doesn’t linger.
The rest of the movie plays like a combination police/army/scientist procedural. What makes it stand out is that, while everyone is pursuing their own agendas and mandates, everyone works together effectively when it comes to preventing catastrophe. As much as I love the pessimism of films like The Crazies (1973), which imply that every attempt to solve a problem worsens it, there’s something uplifting and satisfying about seeing people set aside their differences to accomplish the impossible.
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014)
Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
Written by Tristan Roache-Turner and Kiah Roache-Turner
Starring Jay Gallagher, Bianca Bradey, and Leon Burchill
When I was a teen, I saw Return of the Living Dead and Re-Animator so closely together that I honestly don’t recall which was the first zombie movie I’d ever seen. They were the first two, however, and they set me up for a lifetime of disappointment in zombie films. The genre is so regularly terrible that there are people who, with a straight face, claim to like Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a film with 10 minutes of fun that comes after a full hour of sheer tedium. This is how low the bar is set.
So imagine how hard my jaw hit the floor when five minutes into Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead I realized that I was actually having a great time watching it! The feelings of surprise and delight continued throughout the film, despite the inevitable deaths of beloved side characters. It is a zombie movie after all; it’s a minor miracle if anybody lives.
The film takes its name from the Book of Revelation. There, it is the name of a star that falls to Earth, polluting a third of the potable water. In the movie — well, it’s a biblical quote that says the star will bring a disease that kills “a fuckload of people”. The pollutants introduced into the air by meteorites turn everyone into zombies. Everyone without a gas mask or A- blood, that is. This is a deadly blow to the human race, as populations range from only 0.2-8% with that blood type. As far as zombie infection causes go, it’s certainly novel. It’s also easy to mention, drop, and move past, which is critical for this kind of romp. Less talk, more fun please.
The beginning is a bit of a jumble. It starts with an action sequence, then goes to Benny’s flashback, before going back to Barry’s flashback. Except it isn’t all really Barry’s flashback, as there are scenes of his sister Brooke intermixed. These siblings are the focus of the movie, as the plot largely centers on them trying to reunite. One of the many joys in Wyrmwood is that the other characters aren’t just there to fill dead space. There’s a lot of personality on the sidelines, which keeps the journey lively and makes for some genuine sense of loss as they fall to zombies, researchers, and sheer idiocy.
Brooke triumphant, for the moment at least.
Did I say “researchers”? There’s only one that we see, but he’s a doozy. Think of Dr. Logan from Day of the Dead, only gleefully sadistic. His aim is to find out how to make everyone immune, which means sacrificing as many survivors as it takes. This requires people to procure test subjects, and this justifies the hunting squads that both clean out zombies and capture healthy people. After all, survivors are a rare commodity.
A lot of these plot beats are typical, or close to it. What separates Wyrmwood lies in the details. The zombies are stronger by night, which lets the film have both fast and slow zombies. This has to do with the gas that their bodies generate. By day they emit it, but at night it fuels them. There’s some business about zombie blood being the only liquid that burns now, which makes for zero sense but is fun. Then there’s — well, I won’t spoil it except to say that Brooke’s story arc is neat enough to offset the unpleasantness of her being in bondage for most of the film.
If it seems as though I have mixed feelings about this movie, it’s certainly the truth. There are plot threads that are left dangling, the speed with which the research team starts in is nearly preternatural (the whole movie takes place over the first two days of the infection), and the lack of official response (outside of possibly the 5 member research team) feels like an oversight. In the end, the combination of originality and joie de vie lifts it above problems like logic and narrative structure. It’s not going to replace my two genre favorites, but its severed heads and spilled guts place it above the ordinary, gruesome fare.
The Visitor (1979)
This title screen is too sedate and normal for this movie.
Directed by Giulio Paradisi
Written by Luciano Comici and Robert Mundi
Story by Giulio Paradisi and Ovidio G. Assonitis
Starring John Huston, Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Barbara Collins, Lance Henriksen, and Paige Conner
The Visitor is a movie that defies summarization. You can say that it is about a space angel coming to Earth to take a daughter of Satan to space Jesus for reform school, but that doesn’t get across a fraction of the crazy sauce that this movie has to offer. Lance Henriksen claimed that rewrites came in every day, to the point where nobody knew what the film was about anymore. I believe it, since it certainly plays out that way. Very few scenes seem to be connected outside of the reappearance of core actors. Then there’s the problem that nothing which happens during the majority of the film matters in any way to the conclusion. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film starts by telling us about the evils of Sateen, who will not be appearing in this film. We then see a basketball game. The owner of one team turns out to be Lance Henriksen. His money came from a secret organization that’s wants him to have a son with his girlfriend (Barbara Collins). She can bear children with the powers of Sateen, and her daughter already exhibits telekinetic abilities. The cult wants a breeding pair of Sateen spawn, which they somehow believe they’ll be able to control.
The only part of any of that which matters is that there’s a girl with major power.
Shelley Winters masquerades as a housekeeper to keeps tabs on the girl for another unnamed organization. She scolds and threatens and even slaps the girl, but it’s never relevant. Also not important is the detective that is trying to solve the “accidental” shooting of her mother. Nor are the people focusing their mental energies on a rooftop at the request of John Huston, space angel.
None of these people matter.
The only thing that matters — and you’ll want to skip over this if you want to save the anti-climax for your own viewing pleasure — is that John Huston sits down to play pong with the devil child. Yup. That’s it. That’s the final confrontation between good and evil. Pong. Okay, there are a few magic bolts and demon eyes, but basically after playing a video and deciding she can’t beat the angel, she surrenders and goes to Space Jesus Camp.
I love this movie. It’s awful, and it’s stupid, and things happen for no reason, and I love it for that. Every few minutes it’s a whole new set piece in which something horrible occurs. It’s a pre-1980s movie that’s made for the “MTV generation” of short attention spans and senseless visuals. You can pop this in at a party, knowing that nobody will miss anything by not paying attention but everyone will be rewarded for watching bits of it. Heck, make it a game to see if the group can reconstruct the plot from the different fragments they saw. It’s a goddamn treasure to have a movie like this that is better for being such totally entertaining crap.
Up From the Depths (1979)
They spent more on these titles than on the dubbing.
Directed by Charles B. Griffith
Written by Alfred M. Sweeney and Anne Dyer
Starring Sam Bottoms, Susanne Reed, Virgil Frye, and Charles Howerton
There’s nothing like box office success to spawn pale imitations, and Jaws is one of the most imitated films since Gaslight. Roger Corman probably produced about a third of them, but few are as terrible as Up From the Depths. A story has it that the script and soundtrack were lost, necessitating a reconstruction based on memory and lip-reading. I can certainly believe the actors storing their copies in the circular file after filming, but it seems far-fetched that none were available. Maybe revision pages. Anyway, the story would account for the terrible dialog and often lamentable dubbing.
Up From the Depths doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than a ripoff. The monster is basically a shark, just one that’s supposed to be in the deep sea. A lot of other deep water fish are turning up near the beach, but the movie is completely uninterested in giving a reason for that. Researcher Tom (Charles Howerton) was briefly curious until the unshark arrived. Now, even though the creature ate his assistant/girlfriend, all he wants to do is study the monstrous fish.
There is no festival to threaten with cancellation, but there is a bounty placed on the unshark by the manager of a hotel. In Jaws this led to people putting themselves in danger, mass confusion, and a lot of innocent sharks being slaughtered. Here, it’s just one of far too many excuses for “Hijinks and Hilarity”. A Japanese tourist puts on a towel that’s might be supposed to represent a sumo loincloth, grabs a sword, and marches off to the beach. A couple of people put on full diving gear in their room and walk backwards all the way to the beach because flippers. Hi-LARIOUS! Terrible comedy is my kryptonite, and this movie nearly finished me off.
They wisely keep the abyssal unshark in murky shots.
Credit where it’s due, the giant fish prop isn’t bad. We don’t see a lot of it, but the sight of multiple fins slicing through the water is effective and the brief glimpses of the unshark underwater are good enough to give an idea of what the cast is facing. Don’t expect any attack footage, though. It’s strictly lead up, bloody water, and aftermath. That’s probably for the best. There’s no telling how much damage the prop would have sustained in a full-contact scene.
I found it difficult to watch this movie. I’m not saying that it was offensive (other than the toxic attempts at humor), or that it made me tense. I kept becoming engrossed in anything else at hand — cats, Twitter, blowing my nose — because the film actively repelled my interest. Once I looked away during an interminable underwater scene, and when I looked back a character had died. I back up to see what I had missed only to find that all there had been was a quick shot of blood in the water. I shrugged and went back to rubbing my cat’s ears.
The Thing (2011)
Even the title effects are ripped off.
Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr.
Written by Eric Heisserer
Based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, and Ulrich Thomsen
When John Carpenter took a stab at making a new film adaptation of John W. Campbell’s masterful story Who Goes There? he chose to name it after the first movie version. So he took the title The Thing From Another World and shortened it to The Thing. That’s pretty much all he took from the 1951 film that wasn’t part of Campbell’s story to begin with. Audiences had changed dramatically in 30 years, as had effects technology. The more modern take was a showpiece for practical effects, drawing on the ability of Campbell’s monster to imitate the crew of the Antarctic base to create grotesque hybrid forms for the thing to assume between masquerades. The two adaptations are both good, although in different ways that speak to their times. The first reassured us that American determination and scientific achievement would win the day, and the second warned us that the best we can hope for is mutually assured destruction.
That’s where the story could have ended, but another 30 years on someone decided to show how it began. Carpenter’s movie started with the thing arriving at the American camp in the form of a sled dog. A helicopter from the Norwegian base pursues it but crashes. When the Americans finally check out the other base, the find it in ruins with no survivors. This adds to the feeling of isolation while heightening the danger. We don’t need to see how the previous base got wrecked; it’s happening again. Well, someone felt that we really needed to see it after all, and thus the prequel to The Thing, imaginatively titled The Thing.
Remember when Gus Van Sant did a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho and the world yawned? This isn’t really the situation here, but it sure feels like it at times. Mediocre CGI replaces the phenomenal puppetry and stop-motion while attempting to look the same. Same ideas for combating the thing. There’s one small difference in identifying who’s still human, but it makes absolutely no sense. We’re told that the thing can’t copy inorganic material, so only humans would have fillings. Okay, but the thing also imitates clothing; including zippers, snaps, and synthetic fabrics. The only place the movie breaks truly free from failing to ape Carpenter is with the space ship.
Yup. Nothing human could try that hard to look like “Alien”.
Where the earlier movie started with the mystery of the Norwegian’s hunting a sled dog, this one starts with the Norwegian’s almost literally stumbling into the discovery of the space ship. Seen only through the ice before, here it is largely dug out. Yet with this potential for exploring something different, once the thing is discovered the ship is forgotten until the climax. The filmmakers took a lot of effort to set up and explain the appearance of the Norwegian camp in Carpenter’s film, and by all the mead in Valhalla you’re going to see every bit of that explanation, down to the smallest minutia.
Finally granting us entry into the alien vessel at the end, the film refuses to show much of anything. No hint of the crew, bones or personal items or anything. Just immaculate science fiction halls. The one chance to break free of merely attempting to attach itself to a superior film — to create its own identity — and it fails to deliver.
It’s not a terrible movie, and I have certainly seen worse even during the Hubrisween project. It’s just so unnecessary. Watching it, I felt as though I was seeing a detailed facsimile that wasn’t quite convincing. It just made me wish I were watching the real thing.
Satan’s Skin (1971)
This title has only slightly more to do with the movie than does this bird.
Directed by Piers Haggard
Written by Robert Wynne-Simmons and Piers Haggard
Starring Patrick Wymark, Linda Hayden, Barry Andrews, and Anthony Ainley
Tigon had the distinction of not being Hammer Studios. It wasn’t even Amicus, which produced movies that casual viewers mistook for Hammer. Still, with modest budgets Tigon was able to make a few of the more memorable British horror films of the 1960s-1970s. Witchfinder General showcases Vincent Price in his most purely villainous role, and The Creeping Flesh is an enjoyable monster flick featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as scientists combating evil itself. In my opinion, the studio’s greatest achievement was the 1971 satanic thriller Satan’s Skin, aka The Blood on Satan’s Claw.
Set during England’s interregnum, the action of the film takes place in a secluded village. An eerie humanoid skull, covered in clumps of fur, turns up when farmland is plowed. The bones go missing, and soon the youth of the village begin acting strange. They stop attending religious instruction and begin playing deadly games in the woods. Strangest of all, several grow odd patches of fur on their skin. It’s up to The Judge, local representative of order and modern society, to stop the Devil from assembling a new body on Earth.
The worm on Satan’s eye.
This isn’t a perfect movie. The music is irritating and often at odds with the mood of the moment. While stalwarts like Patrick Wymark and Anthony Ainley anchor the cast, the many children are of wildly varying ability. The pacing compares unfavorably to glaciers. Yet there is much that works in its favor. Unable to afford the lush sets of richer studios, much of this film was shot in actual locations — locations that, by and large, were cramped and decayed. The dinginess of the movie, the claustrophobic rooms in the open countryside: it all sets a mood of fear and decline that fits nicely into the themes of ancient evil and religio-political upheaval.
The setting of the film is perfect. With the established power structures disrupted by the Interregnum, it’s unclear who can address the contamination of the youth. The local representative of the church is only barely able to resist temptation himself, and the only law presence is a judge who spends most of his time in London and considers the rural people to be ignorant and superstitious. The order of the land has been upset, and evil will make use of the disruption to gain a foothold.
All in all, it’s a nice little apocalyptic movie that shows what can be done within the constraints of a meager budget.
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Patient Zero, in a sturdy tank that’s just cracked open.
Written and directed by Dan O’Bannon
Original story by Rudi Ricci, John Russo, and Russell Streiner
Starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, and Beverly Randolph
It’s well-known that Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain because the last-minute title change accidentally removed the copyright notice from the distributed film. It’s less widely known that George A. Romero’s sequels dropped the word “living” from their titles due to the terms of splitting the remaining IP between Romero and co-writer John Russo. While Romero kept the rights to make official sequels, Russo kept the right to use the phrase “living dead”.
It’s a deal that worked well for everyone. Romero, who’d had no attachment to the title their movie had been released under, could explore further dimensions of the setting. Russo could use the title to cash in on the fame of the original work. With a touch of luck, he made some money and launched a new franchise with another film that revolutionized zombies.
The luck took the form of Dan O’Bannon, whose reworked script and directorial vision made The Return of the Living Dead a horror classic in its own right, and a damn funny one at that. O’Bannon had previously contributed to another game-changing film, co-writing Alien with Ronald Shushet. He had collaborated with John Carpenter on Dark Star while in film school. With no credited directorial experience, it’s a wonder that O’Bannon was allowed to helm this project. Again, lucky for the resulting movie that he was.
The placement of the handprint where Beverly Randolph can’t see it is a nice touch.
The story is fairly simple. Workers in a medical supply warehouse mess with old canisters misrouted by the US Army. One of the containers cracks, letting out a toxic gas that brings the dead back to life. The warehouse is beside a cemetery, and before too long the entire area is awash in the living dead.
But the story isn’t the whole picture. In fact, as an ensemble piece the story itself depends on which characters you’re following. Many horror films rely on a core group, who are whittled down as they separate. This one has two main groups, who intermix to an extent without ever fully blending. These are the staff of the supply warehouse (along with the embalmer who works nearby) and a group of punks who are friends with the newest employee at the warehouse. What’s brilliant about this is that it allows the veteran actors to anchor the film while including characters that appeal to a younger demographic.
Clu Gulager just wants to dispose of some rabid weasels in the crematorium.
Another smart move was using a punk soundtrack. It had only been a few years since Valley Girl had proven that a film fueled by new wave could move tickets and a single year since the cult film Repo Man used punk songs. It was by no means a safe decision to go with a playlist style of soundtrack at that time, at least not with one that wouldn’t appeal to nostalgic baby boomers a la The Big Chill. Yet it worked, partly because the songs added to the sarcastic tone of the movie, but also because clever selections and editing made the music serve as a score. To this day I can’t hear The Cramps’ “Surfin’ Dead” without envisioning survivors running every which way to broad up windows, and “Burn the Flames” by Roky Erickson makes an eerily somber accompaniment to self-immolation.
The best idea kept from Night of the Living Dead is one of Romero’s recurring themes: every attempt to control the situation makes it worse. There’s a number printed on the canisters to notify the Army about their location. Burt, the owner of the warehouse, decided against calling it when the shipment arrived years ago, likely because of an aversion to getting involved in a bureaucratic snafu. Once the gas leaks, he again dismisses the notion of calling the number as it would lead to an investigation and possible criminal charges. He decides they can handle it themselves, and by “handle” he means “cover up”. So the evidence is taken to the mortuary for burning. Problem solved, except that the smoke has seeded clouds with the reanimation agent 2-4-5 Trioxin. This awakens the dead of the Resurrection Cemetery, creating a situation that spirals quickly out to f control as well-meaning paramedics and police provide more fuel for the fire. It’s all so avoidable, yet completely inevitable, that you have to laugh cynically. One businessman took out at least a large portion of Louisville, Kentucky, because he didn’t want to deal with red tape.
Don Calfa interrogates a zombie.
The Return of the Living Dead is credited with creating and/or popularizing a number of additions to film zombies. Unlike Romero’s undead ghouls, O’Bannon’s ate only brains. They could run, although the more intact corpses were better at it. They could speak, which is still fairly uncommon. The most unnerving part, though, is that they could feel. That’s their entire motivation. It hurts to be dead, and eating brains relieves their suffering for a time. To be consciously dead, aware of your body decaying, and knowing that there is no way to recover — it’s a nightmarish concept that is all too real for sufferers of terminal diseases. The greatest choice O’Bannon made was to make his zombies sympathetic. They are also victims in this film where the enemy is the failure of systems to incorporate human behavior.
¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976)
Who Can Kill a Child?
Witten and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Based on the novel El Juego de los Niños by Juan José Plans
Starring Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Tourists seeking an “authentic experience” go to a remote location where they discover that the natives are murderous. Or maybe this one: quite suddenly humanity faces danger from a previously harmless source. How about a woman is faced with the contamination of the child still in her womb.
At its best, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? is a genre-masher that draws together elements of eco-horror, colonialist terror of uncivilized areas, and generational fears into a fairly unique mixture. At its worst, it is a dull affair that largely consists of two people wandering around a small village while children grin. There’s a lot of footage dedicated to watching people walk around, not finding anybody.
The premise is summarized by the lone surviving adult that our tourists (Tom and Evelyn, from England) find on the Spanish island of Almanzora. He reveals that two nights ago, at midnight, the children went into all of the houses and killed the adults. Nobody could stop them because “¿Quién puede matar a un niño?” (“Who can kill a child?”). It’s a concept that seems pleasantly naïve today. As the news shows us, plenty of people can kill children, and they do. The movie even tells the audience up front that children often suffer and are killed, as a narrator chronicles massive child casualties in conflicts of the mid 20th century. Germany, India and Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam, and Nigeria are discussed in order to hammer home the point: children are killed.
Red rover, red rover, send an adult over!
Here’s where we enter the realm of eco-horror. Just as the birds and the bees in other films, the children have had enough and spontaneously arisen in revolt against humanity — adult humanity anyway. Just as similarly, there is no cause provided for the sudden shift to aggression. It just happens. There is some evidence that the behavior is transmitted from child to child by proximity. In a chilling scene, the English couple find an isolate house on the far side of Almanzora. There are four children playing outside, but their mother and grandmother are fine and unafraid. Tom negotiates for a ride to the mainland once the men return from fishing, but he and Evelyn keep a nervous eye on the children. When two boys arrive from the village, the normal children run over to greet them. Much intense squinting follows, after which all of the children take on a predatory air.
Perhaps the most unnerving thing about the film is that the children are not relentless until they’ve decided to kill again. They giggle and run and play. Of course the clothing the girls dress up in has blood stains, and the boys are excitedly removing the clothing from a dead woman, and they use a body as a piñata. Just like normal children. Evelyn and Tom have several interactions with the children of Almanzora that don’t involve stabbing or chasing. After all, to the children it’s a game, and what’s more fun than letting the prey believe it’s running loose? As long as they don’t get close to the exit.
Planet of the Vampires (1965)
Directed by Mario Bava
Written by Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Callisto Cosulich, Antonio Román, and Rafael J. Salvia
Based on the story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Renato Pestriniero
English version written by Louis M. Heyward and Ib Melchior
Starring Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, and Ángel Aranda
A crew of space travelers investigating a signal of unknown origin land on a murky planet, where they fall prey to an unknown stalker. Oh, and there’s an ancient alien craft populated by giant skeletons. Sound familiar?
It’s impossible to watch Planet of the Vampires without thinking that it greatly influenced Alien. Not just the high-level plot similarities, or the probable coincidences such as U-shaped spacecraft, but what really strikes you is the creative emphasis on creating a style-driven science-horror experience. It’s just that those styles couldn’t be more different.
Where Ridley Scott choose claustrophobic darkness, Mario Bava elected for bright openness. The bridge sets of the investigating travelers are ludicrously cavernous. The only trace of the creatures preying on the crew are fleeting glimpses of glowing light in a landscape of mists and garish hues. The result is an eerie fantasy world that looks amazing, but unfortunately it’s too ethereal to believe in.
The place where it works best is in the least necessary part of the movie. The interiors of the derelict craft are cramped, especially for the giants that used it. Strange equipment lies everywhere, and attempts to use it activate electric shocks, unintelligible recordings, and the bulkhead door — leading to a panicked effort to reopen it and escape. It’s a terrifically moody scene, and although it lends to the atmosphere and verifies that this planet is a trap, it’s a mostly superfluous diversion from the main story.
It’s got to be humiliating to be caught by a dead guy.
It’s a neat movie, and I adore it, but I’m afraid it’s not very good. The dubbing is never great and is often downright silly. While there’s a lot of visual interest (the costumes and some of the set designs are nifty), there are many times in which it’s painfully apparent that you’re looking at cardboard with a lick of paint. If you like style over substance — and when it comes to Italian cinema, I most definitely do! — then it can be a rewarding view.
One more note: if you’re expecting vampires, you will be frustrated and potentially aggrieved. The vampires exist solely in the minds of whatever marketing team came up with the American title. The original name was the less inaccurate Terrore nello spazio, or Terror in Space. There are some corpses that walk around. They aren’t exactly zombies, but they certainly aren’t vampires. Thank the marketing team at AIP for the misleading title. So now you know.
Opera (1987)
Quoth the raven “Argento”.
Directed by Dario Argento
Written by Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini
Starring Cristina Marsillach, Ian Charleson, and Urbano Barberini
I’m a Dario Argento apologist up to a point, and that point is his 1998 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera that starred his daughter Asia and Julian Sands. That’s the point in his career where I throw up my hands and say that Susperia is terrific. Fortunately Opera falls in the defensible years by a safe distance; and if it seems ludicrous to hinge a plot on a vengeful raven identifying the killer, just remember that a chimpanzee avenging Donald Pleasence is not the most insane part of Argento’s previous film Phenomena.
Opera is heavily influenced by Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, without quite being an adaptation. There’s a young understudy (Betty, played by Cristina Marsillach) who gets the starring role when the prima donna is injured. There’s a mysterious killer, fixated on the ingénue. A performance is interrupted for the penultimate confrontation. The rest is a wild departure, as it is more of a slasher movie than a Gothic romance.
It’s a pretty good slasher, too. The killer strikes those near Betty, binding her so that she is forced to watch. There’s a reason for this fixation, and it’s honestly a tad contrived, but what I love about the film is the way that sight and voyeurism are emphasized by the camera. From the opening shot of a closeup of a raven’s eye, the lens is fixated on p.o.v. shots, eyes, and focusing the view through narrow spaces.
The ravens and Betty have seen things that we haven’t, and fittingly it’s what Betty doesn’t recall having seen that explains her importance to the killer. Further, it’s what she can’t see when her stalker finally blindfolds her that nearly kills Betty.
Not what you want to see through your peephole.
For all of the above I adore Opera. Even the choice of an opera based on Macbeth fits thematically, as not only is the play believed to be cursed but Lady Macbeth’s most famous scene is wrapped up in guilt for bloody deeds. This is a bit of a nod to the film’s back-story.
Here I’m just going to say it, so if you really don’t want to know the reveal for a movie nearly 30 years old, skip to the next paragraph. Betty’s mother made the killer torture and kill young women. Betty herself had seen it happen as a child but had repressed it, because repressed memories are a terrific substitute for good writing. So, the mother’s actions ate transferred to the daughter to expiate the killer’s guilt. Thus, Betty plays Lady Macbeth.
Anyway, it’s definitely a flawed movie. The pins under Betty’s eyelids are a good visual but infeasible as presented. The bit with the ravens is well-filmed but downright silly. I don’t even want to know who thought dubbing a creepy adult for a young girl was a good plan. The play’s director being a clear stand-in for Argento and making moves on his much younger star is downright gross.
Yet this is the Argento I prefer to remember. The one who put effort into artistic touches that rise above the material; not the one we have now, cashing in on what’s left of his reputation with artless cheapies where the main attraction is his own naked daughter.
Web of the Big Damn Spider 
