Drive-In Super Monsterama 2011!

Tonight, we hearken back in time to a month ago. Better late than never, right?

I love, love, LOVE the annual Drive-In Super Monsterama.  This year's lineup was great; I only got to go Saturday night, and there's no way I was gonna miss that.  You think I'd miss BOTH Dr. Phibes films??  On the giant outdoor screen?? Watching them in the night air, while sitting on a lawn chair eating a funnel cake?  You've got to be freakin' KIDDING me!

First up was "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" and "Dr. Phibes Rises Again", back to back.  After you've grown used to a film on the small home screen, seeing it projected onto a giant screen can change the entire way you look at it.  The minute the film started and I heard that pipe organ blasting out of everybody's car stereo, I got the chills.  The lengthy opening sequence that passes entirely without dialogue was extremely surreal, almost like we were watching a silent movie. 

We also hung out for "Count Yorga, Vampire".  I'm pretty sure this is a repeat for the festival, although I know they showed the sequel, "Return of Count Yorga", one year in the past.  "CY,V" was a favorite of mine when I was a kid and vampires were the shiznit for me.  Nowadays, it doesn't grab me the way it once did (especially now that I'm too old to actually wonder whether vampires just might be real).  I do love that moment when the young couple breaks down in their van while driving down Count Yorga's long, winding driveway. They decide to go to sleep in the van, which is a far out 70s screwmobile with a bed in back.  Erica awakens in the middle of the night and opens the curtains to see the Count peering in at her...EEEEEE!  Well, what did she expect, breaking down in the driveway of a vampire?

The fourth and final feature was "I, Monster".  I, Was Tired.  So we left instead of watching Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing go through the paces of Jekyll and Hyde.  I did miss out on seeing some drive-in size Cushing, but at least I got to see him in his brief cameo in "Dr. Phibes Rises Again".  See you next year, Monsterama! 

The Asphyx (1973)

In 1973, period horror flicks were a dying breed, although they probably didn't realize it quite yet.  How cool to discover this very British, very weirdo flick called "The Asphyx", a Victorian-era period piece about an inquisitive upper class scientist who dabbles in experiments related to the nature of death.  Although it was made in 1973, it aspires more to the old days of classic Hammer-style horror.

OK, so there's this guy.  A squire, I think, and be honest--you're not really sure what a squire is, are you?  No, I didn't think so.  Well, I will tell you a squire is...a rich guy who lives in a big house and gives lectures to people about weird smudges on film. Yes, photography, which was so cutting edge back in the Victorian era, is the major plot point here.  The squire guy's name is Hugo Cunningham, and he's just married a second wife.  They're way too happy together, so you know something awful is going to happen to her, right?  Right.  Well, before it happens, we discover Hugo has some strange research going.  He studies pictures taken of subjects who were moments from death, and discovers an unexplained smudge on the images.  Hugo is convinced the smudges are images of the soul leaving the body, and he's determined to prove the soul can be photographed. 

Ladies and gentlemen...the Asphyx.

The trouble really starts when Hugo acquires a new-fangled "motion picture" camera, and while filming his family rowing boats on the water, an accident claims the lives of his wife and son.  Again a mysterious image appears on the film, but this time before his son's death, not after.  Hugo realizes the smudge is not the soul of the nearly departed, but rather something hovering near the subjects moments before their deaths--perhaps causing death itself.  Becoming more obsessed with finding the answer, Hugo films the hanging death of a prisoner and witnesses a startling phenomenon when a beam of light he uses for his photography reveals a bizarre apparition struggling to reach the victim.

Hugo dubs the apparition the "Asphyx", and his hypothesis is that the Asphyx is what truly extinguishes a human being's life.  An experiment with a guinea pig reveals the Asphyx can not only be trapped in Hugo's beam of light, but also imprisoned inside a lighted bottle, rendering the guinea pig immortal because it's Asphyx cannot reach it.  It isn't long before Cunningham enlists his daughter's fiance to help him with his experiments, and he turns himself immortal by trapping his own Asphyx.  Hugo's immortality, however, also causes him to become even more determined to pass this morbid little curse on to his daughter and her fiance.

"Oh, Good God, I just remembered I left the iron on!"

I have to say, the idea here is a lot more interesting than anything else.  It's a wild story, and the fact that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense doesn't seem to slow it down in the least.  The plot moves along at a fast clip, and it doesn't leave you sitting around thinking for too long.  Truthfully, I don't know what to think of the Asphyx itself.  As seen on camera, it is a blurry, squirming wraith that screams a lot.  They're kind of like the green slimer ghost in "Ghostbusters", and they scream like the pod people from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".  They might be ridiculous, but they're pretty weird and disturbing, too.

In the end, "The Asphyx" is one of those films that wants to tell us that even though nobody wants to die, living forever could really kind of suck, too.  Although I wouldn't call it pure 70s Doom, especially since it's a period movie, this idea alone is enough to lend it a little doomy cred.  It's not a bad way to spend an hour & a half.

Lights...camera....Asphyx!

Night of the Living Dead (1968): It Keeps Coming Back!

It seems all I've been posting about here lately has been zombie pictures, so I guess it's fitting that tonight I rewatched the one, the only, the original, "Night of the Living Dead".  I remember seeing it twice as a child; once was on television right when "Dawn of the Dead" was about to premiere in theaters, which would make me 8 years old at the time.  The other time was when my mom took me and a friend to see an outdoor movie in a local park, and it turned out to be this one.  I'm not sure which screening came first, but I do remember being transfixed by the film each time, specifically by how explicit the violence was, and the overall downbeat tone. 

Even though most of what happens in the movie occurs offscreen and we only see the aftermath, there was an aggressive edge to it.  You get the impression that Romero would have shown you everything if he'd been able to make it look effective. But "Night of the Living Dead" combined its early gore effects with a certain level of pseudo realism that was missing from the campy, color grossout films being made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, and an unflinching attitude that went beyond anything that was typical at the time. Ben, the hero, bashes in the heads of several ghouls in the beginning, using a tire iron. At one point, he embeds the sharp end in the skull of a zombie, and it falls back to the carpet after he pulls the tire iron back out.  Even though the penetration has occurred off screen, the illusion is very effective. It still looks upsetting today, as does the grossout scene where a group of zombies fight with each other on-screen over a pile of intestines.

Another thing I love is the way Romero was able to make the murder of Helen Cooper so compellingly surreal and brutal at the same time.  Her death is the one zombie attack in the film that never fails to freak me out, the nightmarish pinnacle of the film. You know the scene, it's when she goes back into the basement as a last resort and the little girl zombie kills her with a handy cement trowel. When I was a kid I used to always wonder why Helen never tried to defend herself with her hands, but as an adult it becomes a little more clear to me that she's in the moment; she's just seen her husband shot dead in front of her, scores of zombies are beginning to burst through the barricades, and she has now discovered her young daughter is not only dead, she's devouring what's left of her husband.  When the little girl advances on her, Helen just kind of collapses in shock and lays there, letting her own little girl slowly hack open her ribcage, an agonizing death, all the while emitting those unearthly death screams as it happens. It's a moment of true horror, a subversion of the family unit in a way that wasn't often seen with such chilling detail.  It happens with Barbara, too; of all the zombies that have inexplicably come to this rural farmhouse, the one that confronts Barbara is her own brother, Johnny, who drags her off into a crowd of ghouls to be devoured.  Barbara has remained disassociated throughout almost the entire film until that very moment; seeing Johnny seems to bring her out of her shock long enough to realize she's about to be killed, and she screams for Ben to help her, too late.  I always shudder at the way you can see her face for a split second right before they pull her all the way down and, presumably, rip her apart while she's still alive. These weren't strangers committing acts of random violence, these were the family members of their victims. Romero & Russo weren't only interested in showing a brutal murder, it was also a total mindfuck.

The cynical, downbeat quality of "Night of the Living Dead" breaks some serious ground for horror, as other filmmakers began to emulate such things as the explicit use of gore, the zombie subject matter itself, or the unapologetically gruesome tone.

Contrary to popular discourse, the movie does indeed offer an explanation of why the dead are returning to life. The talking heads we see on television reporting the phenomenon have made a link to a recently crashed space probe that carried high levels of "mysterious radiation". The film's 1978 sequel, "Dawn of the Dead", completely sidestepped this explanation, and this time Romero stated in interviews that there was no known reason for the reanimation of the dead, and that the radiation scenario from the original was not intended to be the definitive explanation. But Romero had also started referring to the work as a 'trilogy', and that it had always been intended as a trilogy, which is something he had never mentioned in print after the original film debuted...prior to his 1977 interview in Film Comment, he'd never even alluded to a potential sequel. In fact, two years after making the 'trilogy' comment, he told Cinema Spectrum that when he was making "Night", he never knew he would ever make another film like it. It seems odd that in a script like "Night of the Living Dead", the crash of a radioactive space probe and the subsequent emergence of zombies from that same area could have been intended as anything other than an explanation. Otherwise, what the hell was it, a strange coincidence?

Regardless of implicit intentions, the ending of "Night" closes on a scenario where the living now outnumber the living dead once more and are rounding them up to be thrown onto huge bonfires. The TV news reports that the level of the radiation is decreasing, and this is the ultimate tragedy of our small group of non-survivors: if they'd just managed to hold it together a little while longer, they'd have lived to see the end of the emergency.  Instead, they're all dead at the end.

The moment any movie's end credits begin is often the moment where people stop paying attention, but that's one of the most disturbing aspects of "Night of the Living Dead".  Hidden in plain sight during the end credit sequence is a series of horrifying still images of Ben's body being dragged away by possee members weilding meat hooks, to be thrown on a bonfire with other bodies and set ablaze.  Knowing that just moments before, he was the only survivor of the film, and a random act by an overly enthusiastic possee member leads to him being shot dead and viciously violated.  This wasn't done to him by zombies, but by ordinary, living human beings, with shotguns and meat hooks.  Now that's a scary concept.

Shock Waves: Tourists Shouldn't Play with Wet Dead Things

Ahhh, zombies.  I love em, and I know you probably do, too.  Back in the early 70s, before everything that could have been done WAS done, low budget movies were mixing it up left and right.  I envision it as a time of wild creativity in horror films, but it's probably closer to the truth to say that people were doing it in the name of exploitation, jumbling ideas around in an attempt to find a marketable, cheaply made product.  Still, it's always a pleasure to watch a movie that you think is gonna really suck, and then suddenly you find that it's gotten under your skin somehow.  Such is the case with "Shock Waves", a nifty little drive-in movie about a small group of tourists on a pleasure cruise who find themselves marooned on an island and stalked by a horde of zombies--in particular, undead gogglefaced Nazi soldiers intent on their swift execution.

In the grand 70s Doom tradition, "Shock Waves" opens with a flashback narration, similar to "Let's Scare Jessica to Death".  The heroine in this case is Rose, played by none other than one of my all-time genre heroines, Brooke Adams.  Rose is one of four tourists on a small chartered yacht, captained by none other than John Carradine.  There's also a groovy 70s first mate named Chuck, who's a perfect romantic interest for Rose.  Before anything much can happen though, the group experiences a strange solar phenomenon where everything turns orange.  Maybe it was that brown acid.  Chuck and the Captain lose control of their navigation devices, and they eventually have to admit that they're completely lost.  After the sun goes down, the yacht is sideswiped by a huge ship that comes out of nowhere in the darkness, and the yacht is stranded on a reef.

The next morning, the crew and passengers are forced to evacuate the yacht after they discover it's taking on water.  Taking the small lifeboat to a nearby island, they find the body of their captain in the water, presumably after drowning while checking the underside of the boat.  After exploring the island, they find an abandoned hotel, and quickly discover they're not alone.  Living on the island is a hermit (Peter Cushing) with a German accent (would this make him a Germit?), who is alarmed to hear of the appearance of the ship.  His concern is for a very good reason: the return of the wrecked ship means there are now a whole lot of zombies in the waters around the island.  He eventually confesses that he's a former SS Commander, marooned on the island since World War II.  He was in charge of a squadron of experimental zombies known as the Death Corps; soldiers not living and not dead, not needing to breathe or eat, and able to kill human beings with their bare hands.  When Germany lost the war, he sank the warship and quickly settled into his new role in life in exile. As a Germit.

The zombies converge on the island and begin their stalking.  The early victims get picked off when they're alone, but as the number of breathing people on the island dwindles, the zombies become more bold and chase down their prey.  Fans of cannibal zombies will be disappointed, as these dead guys aren't hungry, they only want to murder the hell out of you.  They're not Romero zombies at all, as they're clearly intelligent and have articulated movements.  Silent and creepy as hell, they're a truly frightening group with gray wrinkled skin and black goggles that give them an eyeless effect as well.  The zombies like to hide under the water until you pass nearby, then grab you and pull you under until the bubbles stop.

Peter Freakin' Cushing!!!

Released in 1977, "Shock Waves" was actually created and filmed in 1975, which has got to make it the first "Nazi zombie" movie ever.  The dreamlike atmosphere of the film is bolstered by the strange gaps in the narrative.  Where other movies want to talk you to death, "Shock Waves" is unusually quiet.  There are no conventional introductions to the characters, the story just starts as if we already know who these people are.  The orange solar phenomenon, which coincides with the reappearance of the German ship, remains bizarre and unexplained throughout the entire film.  It almost seems as if important character development or plot exposition was edited out of the film in post-production.  The director, Ken Wiederhorn, makes the most of the Florida setting, focusing on weird isolated locations to create a disorienting environment for the characters.  A lot of the action takes place in shallow tributaries and glassy pools of water surrounded by lush green vegetation, bizarre gray brush, and weird looking sea life.  The abandoned hotel is an amazing location too; I can't imagine a better place to live in exile.  Minus the zombies, of course. 

Nazi Zombie, or Backup Dancer for Lady Goggle?

"Shock Waves" also has a lot of the creativity that's often forced by a low budget.  In one of the movie's creepiest moments, just after the yacht has been stranded on a coral reef after nearly colliding with the ghost ship, the passengers all gather on the deck and peer out into the darkness, hoping to see what they could have wrecked into.  The Captain sends up a flare, and it momentarily illuminates the hulking German ship, now looking like nothing more than the skeletal remains of what was once a seafaring vessel.

John Carradine, doing that John Carradine eyebrow thing

The underwater shots of the dead soliders are very creepy.  The first time we see one, he's walking along the metal framework of the rusted ship, across the ocean floor. I felt uncomfortable watching it, mostly because one unbroken shot shows him walking through a strange underwater landscape of coral and vegetation, and I kept thinking "That actor has got to breathe sooner or later!"

Sometimes the shots of the zombies don't connect all that well with those of the actors reacting to them, as if the cast were not all together at the same time. There's some disorienting editing and meandering passages that seem to indicate padding, mostly with shots of the zombies appearing on screen, but I think it could have been an attempt to suggest many more zombies than were actually there. It creates a weird, hypnotic atmosphere to the film that goes well with the hazy sun-bleached cinematography. There aren't many movies where outdoor daytime photography with a lot of sunlight creates an atmosphere of dread, but this one comes to mind immediately.

The doomy synth score is a memorable aspect of "Shock Waves", too.  While it consists of only a few themes and riffs repeated through the movie, it contributes perfectly to the bleak atmosphere.  And also, could I geek out just a little bit over the fact that both John Carradine and PETER CUSHING are in this movie?  Their roles, especially Carradine's, are really nothing more than guest appearances, but it's enough to lend the movie some much-needed credibility that a totally anonymous cast might have had trouble with.  In the case of Cushing, it's amusing that "Shock Waves" appeared in theaters the same year he was also on screen in a movie called "Star Wars".



Nurse? Bring me my makeup....

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