Drones, atmospheres and a touch of depravity - A Halloween playlist

I may not get to watch any Horror films today so instead I'm lining up as many scary records as I can. A Halloween playlist of sorts, and we're starting with a huge slab of kosmiche weirdness courtesy of Tangerine Dream's 1972 album Zeit. It's not my favourite TD album, but it's certainly the scariest - 4 sides of unnerving atmospheres and drones, the album subtitled "A Largo in Four Movements", perhaps a nod to the album's classical undertones. All the usual spacey cliches come to the fore with Zeit, but the sci-fi trappings soon peel away with those long abrasive Ligetti-like cello lines that open the album. This is music heard in the cold empty wastes of endless space, or the abandoned alien city of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. It's a long grueling 75min trek and if you can make it to the end, you have my complements.

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This next selection is very much the Horror-film-by-proxy. I won’t get to see The Shining, or The Exorcist this evening but I can certainly listen to them, and this collection of Krzysztof Penderecki works contains selections from those films (and INLAND EMPIRE). Across this double CD, the Polish composer turns the traditional orchestra into an avant-garde labyrinth of woozy strings, brooding rumbles, ominous silences and disruptive percussive effects. It’s good to listen to this collection again, and hear those pieces so familiar from The Shining in their entirety, rather than the fragments Kubrick selected, judiciously so it must be said. As well as the titles listed above, James Horner's score for Aliens is strongly reminiscent of Penderecki's work especially the 1976 piece The Dream Of Jacob, included in this collection (and one of the pieces heard in The Shining)

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Carrion for Worm, the 1991 long-player from Arizona’s Nuclear Death is quite possibly the most unnerving album that emerged from the first wave of Death Metal. Deicide waged war on Christianity, and Cannibal Corpse and Autopsy drenched their albums in outrageous splatter but Nuclear Death were genuinely out on a limb, and lyrically their songs read like extracts from the diaries of Se7en’s John Doe.

Little boy with little penis
plays his organ in the dark;
his lust will forever be
with the feces of his homosexual lovers;
the boy will forever dine
on the feces of his homosexual lovers;
Little boy, perverted boy
don't grow up, just die...

Indeed. Carrion for Worm is a fantastic sounding album, with churning distorted guitars, grindcore velocity blast beats, and the demonic howl of vocalist Lori Bravo, a rare case of a woman fronting an extreme metal group. It's a shame the band never clawed its way out of the underground. Last year I read Choosing Death, a very good account of the early Death Metal scene and the author mentioned the mighty Bolt Thrower and their female bass player - a singular case of a woman in a death metal band. Evidently the author never heard of Nuclear Death.

Samhain

Dr. Sam Loomis explains a cryptic message left behind in Halloween 2... It's a favourite scene for many in Rick Rosenthal's enjoyable sequel, but I always cringe at Donald Pleasance's skewed pronunciation of the Gaelic word Samhain - which should have sounded phonetically speaking as "sow (as in the word for a female pig, sounds like south) in". Perhaps John Carpenter thought Samhain would sound too weird for American audiences, but Loomis, and Englishman supposedly well versed in Celtic mythology should have known better. I say supposedly because Samhain is not "the end of summer", but the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter - the Irish word for November is in fact Samhain, and here today in Ireland we are celebrating Oíche Shamhna (pronounced eee-ha how-na). Thankfully, that good Wexford man Dan O'Herlihy got it right in Season of the Witch...

Advice to fellow bloggers

I'm getting increasingly fed up by the amount of blogs that carry advertising. Just this morning, the content of two blogs I landed on was so interwoven with loud, dynamic advertising that I soon tired of both and went elsewhere. Which was a shame because both blogs looked so enticing – the first was an impressive trainspotter’s Beatles blog, while the second, was a blog post which examined the differences between the longer and shorter versions of Andrei Rublev. The latter was especially regretful – the author had clearly put some effort into the work, illustrating his text with screen grabs from the different versions, but disastrously, every second or third screenshot was interspersed with an ad, ruining what was a perfectly good post. For the humble blog with a small readership, ads are a bad strategy. Next to nothing will be made in revenue for the smaller, more personal journals, and no matter how well written and designed a blog is, the function of the ad is to draw readers attention away from content the author might have spent some time crafting. Ads look sleazy, and if I understand Adsense correctly, blog owners have little control over what they appear to be endorsing – was the Beatles blogger really recommending I buy a blood sugar meter ? Annoying…

Toys Are Not for Children

Marcia Forbes playing a young woman who’s never heard the old adage of be careful what you wish for, in Toys Are Not for Children…

I had a belated second screening of this 1972 film last night, some 16 years (!) after I first picked up the Something Weird DVD (double-featured with the 1971 sexploitation fantasia The Toy Box), and very much enjoyed it. Prior to last night’s screening, I had but a sketchy memory of the film and much of the nuance was long forgotten. Mondo Digital's Nathaniel Thompson called the film a cross between Andy Milligan and Joe Sarno, and I might have included early John Waters as well inasmuch as the film clearly has an intelligence and ambition that elevates it above the usual grungy Harry Novak-produced fare. I particularly enjoyed the film’s editing style which frequently disrupts the narrative’s timeline, and there are some fine performances in the film, chiefly Marcia Forbes, a rather lovely and enigmatic beauty who lends her character a compelling childlike naivete that elicits one's sympathies. It looks like Toys was her only appearance on celluloid which is a shame. I liked too actor Luis Arroyo, here playing a tough-talking pimp, and I could easily imagine him as a peripheral character on the side lines of Mean Streets. If the film’s main talking point is the climactic scene, and one character’s dreadful misunderstanding of the situation, I couldn’t help but feel even more unnerved by the repetition of shots of the 6-year old daughter and the father. Still, I’m very pleased Arrow have brought this singular film back into circulation (and in fine style too), and I’ll definitely upgrade the tatty looking Something Weird edition…

Up the stream without a... Blu-Ray

I've had Netflix (Ireland) for several months now but it was only at the weekend that I finally sat down to watch Roma. I thought the film was absolutely magnificent, unquestionably one of the best films of the century, but after watching the film the gulf between streaming film and collecting film was thrown into sharp focus. While I enjoy Netflix and Prime, the experience of watching film on both platforms remains completely ephemeral, much like catching a film on broadcast television. Quite often a TV screening or stream is used as a sort of audition for adding a film to my collection. So Talking Pictures on Sky has become a good source for Indicator titles - it matters little that Talking Pictures' quality control is often mediocre - films are invariably soft looking and often shown squeezed, but these presentations serve well enough as "run-throughs" - the main event comes not with this initial introduction but with the Blu-Ray purchased afterwards. I felt the same way seeing Once Upon a Time In Hollywood recently. Despite seeing it on a large IMAX screen, the experience was entirely transitory - what I truly savored in the days that followed the screening was the thought of re-watching the film again (and again!) at home on BR on the 55" LG.

Seeing Roma at the weekend, the exhilaration of discovering this extraordinary film was tempered by the fact that I can’t buy a physical copy of the film, in an optimum presentation, with supplements and artwork. Beyond that, I can’t even display this incredible film on my shelf (where it would sit alongside Fellini’s 1972 twin-in-name film). Some might say that it’s the film itself that counts, that all the rest is window dressing, but for me physical media and all the rituals that come with it still matters. I think I’m finally making peace with the idea that films on boutique labels like Second Run and Indicator (two labels whose labours of love rarely dip below the £10 ceiling) are simply worth that extra bit of money.

Not now Pink !

Earlier today, I finished reading Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, my second read of Mark Blake’s excellent biography, and evidently I had forgotten how depressing the second half of the book is, when the band hit the ‘80’s, and suffered a dictatorial songwriter, an inevitable breakup, and a re-emergence as a dreary AOR outfit with all the rough edges that once made the group so special, thoroughly sanded away. The shots fired between Roger Waters and Floyd Mark III (Gilmour, Mason, Wright and a supporting cast of session players) makes for genuinely painful reading, not to mention the plight of Syd Barrett and his ailing mental health, which never stopped fans and the press intruding upon his life. I’ve always felt the Floyd did their finest work up to Dark Side of the Moon, and everything that followed was superfluous. When I picked up Mark Blake’s book, I was seriously considering buying the Discovery boxset, to upgrade my 1967-1973 CDs and finally add Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and subsequent albums to the collection, but upon completion of the book, that plan is no more...

Der Golem (1920, dirs. Carl Boese & Paul Wegener)

With growing anticipation of Masters of Cinema's forthcoming Blu-Ray of Der Golem (due November), I dug out my old Kino DVD on Monday night to see how the disc still holds up. Back in the early noughties, it was incredibly exciting to finally catch up with the great masterworks of early German Cinema in the best presentations home video technology of the day would allow. Nevertheless, the arrival of the MOC Blu-Ray will be most welcome. The image on the Kino disc has had most of its detail scrubbed out by the excessively bright tinting and the source prints used are heavily speckled with debris and damage. I wasn't expecting the Kino DVD to be so redundant (in fairness, it's 15 years old!) but it makes the Blu-Ray edition all the more exciting. The film of course is marvelous and eerily prophetic - I was especially struck by the placing of the Star of David on the Golem to give it life - something that the Nazis would essentially reverse with the Yellow Star as a symbol of humiliation and ultimately, a death sentence. This was not a new idea introduced by the Third Reich, it had been used as far back as medieval times to mark out Jewish communities, but with Der Golem being a German film, the image of the Yellow Star is loaded with significance. The film has many parallels with Universal’s Frankenstein film, but weirdly, I thought of Jess Franco’s Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, during a brief close-up of Paul Wegener, whose make up appears, at least on the monochrome image, as silver colored, as per Fernando Bilbao’s memorable silver-sprayed monster in Franco’s film…

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

“Jennifer Gentle you're a witch. You're the left side, He’s the right side. Oh, no!”

I’ve been listening to Piper at the Gates of Dawn this evening, rotating the mono and stereo mixes, packaged together for the album's 40th anniversary, and despite the general consensus by Pink Floyd fans that the mono mix is superior, I find the stereo far more satisfying; the separation between instruments lends the album a scale and grandeur the mono lacks (Flaming, the best song on the album feels like black and white in the mono version to the stereo’s Technicolor), and there’s a greater depth to the “little instruments” scattered throughout the album. Still, there are moments when the mono mix surges ahead - Rick Wright’s organ is far more present on the mono Interstellar Overdrive, and there’s far more bite and attack to Syd Barrett’s guitar and Nick Mason’s drums. On my second pass of the mono version, I actually turned the volume up past my own comfort level, and the album felt genuinely abrasive, perhaps an approximation of what the band sounded like when it was playing small club dates at deafening levels. Listening to the album again this evening, the level of invention for a debut is outrageous and there’s the excitement of hearing a new language being forged (which found its greatest expression in the German avant-rock bands that followed). I’m not sure if Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a better record than Sgt. Pepper, probably not - The Scarecrow and Bike are too whimsical for their own good, but either way, stereo or mono, it’s an astonishing album...

Dario and David

David Bowie and Dario Argento photographed for the May 1995 issue of Italian culture magazine Sette... This momentous meeting of two great icons took place in London during promotion tours for the Outside album and The Stendhal Syndrome. I don't have my 3 or 4 Bowie biographies at hand right now, but I don't recall Argento earning a mention in any of them, so I wonder will this great summit (and indeed Bowie and Argento's first meeting over in Berlin in 1978 at a dinner with Fassbinder) feature in the forthcoming English-language edition of Argento's 2014 autobiography Paura ? I was initially tempted to pre-order the book when it was first announced, but I've read a few awkwardly translated Italian reviews of the book and they suggest there's nothing terribly revelatory for seasoned Argento scholars. We'll wait and see...

The Dead Pit (1989, dir. Brett Leonard)

That sinking feeling when a film favourite from the past no longer cuts it... Not that it was ever a favourite even when I first saw this on VHS back in the early 90's, but I did once have great affection for Brett Leonard's 1989 debut The Dead Pit. I decided to revisit the film at the weekend courtesy of Code Red's 2008 DVD. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour when it finally went on (well after midnight, never a good time), but I found the film a bit of a slog to get thru, at 100mins, it's far too long, and despite some enthusiastic gore (including a brain-tweeking pre-Hannibal lobotomy), the film features some of the most laughably spastic zombies I've seen in a long time, hamming it up to absurd levels. Cheryl Lawson isn't quite up to the task of playing a character in near constant hysteria but at least she looks gorgeous running around in a skimpy vest and cotton panties (?) I've always felt the film had something of a European sensibility, perhaps a dash of Lucio Fulci here, a pinch of Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue there, but on this viewing, the film might be better enjoyed alongside Zombi 3 and After Death. Code Red's DVD badly needs an overhaul as well, the transfer looks just a little too soft in this day and age. It would make a fine addition to Vinegar Syndrome's roster of remastered late 80's Horrors, and perhaps then it might warrant another viewing...