Moving House !

This blog has been on something of a hiatus for the last few weeks as we began preparing to move house. We put up the house for sale back in June 2010 and come this Thursday the process will be complete. I should be painting the town red with happiness now we're finally getting out of a neighbourhood that has been quickly going downhill these past few years - think of the neighbours as a cross between the gypsies in Snatch and the locals in Straw Dogs - but all I'm feeling is a sense a quiet relief. Property prices in Ireland continue to crash like falling masonry so we got out at good time I think. The whole selling/buying process has been fraught with difficulties along the way - bitter compromises and 11th hour negotiations but I'm about to draw a line in the sand now between my old life and a hopefully brighter new one, so all those regrets can be swept aside...

I won't be offline for the next few weeks, I'm still planning on posting the occasional thing just to keep these pages looking fresh, but with my DVDs locked away in storage for the next few weeks, the action will be limited. The pic below is just one of the many boxes of DVDs that I've filled in the last week or so, I knew my collection was fairly big (approx 2,000 DVDs in 10 years) but the minute I began peeling them off their neatly arranged shelves it all became a huge headache, so there's a lesson in there somewhere...

A boxed life....from Grindhouse to Arthouse to new house (ho, ho!)

The Deer Hunter

"Did you ever think life would turn out like this?" asks one of the characters in Michael Cimino's 1978 signature film The Deer Hunter. It's a key line in the story of three Pennsylvanian steelworkers whose lives are drastically changed by their experiences in the Vietnam war...

Cimino's masterstroke was to make The Deer Hunter a long form work, and the film greatly benefits from the time and space awarded to the characters. In fact, this 3-hour film is in no great hurry to get done - its only after the first 40min or so that the main protagonists come into focus and we begin to learn about their personalities. This early part of the film is the most leisurely paced - the lengthy wedding sequence prompted one commentator of the film to express embarrassment for not turning up with a gift; but The Deer Hunter never feels long - as the grand sweep of the film takes us from the monolithic steel works, along the drab streets of the town, to the hunting grounds of the mountains, the killing fields of South East Asia and the turbulent swirl of Saigon. Worth mentioning the terrific moment where the familiar life of the steel workers is swept away to a mournful Chopin piano refrain, played by George Dzunda's character, as the film abruptly cuts to the second act set in Vietnam.

Cimino's direction for the most part is subtle and unobtrusive and captures well the nuances of blue collar town life, with its 24-hour bars full of shift workers, its deeply religious traditions and the rough treatment of the women by their men. It's a tough film, not alone for the bloody Russian Roulette sequence (which earned the film much controversy and accusations of racism) but the film is full of interactions and relationships punctuated by awkward moments, and characters trying and failing to fit and connect. Also the look of the film is uncompromising, austere in its use of color, with cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond desaturating the frame, creating a sombre mood. Even the Vietnam sequences are spare in their color, an aesthetic borrowed from the 16mm news footage that Americans came to know the war by, the very opposite of the lush, jungle exotica of Apocalypse Now.

Of course the film has one of the more celebrated ensemble casts in American film. Robert De Niro¹, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Savage, John Cazale and George Dzundza deliver career best performances, even non-actor Chuck Aspegrenall who was Cimino's access into the world of the steel industry when scouting locations for the film, equips himself well amid all the heavyweights, in his role of Axel.

Admittedly the film has its flaws - Cimino's use of insert stock footage of Vietnam scenes is simply clumsy, and that the three marines would end up together as prisoners of war by sheer coincidence feels a little contrived. But more seriously, Christopher Walken disappears for virtually the second half of the film only to reappear for the finale where his character has gone through such a radical shift in personality, that the emotional pay-off of the climax doesn't quite work as it should. Nevertheless The Deer Hunter is a magnificent, ballsy film and one of the last great movies of the 70's.

My copy of The Deer Hunter is the Studio Canal UK 2-disc edition from 2003. It's hardly worth mentioning this particular edition as the Optimum Blu-Ray is superior in every way. The extras from the DVD have been ported over to the BR and they're well worth the time. Cimino turns in an excellent, engaging and very thorough commentary track, no mean feat for a three-hour film. Cimino returns for the first of three features on the making of the film. The director repeats some information from the commentary track but expands on other subjects including Jane Fonda's² reaction to the film. The 2nd feature has Vilmos Zsigmond discussing the shooting conditions and his lighting choices, while the 3rd segment features John Savage and his relationship to the film, which at one point causes Savage to become emotionally upset when recalling how he reconnected with the film some years later when he heard Cavatina, John Williams's stirring theme music.

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Notes
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1. Robert De Niro has appeared in 4 films playing Vietnam veterans. In addition to The Deer Hunter, he played a vet in De Palma's Hi Mom! (1970), an unstable vet in Taxi Driver (1976), and finally in Jacknife in 1989

2. Jane Fonda apparently disliked the film for it's portayal of the Vietnamese, and no doubt the coda of the film where the surviving cast sing "God Bless America". Fonda herself stared in Coming Home made the same year as The Deer Hunter, which took a more caustic view of the Vietman veteran experience. Cimino, not one to mince words refers to Fonda as "Hanoi Jane", the name Fonda was given after her trip to Hanoi in 1972 where she criticized the American campaign in Vietnam.

Under Pressure - Making The Abyss

It seems we're still a while away from seeing James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss surface on Blu-Ray. Rumour has it that the film will get a HD release in December 2011. Until then Fox's DVD should suffice, if only for the inclusion of Under Pressure - Making the Abyss, a superb hour long chronicle of the making of Cameron's epic sci-fi.

When it comes to special effects films I normally shy away from "making of" features - I prefer that the magician's secrets remain just that, but Under Pressure makes for fascinating, compelling viewing, detailing the enormous engineering challenges the film makers had to overcome to realise Cameron's vision, as well as the considerable demands the film placed on the actors. The set was an abandoned nuclear power plant in South Carolina which housed a reactor containment vessel big enough to create the 7 million gallon underwater world of The Abyss.

For years Cameron has had a reputation for being some sort of latter day Otto Preminger, a film maker whose temper is often let loose on his cast and crew. The film largely avoids such drama, but there are some candid moments where Cameron's patience is tested when faced with cast and crew griping. Cameron makes for excellent, intelligent company and is honest enough to admit that at times the production was out of it's depth, as it faced unforeseen bad weather (which led to the production switching to night shoots), and more seriously, huge plumbing problems with the tank.

Interestingly Cameron mentions the scene in the film where a rat is made to breathe "liquid oxygen" and points out that the scene was cut in the UK over concerns of animal cruelty. Actually, the British Board of Film Classification had the scene re-framed (and awkwardly so), with the rat appearing mostly out of shot. It still remains one of the Board's more controversial decisions (and mandated by the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act). This modification still exists today on the UK DVD.

Admittedly Cameron soft pedals some of the tougher moments the actors were subjected to, but thankfully the cast who still seem bruised by the film's difficult shoot, rarely hold back. Ed Harris painfully reveals at one point that he had a brush with death as he found himself at the bottom of the tank with no oxygen, while Michael Biehn remembers an occasion where the submerged cast were plunged into total darkness when the lights in the tank lost power. Yet another story from the shoot involves Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio storming off the set during the filming of her scene where she is resuscitated after drowning - a particularly intense take had to be abandoned when the camera ran out of film, which enraged the actress and caused her leave that day's filming. Tellingly Mastrantonio is the only cast member who didn't participate in the documentary. Perhaps some memories are too painful to share...

Under Pressure - Making The Abyss is available on the 2-disc DVD edition of The Abyss, and can also be viewed at youtube
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On a personal note, The Abyss has a special place in my heart as it was my first taste of a phenomenon known as the "Director's Cut", when Fox released the long 3 hour version of the film in the early 90's on VHS. Not only that, it was my first time seeing a "Widescreen" film, a concept that left people utterly bewildered back in the day...

Black Christmas

My final post for the Christmas holiday (which officially ends today!) and we go out with a classic. Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas never quite gets a shout out in the roll call of Essential 70's Horror movies, despite its sheer brilliance, and its importance in the evolution of the genre, but more of that in a moment... It's Christmastime at a women's sorority house and celebrations are being routinely interrupted by a creepy prank phone caller. Initially shrugged off, the calls become increasingly crazed and obscene and one of the sorority sisters has gone missing, while the caller himself seems to be dangerously close...

As the title suggests, this not only turns the traditional Christmas film on its head but chops it clean off, a movie that can still generate some real scares nearly 40 years on. The abusive phone calls are genuinely shocking and disturbing (no doubt an influence on When A Stranger Calls) and while the violence may not wash the screen in red, it's suitably grim and ugly. I'm reluctant to reveal too much detail about the plot as the film quite brazenly refuses to tow the line of the traditional thriller but be warned about the deeply subversive ending, which will delight and infuriate in equal measure.

Nowadays it's de rigueur to discuss Halloween in the same breath as Black Christmas and while John Carpenter's film may be the archetype of the modern slasher film, Bob Clark's film is the archetype of the archetype. Halloween may well be a superior, more streamlined (and better behaved) horror film, but Black Christmas casts a long shadow over Carpenter's film. It's difficult to appreciate the achievement of the film after 30 years of slasher cinema, but the distorted point-of-view shots through the killer's eyes, the unsettling score (by the brilliant Carl Zittrer), the use of darkness and eerie empty spaces were ground-breaking in it's day, and John Carpenter wisely employed Bob Clark's great style when designing his own classic scare show.

Aided by the director's very fine screenplay, performances are strong throughout - the gorgeous Olivia Hussey as the long-suffering heroine, 2001's Kier Dullea, whose sensitive musician is somehow not quite right; John Saxon, playing the cop investigating the sinister goings-on (his lieutenant Fuller could have easily walked straight into A Nightmare on Elm Street), and best of all, Margot Kidder, fresh from de Palma's Sisters, playing a foul-mouted, boozed-up party girl and providing some crass humour to dispel some of the darker undercurrents in the film.

Black Christmas has had quite a complicated history on home video, as well as DVD where it was issued in differing transfers on both sides of the Atlantic. The film was released on Blu-Ray in 2008 courtesy of Critical Mass. This disc copped some heat for its underwhelming picture, but I must say that this is the best Black Christmas has ever looked, far superior to any previous release. The 1.78 image is sharp and relatively clean and copes very well with the film's copious amounts of dark photography. On the whole very watchable. The mono track is fine and robust - I've heard talk of the stereo track having minor sync problems so stick with the mono option. Finally, the extras from the previous special edition DVD have been ported over for the Blu-Ray. An ill-advised Black Christmas remake came and went in 2006.

Peter Cushing - Past Forgetting

Back in print again and for the first time in digital, Peter Cushing's reading of his second autobiography, Past Forgetting, subtitled A Memoir of the Hammer Years. Cushing was compelled to write a second book on his life, after fans petitioned him, wanting to hear more about his work as an actor, his first book, simply called An Autobiography, concentrated on his life with his beloved wife Helen. In Past Forgetting, Cushing admits that the life of an actor is rarely as exciting as people imagine it to be, but nevertheless gives a very fine whistle-stop account of his long career on stage, television and Cinema.

Cushing reads from his book with impeccable tone and diction and is a joy to listen to. A dapper old school Englishman with impeccable manners, Cushing's reminiscences of his career is full of kindnesses toward his fellow artists and reveals a fondness and respect for his work in Cinema, especially the Horror films he made. At one point he amusingly recalls some of his screen deaths including Ken Wiederhorn's 1977 Shock Waves:

 "The next merry little prank took place in Miami's Palm Beach, Florida in a film called Death Corps when some rather unpleasant gentleman drowned me by holding my head under the stagnant waters of the Everglades and left me there as crocodile bait. I was playing a Nazi officer so I deserved all that I had to swallow...

It's worth noting however that the subtitle of the audio book is something of a stretch - fans expecting a comprehensive overview of his days at Hammer will be disappointed as Cushing rarely dwells on any one film he made at the studio but he does impart some fascinating tidbits, like suggesting to Terence Fisher that there should be a scene in The Mummy to explain the hole in the Mummy's torso as seen in Bill Wiggin's poster art, which was already finished before the the production of the film wrapped. Hammer fans will definitely be disappointed about omissions - I wish Cushing had spoke about one of his finest films for the studio Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, and he only mentions in passing his role in the Nigel Kneale scripted BBC adaption of Nineteen Eighty-Four filmed live for the BBC in 1954.

These minor complaints aside, Past Forgetting is an excellent, engaging listen and Cushing has a wonderful sense of humour and playfulness, as well as a great modesty for his enormous talents. Originally the audio book was released in 1988 as 3 cassettes and has been difficult to find over the years until audio book specialists Cosmic Hobo Productions remastered the tapes for CD in 2010. The same label also has a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories read by Cushing. An if that wasn't enough, you can download a copy of Cushing reading an adaptation of Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, from the original Warners vinyl LP from 1974.

Haunted Air - A Collection of Anonymous Halloween Photographs America c. 1875 - 1955

If you're one of those people who get a frisson from the sequence in The Wicker Man where the islanders don animal masks for the May Day sacrifice, then this book is for you. Haunted Air - A Collection of Anonymous Halloween Photographs America c. 1875 - 1955, is a wonderful compendium of found photographs of people dressing up to celebrate Halloween. That the photographs are from a bygone era of early 20th century rural America, lends the book a very special quality - the masks and costumes seen throughout the book are almost entirely homemade, with children, adults and whole families appearing as ghosts and ghouls, witches and warlocks, horned devils, sad faced Lon Chaney style harlequins, scary monsters and the odd figure in the then traditional blackface.

Leafing through the pictures in the book, one gets the impression that Halloween for these people had far more significance than it does in today's over commercialized culture, that for these Southern farming-belt communities, it was an important festival to remember the dead, ward off bad luck, and the signifying of the arrival of the hard winter chill. The photographs are faithfully reproduced throughout with no discernible digital manipulation. Some of the photographs are fresh, while others show the ravages of time, and the book is all the better for it - one imagines this collection was culled from the dark recesses of wardrobes and cupboards, and dusty photo albums; forgotten, neglected, the identity of the masked and anonymous participants having long since drifted into the ether like the spirits of the dead they are depicting.

Haunted Air opens with a forward by David Lynch, a poetic afterword by Geoff Cox and a short historical note by the book's author and curator Ossian Brown. The book comes as a sturdy cloth cover hard back and is available from Amazon or direct from the book's dedicated site. Essential viewing for lovers of weird and macabre Americana.

A Chuck Norris / Joseph Zito Double-Bill

It always seemed an absurd notion to me that the Vietnamese government would maintain POW camps holding American soldiers after the war had ended, but who am I to argue with such an idea considering it gave us Rambo: First Blood Part II and 1984's Missing In Action, starring Chuck Norris and directed by Joseph Zito. In the film, Norris plays Braddock, a Vietnam vet who travels with a diplomatic party to Saigon to finally settle the matter of American soldiers still held by the Vietnamese government. Convinced the government is lying, Braddock heads back into the jungle to finally bring the last of his fellow brothers in arms home...

Cast aside any ideas about Missing In Action being a guilty pleasure, the film simply does what it says on the tin, that being a rollicking good action film. Directed with fizz, energy and economy by Joseph Zito (who directed the gory slasher The Prowler and the best of the Friday the 13th sequels, Part 4: The Final Chapter), the film wastes precious time hurtling from one explosive set piece to another. The central sequence of the film is perhaps the best, when Braddock prepares his mission from Bangkok, featuring some good South East Asian color (a la The Deer Hunter), an excellent dockside car chase and some nifty beatbox music injecting some life into Jay Chattaway's otherwise typical action movie score.

Chuck Norris turns in a good performance as Braddock - in fairness, the character is a man of few words and Norris at least knows how to run around with machine gun and make it look convincing. Sterling support too from M. Emmet Walsh, and the go-to-guy for Asian villainy James Wong. The film would prove to be a big hit for Cannon, and would birth two sequels of varying quality ¹. Still, the original film is a well deserved minor classic of 80's Exploitation Cinema, although in hindsight Missing In Action now looks increasingly like a dry run for the next Norris/Zito collaboration, the epic undertakings of 1985's Invasion USA ².

For Invasion USA, Cannon brought the war back home with a bang. Christmas has been cancelled in Miami as an army of terrorists, led by some nefarious Russians (naturally) are cutting a swathe of destruction across the Southern state in an effort to engulf the US in a state of chaos and the eventual destruction of the American way of life. Fear not as Chuck Norris is back, playing Matt Hunter, a hard-ass ex. CIA operative who doesn't take this kind of messing lying down, especially with a few scores to settle and some unfinished business involving the terrorist leader...

Invasion USA was a big Cannon production and it looks it - with an impressive array of extras, copious amounts of military hardware, vehicles of all description, usually meeting a sticky demise and large elaborate sets that are riddled with bullets and blown to bits with wild abandon. Joseph Zito, back in the director's chair again does a fine job orchestrating the non-stop carnage and the film is well paced (just under 2 hours no less!) and looks good, especially the opening sequences set in the Florida everglades. Chuck Norris' performance is pitched at the same level as Missing In Action, his character here interchangeable from Braddock, and is best described, to borrow from Blade Runner as "a goddamn one-man slaughterhouse". Still, as a laconic gunslinger wielding two uzis, it works just fine. Good stuff too from Richard Lynch, always reliable as a low-rent Rutger Hauer, making a formidable nemesis for Chuck Norris as the terrorist mastermind leading the invasion.

Missing In Action and Invasion USA are available on DVD, both MGM catalogue titles meaning they're serviceable looking discs, and at least are inexpensive, so if you can drag yourself away from your Yasujirô Ozu DVDs for a few hours both films are highly recommended touchstones of 80's action cinema.

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Notes
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1. The subject of Missing In Action's sequels is a curious one. Cannon actually had the Part 2 of the series in production alongside Part 1. Originally, "Part 2", directed by Lance Hool was to be released first (the film set chronologically before Part 1) but when both films were in post production Cannon realised that the Joseph Zito lensed film was the stronger of the two so the studio wisely chose to release the Zito film first, and what would become Part 2 was promoted as a prequel to the original and was released as Missing In Action 2: The Beginning. The final installment of the series, Braddock: Missing in Action III was released in 1988

2. As titles go Invasion USA is one of the better ones, but an obscure 1952 film was the first to use the title. The 1952 film was about a Communist invasion of America, as too was Red Dawn John Milius' 1984 film about an invasion of the United States by Soviet Union and Cuban forces.

The Post of Christmas Past

Happy Christmas, or if you're deeply offended by such a vulgar gesture, Happy Holidays. I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan of Christmas - I find it stressful, trying to rush out and choose presents that loved ones might actually like, rather than pretend to like; being unable to stop myself gorging on big meals and endless junk food; and having little time to do anything else because my job is really busy towards the end of the year.

I wasn't always such a grouch. Christmas was an altogether more magical time when I was younger. In the days before the VCR and satellite TV, Christmas was a glorious time for TV, when networks would roll out the big premieres. Nowadays the Harry Potter series is firmly established as the staple Christmas movie, but when I was growing up in the 80's, it was Star Wars. I was also a big Star Wars Toys kid and every Christmas I would a get Star Wars vehicle. My pride and joy was Han Solo's Millennium Falcon. My Dad still likes to remind me how much money he paid for it back in the day, and how much all my Star Wars toys would be worth today had I not swept them all up and passed them on to younger relatives. I do wish I kept them now...

Milestones / Ice - the French DVD

Now that we are in dying weeks of 2010, I can safely say my favourite DVD release of 2010 has been the French label Capricci's 2-disc release of Robert Kramer's 1969 film Ice and his 1975 masterpiece Milestones. Ice focuses on an underground revolutionary group plotting and staging guerrilla style attacks on an American government locked in a war with Mexico. Kramer examines the workings of the organization from within the group, focusing on the tactics, strategies, and the difficulties of achieving the success of their aims in the face of internal squabbling, brutal and oppressive punishment by the police and the sheer difficulty of co-coordinating their efforts with other revolutionary groups, with similar ends but differing means. Ice was shot on b/w 16mm film stock and has an incredible vérité feel to it, remaining to this day quite a radical, thought provoking film, which fans of Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers and Conta-Gavras' State of Siege should seek out...

Ice's running time of two hours might seem excessive for a political thriller, but it's modest in comparison with Kramer's 1975 epic Milestones, which runs about 3 hours 20min. The film is essentially a huge patchwork of various people - including a film maker, an anti-war activist released from prison, a troubled Vietnam vet, a blind potter, a young woman preparing to have a baby - all working out their lives and problems of living in America in the 70's against the backdrop of the Vietnam conflict. Like Ice, Milestones is a sort of "fictionalized" (and scripted) documentary but some 5 years on from Ice, Kramer's direction has loosened up and the film has some stylish flourishes - Kramer uses a wide angle lens in some sequences (lending a strange exaggerated depth of field), and the director employs some Nouvelle Vague-ish licks - jump-cuts, over-lapping dialogue, and a free sense of editing, with Kramer dropping in newsreel footage and photo montages of slave trade documents, tenement poverty and the brutal, shameful treatment of blacks and Native Americans in the United States. Two sequences standout amidst this huge tapestry - an astonishing, surreal nightmare, and an unflinching child birth sequence. Epic in form, epic in content, Milestones remains a key work of American Independent Cinema.

Milestones and Ice are available as a 2-disc French DVD courtesy of Capricci. Both films are presented with optional removable subtitles (in French or Spanish). The full-frame transfers of both films are not without their problems. Ice is the worst of the two. The transfer itself is fine, but the print used is well worn, with lots of debris, lines, tears and scratches. On the plus side, the image is bright, has good contrast and detail is sharp. By no means, a Criterion remaster, but nevertheless a perfectly acceptable transfer considering the rarity of the film. Milestones which was shot in color and is the better of the two, transfer wise, with less damage, evidently sourced from a good 16mm print (less troublesome than the one used for Ice) and featuring strong detail and good color. Audio for both films is fine, each of the films having a minimal amount of music anyhow. Neither film contains any extras. Capricci's DVD set comes in a fold-out cardboard sleeve, with both discs housed separately along side some stills from both films.

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Notes

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Robert Kramer is well represented on French DVD. In addition to the Milestones / Ice DVD, there are DVDs of Cities of the Plain (his final film, from 2001), a double-bill DVD featuring Doc's Kingdom / Walk the Walk ('87/'96) and a 3-disc edition of Kramer's long-form road movie masterpiece Route One USA (1989). Unfortunately Doc's Kingdom / Walk the Walk have hard coded subtitles, and the French language Cities of the Plain has no English subs. Thankfully Route One USA is a superb set, with an excellent transfer and extras, and featuring removable subs. The 4-hour film spread over 2 discs, the third disc being an audio CD of the music from the film.

The Art of Hammer - Posters from the Archive of Hammer Films

Hammer fans and movie poster lovers would do well to check out Titan's latest Hammer effort, The Art of Hammer - Posters from the Archive of Hammer Films, a large 26 x 33cm 192 page hardback coffee table book collecting almost 300 Hammer movie posters from down thru the years - British quads, US one-sheets, foreign and International posters of Hammers famous, not so famous and down right obscure (The Snorkel ?). The book is printed on high quality glossy paper and divided into three decades - 50's, 60's and 70's. The book features credits for each poster, including some interesting notes and facts - did you know that ubiquitous Hammer player Michael Ripper's name only ever appeared on one Hammer poster - the 1957 war film The Steel Bayonet; or that the poster for Hammer's Camp on Blood Island (below) was banned from appearing in locations around London (and on the Underground). The following pics are taken from my copy.

Peter Christopherson 1955 - 2010

I'm still stunned and confused by the sudden death yesterday of Peter Christopherson aka Sleazy, one-quarter of Throbbing Gristle and one-half of Coil. I've been listening to TG and Coil for 18 years now so Peter has always been a huge presence in my life. Hardly a few days would go by without me putting on one of their albums. Peter was also one of the designers at Hipgnosis (and worked on sleeve designs for Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Animals, and Peter Gabriel's early solo LPs), in between TG and Coil, he was a member of Psychic TV, he was an accomplished video director (Erasure's A Little Respect, videos for Rage Against the Machine, Sepultura, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails' The Broken Movie) and in recent times was still producing brilliant post-Coil music with The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, SoiSong and the reformed Throbbing Gristle. A few years ago we swapped emails - I was bugging him about re-issuing old Coil albums and he was always friendly, accessible and generous with his time. I will miss him dearly.

Reflecting on Peter's work today, I found myself drawn to his photography and those recurring themes - urban landscapes, naked flesh, injured bodies, and the kind of violent, thuggish youth that might have stepped from the pages of Burroughs' 1971 novel The Wild Boys. I gathered together some favorites...

▲ John Lydon photographed in 1976. Malcolm McClaren commissioned Peter to take the first publicity photos of the Sex Pistols but deciding that the portraits were too grim the photographs were never used.

▲ Val Denham with Hitler Youth knife photographed in 1979. This image appeared on Volume 1 of Mute's Live TG collection while an alternative shot appeared on Fetish's Discipline 12"

▲ One of Peter's "Casualty Simulation" photographs, date unknown.

▲ Adrenalin/Distant Dreams (Part 2) 7" single. The image of a desolate suburban street is given a sinister flavor by the presence of a singe discarded shoe. The inset picture is more mysterious - some kind of machine, possibly the bellows of an old camera.

▲ An evocative photo of the Oakland bridge for the Mission of Dead Souls album, Throbbing Gristle's original final concert in San Francisco in 1981. Photographing the bridge from this particular angle, the vanishing point makes it appear that the bridge goes on forever

▲ Reel to reel tape recorder photographed for the William Burroughs tape experiments collection Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, the original final release on Industrial Records, 1981

Creepshow 2

Admittedly, issue #2 of Creepshow is nobody's favourite film. Made in 1987 and directed by long-time Romero cameraman Michael Gornick¹, it's a distinctly low-key² affair compared to the original film, paring down Creepshow's five-story framework to three³. In the first story, Old Chief Wood'n Head, a wooden Indian statue comes to life to seek revenge after a kindly shop owner and his wife are slain by some thugs... The middle segment, The Raft has a bunch of teens menaced by the blob-like inhabitant of a lake... The concluding story, The Hitchhiker is about a woman who can't seem to shake off a persistent traveler of the night - even after running him over and leaving him for dead on the highway...

In many ways, Creepshow 2 is best described in terms of other unappreciated sequels like Halloween II and Hellbound: Hellraiser II - they don't hold a candle to their parent films, but in amongst the clutter, there is plenty to enjoy. In the case of Creepshow 2, at least two of the segments are genuine winners. Old Chief Wood'n Head, is a bit of a dud, but The Raft and The Hitchhiker are wonderfully grisly and gory (with FX courtesy of Ed French and two-thirds of KNB, Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger). Michael Gornick's direction on Creepshow 2 is not especially slick or stylish but at least the film looks good, from the dusty Arizona town of Old Chief Wood'n Head, to the tranquil lake-setting of The Raft, and the chilly woodlands of The Hitchhiker. Veteran Hollywood soldiers George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour add some marquee value but in general the film is weakened by some stiff performances. Constant readers of Stephen King will get a kick out of seeing their hero playing another character from his gallery of rednecks in his short cameo. Incidentally the trailer for The Raft reveals the great sucker punch ending so if you haven't seen the film it's best avoided. Worth mentioning the animated segments of the film, starring "The Creep" who introduces each story. In addition there's a second animated thread about a young Creepshow reader, and one effective way of dealing with bullies. The animation is rather clunky - think Scooby-Doo, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Anchor Bay have dusted off Creepshow 2 for a very fine release on both sides of the Atlantic. The transfer is pretty good considering the film stock of this era - it's still a soft looking film, but at least the colors look solid and the print itself is clean. Audio is good too, as are the extras - a short featurette on the film and an audio commentary by Michael Gornick who discusses the nuts and bolts of the production.

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Notes
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1. Romero fans will know Michael Gornick as the cinematographer on some of the director's key films - Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Creepshow. Originally Tom Savini was to make his directorial debut with Creepshow 2 but the task eventually fell to Gornick who had previously directed an episode of TV series Tales From the Darkside. Savini does appear in the film, albeit under heavy makeup as "The Creep" in the live action sequences that bookend the film.

2. Low-key and low-budget... Warners who bankrolled the original Creepshow were less enthused about a sequel, and the film wound up at the more modest New World Pictures. The production had its fair share of difficulties. Delays due to bad weather put the film behind schedule, there was a change of principle crew members at one point, and Barbara Eden who was originally cast as the lead in The Hitchhiker episode was forced to drop out of the film.

3. Creepshow 2's trilogy of stories were penned by Stephen King and George Romero. The Raft was an existing story and came from King's 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. It was never intended that George Romero direct the film - at the time, the director was preparing his adaptation of Pet Semetary, which of course never happened and the project went on to be filmed by Mary Harron. And while the Pet Semetary film is no great shakes, neither is Romero's adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Half...

Barn of the Naked Dead

Laaaadies and Gentlemen ! Children of all ages ! The Greatest show on earth is about to begin - we have 3 beautiful showgirls chained up like animals in a circus for the perverse desires of a psychopath in top hat and tails, wielding a whip and nursing a Mommy-fixation. Watch them dismally try to escape only to be captured and face the biting sting of the lash ! Gasp in horror at the severed head in the birdcage ! Shriek in terror at the strange freak of nature locked up in the outhouse ! All these heart-stopping thrills n' spills await you at the Barn of the Naked Dead !

A candidate for Greatest Film Title of the 70's, this early effort by Alan Rudolph (his 2nd film in fact) is propelled along by the sheer strangeness of the story, and plenty of sleaze, despite never quite delivering on the flesh and blood of its outrageous title. Rudolph's direction is far slicker than a lot of low-rent exploitation of this era, and the film has a visual spark when Rudolph takes his camera outside to the desert flatlands where most of the action takes place. Shot around Lancaster, California, the desert scapes are suitably grim - in fact the bizarre events of the film are seemingly caused by the military experiments resulting in a poisoned wilderness¹, and the horribly disfigured mutant locked up in the outhouse. The film has little of the quirky stylings of Rudolph's later films, but there is one brilliant sequence late in the film where the action assumes a strange, hallucinatory quality quite at odds with the rest of the film which is more Tourist Trap and Schoolgirls In Chains than Trouble In Mind...

As with the direction, performances are much better than the usual kind of drive-in fare, Andrew Prine² especially good as the psychotic circus master. Behind his striking handsome looks, Prine's character is sinister and clearly unhinged. Barn of the Naked Dead was released in August 1974, two months before the release of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the timing was perhaps fortunate. Alongside Tobe Hooper's great masterwork, Rudolph's film looks rather quaint. Still, looking at the film today, it has a disquieting, dark undercurrent, considering some recent high profile media stories about young women disappearing only to be found after years of captivity and mistreatment.

Barn of the Naked Dead was released on DVD (coded for R1) in 2009 in a joint venture by Shriek Show and Code Red under the more sedate title of Terror Circus. An earlier DVD of the film was released some time back, but this disc is the one to get - featuring a fine, sharp, colourful image using a mostly pristine print. Audio is strong too, showcasing the weird avant-jazz score (listen to those rasping trumpets!) and the disc comes with some very interesting extras - an audio commentary from the film's FX artists, a 24-minute retrospective entitled, “Barn Again: Returning to the Terror Circus” (which doesn't include Rudolph among the participants), the trailer and the alternative title sequence under the Barn of the Naked Dead moniker. If you're a fan of 70's independent Horror, the film is well worth investigating...

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Notes
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1. Wes Craven would re-use the radioactive desert location motif a few years later with his 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, which has strange mutants picking off travellers that have strayed too far off the path.

2. Andrew Prine is perhaps best recognized as one of the unfriendly "Visitors" in the original series of V, but his filmography has quite a few interesting, and noteworthy films including Simon King of the Witches, The Centrefold Girls, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Grizzly and Amityville II: The Possession

Video Nasties - The Definitive Guide

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... UK DVD label Nucleus Films' latest release is their long awaited retrospective of that curious British phenomenon, the "Video Nasties". Spread over 3 discs, the set contains 72 trailers for films which at one point or another made the legendary Director of Public Prosecutions' list of contentious titles, plus the feature length documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape as well as some worthwhile extras to round off the set. But before I dive into the contents of the set, let's have a quick history lesson and rewind the cassette back to the early '80's (please forgive the tracking noise on the tape, its entirely unavoidable).

Fear & Loathing at the local videoshop... The year is 1982 and the shelves of video libraries across the UK are teeming with a bewildering range of horror and exploitation films which, for small independent video labels, are cheap to acquire and cheap to put out.
Lacking, big stars and big titles, video labels like GO Video and VIPCO mount increasingly explicit advertising campaigns, not to mention lurid video sleeves to attract customers. The strategy is working. Sales in horror videos are at an all-time high. And the moral watchdogs are beginning to notice. 1983, and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), alerted to the violent and perverse content of videos like Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit On Your Grave, SS Experiment Camp and The Driller Killer, has drawn up a list of titles which are likely to deprave and corrupt an unsuspecting public. In the months ahead, video shops across the UK are raided by police officers in an attempt to sweep up and destroy videos considered obscene and beyond the limits of acceptability. The terror has begun, the "Video Nasty" era has arrived...

Video Nasties - The Definitive Guide

Disc 1 - Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape

Kicking off Nucleus' superb 3-disc set is the excellent and engrossing documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape. Directed by Jake West, and produced by Nucleus chief (and VHS tape collector extraordinaire) Marc Morris, this documentary gathers together all of the surviving participants on both sides of the Video Nasty argument - the politicians and law enforcement officers who led the prosecutions, and the brave voices who opposed the campaign and the erosion of their civil liberties; plus contributions from film makers (Neil Marshall among others), film professors and those involved in the video business at the time.

Interspersed among the interviews are historical interviews, news footage and press clippings, superbly illustrating the peculiar climate of that era. The video industry was at that time something of an unregulated twilight zone - the BBFC were still some years away from controlling the content of videos, while the seizures and banning of controversial titles was haphazard at best, the DPP list in a constant state of flux, as titles disappeared from shelves only to reappear back in video shops a few months later. The documentary is extremely fair minded, and represents well the views, however ridiculous it seems, of those who believed (and evidently still do) that the greater public were in harms way from a tide of violent and sexually depraved videos.

Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape is expertly put together, with some gorgeous poster artwork illustrating the advertising of the films in question, and there are some very amusing visual references to the VCR age (and what we had to suffer through before the arrival of laserdisc and DVD!). Absolutely essential viewing for Horror fans.

Disc 2 & 3 - The Trailers

Of the 72 trailers, 39 of these are for films which were successfully prosecuted in the UK. These are contained on Disc 2. Disc 3 collects the remaining 33 trailers, which did at one point appear on the DPP list but were subsequently removed (most famously The Evil Dead)

Many of them have already been made available on previous trailer comps. and individual DVDs, but having them gathered together in one program, is an absolute perfect cystalization of the Nasties list. Simply put, if you're new to the Nasties phenomenon, this is ground zero. The trailers themselves are in very good, if not excellent condition and content-wise, are mostly wonderful and surprisingly explicit - the clip from The Beast In Heat shows the pubic hair eating scene (surely the most ludicrous scene in European Trash Cinema!); the trailer for SF Brownrigg's Don't Look In the Basement factors in some explicit gore shots from Last House on the Left; there's Night of the Demon, with its penis-ripping shot; and the very kinky trailer for the Greek oddity Island of Death (under the German title Die Teuflischen von Mykonos, or the Devils of Mykonosthe). Some rarities too - the trailer for Delirium which opens with the music for BBC quiz show Mastermind!; the trailer for the ultra obscure and ultra weird Frozen Scream; a widescreen trailer for Madhouse, the trailer for Don't Go Near the Woods (not on the Code Red Special Edition) and an Italian trailer for Gestapo's Last Orgy (here as L'ultima orgia del III Reich, or The Last Orgy of the 3rd Reich)

Whatever you do - DON'T ! The Video Nasties list included no less than 4 films that carried a deadly warning

In addition, each trailer is introduced by a film critic and author who offer a short critique of the film with a little trivia thrown in good measure, as well as some amusing personal anecdotes - for the trailer of Zombie Flesh Eaters, Alan Jones remembers meeting with Fulci only for the director to vomit all over him; Kim Newman wonders how Slaughter, the original incarnation of Snuff, is meant to end; Stephen Thrower admits the considerable feat of seeing Franco's Bloody Moon "about 30 times"; Allan Bryce points out some bad acting from a playful dog in Love Camp 7; Brad Steven's identifies some footage in the Driller Killer trailer which didn't make the final cut; film critics Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik strongly argue the merits of Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave; and Dr. Patricia MacCormack (dressed in amazing goth chic) gives a startling reading of The Revenge of the Boogyman, and shows us her wonderful tattoo tribute to The Beyond ! All 72 trailers can be viewed with or without the introductions.

If all that wasn't enough, the 3 discs are rounded off with image galleries of original VHS artwork, and for video nostalgists there are 50mins (!) of video company logos from the pre-certificate days of British home video.

Video Nasties - The Definitive Guide comes as as a Region free set and is packaged in a lovely alpha case housing the 3 discs, with the first 5000 copies containing an extra goodie - gorgeous postcard replicas of some of the most notorious of the Nasties in their original VHS artwork. On the whole, the set is simply magnificent and quite obviously the best DVD release of 2010.

aka I Am Legend

Richard Matheson's iconic 1954 novel I Am Legend film was originally meant to be filmed by Hammer* in 1958 but instead was given its first cinematic outing in 1964 as The Last Man On Earth, an American-Italian production starring Vincent Price. Matheson reportedly hated the film but it remains to this day the best adaptation of the book.

The plot of The Last Man on Earth sticks closely to I Am Legend, but for those unfamiliar with the book, the film goes like this - a plague which originated from Europe (Transylvania perhaps?) has spread worldwide carried by the winds and bringing fever, blindness and death to those infected. Inexplicably unburned bodies of the dead are seemingly returning to life and displaying vampire-like characteristics. Robert Morgan, (changed from Neville in the book) once a doctor working on a cure for the plague, remains the only human left alive, and is locked in a perpetual battle with the living dead. However, a chance discovery of another human being may prove to be the deadliest danger of all...

A bleak and downbeat film, The Last Man On Earth sticks closely to the structure of Matheson's novel - the first section of the film sees Gordon going about his business of eradicating the vampires, the second act of the film flashes back to Gordon's previous life, while the third act concludes the film with Gordon's discovery of the woman and the so-called New Society. The film was directed by Sidney Salkow who directed many routine programmers before defecting to TV. Here, his work in not terribly distinguished but the film does look good, with fine black & white 'scope photography by Franco Delli Colli (who shot Django Kill and Strip Nude for Your Killer among others).

The first act of the film is heavy with Vincent Price narration, rather than letting the story flow visually but a wordless opening 25mins would have been perhaps too radical for audiences in the mid-sixties. It's often a deeply melancholic film, with a very fine Vincent Price affecting an aching weariness, unlike the the sardonic smirk of Charlton Heston in The Omega Man) and Gordon's life seems precariously on the brink of collapse, his home alarmingly ramshackle, and his defences make-shift, unlike the got-it-together Will Smith in Warners' 2007 adaptation.

Richard Matheson had his onscreen credit changed to "Logan Swanson", unhappy with the finished film

The film does have its flaws - the film lensed around the suburbs of Rome, although sufficiently depopulated of people doesn't make for a good stand-in for Los Angeles, (The Omega Man was superb in this respect). Also, the post-synced dialogue is often quite poor (although the canned voices of the vampires calling to Gordon do sound somewhat eerie at times). The importance of Matheson's novel on the Fantasy genre cannot be overstated, and would be a key influence on modern Horror Cinema by way of Night of the Living Dead. The Last Man on Earth must have been in Romero's thoughts when shooting his landmark living dead film - the shots of the vampires laying siege to Gordon's home echo the sequences in Night of the Living Dead when the zombies gather at the farmhouse. Even more so, the final sequences of The Last Man on Earth strongly resonates in Romero's later work - the bitter ending where Gordon formulates a cure for the plague only for it to go ignored would turn up again in the climax of The Crazies, while the shots of armed mutants pursuing Gordon down a smoke-filled staircase are close to the swat-team sequence in the opening of Dawn of the Dead.

MGM's DVD of The Last Man On Earth is a very good effort. The 2.35 transfer looks especially good and sounds good, and there's a short but worthy interview with Richard Matheson. The disc also features on the flipside Ray Milland's interesting 1962 apocalypse film Panic In Year Zero. The film is a public domain title also so beware of inferior releases. The MGM disc is the one to get.

Notes: Admittedly there's isn't much information out there on Hammer's proposed film of Richard Matheson's classic novel. After Hammer's success with The Curse of Frankenstein, the studio invited Matheson to submit a screenplay for I Am Legend. Tentatively entitled Night Creatures by the studio, the film was to be directed by Terence Fisher but when Hammer took the script to John Trevelyn, the head British Censor, Trevelyn insisted that a film made from Matheson's screenplay would be banned outright. And so Hammer were forced to abandon the project. It's intriguing to speculate on how Hammer would have handled I Am Legend. Apparently the studio had requested Matheson to soften some of the more dark and disturbing episodes from the novel, but it's perhaps wishful thinking that Hammer would get away with a contemporary vampire story removed from the period setting of The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula.