"Once the Lurking Lust is Loosed-": Robert Bloch's "The Night of the Ripper"

Robert Bloch had a writing career that spanned sixty years, during which he wrote about Jack the Ripper four times.  “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”, published in Weird Tales in 1943, presented the idea of the Ripper as an immortal making human sacrifices to stay that way.  He revisited the Ripper in “A Toy for Juliette” and the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold”.  His most comprehensive look at the Whitechapel serial killer was in his 1984 novel The Night of the Ripper.     

The Night of the Ripper is replete with well-researched Ripper facts and historical detail: unusual slang (“buors” are prostitutes, “suckcribs” are beer halls), Victorian London locations and personalities involved in the case and, of course, gruesome descriptions of the bodies of the murder victims.

The background makes for entertaining reading, but the story itself is formulaic.  A wooden American doctor, Mark Robinson, joins forces with the dyspeptic Inspector Abberline to stop the fiend, while a nurse, Eva Sloane, provides the requisite love interest.  Characterization is weak and there are too many characters who are only introduced as potential Rippers.  Bloch feels the need to throw in cameos by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and John Merrick, to no discernible purpose.  When Bloch reveals the real Ripper, it’s possibly the least interesting choice of all the suspects.

The Night of the Ripper is a quick read and might be worthwhile for Bloch’s detailed account of the setting and the crimes, but as a novel it feels hastily constructed and superficial.  The fact that at some points it seems virtually any character could be the Ripper, and a few ruminations on the beast within (“conceal it though we may, the beast is always there, waiting to escape”) suggest the deeper study of psychological aberration Bloch might have undertaken.       

"Be Prepared to Take the Good with the Evil...": The Kingdom (Riget) 1994-1995

Take a blender.  Add a distillation of hospital dramas.  Dump in a liberal helping of Twin Peaks, but enhance it with an extra dose of quirky humor.  Pour directly from a bottle of spirits (clamp the lid down quickly so they don’t escape).  Blend well, and you might get a rough approximation of The Kingdom (Riget), Lars von Trier’s eight-episode miniseries for Danish television.  However, The Kingdom is a unique concoction, hard to describe or replicate (although Stephen King adapted The Kingdom for American television as Kingdom Hospital,  which I haven’t seen but apparently stayed fairly true to the original).

Centered on Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the fictional Kingdom is a sepia-toned labyrinth full of ghosts and demons.  Built, according to the introduction, on the ancient “bleaching grounds”, it is stocked with ghostly ambulances, spirits crying in the elevator shafts, and the menacing shade of Udo Kier.

Like any good hospital drama, The Kingdom has an ensemble cast of patients, doctors, and support staff – they are just a little quirkier than most.  The Swedish chief of neurosurgery (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) hates his Danish coworkers, frequently shouting his catchphrase “Danish scum!”  His arch-rival, Jørgen (Søren Pilmark), works the system from his lair in the basement, and is not above a little blackmail to get his way.  The medium Mrs. Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes) keeps finding ways to get herself admitted to commune with the unquiet dead.  Dr. Bondo (Baard Owe) lusts after a patient’s liver tumor, while Dr. Petersen (Birgette Raaberg) experiences an unusual pregnancy.  Two dishwashers with Down Syndrome (Vita Jensen and Morten Leffers) make cryptic comments on the supernatural goings-on.  Lurking behind them all are the ghost girl Mary (Annevig Ebbe) and the ominous Age Krüger (Udo Kier).  Despite the short duration of the series, viewers get to know them all through a variety of bizarre subplots, and the acting and script make even the smallest role engaging.

The first series has its share of chills, but is also very funny.  The final episode ends with an attempted exorcism and a difficult childbirth; in both, horror and humor combine.  The second series is weaker, focusing more on the quirky humor of the characters and less on the horror.  Like the first season, there’s a cliffhanger ending, but sadly, a planned third season never came to fruition since several of the major actors died.

With The Kingdom, Lars von Trier presents a unique series, unclassifiable and highly entertaining. 

 

Night Watch (2004): The Terror of Spastic Director Syndrome

The establishing prologue for Night Watch (Nochnoy dozor in the original Russian) is not encouraging – two fantasy armies are doing battle, but they’re slightly cheesy, and you keep expecting to see Terry Gilliam prancing behind them banging coconut shells together.  The prologue is like those in many fantasy novels, easily skipped to get to the good stuff.  It’s a tedious way to set up the eternal contest between the supernatural “Others”, Light and Dark, each monitoring the opposing side to look for violators of their ages-old truce (the monitors are the Night Watch and Day Watch).

The film follows precog Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy), a member of the Night Watch tasked with policing the Dark Others.  He’s a refreshingly shabby protagonist, a staggering, vagabond vampire hunter.  His Night Watch teammates include a few shapeshifters who never actually shape-shift, and Olga the were-owl (Galina Tyunina), who has a well-filmed, messy transformation scene and then seems to have nothing to do for the rest of the film.  The Night Watch members echo the Ghostbusters, with their jumpsuits and their bright yellow truck with flaming tailpipes, whizzing through the city streets to supernatural incidents.

There is a plot, but it is told incoherently, as if the director cut out half the footage at random.  The end result is loud, garish, confused, and somewhat annoying, with strange camera angles, quick jump cuts, and hardly a whisker of character development.  There’s something about the “Vortex of Damnation” and a cursed virgin, who appears to herald the final battle between Light and Dark, and a great Other who will choose sides and determine the outcome. 

The film and its sequel Day watch (2006) were based on a series of novels by Sergey Lukyanenko.  Perhaps if you’ve read the novels you can fill in the blanks in the movie version of Night Watch, but otherwise the events are made barely comprehensible by the spastic, jumpy direction.  The special effects, impressive for the overall budget of about 4.2 million, and sometimes inventive (wheeling clouds of ravens and a handy spine-sword), are the only real reason to see Night Watch. 

Naked SCUBA! Zombie vs. Shark! Splinter-in-eyeball! It's Lucio Fulci's "Zombie"

Hot on the shambling heels of Dawn of the Dead (1978) came Lucio Fulci in 1979 with the imaginatively titled Zombie (sometimes titled Zombie 2 to confuse European viewers into thinking they were seeing the sequel to Romero’s film, which was titled Zombie in European releases). 

An abandoned boat (or is it?) drifts into New York Harbor.  It belongs to the vanished father of Ann (Tisa Farrow, Mia’s sister).  A note (“due to my morbid curiosity, I have managed to contract a strange disease”) points to the Caribbean.  Soon, Ann is on her way, joined by reporter Peter (Ian McCulloch, who went on to star in a different role in 1980’s Zombie Holocaust, a film which is unrelated to Zombie other than being filmed on the same sets, and alternately titled Zombie 3, apparently to confuse viewers even more).

The two convince boat bums Brian and Susan (Al Cliver and Auretta Gay) to take them to the supposedly cursed island of Matul, the home of Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson).  A zombie outbreak is underway, with no explanation for the cause other than some mumbling about voodoo. 

The highlight of Zombie occurs before the protagonists reach the island, as Susan goes naked SCUBA diving and is witness to a zombie eating a shark.   

It’s difficult to top that.  Fulci tries to do so with gore, giving up on the scanty plot for face-eating, arm-rending, flesh-ripping, splinter-in-eyeball mayhem.  In general, the special effects are realistically stomach-turning.  Gallons of blood are spilled, bright 70’s movie blood like tomato sauce (maybe it was tomato sauce?).

It’s surprising more zombie films aren’t set in the Caribbean, where, after all, zombies originated.  Zombie has pretty island scenery and brightly-colored villages where the zombies roam, and the soundtrack includes both cheerful island music and voodoo drums.  The film even includes a sort of tropical recreation of the cemetery awakening scene from The Plague of the Zombies and many others.

Although more gross than frightening, and not the most intelligent zombie film ever made, Zombie is undeniably entertaining and well worth a look.

Happy Halloween!

Horror of the 80s: Demons (1985)

A subway in West Berlin.  New Wave styles abound.  A young student, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), is stalked by a mysterious figure (Michele Soavi) with a metallic half-mask (or is it – his face?).  It turns out that he is only handing out tickets to a movie at a recently renovated theater, the Metropol.  Cheryl and her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo) cut class to go. 

“You don’t think it’s going to be a horror movie, do you?” asks Kathy.

The theater contains a creepy usherette (Nicoletta Elmi, of Dario Argento’s Deep Red  and several of Mario Bava’s films, in a cameo of sorts) and some odd audience members, including two young men, George (Urbano Barbarini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), who make friends with Cheryl and Kathy.  They begin to watch the horror movie-within-the-horror movie.  The characters on screen find an ancient book “something about- demons!” and a strange mask.  Whoever wears the mask will become a demon – oddly enough, such a mask was in the theater lobby, and one of the audience members tried it on before the show…

Soon the demonic infection is spreading, both onscreen and throughout the audience.  They realize they’ve been bricked in to the theater, and the body count begins to rise, to the tune of bouncy 80s synth-pop.

Co-written by director Lamberto Bava (son of Mario) and Dario Argento, who produced it, Demons  is a mixed bag.  The highlights include some good special effects, mostly demonic transformations in which long claws grow, air bladders are used effectively, and teeth pop out to be replaced with fangs.  There are a few inspired touches, most notably when the actress in the onscreen horror flick is being menaced by a knife making long gashes in her tent, and suddenly the theater screen itself gashes open and one of the infected audience members falls through.

There’s a lot of Argento-like playing around with lighting effects, some of which is quite nice – although sometimes you get the feeling that the filmmakers went through the script and randomly said “this scene will be blue.  This scene will be red.”

The theater setting is sometimes used to good effect (the darkened row of seats, the innumerable red curtains through which victims claw their way), but could be better utilized. 

The low points:  there’s a lot of primary color demon-vomit and cheesy makeup.  The demons themselves are rather generic monsters – basically zombies with fangs and glowing eyes.  The acting is miserable and the lousy English dubbing doesn’t help.  Wait for the laughable sequence in which the hero rides around the theater on a dirt bike which has mysteriously appeared from somewhere, swatting at demons with a samurai sword.  Things get even more random with a deus-ex-flying-machina towards the end.

Still, Demons was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Demons II, the following year.  For the most part it’s an average 80s horror flick, entertaining enough but easily forgettable.

Halloween Reading: Zelazny's "A Night in the Lonesome October"

I hadn't heard of A Night in the Lonesome October until my brother sent me the audio version.  Read by Zelazny himself, it's quite good.

Published in 1993, Lonesome October, nominated for a 1994 Nebula Award, was Zelazny's last book (he died in 1995, aged 58).  Zelazny was a truly original fantasist, perhaps best known for the The Chronicles of Amber, which I can't say I really got into.  Nonetheless, I found A Night in the Lonesome October to be very engaging.     

Set in Victorian Era London and vicinity, the story is in the form of first-person (or first-dog) journal entries by Snuff, who is the familiar of his master, Jack.  Each night in October gets a chapter in this gradually-revealed tale of preparations for a great supernatural event, a full moon on Halloween, when the barriers between the planes thin and doors between worlds may be opened.  A host of characters ranging from Dracula to Jack the Ripper have assembled, intent on either opening or closing a portal to Lovecraft's Great Old Ones.  Each "Player" in the "Game" has a familiar, who go about bargaining with each other and attempting to pinpoint the exact site of the portal, never quite sure who is on which side.

Zelazny writes in a sparse, effective, and humorous style, expertly building the suspense as grave robberies, murders, and weird happenings abound.  There's a somewhat pointless foray into Lovecraft's Dreamlands that reads like filler, but the rest of the story is tautly constructed.  

Reading A Night in the Lonesome October, with its monstrous characters and autumnal setting, is like being wrapped up in a warm, soft blanket of Halloween.  Simple, fun, and satisfying, it's an excellent read to get you in the Halloween spirit.