The Beast Within (1982)

Nioba, Mississippi, 1964: a dark night, a stranded couple, and a barely-glimpsed, dog-eating, raping thing. So begins The Beast Within, directed by Philippe Mora (who later directed several Howling sequels). Seventeen years later, the product of the rape, Michael (Paul Clemens), is suffering from strange dreams and what his doctor thinks is a mysterious pituitary disorder. His parents (Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch) rather optimistically go in search of his real father to try to find some answers. Before long, Michael too is compelled to go in search of his roots, drawn to creepy small-town Nioba. Soon a murder and the discovery of mass graves in the woods stir things up, and then the body count starts to rise. Who was Michael’s real father, and what dark secrets lurk in Nioba’s old rotting houses and eerie swamps?

Mora makes good use of small town and rural southern imagery, and of the creepiness of small town dwellers. Almost every scene is well planned for maximum horror (the camera lingers lovingly on raw meat mixed with ketchup as Michael rips a man’s throat out).

The acting is enjoyable as well. As the tormented Michael, Paul Clemens shines.  His twitchy, shifty mannerisms effectively convey his character’s struggle with the “beast within”, and these combined with subtle makeup effects make him truly scary. In fact, when the beast finally does take over (and the transformation effects are well done, with one of the early uses of air bladders to convey the look of things bursting out from under the skin) the final product isn’t as frightening as the glaring, crazed Michael himself. Also good are Kitty Moffat as the innocent Amanda Platt, the object of Michael’s twisted affection, and John Dennis Johnston as her abusive father. The undertaker, Dexter Ward (Luke Askew), ramps up the creepiness factor. The town drunk (Ron Soble), the doctor (R.G. Armstrong), the judge (Don Gordon), and the cold-eyed sheriff (L.Q. Jones, in one of his many sheriff roles), are all enjoyable if overly-familiar small town characters.

The blaring score by Les Baxter is sometimes overused - silence would evoke more horror. Also, the beast-Michael is creative but oddly cartoonish and unthreatening. Still, the end result is fairly satisfying. The Beast Within may not break much new ground, but it stands out from the crowd. What it does, it does well.

At Midnight I'll take Your Soul: "I'm going to the graveyard. Anyone care to come along?"

The opening credits of At Midnight I'll take Your Soul (1963) roll as haunted house sound effects play- the screams and moans and laughter of the damned.  Then we’re treated to an over-the-top witch lady who speaks directly to the audience “Don’t watch this movie.  Go home.”

Coffin Joe, the sadistic undertaker, is a nasty little bully of a man, terrifying the townsfolk with his black clothes, top hat, cape, and long, sharp nails.  He eats meat on holy days and casually attacks people.  “Want me to measure your coffin?” is his common threat.  He's a blasphemer, an atheist, and somewhat of a philosopher, disbelieving in god and devil alike.  He is kind to children, but casually psychopathic towards everyone else.  His eyes go all wide and veiny when he’s about to do violence- a little like Popeye’s muscles when he eats spinach.  This and other special effects, especially an eye-gouging and a setting on fire, look primitive and painful- it’s likely the actors really suffered for their art (I use the word "art" lightly, as well as the word "actors").

Obsessed with carrying on his bloodline, Coffin Joe decides to etherize his barren wife Lenita and kill her with a tarantula in hopes that the lovely Terezinha will consent to his wishes.  Unfortunately for Joe, things are not so simple and he must kill and kill again.  He taunts the spirits and disrespects the witch lady, never a good idea.  Such an unpleasant character must surely get his comeuppance.

“AliMENto des VERRmis!”  A lot of Coffin Joe’s impassioned soliloquies are overdubbed and this is somehow quite effective.  José Mojica Marins does well with a melodramatic portrayal of a crazed killer, almost like a silent film villain in scope, with grotesque twisted features and much leering and rolling of eyes.

At Midnight I'll take Your Soul is one of those movies that- well- it isn’t GOOD good, but it inspires a certain fondness.  The over the top melodrama, the spiders and maggots and cemeteries, the maniacal laughter and ghostly wailing on the soundtrack, the glitter meticulously glued on the negative to denote a ghost, the title itself, all are endearing.  It's a good one to watch late at night without devoting your full attention to it.

This film is available on YouTube, but I saw it on DVD.  The DVD includes an interview with the director/star, and a trailer for the higher-budget sequel, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse.  After seeing the trailer, nobody can resist, and I’m looking forward to tracking this down and continuing the saga of Zé do Caixão.    

Oasis of the Zombies: Yawn of the Dead

I can at least say that Oasis of the Zombies (1982) was better than Zombie Lake.  Slightly.  Prolific writer/director  Jesús Franco was originally supposed to direct the latter as well, but didn’t.

 

Unlike Zombie Lake, Oasis of the Zombies attempts a plot, with Nazi gold lost for decades in the desert at a “damned” oasis (and this is the only explanation we get as to why there are Nazi zombies there).  The North African setting, with dunes, camels, and mustached adventurers, is inviting, but Franco fails to fully deliver.  

After some backstory, a carefree group of students travels from London to hunt the treasure.  They progress toward it at a snail’s pace, and once arrived they are awfully nonchalant when they find the zombies’ last victims, burying them in shallow graves and then having a good laugh.  But soon, the laugh will be on them.

Franco wisely chooses not to reveal the zombies until well into the film.  The zombie makeup is not great, but it is at least sporadically creative (with worms!).  The same could be said of Franco’s cinematography and script, only without the worms (and, perhaps, the creativity).  There are a few hilarious lines, though (“They came from the sand!  They came from the sand which is here!”; “Did you find what you were looking for?”  “I mainly found myself”).  

The exotic scenery in Oasis of the Zombies is nice, but the zombies-beneath-the desert sands idea isn’t really put to good use.  In the end, the zombies plod around and take forever to get anywhere, like this film and many others of its ilk. 

Zombie Lake: How can a film about Nazi zombies be boring?

Furthering my explorations into the Nazi zombie subgenre, I tried Zombie Lake, and almost fell asleep.

Zombie Lake, filmed in 1981 with the original title of Le Lac des Morts Vivants, immediately goes straight to business as a young woman strips off for some skinny dipping in the titular lake (more of a pond, really).  After a few minutes of nudity, the first Nazi zombie appears and clumsily grabs at the water nymph (underwater sequences courtesy of a very poorly disguised swimming pool).  Neither party seems fully invested in the scene – in fact, they both look rather bored.  This sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Script, acting, special effects, and dubbing are almost deliberately bad, but rarely in the “so bad it’s good” way.  The long periods in which nothing of interest happens give the viewer time to admire the pleasant French village scenery, or take a nap.

In a flashback to World War II, we see a forbidden romance between a Nazi soldier and a village girl cut short when the Resistance ambushes the Nazis and dumps their bodies in the lake.  “You could call it the damned lake of the dead,” as the mayor puts it, although why the lake creates zombies remains an unanswered question.  

Damned or not, the lake is certainly a popular skinny-dipping spot.  A septet of giggling girls is soon disgorged from a VW camper van (one of many anachronisms) to become the next zombie snack.

Stirred to action, for some reason, after lo these many years, the Nazi zombies rampage around the village.  Their modus operandi is to clumsily wrestle their victims to the ground, then give them hickeys on the neck while drooling unconvincing fake blood.  Sometimes the special effects “artists” could be bothered to add slight neck wounds after the fact, sometimes not.  Clumsily applied green zombie makeup makes the Nazis look a bit like plastic army men.  Also, some of them have taken lessons from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.

The only ghost of a plot involves the love child of the forbidden romance, who is visited by her “good” zombie father.  The villagers eventually form a mob to destroy the “mad, murderous zombies” via flamethrower, leading to some alarming special effects sequences (one wonders how many Nazi zombie actors were burned in the making of this movie).  The fact that the zombie-eradication scene inexplicably alternates from night to day is a little distracting.

Perhaps a drinking game could be made of the numerous goofs and anachronisms, but the whole thing is so dull and plodding, with awful special effects and no real frights, that skipping Zombie Lake is probably the best option.  Even the director, Jean Rollin, claimed to be embarrassed by the film, and this was a man who directed such greats as Folies Anales and Discosex.  If the abbreviated version above wasn't enough, the entire film is to be had on YouTube.     

Incidentally, something about the movie (plotlessness, nudity, people walking in and out of lakes?) reminded me of Jesús Franco, and sure enough he’s listed as one of the writers of Zombie Lake.  Next up is Franco’s own Oasis of the Zombies, which can’t be worse than Zombie Lake.  I hope.

Barry Levinson's "The Bay": It's the chicken shit, stupid!

The Bay, Barry Levinson’s eco-horror production, didn’t play in many theaters, but the Strand Cinema in Georgetown, South Carolina (where most of the filming took place) had a few showings over the weekend.

Although it was interesting to see all the nearby locations, the film itself didn’t meet my expectations (which weren’t particularly high).

In The Bay, Georgetown stands in for the Chesapeake Bay town of Claridge, where Fourth of July festivities are in high gear.  There’s a blue crab eating contest, a dunk tank, and even a Miss Crustacean contest.  A novice reporter (Kether Donohue) is there to cover the action.  What unfolds is a parade of horrors, as festival-goers stagger around screaming with fast-growing red pustules.  The local hospital begins to fill up and doctors make the horrifying discovery that something is munching on the victims from the inside.
 

The premise is that the reporter puts together an exposé of the cover-up following the disaster, so the whole thing is documented with a plethora of found footage.  This is almost convincing, except for the typical horror movie soundtrack pasted over it to enhance the arthropod terror.

Yes, it’s isopods.  Flogging the eco and minimizing the horror, screenwriter Michael Wallach makes it abundantly clear that pollution, primarily from chicken farm runoff (a real problem around the Chesapeake), has made the fish parasites grow and multiply and decide humans might be tasty too.  Again and again, the audience’s collective nose is rubbed into the explanation, although why the isopods decided to strike on the Fourth or why other organisms weren’t affected by the toxic water are questions that remain unresolved.
Abundant real-life examples of the indignities suffered by the Chesapeake, from leaking nuclear plants to pharmaceuticals in wastewater, are trotted out for display.  But if Levinson wanted to send a message about environmental issues, the silliness of the isopod premise was not the way to go.
   

The biological implausibility helps deflate the public service announcement aspect of the film, and what’s left is oddly dull.  The plot is minimal (people get infected and die) and the characters are so peripheral as to be almost non-existent.

There are a few genuine, if cheap, scary moments as the infected townsfolk pop up suddenly, roll their eyes, or scream, and shots of bodies lying in the quiet streets at night inspire a momentary sense of dread, but there’s not enough horror to go around.  Somehow the squeaking, scuttling isopods aren't very menacing even when they're eating their way out of people.  The real assault on the senses is the shaky found footage camera work, which made me want to vomit harder than the folks in the blue crab eating contest.

I had hoped something more entertaining would come out of The Bay... giant crabs, perhaps?   

The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

After a slight dip in quality in the second volume, the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories is back with a “Boo”!  Even Robert Aickman’s introduction has more zest.  Aickman writes that “As an antidote to daily living in a compulsorily egalitarian society, a good ghost story… can bring real joy.”  He attempts to define a good ghost story as one that opens a door and leaves it ajar at the end of the story, perhaps referring to his own open-ended tales.

E.F. Benson, celibate son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, leads off the collection with Negotium Perambulans, in which a similarly celibate narrator returns to the idyllic Cornish town of his youth to encounter an ambiguous creature which, though not very pleasant itself, preys on the wicked.  Benson wrote many excellent supernatural stories, and this is among them.

 

“There he lay a-dying,” said the last of my informants, “and him that had been a great burly man was withered to a bag o’ skin, for the critter had drained all the blood from him.  His last breath was a scream…”

 

The End of the Flight, by Somerset Maugham, involves a man pursued around Malaysia by another bent on revenge.  Supernatural elements are hardly even suggested, but the story does leave the door ajar at the end. 

The next 71 pages are deservedly taken up by Oliver Onions’ The Beckoning Fair One.  It is one of the best ghost stories.  Aickman says it best in his introduction:  “An almost perfect story, its perfection is the more impressive by reason of the unusual but indispensable length to which it is sustained.”

The Dream, by A.J. Alan, is a simple story, but it’s told in such a straightforward, avuncular way that it is impossible to dislike.  Alan’s conversational style served him well, as he broadcast his stories on the BBC from 1924-1940.  My guess is that this one may also have begun as a radio broadcast. 

I didn’t care for The Stranger, by Hugh MacDiarmid (known more for his poetry).  It’s the tale of a possibly-unearthly stranger in a pub, which like Alan’s story preceding it could be summed up in a few sentences.  Here, however, MacDiarmid doesn’t create the atmosphere needed for such simplicity to work.

The Case of Mr. Lucraft, by Sir Walter Besant and James Rice, who wrote together from 1871-1882, is highly enjoyable.  I appreciate the fact that in these Fontana anthologies Aickman selected some completely unique premises, and this is one of them.  The unfortunate Mr. Lucraft, narrating from advanced years, takes us through his early life when he bargained away his appetite to the sinister Mr. Grumbelow:

“You will dip the pen,” said the old gentleman, “in the blood.  It is a mere form.  A mere form, because we have no ink handy.”

Another unique story is The Seventh Man, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which could have been a prototype for Arctic (and Antarctic) horror to come:      

“There, before him, on the frozen coat of snow, was a footprint... many footprints.  Prints of a naked human foot: right foot, left foot, both naked, and blood in each print – a little smear.” 

No Ships Pass, by Lady Eleanor Smith, is one of the few in this anthology I’ve read before.  Maybe this is why it seemed on a second reading a bit too lengthy for what it is; enjoyable, though, as a castaway washes up onto an island and finds himself in a tropical version of No Exit.  

The Man Who Came Back, by William Gerhardi, might have benefitted from a less descriptive title, but is a nicely written example of a concise and traditional ghost story.

Aickman finishes the collection with The Visiting Star, in which an ageless actress comes to perform in a dull mining town in the middle of winter.  I greatly enjoy Aickman, and hadn’t come across this story before.  As is often the case with his works, The Visiting Star is understated, somewhat rambling, and leaves much open to interpretation.  

So, Aickman has selected a wide range of atmospheric supernatural stories here; some are frequently anthologized, some rarely seen, but almost all are highly entertaining. 

"Isopod" is coming... maybe not to a theater near you.

After filming in 2010 in Georgetown, South Carolina, and dropping off the radar for quite some time, Barry Levinson's "ecological horror" film "Isopod" (or "The Bay", whichever it is) is finally being released on November 2nd, following showings at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.  However, the film, which doubtless had its genesis when a screenwriter read a news story about parasitic marine isopods, is now being distributed by Roadside Attractions, not Lionsgate, and is expected to see a limited release.

I like the picture Fangoria posted.  It looks like another typical day at Georgetown Hospital.