RetView #85 – The Orphanage (2007)

Title: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

Year of Release: 2007

Director: JA Bayona

Length: 97 mins

Starring: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep, Mabel Rivera, Montserrat Carulla

This acclaimed co-production between Spain and Mexico is the long-form directorial debut of Barcelona-based director JA Bayona, who went on to direct Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Society of the Snow (2023), which told the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. Short on both money and experience, for Orfanato, Bayona enlisted the help of Mexican horror legend Guillermo del Toro Gomez, perhaps best known Mimic (1997), The Shape of the Water (2017) and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019). It’s also the first screenplay by Sergio G Sanchez, who was heavily influenced by the classic literature Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, as well as horror movies like The Innocents (1961), The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist (1982). The work was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2008 Goya Awards after being nominated for no fewer than 14.

The Orphanage opens with some kids playing a game, but you just know things won’t stay this innocent long, in more ways than one. One of these kids is Laura (Rueda) who is adopted only to return to the now-abandoned building thirty years later with her husband (Cayo) and son, Simon (Príncep), with the altruistic intention of turning it into a home for disabled children. Soon after they move in, Simon, who is both adopted and HIV-positive but doesn’t know either (which is certain to make for some pretty awkward family chats at some point) soon starts making friends, kind of unusual given that the place was deserted when they moved in, and starts saying off-kilter things like, “I’m not going to grow up. Like my new friends.” He now has six of these invisible playmates, by the way. He talks about a treasure hunt, presents a box of teeth as a ‘clue,’ and claims that if he finds the treasure he will be granted a wish. He has also taken to drawing creepy pictures of a child with a cloth sack over his head, another massive red flag. Don’t the kids in these films always do stuff like that? By now, it’s pretty clear the old orphanage is haunted and the spirits are exerting their influence on poor Simon. The question now becomes why? Because there is always a ‘why.’ Things are compounded by a visit from a social worker called Benigna (Carulla) who is later spotted acting suspiciously in the grounds. As things escalate, Laura becomes increasingly concerned, and then frantic with worry. All of which seems entirely justified when Simon disappears, driving a wedge between Laura and her husband. This leads to a series of strange discoveries, and as the secret of the orphanage is slowly revealed it turns out Simon is neither the first nor the only child to go missing.

The gothic mansion (the Partarriu Manor) where most of the action takes place is very impressive (pictured below), and some of the cinematography truly stunning. Despite being filmed on location in Llanes, northern Spain, there is a lot of torrential rain (rain in Spain?) and it’s overcast most of the time, which all adds to the menacing mood. The location was chosen due to its diverse natural settings, which Bayona made full use of. It was made in 2007, but looks and feels a lot older. Maybe that was the intention. In 2007 New Line Cinema bought the rights for an English-language remake but that seems to have stalled, and there have been crickets ever since. On this, Bayona noted, “The Americans have all the money in the world but can’t do anything, while we can do whatever we want but don’t have the money,” whilst also pointing out that the American industry doesn’t take chances, and prefers to remake movies that were already hits.

The Orphanage reportedly received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and when it was released in cinemas became the second highest grossing debut ever for a Spanish film. It was also a hit with international audiences. At the time of writing the film has an 87% approval rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes based on 181 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The critical consensus reads, “Deeply unnerving and surprisingly poignant, The Orphanage is an atmospheric, beautifully crafted haunted house horror film that earns scares with a minimum of blood.” Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert said the film is “deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans. It lingers to create atmosphere, a sense of place, a sympathy with the characters, instead of rushing into cheap thrills.” A more contemporary review in The Film Magazine says: “The Orphanage might be one the most moving ghost stories ever put to film, and throughout its deliberate, slow-burn telling of a pitch-black gothic mystery it never loses touch with its beating heart. It’s about lost, forgotten, mistreated children and how pain can be passed on decades down the line, but ultimately also that love, care and kindness saves lives and prevents the next generation being both metaphorically and literally haunted.”

On the negative side, the film drew criticism for its ending and several reviewers picked up on the fact that at its core the film is about grief and the mental toll it takes, with some suggesting it is a depiction of a bereaved parent’s slow descent into madness drawing comparisons with The Babadook (2014). Tellingly, this is never definitively addressed.

Trivia Corner:

Though uncredited, Guillermo del Toro Gomez plays the doctor at the Emergency Ward who treats Laura after she injures her leg looking for Simon.

RetView #82 – Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Title: Cannibal Holocaust

Year of Release: 1980

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Length: 96 mins

Starring: Robert Kerman, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi

A lot of films have been called controversial. Scroll this blog series and you’ll find dozens of them. But not many films can legitimately claim to be ‘the most controversial film of all time.’ Oh boy. This has everything; genocide, mutilation, graphic violence, animal slaughter, sexual assault, nudity, racial discrimination, not to mention portrayals of actual cannibalism. The film was banned, on various grounds, in over 40 countries (including the UK until 2001) and Italian director Ruggero Deodato, who heavily influenced both Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, was even investigated on suspicion of murder at one point. More about that later. In fact, the film is still banned in some countries, even in its edited form. Not that it mattered much when home video became popular, and even less now with the Internet. There has been so much intrigue around this release that it would require a whole book to explain in full rather than a measly blog post. What a lot of people seem to forget is that Deodato was (he died in 2022 aged 83) a purveyor of exploitation cinema. It was the mechanism he used to shine a light on ‘difficult’ topics. Added to that, he was a master manipulator. If he got a rise out of anyone watching this film, for whatever reason, that was exactly what he wanted, and something he went to great lengths to achieve. Even the use of the word ‘holocaust’ in the title was no accident, and you feel was intended to simply stir up emotions, especially in Europe where the word still held so many negative connotations through World War Two and Italy’s association with fascism.

The movie follows a team of American film-makers led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman) into the Amazon rainforest (it was filmed on location) as they search for indigenous tribes rumoured to be cannibals. No prizes for guessing what probably happened to them, then. Footage from the trip is recovered (found footage, if you will) and later ends up in the hands of a TV station where execs watch it and together we discover the grisly fate of the expedition. Many have suggested that this marked the beginning of the found footage genre later popularised by movies like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Megan is Missing (2011), and V/H/S (2013). Produced as part of the contemporary cannibal trend of Italian exploitation cinema, Cannibal Holocaust was partly inspired by Italian media coverage of Red Brigades terrorism. Deodato thought that the media focused on portraying violence for salacious reasons with little regard for journalistic integrity, and believed that journalists staged certain news angles in order to obtain more sensational footage. This idea of media manipulation became central to the film, which essentially a mockumentary about a group of filmmakers who stage scenes of extreme brutality for a Mondo-style documentary. For example, ‘recovered’ footage shows the group capturing and raping a local Ya̧nomamö (Tree People) girl. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes they later find the girl impaled on a wooden pole by a riverbank. It is assumed that the natives killed her for loss of virginity, but subtley implied that the filmmakers themselves killed her and staged it as a murder for dramatic effect. The result is that the viewer begins to question everything they see, and ask whether they themselves are being manipulated, which of course, they (we) are. In a 2011 article for The Guardian, journalist Steve Rose remarked, “As a comment on shock value, Cannibal Holocaust succeeded all too well. The get-out is that the film-makers in Cannibal Holocaust are the real savages. They are shown goading, raping and even killing to get sensational footage for the media back home.”

After its premiere in Italy, the film was ordered to be seized by a local magistrate, and Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges. He was later charged with multiple counts of murder due to rumours that several actors were killed on camera in snuff film fashion and faced life in prison. In reality, the cast had signed contracts requiring them to disappear for a year after shooting to maintain the illusion that they had indeed died. When the actors appeared in court, alive and well, the murder charges were dropped, but not before it blew up in every newspaper in the country.

It was alleged that during production, many cast and crew members, including Kerman, protested the use of real animal killing in the film, which is certainly hard to watch at times. I still feel for that poor turtle. The point Deodato seems to be making here is that animals are living, breathing creatures, and they bleed and writhe when they are killed, something society often forgets when all the meat we consume comes in shrink-wrapped packages from the supermarket. This is typical of Deodato’s approach in that his preferred method of inferring a message was to hold it up in front of your face and take a machete to it. He was similarly derided for his ‘exploitation’ of native tribes, actual members of which play key roles in the film but are uncredited and, allegedly, unpaid, though one would assume that with concept of money being so alien to them they wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. At its core, the film is an attack on sensationalist media, which is often built on flawed journalistic ethics, all of which Deodato used himself to great effect in marketing the film. Love it or hate it, you have to admire the ingenuity. In a 2011 interview with the BBC prior to his death, the director said: “All debates on cinema are good for the artform. The most important aspect [of Cannibal Holocaust] was the original use of reportage style. The special effects aimed to make people believe what they were seeing was real.”

Cannibal Holocaust has never really been out of the public eye, but was thrust back into the limelight in 2013 when it was revealed to be the inspiration for Eli Roth’s Green Inferno which took its title from the opening monologue in Cannibal Holocaust. A planned sequel, entitled Cannibal Fury, was never made. Even knowing what we know today, it remains as shocking as ever. This isn’t a pleasant viewing experience, but it was never intended to be.

Trivia Corner:

Demonstrating once more how media savvy and self aware he was, in 2007 Deodato made a cameo appearance in Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part 2 playing a cannibal, no doubt with his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek.

RetView #77 – Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

Title: Attack of the Giant Leeches

Year of Release: 1959

Director: Bernerd L Kowalski

Length: 62 mins

Starring: Ken Clark, Yvette Vickers, Jan Shepard, Michael Emmet, Tyler McVey, Bruno VeSota

ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, (aka THE GIANT LEECHES), poster art, 1959.

IMHO leeches are a very underused mechanism in horror. We see far too many rats, spiders and snakes, but not nearly enough of these natural blood-sucking vampires. They are fucking disgusting. Even the little tiny ones that stick to your legs after you go paddling in streams are gross. Imagine giant ones! Luckily, someone else did, so you don’t have to. Produced by Gene (brother of Robert) Corman and directed by Bernerd L Kowalski (who would go on to direct episodes of classic eighties action series’ Knight Rider and Airwolf) Attack of the Giant Leeches came right at the end of the 50’s creature feature craze that was a reaction to the Cold War that gave us such timeless gems as It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), The Indestructable Man (1956) and The Blob (1958). This is reiterated, if you were in any doubt, when a character speculates that the man-eating leeches they are up against have been affected by atomic radiation from nearby Cape Canaveral. It was shot over eight days and released as part of a double bill with the horror comedy A Bucket of Blood (strangely enough, directed by another Corman, Roger, who would later gain fame for his film adaptations of Edgar Allan poe stories) by American International Pictures.

In the swampy Florida Everglades, a pair of massive intelligent leeches live in an underwater cave, presumably subsisting on the local wildlife as several references are made throughout the film to a lack of crocodiles in the area (which one would imagine not being a bad thing). Soon, though, the giant leeches decide to move on to people and begin dragging locals down to their cave, where they are kept alive and slowly drained of blood. Two of the first victims are local vixen Liz Walker (Vickers), who has been cheating on her husband Dave (VeSota), and her latest paramour. Poor traumatised Dave immediately comes under suspicion, mainly because he admitted chasing the amorous couple through the forest with a shotgun, but then he commits suicide leaving more questions than answers. Game warden Steve Benton (Clark) takes it upon himself to investigate, aided by his girlfriend, Nan Grayson (Sheppard), and her father, Doc Grayson (McVey). The intrepid bunch soon discover the giant leech’s underwater lair and blow it up. The end.

Or is it?

The film is notable for featuring Cary Grant’s long-time squeeze Yvette Vickers soon after her appearance in the Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958), who promoted it by appearing as a centrefold in the June 1959 issue of Playboy. After that, her movie roles began to decline and she was last seen alive in 2010 having withdrawn from her family and friends. Tragically, her mummified body was discovered around a year later at her home on Westwanda Drive, Beverly Hills, by actress and neighbour Susan Savage. There were no signs of foul play, the cause of death deemed to be heart failure resulting from coronary artery disease. After her demise, Hugh Hefner issued statements expressing his sorrow.

Attack of the Giant Leeches, while corny and somewhat predictable, doesn’t get nearly enough love. It barely even comes into the conversation. Any conversation. This is despite a remake directed by Brett Kelly and written by Jeff O’Brien being released in 2008 and a stage adaptation performed at The Village Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 2020. The original has proved somewhat divisive on Rotten Tomatoes, where it measures 70% on the Tomatometer but has an audience score of just 18% based on 1000+ ratings. In his book Classic Movie Guide: From the Silent Era Through 1965 (2010) film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film 1.5 out of 4 stars, calling it a “ludicrous hybrid of white trash and monster genres.” There’s just no pleasing some people.

The original movie is now in the public domain as its copyright was never renewed, and you can watch it in full HERE.

Trivia Corner

The monster costumes were designed by actor Ed Nelson and Gene Corman’s wife, with some claiming they were constructed from stitched-together black raincoats. Other insiders were less gracious and insisted black refuse sacks were used. Honestly, I kinda hope that was the case.

RetView #73 – Indestructible Man (1956)

Title: Indestructible Man

Year of Release: 1956

Director: Jack Pollexfen

Length: 72 mins

Starring: Lon Chaney Jr, Max Showalter, Marian Carr, Ross Elliott, Robert Shayne

The summary of this one reads like a mash up of Curse of Frankenstein and Shocker. Charles ‘Butcher’ Benton (played by Chaney Jr, by consensus one of the greatest horror movie actors ever) is a convicted murderer and robber betrayed by some acquaintances (and his attorney) who wanted to get their hands on his share of some loot. As a result, he is sent to the gas chamber and his body unlawfully sold to a mad scientist (Shayne). Benton’s lifeless corpse is then zapped with high-voltage electricity and subjected to various experimental chemical injections. His heart is re-stimulated and he is essentially brought back to life. Except now he has been rendered mute because of the electrical damage to his vocal chords, so all he can do is stare menacingly at people. By way of compensation, he is immensely strong and impervious to scalpels, bullets and even, as we find out later, bazooka shells. Hence, the Indestructible Man. Got it so far? Nice.

So, moving on, when Benton ‘comes around’ he is understandably a bit miffed at how things have turned out and swears revenge on all those who have wronged him. And by now, its a pretty extensive list. So first he kills the mad scientist and his assistant, then goes on a murderous rampage to even up the score(s). At one point, one of his would-be victims seeks the help of a friendly barman, busting into his joint saying, “I need help! I just found out Benton has hired a killer to get me.” This was before anyone had twigged it was Benton doing the killing, of course. The ‘friendly’ barman turns out to be anything but sympathetic and says, “Then drink up and get out. I don’t want any trouble in my place.”

The entire movie takes place in Los Angeles over a 72-hour period and is told in the kind of narrative style popularised by TV cop show Dragnet, which keeps the viewer up to speed and is just as well given the fact that the main star has been struck mute. Weirdly enough, that year Chaney Jr starred in another movie in which his character doesn’t speak (The Black Sleep). A very accurate IMDB review (where it currently holds a review score of 4.3/10) says, “Dragnet meets Frankenstein’s monster is the best way I can describe the flavor of this film, which is not nearly as bad as its current low rating would have you believe. In fact, if you like 50’s and 60’s Allied Artist horror on the cheap, I think you’ll like this one. Remember Allied Artists was a poverty row outfit, and they could usually afford just one star. In this case it is Lon Chaney Jr.”

In their contemporary review, the website Basement Rejects gives us the other side of the coin. “For the most part the special effects are pretty awful and the movie appears very cheap. I say for the most part because I think the burn make-up at the end of the film is pretty good. He is supposed to be a character that cannot die but his character can still be maimed. The result is a pretty effective face-melt burn. Indestructible Man isn’t so invincible. It is a rather lame story that seems more like a plot of an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits than a feature film (maybe that is why it is only 70 minutes long). The movie isn’t very good and it isn’t very fun…there is a reason it is often a bargain B-Movie.”

The Spinning Image was even more scathing, but no less accurate: “This endearingly rubbish science fiction thriller was scripted by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. It’s basically a low budget gangster movie with the novelty of featuring an indestructible man as its main villain. There are many moments of lunacy: the map to the stolen money has no landmarks or writing on it, save for a big X, the professor’s assistant apparently drives Chaney’s freshly-executed corpse home in the back of his car; Chaney’s stripper girlfriend eagerly agrees to go out with the lieutenant tracking him down when the detective reveals his first name is “Dick”.

Indestructible Man came as something of a surprise to me. Or a bolt out of the blue, if you’ll excuse the pun. It’s refreshing to come across a fifties B-movie that isn’t about either aliens or radiation. It was distributed on a double-bill with World Without End (1956) and in some areas with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) both of which ARE about aliens. Sort of. Overall, I liked it. Sure, the special effects are questionable. Okay, everything about it is questionable, but it was made in1954 (and held back for two years). That’s a long time ago. So long ago, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube for free.

Do it.

Trivia Corner:

Lon Chaney Jr. reportedly asked director Jack Pollexfen not to make any dialogue changes or additions after the lunch break, because he was a big drinker and would usually be blotto by then.

RetView #68 – The Birds (1963)

Title: The Birds

Year of Release: 1963

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Length: 119 mins

Starring: Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright

Few films can legitimately lay claim to being bona fide classics, though most of The Birds’ accolades came after the fact. In 2016 it was deemed to be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant enough to be selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress. By then it had also won the Horror Hall of Fame award (1991) and been voted the seventh-scariest movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 (2006). The film has been tremendously influential, having been referenced by filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and John Carpenter, among others and on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes it has a 95% rating, the critics consensus stating; “Proving once again that build-up is the key to suspense, Hitchcock successfully turned birds into some of the most terrifying villains in horror history.”

All this praise is remarkable considering that the movie was panned by several notable critics on its release. Writing for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann called it, “the worst thriller of his [Hitchcock’s] that I can remember,” while Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the famous director, “Was once widely quoted as saying he hated actors. After his 1960 ‘Psycho’ and now ‘The Birds,’ it must be fairly obvious that he has extended his abhorrence to the whole human race.”

On the surface the plot is simple enough, but the real beauty is hidden in the complicated interplay between the primary characters. The movie opens in a San Francisco pet shop, where carefree socialite Melanie Daniels (Hedren) encounters Mitch (Taylor) who is looking to buy some lovebirds for his sister’s birthday. For some bizarre reason she pretends to work there, and Mitch plays along, though he recognizes her from a previous court appearance. When the jig is up, Melanie asks how he knows her name, to which he replies, “A little birdie told me.” Brilliant.

At around 29-minutes, after being attacked by a legitimate angry bird, Melanie holds a cotton ball against her wound. The way her hand and forearm are positioned makes the appearance of a bird, with a ring on her finger forming the eye. Tippi Hedren later confirmed this, and said that Hitchcock had instructed her to insert subtle hints about the upcoming bird attack throughout the film.When Mitch leaves, Melanie buys the lovebirds and follows him all the way to Bodega Bay where he’s visiting his parents, only to give him the birds and tell him that she loathes him, none of which is remotely weird, apparently, even in the sixties.

Things get spicy when Melanie meets Mitch’s previous love interest, a schoolteacher called Annie (Pleshette) and his overbearing mother (Cartwright) who doesn’t think anyone is good enough for her son. Shades of Psycho there. Amidst all this simmering tension, it’s almost a relief when some birds go rogue and start dive bombing people to death. We never really find out why, though Hitchcock later said in an interview that the birds rise up against the humans as punishment for taking nature for granted. The only context we are given in the film is a radio report heard near the end which indicates the Bodega Bay attack is not an isolated incident and the problem is so bad that the military might be forced to intervene.

What many modern viewers may not pick up on are the hidden implications in the plot and nods to popular culture. The Birds was made shortly after Chinese leader Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows in the country to be killed as part of the ‘four pests’ campaign during the Great Leap Forward because they ‘ate too much grain.’ Starting in 1958, hundreds of millions of birds were killed causing an unmitigated environmental disaster known as the Great Famine (1959-61) which ultimately led to the deaths of an estimated 45-million people. Too late Mao realized that he sparrows didn’t just eat grain, they were also nature’s pest control, and without them locusts and other insects were allowed to run riot decimating crops and disrupting the area’s fragile ecosystem. With this fresh in the news at the time, the insinuation was that though calling in the military to kill the birds might solve the immediate problem (angry birds) it would spark a similar chain of events in America which could lead to the downfall of Western civilisation. It is assumed that the movie does not finish with the usual THE END graphic, because Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of continuing, unending terror.

The Birds was loosely based on the story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier which appeared in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree. Coincidentally enough, on August 18th 1961, as Hitchcock was developing the movie, there was a mass bird attack on the seaside town of Capitola, which was substituted for Bodega Bay in the movie. It was an early purveyor of the much-overlooked genre known as ‘eco horror’ which usually feature animals or nature striking back and taking their revenge on humans. Other examples include Jaws (1975), Cujo (1983), Lake Placid (1999), Black Water (2007) and even Doomwatch (1972). Hedren was 33 years old at the time of filming (and ironically had a five-year old daughter called Melanie, as in Melanie Griffith. It’s unclear whether Hitchcock deliberately gave her character the same name) but was listed as being 28 in the press release because 33 was considered too old for a starlet to be making her big screen debut. Over the years numerous salacious rumours have come to light regarding Hitchcock’s treatment of her, the situation itself providing the storyline for a HBO movie called The Girl (2012) in which Hedren was played by Sienna Miller.

Trivia Corner:

When audiences left the U.K. premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further.

RetView #67 – Xtro (1983)

Title: Xtro

Year of Release: 1983

Director: Harry Bromley Davenport

Length: 81 mins

Starring: Bernice Stegers, Philip Sayer, Simon Nash, Maryam d’Abo, Danny Brainin

If you watch a thousand sci-fi horror movies, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else as bizarre and downright weird as this one. Tony (played with unsettling aplomb by a 10-year old Simon Nash who later wound up in Birds of a Feather) is a disturbed little boy badly affected by the sudden disappearance of his father three years earlier who he claims was taken by a bright light, the implication being that he was abducted by aliens. His mother (Stegers) and her new lover (Brainin), unwilling to accept the alien abduction theory, assume that he simply ran off. As you can probably imagine, everything is sent onto a tailspin when he reappears announcing ominously “I’m back.”

Truth be told, daddy (Sam Philips, played by Philip Sayer, who also appeared in The Hunger with David Bowie before tragically died of cancer just a few years later at the age of just 42) makes one heck of an entrance, bursting out of a woman’s horrifically distended belly fully-formed and chewing through an umbilical cord. All things considered, he makes a decent go of fitting back into the family, seemingly oblivious to the friction he causes, but his plans go somewhat awry when Tony finds him chowing down on his pet snake’s eggs. This isn’t long after the poor kid walks in on his mum bumping uglies with someone who wasn’t his dad, but he seems far more traumatised by this most recent event. And things only get weirder from there. When he makes amends with poor, traumatized Tony, Sam also sucks his blood, vampire-like, in the process passing on some rather impressive special powers which Tony uses to bring his toys to life. He then sends these toys, which are now magically life-size, to brutally murder an elderly neighbour who, upon finding Harry the pet snake in her salad, crushes it with a hammer and delivers it back in a plastic bag. He also sets them on Analise, the French au pair (d’Abo, who would go on to be a Bond girl in 1987’s The Living Daylights) and her boyfriend. In fact, Tony becomes increasingly belligerent as the movie progresses and is a right little twat by the end, when all the main characters converge at the holiday cottage where the initial disappearance occurred.

Upon its home video release in 1983, the film was subject of a prosecution case in relation to obscenity laws, and consequently got caught up in the whole ‘video nasty’ furore. Surprisingly, it had actually been passed uncut by the BBFC with a well-deserved ’18’ certificate. Several different endings were made, and which one you get depends on which version you see. A pair of sequels followed, Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991) and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995), neither of which bore any relation to the characters in the original. According to Wikipedia, in 2011, director Bromley-Davenport confirmed that a fourth instalment was in the works but 11 years on it is yet to be delivered, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing.

Writing for Starburst magazine, Alan Jones suggested that stegers had been ‘horribly mis-cast’ but went on to state that the special effects were “minor miracles of ingenuity” for their low budget and admired the movie for “trying so earnestly to resuscitate low budget exploitation sf/horror films in this country.” Variety found the film “too silly and underdeveloped in story values to expand beyond diehard fans” and that “Harry B Davenport builds little suspense and no thrills in a film devoid of stuntwork or action scenes. It’s just another “check out that makeup” exercise, consisting of brief scenes and poor continuity.”

Critic Roger Ebert absolutely panned the film, awarding it 1 of 4 stars, saying, “Most exploitation movies are bad, but not necessarily painful to watch. They may be incompetent, they may be predictable, they may be badly acted or awkwardly directed, but at some level the filmmakers are enjoying themselves and at least trying to entertain an audience. ‘Xtro’ is an exception, a completely depressing, nihilistic film, an exercise in sadness. It’s movies like this that give movies a bad name.”

Retrospectively, TV Guide went one better (or worse) in ‘awarding’ the film 0 of 4 stars, calling it, “A vile exercise in grotesque special effects” and “An excuse to parade all manner of perversities across the screen,” further stating that, “Not only is this disgusting, it lacks anything that remotely resembles suspense.”

Easy to see, then, how it warranted three sequels.

Trivia Corner:

Despite never having met him, Queen guitarist Brian May was so affected by Swansea-born actor Philip Sayer’s premature death that he wrote the song Just One Life, which appeared on his 1992 solo album Back to the Light, in his honour.

Previous RetView entries can be found HERE.

RetView #66 – It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

Title: It Came from Beneath the Sea

Year of Release: 1955

Director: Robert Gordon

Length: 79 mins

Starring: Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis, Harry Lauter

In typically dramatic fashion, this B-movie classic begins with a bristling voiceover about nuclear submarines culminating in the sensational pronouncement, “The mind of man had thought of everything! Except that which was beyond his comprehension!”

Oh dear.

We are then transported to one such submarine captained by Commander Pete Mathews (Tobey) on exercise in the Pacific Ocean, where the crew pick up a mystery object “bigger than a whale” on their sonar. Uh-oh. The sub comes under attack by this massive unknown creature but manages to limp back to Pearl Harbour where it is examined by a team of marine biologists (headed up by Domergue, who sticks around to provide the love interest – more about that later). Subsequently, some tissue is discovered and is found to belong to a giant octopus. The scientists conclude that the creature is from the Mindanao Deep, a submerged trench eat of the Philippines said to be more than 10,500 metres deep, and has been forced from its natural habitat by that pesky H-bomb testing.

When a spate of disappearances are reported in the area, the U.S. Military have to act before the creature makes its way to San Francisco (because that’s what giant cephalopod do, apparently). They are only partially successful, and in the climax we witness a titanic showdown between the creature and the Golden Gate Bridge during which, let’s face it, neither side is likely to be covered in glory. Despite being an inanimate object, the bridge actually holds its own. The rumble is enough to spark panic in the streets, the city’s residents apparently ignorant to the fact that simply being on dry land would ensure their safety from sea monsters. Though, that said, the local sheriff (Lauter) was on dry land when he was attacked so it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. We don’t actually see the monster ‘in the flesh’ until the second half of the film, but the suggestion is there, the constant threat, which makes it a neat little metaphor for nuclear war. When the giant man-and boat-eating radioactive octopus does make an appearance in order to pick on a Canadian freighter, the order is to abandon ship which makes total sense. There’s a giant octopus nearby, let’s all just jump in the water.

This is pretty standard Fifties fare, with people’s post-war insecurities and pervading nuclear fear being played out regularly on the silver screen. It must have been absolutely terrifying to be a crewman in those early experimental submarines when you weren’t just unsure whether the engineering and technology that was supposed to keep you alive would hold up, but you also weren’t sure what else was in the water. To add an element of cold realism, key scenes were filmed in and actual sub (the diesel-electric USS Cubera) with the help of serving navy personnel in supporting roles. The movie was developed in the wake of the first Hydrogen bomb explosions partly as a retort to Universal Studio’s (Columbia’s great rival) hugely successful It Came from Outer Space (1953). It Came from Beneath the Sea was even more of a success, as it was produced on less than a quarter of the budget and made more at the Box Office where, upon release, it was paired with Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), widely acknowledged as one of the first true zombie movies.

One of the most fascinating aspects of It Came from Beneath the Sea is the clumsy love triangle subplot involving Professor Lesley Joyce (Domergue), her colleague Dr. John Carter (Curtis) and Commander Pete. At one point, when they all should really be more interested in the big monster terrorizing the ocean, Carter patiently explains to Commander Pete that Lesley is representative of a “new breed” of women who, “Feel they’re just as smart and courageous as men.” Well, I’ll be damned. It’s almost as awkward as the set-up in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Despite his having all the personality and charm of a tennis ball, Joyce is clearly attracted to the more macho Commander Pete, and doesn’t resist when he comes on to her. She then goes back and asks John what she should so about it. Incredibly, Beau Numbero Dos doesn’t get mad about it, and simply encourages Joyce to explore the emotional implications of the kiss. Okay, mate, Ta. For the rest of the film Lesley flits between both leading men, stating that when all the octopus business is cleared up she’ll be embarking on a lengthy tour of Egypt with John, before turning around and accepting commander Pete’s impromptu and quite unexpected marriage proposal. So yeah, while adding a human element, all that malarkey was confusing and somewhat unnecessary. Stick to the monsters, please.

Whilst the acclaim wasn’t universal, upon release the film was met with generally favourable reviews. Radio Times called it a, “Classic monster flick,” while contemporary resource Allmovie (previously All Movie Guide) wrote that it, “Utilized elements of the documentary, with a narration that makes the first half of the movie seem almost like a newsreel, which gives the action a greater immediacy. This is all presented in a cool, clipped realistic manner, with a strong but convincingly stated macho tone…It all served to make the first quarter hour of the film almost irresistibly suspenseful, and gave Harryhausen one of the best lead-ins that one could ask for, for his effects.”

Trivia Corner

The stop-motion creature effects were designed by the legendary Ray Harryhausen, who also worked on Mysterious Island (1961). To save money, he was only allowed to animate six of the octopus’ eight limbs, leading him to jokingly name the creature “his sixtopus.”

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RetView #65 – Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2011)

Title: Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead

Year of Release: 2011

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Length: 85 mins

Starring: Arisa Nakamura, Asana Mamoru, Mayu Sugano, Asami Sugiura, Kentaro Kishi

Seven minutes into this movie I needed something stronger than bottled Stella and WTF because bottled Stella and WTF just wasn’t cutting it any more. Even in the bizarre realms of Japanese horror, I don’t think I’ve seen anything this wacky before.

The plot evolves around karate student Megumi (Nakamura) who, consumed with guilt and grief over the suicide of her bullied sister, accompanies a group of older friends on a camping trip into the woods. Things get weird when they go fishing in a river known for carrying ‘parasites that keep super models thin.’ The voluptuous Maki (who wants to be an idol) takes this on board and before anyone can stop her, swallows a massive tapeworm they find inside a fish they catch. Before you can say, “WTF? Where’s my Stella?” a zombie appears from nowhere and chews someone’s finger off, prompting Megumi to deliver a spinning kick to the head that snaps his neck.

“Megumi! That was too strong!”

“It was just a normal kick.”

Thoroughly freaked out, the group then leg it to a deserted village where poor Maki suffers a sudden diarrhoea attack and relieves herself in an outhouse, only to be molested by more zombies. The rest of the group, meanwhile, are rescued by an old villager who also has tapeworms. In a fit of despair he blows his head off with a shotgun and one of his eyeballs flies out, straight down the throat of the nerdy one of the group. And then, without so much as pausing for breath, its on to fight more pervert zombies. It’s okay, though, Megumi finds a double-barrelled shotgun and takes out a whole room full of them without reloading once, but let’s not be pedantic. Another of the unfortunate zombies is offed when someone sits on his head and crushes it (“I killed him with my butt!”), a scene which is replayed multiple times in case you missed it the first time. You get the feeling the makers were doing it to somehow stir the viewer’s loins, but my loins stayed firmly in place.

After a bit, a mad doctor turns up, kills a rogue tapeworm with a nail gun, and then they all have dinner together. The doctor reveals that the zombified villages are all riddled with tapeworms and the reason they bite is to lay eggs. Not good news for that bloke who had his finger chomped off. Let’s just say he has a very bad reaction. Phew.

Just so you know, by this point the movie is barely half way through. There’s another 45-minutes or so of this utter madness. Director Noboru Iguchi, who also wrote the screenplay, certainly knows how to keep up the pace. He started his career in JAV (Japanese Adult Video) movies, where he ‘explored’ several genres including bondage and incest, common themes in Japanese porn. Or so I am led to believe. Iguchi is best known for a film called Final Pussy which, as a result of a military experiment going wrong, has a lead character with guns bursting out of her boobs whenever she gets aroused. What a passion killer that must be. After crossing into the mainstream, Iguchi won plaudits for his work on various horror/comedy/gore films such as The Machine Girl (2008), Mutant Girls Squad (2010) and Dead Sushi (2012).

Incredibly, this cult offering has amassed almost 2,000 ratings on IMDB with an average rating of 4.7/10. Starburst magazine enthused “Silly, sure. But, when you have a theatre full of grown adults laughing and having a good time you know it’s going to be an instant cult classic.” Meanwhile, in their review, Variety said, “The title alone will help it worm its way into fantasy fests and Asian cult ancillary, to be seen by viewers who will need to be drunk or otherwise zombified to enjoy it.”

To be fair, they aren’t wrong. I’m tempted to say it got a bit outlandish towards the end, but that in itself would be a stupid thing to say. It was outlandish from the start. Even the poster is outlandish. But if you have a thing for farts, vomit, martial arts, giant parasites, exploding heads, shit-covered pervert zombies, or any combination of the above, this one is for you.

Trivia Corner

In the credits, an actor called Demo Tanaka is credited as ‘the shit zombie,’ presumably because he crawls out of a toilet all covered in shit, and then proceeds to sling it at people. Incidentally, the actress Asana (no, really) Mamoru had to control her bowels in the outhouse scene that made the shit zombie famous so she didn’t actually shit on him. Some of the farts heard are real, apparently, which must be a valued addition to anyone’s showreel.

RetView #59 – 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Title: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Year of Release: 2016

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Length: 87 mins

Starring: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallacher Jr.

Apart from Quarantine 2 – Terminal I haven’t covered any sequels in this series thus far. There are reasons for that, but it might change in the not too-distant future. For now, you’ll have to make do with this, that rarest of things; a sequel on a par with the original. In fact, 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t a bona fide sequel at all. In the words of uber-geek producer JJ Abrams, it’s more of a ‘blood relative’ of Cloverfield. The original script was called The Cellar, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the original movie. It was written by Josh Campbell and Matt Steucken back in 2012 before being acquired by Abram’s production company, Bad Robot, and adapted to suit.

When the first Cloverfield movie, a found-footage monster flick, was released in 2008, it became an unexpected smash hit, prompting Abrams to turn it into a loosely-connected franchise which, to date, consists of three films all taking place in the same universe, known as the, ahem, Cloververse, with a fourth in production. Each movie deals with creatures from different dimensions attacking earth as a repercussion of experiments carried out aboard the Cloverfield Station in outer space.

If it’s monsters you’re after, though, you may be disappointed with this particular instalment as it would be more accurately defined as a very effective psychological thriller. It follows twenty-something Michelle (Winstead, who previously starred in Final destination 3 and the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, also called The Thing, confusingly enough ) who, after splitting up with her boyfriend, is involved in a car accident. She wakes up in an underground bunker with a broken leg and is told by the bunker’s owner Howard (Goodman) that he took her there for her own protection because the air outside has been poisoned as a result of earth coming under some kind of attack. Suspecting Howard deliberately ran her off the road and abducted her, Michelle is immediately suspicious but has little choice but to play along. The mystery thickens when she is introduced to the bunker’s third occupant, Emmett (Gallacher Jr), who tells her he had been employed by Howard to help him build and stock it. He saw an explosion in the sky and, fearing for his safety, forced his way inside, injuring his arm in the process.

Still dubious, Michelle makes up her mind to steal the keys to Howard’s truck and make good her escape. But before she can open the hatch leading to the outside world, she sees a woman outside covered in skin legions and begins to think Howard may be telling the truth. Bunker life isn’t THAT bad. They have plenty of food and water, and enough books, DVD’s and board games to keep them occupied. However, as the unlikely trio settle down to ride out the metaphorical storm, certain troubling details begin to emerge about Howard. What happened to his missing daughter? What kind of ‘waste’ is he disposing of in that vat of acid in the bunker? What made him flip out playing charades? And why does he dislike Emmett so intensely? All this, added to the tension, growing cabin fever, and general air of paranoia, makes for a powerful movie with a nerve-shredding climax. I’m not going to give away the ending here, but suffice to say it’s one of the most unexpected and breathtaking in recent memory.

Perhaps surprisingly, the movie was met with generally favourable reviews, levelling out at an impressive 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Guardian said it was “More Hitchcock than Xbox” and Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times praised the cast and cinematography, saying, “Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, ‘10 Cloverfield Lane,’ though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.” Its critical success was replicated at the Box Office, where it grossed over $110 million from a $15 million budget. Not quite as impressive as the first instalment, but close enough.

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Trivia Corner

In one scene, Howard is watching the 80’s classic Pretty in Pink. In this movie, Molly Ringwald’s character has a hobby of making dresses. This is a subtle reference to Michelle, who had earlier confided to Howard that she dreams of being a fashion designer.

RetView #55 – The Giant Claw (1957)

Title: The Giant Claw

Year of Release: 1957

Director: Fred F Sears

Length: 75 mins

Starring: Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, Lou Merrill, Edgar Barrier

1947 was a pivotal year in the development of the human race in many ways. Two separate incidents occurred that had a profound effect on popular culture (in particular writers and filmmakers) and, if you believe some of the conspiracy theorists, science and technology. First, in June, there was the Roswell incident. Then, the following month, Kenneth Arnold made his famous UFO sighting and inadvertently coined the phrase ‘flying saucers’. These two seismic events, coming so soon after World War II was effectively brought to a sudden halt by America’s two-pronged nuclear assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had a wide-ranging influence on America’s psyche, and by extension, the rest of the world. It was a period of great change and infinite possibilities. Over the next decade countless movies tried to tap into this rich vein of fear, paranoia and uncertainty running through the public consciousness, and The Giant Claw (sometimes referred to as the Mark of the Claw) is a fine example.

Whilst engaged in a radar test flight, civil engineer Mitch MacAfee (Morrow, who also starred in the Twilight Zone episode Elegy) spots what he thinks is a UFO. Three jet fighter aircraft are scrambled to pursue and identify the object, but one goes missing. Officials are initially angry at MacAfee over the loss of a pilot and jet over what they believe to be a hoax. When MacAfee and mathematician Sally Caldwell (Corday) fly back to New York, their aircraft also comes under attack and crash lands in the mountains. A farmer (Merrill) comes to their rescue and tells them about a local legend speaking of huge birds. Again, MacAfee’s report is met with skepticism, but the authorities are forced to take his story seriously when several more aircraft disappear. They discover that instead of some alien craft, a gigantic bird “as big as a battleship” purported to come from an anti-matter galaxy, is responsible. MacAfee, Caldwell, Dr. Karol Noymann (Barrier), and General Considine (Ankrum) set to work finding a way to defeat the seemingly invincible creature before it wreaks havoc on America. They are partially successful, and eventually invent a weapon capable of killing the creature, but not before it strikes at the very heart of capitalism by attacking New York. This is when it becomes obvious that the giant bird is a damn commie (on a subliminal level, the monstrous entity also probably represents the looming, destructive fear of the unknown, which is arguably the same thing) because it wastes no time venting its fury on the United Nations building during a cheesy, yet fun-filled and strangely intoxicating climax.

The movie was distributed by Columbia Pictures as a double feature with The Night The World Exploded (1957) and was directed by Fred Sears, a legend of the B movie genre most famous for Earth vs The Flying Saucers (1956) and Rock Around the Clock (1956). Tragically, shortly after The Giant Claw was released he was found dead by a security guard in the washroom of his office at Sunset Studios of Columbia Pictures at the age of 45. By then, he had directed over fifty films and acted in many more, usually in uncredited roles. According to Richard Harland Smith of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the inspiration for the story may have been taken from media reports about scientific discoveries in the field of particle physics, dealing with matter and antimatter. Other influences included the Japanese film Rodan (1956) and the Samuel Hopkins Adams story “Grandfather and a Winter’s Tale,” about a mythical bird-like creature prominent in French-Canadian folklore called la Carcagne, which appeared in the January 1951 issue of The New Yorker.

Critical reception was extremely negative, with the special effects in particular roundly mocked. Film writer and historian Bill Warren commented, “This would have been an ordinarily bad movie of its type, with a good performance by Jeff Morrow, if the special effects had been industry standard for the time. That, however, is not what happened. The Claw is not just badly rendered, it is hilariously rendered, resembling nothing so much as Warner Bros. Cartoon-character Beaky Buzzard. Once seen, you will never forget this awesomely silly creation.”

Wowzer.

Trivia Corner

Jeff Morrow later confessed in an interview that no one in the film knew what the monster looked like until the film’s premiere, since it was added later. Morrow himself first saw the film in his hometown, and hearing the audience laugh every time the monster appeared on screen, left the theatre early, went home and started drinking.