Lucio Fulci’s 1981 gorefest E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà (better known in English as The Beyond) is one of those movies you either love or hate. If you’re all for your horror movies having logical plotlines you can follow, you’ll want to give this one a wide berth, but if you can dig films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) or – an even better example – Inferno (1980), E tu vivrai should be right up your alley.

In E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà, Fulci completely eschews any kind of narrative cohesion in favour of a string of horrific scenes, but it’s not like there’s not any sense to it all. In fact, Fulci and fellow screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Giorgio Mariuzzo anchor the plotlessness of the film completely in its basic premise. This may sound cloudy – but use democracy as an analogy: just like democracy carries within it the potential of its own demise (Germany 1933, anyone?), so the plot of E tu vivrai carries in it the complete deconstruction of a cohesive plot and narrative.

Why? Because E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà is all about opening doors you shouldn’t open and about suffering the consequences.

Lousiana, 1927. A boatful of people who have just taken the official Angry Horror Film Mob license (TM) descends on The Seven Doors Hotel. One of the guests at the hotel, a painter named Schweik, also appears to have dappled in the black arts. Under any circumstances, for reasons never explained, the Angry Mob is out to get him. In spite of Schweik’s warnings that the hotel stands on one of the doors of hell (implying that he’s the one that keeps said door safely closed), they proceed to kill him, first using heavy chains, then nailing him to a cellar wall and pouring quicklime all over him. Cue gory face melting effect. Cool stuff, and this is only in the first five minutes of the film.

Also in the hotel at this time is a creepy blind blonde, who’s reading from a book with the title “EIBON” on the covers. Now for any of you familiar with H.P. Lovecraft and the group of contemporary writers who all wrote interconnected stories, based on Lovecraft’s concepts of cosmic terror, “The Book of Eibon” should ring a bell. It’s one of those terrible tomes which, like Lovecraft’s “Necronomicon”, holds all sorts of dark secrets. “The Book of Eibon” was conceived by Clark Ashton Smith, but apart from using the title of the book, E tu vivrai has little to do with Lovecraftian horror, but it’s a nice little easter egg for horror buffs. Anyway, a quote from the book plays an important role in the film: “And you will face the sea of darkness and all therein that may be explored”. Creepy, eh? You better believe it!

Anyway, the scene changes to 1981, where Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) has just inherited The Seven Doors Hotel and is going about restoring it for business. She doesn’t get very far in her endeavours before people start dying. First a painter falls down from a scaffolding because he sees the creepy blind blonde in one of the rooms, but this is just for starters. The real shit hits the fan when a local plumber is summoned to figure out why the basement is flooded. The plumber – whose name, by the way, is Joe (although any relation to Joe the Plumber is unlikely) – accidentally stumbles on Schweik’s dead body and is instantly killed.

Schweik

After this, reality slowly starts to degrade. It’s not at all obvious from the get-go, but after having watched the film, it’s really quite clear that once Joe found Schweik’s not-so-dead body, one of the doors to hell was opened. What’s more is that whoever enters the house doesn’t leave alone; he or she carries hell with them. Which means that bad things start happening. This not only goes for Liza, but also for the local inquisitive doctor John McCabe (David Warbeck), who strikes up a friendship with Liza.

Liza meets Emily, the blind blonde from the beginning of the film. Emily takes Liza to her house, and tries to warn her about The Seven Doors Hotel. When Dr. McCabe later explains to Liza that the house, she believes Emily lives in, has been empty for 50 years, Liza starts questioning her own sanity. If only it were that harmless. But as Liza is soon to find out, the truth is much, much worse.

When Joe the Plumber’s wife turns up at the morgue to prepare her husband for the funeral, she ends up getting her face melted by a jar of acid, and their little daughter is caught in the room with dead dad and dead mom. Frantically trying to avoid the fast flowing mix of blod and acid, she tries all the doors, only to find them locked, except for the last one. This one, unfortunately, is one of the freezers – cue zombie. And the next time we see the little girl, her eyes have cataracts, just Emily’s – a clear sign that she’s been claimed by “The Beyond”.

Other horrifying events happen to various people who’ve come into contact with the hotel. The architect who’s been helping Liza restore the building has his face eaten off by tarantulas when he’s researching the history of the hotel in the local town hall (keep an eye out for Lucio Fulci in a cameo as the town hall librarian who’s hell bent on having lunch and thus avoids the angry arachnids).

Also, the two creepy housekeepers Martha and Arthur (who were never hired by Liza – “They came with the hotel”, she explains to McCabe) are dispensed of. In one memorable scene, Joe the Plumber’s undead body emerges from the ancient goo in a bathtub, and forces Martha’s head backwards, onto one of the huge spikes in the wall. The infamous splinter-in-the-eye scene from Zombi 2 is reverted here, as Martha’s eye is pushed out of her head from the back by the spike.

What remains of reality completely disintegrates when Arthur (now Zombie Arthur) attacks Liza in the basement of the hotel. She and McCabe escape to the hospital where McCabe works, only to find it overrun by the living dead. After a lengthy escape scene with lots of obligatory zombie head shots (McCabe conveniently has a revolver in his desk drawer), they escape down a stairwell, and are suddenly back in the basement of the hotel. Entering the hole in the wall where Joe the Plumber initially found Schweik’s dead body, the two of them find themselves in a barren wasteland with dead bodies on the ground for as long as they can see. Only, they can’t see much any longer, because their eyes are now milky white. Because no one needs eyes in The Beyond…

In The Beyond

All of the above are just bits and pieces of the gory goodness which is E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà. Fulci is quick to establish his horrific mood, and underscores it again and again with scenes of gory violence. Not all of the effects may be top notch – the rubber tarantulas used in the face eating scene are pretty funny, and some of the zombies look fake – but overall, the effects are really good, and some of the zombies – particularly Schweik’s body – actually look pretty creepy. When you combine this with the beautiful photography by Sergio Salvati, the efficient editing by Vincenzo Tomassi and the haunting score by Fabio Frizzi, you have a winner in my book.

None of this will mean a damn thing if you can’t appreciate a film which achieves its effect through tableaus rather than through a logically unwinding story. It all only makes sense in retrospect, and many viewers will undoubtedly be turned off by the film – not only because it doesn’t unfold logically, but also because of the varying quality of the effects.

For those who appreciate this sort of fare, E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà will be a huge hit, and I’m happy to say that I for one love this one. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and I just haven’t gotten around to watch. Now I finally got it done – amongst other things because the film is the Film Club Pick of the month over at Final Girl.

Concludingly I can say that after seing the film, I’ve been listening a lot to Fabio Frizzi’s score, which not only works wonderfully in the film, but is a killer listen on album, too. Both film and score come highly recommended!

I was quite positively surprised by Zack Snyder’s adaptation. It doesn’t rise to the greatness of the graphic novel, but then again – who had honestly expect it to? A lot of the meta-comments and references which the graphic novel is so full of didn’t make it into the film, which is both completely understandable and at the same time completely underwrites Moore’s statement that comics, as a media, can do things which films cannot. One thing which the film does not succeed in doing any way nearly as successfully as the graphic novel is the deconstruction of the superhero myth. The theme is definitely there, but it’s buried just a bit too much under a veneer of coolness which the genre, even with main characters such as these, simply can’t shake. While the retired Watchmen do come across as real people with real emotions (and real erectile dysfunction), they never come across as quite as pathetic as they do in the graphic novel. From a comparative point of view, this is the film’s one primary weakness as opposed to the graphic novel.

Otherwise Watchmen, as an adaptation, is quite admirable. Snyder and his team has stuck extremely faithfully to the graphic novel with only minor changes throughout and a somewhat larger change to the ending. The overall ending is completely as in the comic, but elements of it has been changed.

BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

The concrete change I’m talking about is that rather than Adrian Veidt using technology to create the belief that alien forces are invading Earth, thus forcing the US and the Soviet Union to join forces instead of blowing each other sky high, he uses technology which leads the world leaders to believe that the mass destruction was perpetrated by Dr. Manhattan. While it’s a fairly major change, it works in the context of the film, and avoids the rather more colourful faux alien invasion of the comic book which might have thrown parts of the audience into a fit of laughter. I would’ve liked to see the “alien”, and particularly the gruesome New York-scenery immediately after it, but what the hey – it works.

SPOILERS END.

The physical action of the graphic novel, as well as most of its design, has been faithfully carried over into the film. The costumes are somewhat different though, as we could already gather from the trailers, and they’re not quite as tacky as they are in the comic. Nite Owl who actually looks a bit like a dork in the graphic novel looks pretty cool in the film, for instance. Other minor changes include the gore-level. We may not see the terrible destruction wreaked on New York (although we do see most of N.Y. getting nuked off the face of the Earth), but in other places, the gore-level is definitely set to 11. Case in point: Rorshach’s flashback to the scene where he stops being Walter Kovacs entirely. In the graphic novel, he handcuffs the bad guy in his [i.e. the bad guy's] house, leaves him with a hacksaw and then sets the house on fire. In the film, Rorschach goes to work directly on the baddie with a meat cleaver. Shown in fairly gory detail. Still, it works fine, and is a minor change as far as I’m concerned.

The faithfulness of the film to the graphic novel may in fact be the film’s major problem as a piece of cinematic storytelling in general, as it comes out fairly stiff and rigid. This will however probably only be an issue to those who have read the graphic novel, and even so it isn’t really much of an issue. I can’t really hold this against the adaptation, since it was a question of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” as far as Snyder and his team were concerned. If they made too many or too major changes, they’d be crucified by the hardcore fans, and in choosing to stick almost slavishly to the graphic novel, the outcome is, as I said, a tad rigid.

But oh, what a stylish sort of rigid! Visually, the film is a blast! It’s beautifully executed, and thankfully not too heavy on the slo-mo, which I feared might be a problem with Snyder. He uses slow motion, to be sure, but not nearly as much as I thought he would, and not to the degree it becomes annoying.

Generally, the film is well-cast. The main characters all hit the nail, except most of them are a bit younger than they seem to be in the graphic novel. Still, it doesn’t detract from the overall fact that the actors look their parts. Jackie Earle Haley is superbly cast as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach, and both Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson (as Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg, respectively) also come very close to their comic counterparts. Whether or not you like the CG-version of Doctor Manhattan is something to be discussed, I suppose, but my initial fears, from seeing the trailers, was soon alleviated. Once you’re in the theater and the film is playing, you simply accept him and don’t really think too much of the way he looks.

Finally, a few words about the main title sequence which is very possibly the best one of the sort I’ve seen in the last half decade or so. It sets up the entire background of the universe, from the appearance of the Minutemen in the 1930′s and up until the present day (i.e. 1985), and it does it beautifully through a set of montages, taking us through five decades to the sound of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin”. The use of contemporary music in the film was occasionally a tad self-conscious in my ears, but it never detracted so much from the experience as to become decidedly annoying.

Playing a solid 160 minutes, Watchmen is a long film, and never comes across as too long. That’s a feat in itself, but even at 160 minutes, it’s fast paced. For those who don’t know the basic premise or the storyline, there’s a lot of information to digest in a very short time span, and I do imagine that for some people, Watchmen may be a bit complicated. Even I was momentarily thrown off for a few moments, although I read the graphic novel a month ago. A problem? Maybe, but not a big one.

In the final analysis, Watchmen is a very watchable film (lame pun, sorry), and it definitely came out a helluvalot better than I’d hoped it would. It’s not a masterpiece like the graphic novel it’s built upon, but it does as good a job as I think is possible with this kind of material.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, waiting until the need came over me to watch it (for review purposes), and last weekend it finally did. I didn’t have what you would call high expectations for the film – at least not in a traditional sense – but I knew from experience that this might not be all that bad. My first personal experience with a Turkish superhero-flick was hugely entertaining, and if you haven’t seen Dünyayai kurtaran adam (better known as The Man Who Saves the World – or even more widely known as Turkish Star Wars), you should do so right now. It’s even available online – you can watch it right here on Google Videos.

The absurdity of Dünyayi kurtaran adam is almost too much to contain in one blog post, and since this is supposed to be about Demir pençe (korsan adam), I’ll keep it to a minimum. But let me just say that Dünyayi sports direct rips from Star Wars (in the wrong aspect ratio, to boot), an overweight Cüneyt Arkin fighting “zombies” (people with what looks like toilet paper wrapped around their heads), jumping energetically over his enemies to the tones of the “Raiders March” and other music lifted directly from well-known Hollywood-films – and much, much more. The plot is as insane as the rest of the film, and I won’t even attempt a recap here. But to convince you to see the film in its entirety, I’ll embed the famous training-montage – arguably one of the most hilarious parts of the film (note that the music in the embed is not the music used in the film):

Anyway, on to Demir pençe (korsan adam) which is known in English as Iron Claw the Pirate. Exactly why this is the case, I’ve yet to find out, since Iron Claw is no pirate but rather a masked crimefighter. Calling Demir pençe (that is Iron Claw) a superhero may be a bit too much, since his only superpowers appear to be driving insanely on his motorcycle and doing badly cheoreographed fight scenes. Also, what’s with the mask? The dude wears a standard superhero costume, initially including the mask. However, in later scenes it’s completely random if he wears his mask or not. I guess hiding his identity isn’t that important.

In the film, Demir pençe comes up against Fantômas. Yes, the French superbaddie who was created way back in 1911 and has featured in a number of French pulp stories as well as multiple films and TV-series since 1913.

Turkish superhero-flicks using known characters is not exactly an unknown phenomena. In Tarzan Istanbul’da from 1952 Tarzan (yes, THE Tarzan) comes to.. you’ve guessed it, Istanbul, and in 3 Dev Adam from 1973, the Turkish authorities ask Captain America for help in their fight against crime. Whether Fantômas qualifies as a really famous character is debatable, but he’s definitely imported. So’s the music, which – amongst other things – is lifted directly from John Barry’s scores from Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Other music seems to come from several different westerns.

Most of the film plays out as a sequence of fight scenes, where Iron Claw takes on Fantômas and his minions, led by head-henchman Behcet who has a metal arm (well, metal is maybe not completely correct, perhaps “silver colored oven glove” is more like it, but you get the point). The problem is that there’s virtually no plot development. Apart from Fantômas being bent on getting a microfilm from some professor, nothing much happens in the plot department. Sure, Fantômas is your run-of-the-mill super-baddie who wants to take on the world (starting with Istanbul – the obvious launching pad for any bid for world domination), but he doesn’t really do very much about it.

Throughout the film, Iron Claw gets his intelligence from “Uncle” or “The Uncle”, who may or may not be the actual uncle of Iron Claw or Iron Claw’s girlfriend Mine, who is also a costumed crime fighter. The confusion arises from the fact that just about everybody seems to call the old geezer “Uncle”, and excuse me for not speaking Turkish. Upon getting info from “Uncle” on the whereabouts of Fantômas’ minions (which “Uncle” seems to get by with surprising ease), Iron Claw jumps on his trusty motorbike and heads out to kick some ass.

Being a loosely stringed-together number of fight scenes, Demir pençe (korsan adam) ends up being rather boring – wall, actually just boring – since the fight scenes are nowhere near exciting. They’re occasionally quite funny, though, being extremely badly choreographed. But neither bad choreography, wooden acting nor a peppering of scenes with scantily clad Turkish women can save Demir pençe (korsan adam) from being a bit of a snoozefest.

In the genre of Turkish superhero films, there are better options than Demir pençe (korsan adam) – for instance the above mentioned Dünyayi kurtaran adam – and this particular one is really only recommendable to hardcore fans (all 17 of them) of the genre. There’s a certain bizarre charm somewhere deep down in the mess which is Demir pençe (korsan adam), but mostly it’s just boring.

Now, I just happened to see episode 5.06 last night, and was extatic when it was over. More answers, yet more questions. Some have been complaining that we’re getting the answers doled out too liberally now, but I don’t agree with that at all. It’s just as it’s supposed to be. And they haven’t completely let off posing new mysteries, either.

Anyway, the first ABC promo spot for next week’s episode is already up, and there are some interesting bits and pieces there already:

SPOILER

Locke speaking to Charles Widmore?
Locke coming back to life on the island?
Vincent the Dog talking? (Ok, so that’s a lie – I made that up, but the other two are correct)

Also, the ABC press release gives more interesting tidbits: guest stars include John Terry, Malcolm David Kelley and Lance Reddick. That’s Christian Shepherd, Walt and Matthew Abaddon for you, folks. Looks like yet another mythology-laden episode next week. I can’t wait!

END SPOILER

You can watch the first promo for 5.07 – The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham – below, or catch it over at darkufo.blogspot.com here.

Still, Watchmen remains topical to this day, and probably more so post 9/11 than in the years between the end of the Cold War and until the War on Terror began. This is due to the finely sublimely crafted manuscript by Alan Moore which, while using the contemporary fears of global thermonuclear (or thermonucular, if you’re Dubya), manages to focus on the fear and anxiety itself, more than the reasons for it. Sure, we get the headlines (“Soviets go into Pakistan”) and see President Nixon (a dystopian idea if ever there was one!) retreat to the safety of an underground bunker. But it’s not the trappings of war which Watchmen is interested in, but rather the alienation that fear engenders. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but it’s done so gracefully, so expertly and so damn entertaining that it has to be seen to be believed.

I finished Watchmen for the first time just the other day, and I’m not finished thinking about it – nor will I be in the foreseeable future, I believe. Because while the topical content is one thing, the deconstruction of the superhero myth is another. This also is heavy stuff, and frankly I think it’s going to be difficult to view regular superheroes in the same light as before. There’s a pre-Watchmen-era and a post-Watchmen-era, and I’ve crossed that point in time.

The deconstruction of the myth of the superhero which Alan Moore achieves brilliantly is not only cool in its own right, but it prompts a number of questions about the superhero as a modern popular cultural character. There are interesting morality issues here, which makes even the “good” superheroes look kinda sordid. I mean, apart from their amazing gifts and their gallivanting around, saving Earth (and thanks for that), what are they other than vigilantes with special abilities which make them unreachable by any Keene Act? Of course, X-Men has toyed with similar ideas about negative responses to superheroes, and other franchises have taken up the idea, but it has never changed the essential rightness of what the heroes were doing. When the common people hate “muties” in X-Men, we – the readers – know that the common people are ignorant ingrates. When the common people hate and fear the “superheroes” of Watchmen, we – the readers – are forced, in some measure at least, to sympathize with that fear.

Of course the heart of the morality surrounding the superhero as an archetype goes deeper than just the fiction itself – there are interesting questions to be asked what the popularity of the superhero means in sociological sense. Moore, ever the cranky, “gotta keep kicking you in the groin”-type, recently compared American superhero comics with the US foreign policy. Here’s what he said:

I’ve recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they’re a lot like America’s foreign policy.

America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight.

You can read the entire interview over at Total Film here. While I personally don’t see it exactly as Moore does, somewhere deep down, in places we don’t like to talk about (to paraphrase a certain colonel in a certain court room drama with a certain Tom Cruise), the man has a point of sorts. I don’t think the “unfair fight” is really the most interesting aspect of all this, but it’s one of them.

Yet another aspect where Watchmen is absolutely brilliant is in its basic construction. The inclusion of various texts from the world of Watchmen (chapters from a biography, news clippings etc.) not only lends the whole thing a sense of realism, it also informs us about the mind of these characters which would be difficult to do through the direct action alone. Not that the storyline is not heavy on the characterization, because it is, and the main characters of Watchmen are all tremendously interesting in different ways. Some more than other, of course, but not one of them is “just” a character. The meta-layer which is introduced by the comic-within-the-comic is also a brilliant way of commenting on the primary action of the story, and also tells us that in the world of Watchmen, there are no superhero comics – instead there are pirate comics. A small detail, perhaps, but it works wonders in building up a sense of realism.

Attention to detail is what it’s about, and here Moore couldn’t have been more lucky than to work with Dave Gibbons, whose illustrations are chock full of details which may not be essential to the plot line, but add even more realism.

I’m still in a place where the reading experience needs to filter through my mind some more, and settle. But I really understand now why Watchmen has the reputation for greatness that it does, and it is completely deserved. To combine a hugely entertaining story with so many elements which give food for thought is no mean feat. The big question now is how in the hell Zack Snyder hopes to capture just some of all of that in the upcoming film. Before reading the graphic novel I was skeptical of the film – now I’m positively afraid. Am I still going to see it? Hell, yes. Even though it may very well suck, we’ll always have the graphic novel to return to.

If you haven’t read this baby yet, it’s about damn time.

LOS ANGELES – One of the biggest mysteries of “Lost” — the Smoke Monster — will be unveiled on the popular TV drama, and soon.

Actor Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin, said in an interview that the origin and nature of the malevolent dark cloud will be disclosed and viewers will even get a glimpse of its lair. Turns out the monster is as “old as the island” that’s been home to the Oceanic jet-crash survivors and their foes.

Kim also cautioned against expectations that his character, Jin, will reunite with his wife, Sun (Yunjin Kim), even though Jin survived a freighter explosion and Sun returns to the island after escaping it.

Those events don’t mean “they’re particularly in the same place or chronologically in the same time,” Kim said.

As for the atomic bomb that showed up in the “Jughead” episode, he said the show’s producers rarely give something such prominence unless it counts in the island’s mythology.

“That’s a huge red herring if it’s a red herring,” Kim said, suggesting the bomb could help resolve plot points as the series ends in 2010.

Perhaps the time-traveling that’s popped up this season might be one of those.

Sounds as if the writers are gearing up to tie a knot on one of the oldest mysteries – actually THE oldest mystery – on the show: the “smoke monster”, which first made an appearance (although its shape was then unknown) in the pilot back in 2004.

Personally, I can’t wait to finally find out what that’s all about. As for Jughead playing a major role, I dunno. But I suppose Daniel Dae Kim ought to know what he’s talking about.

The Woman in Black (from the Granada 1989 movie)

Now, people who know me know that I’m a sucker for ghost stories. Being a hardened genre veteran, I repeatedly find that ghost stories and haunted house stories are among the only ones that still scare me shitless from time to time. Mind you, not the ridiculous effects-laden bullshit movies that pass themselves off as ghost stories (House on Haunted Hill-remake, I’m looking at you), but the real deal. I still remember being scared white (as a ghost, see?) by the Granada made for TV-version of The Woman in Black from 1989 (deplorably never officially released on DVD), and even some of the Japanese spook-stories have had me.. well, spooked.

One particular favourite from The Woman in Black (from memory, and it’s been a while, so bear with me): the young solicitor wakes up in the creepy house only to find the ghost hovering inches above his face (or so I remember the scene – creeps me out as I’m writing this).

A similar favourite from Ju-On (both the original and the American remake): woman is scared, and rushes home to apartment. Brother calls, can he come up? Sure, woman says. Brother is at door immediately, even though woman lives in a high-rise. Woman is even more scared than before. Flees to bed. Hides under covers. Only – and this is the kicker, folks – to feel movement under the covers with her, and the Japanese ghost girl with the long black hair (TM) suddenly crawling onto her chest. GEEZ, LOUISE! The American remake of Ju-On (Ju-On: The Grudge) has me so spooked, when I got home from the theatre, I had to check behind my shower curtain. I shit you not.

Still, the old fashioned ghost story appeals the most to me. Which is why I suppose The Woman in Black sits so well with me. The Innocents, too (1961). The Haunting (the original 1963-version, please, if you don’t mind). Even The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001). And the short stories and books that so many of the great ghost story movies are based on.

Unfortunately I’ve still a long way to come with the books. Although I’ve read The Turn of the Screw (which The Innocents is based on) by Henry James (1898), I haven’t yet read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), neither Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983). But I plan to remedy that fairly soon. I already have one unread haunted house novel on my shelf – Ann Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door (1978) – and when I finish my Ph.D. I plan on a small shopping spree for ghost novels. Should be cheap, too.

Actually, all I wanted to say with all this is that The Haunting in Connecticut has moved up its opening date from June 19th to March 27th – in the States that is. When (or if) it will open in Denmark remains to be seen. I hope it does, because while I know I shouldn’t judge from the trailer, I can’t help but feel good about this film. Could turn out to be terrible effects-laden bullshit, but if they remain true to the story and tone down the effects, I’ll go to the theatre in diapers.

See, I watched the original dramatization of this supposedly “based on true events”-story on (hold on to your potatoes) The Discovery Channel a few years back. Yeah, The Discovery Channel. So what? Sue me! The dramatization they aired on said channel was actually pretty nifty, and left me spooked. Back then the film was part of a series of “A Haunting..”-dramatizations, so it was called A Haunting in Connecticut, not The Haunting in Connecticut, but that’s beside the point. Point is, it was pretty creepy. And as far as I can tell from the trailer (see below), the new theatrical feature follows the storyline fairly well.

Please God, let them not screw this one up. It’s been so long since we’ve had a proper ghost movie.

James Whitmore (1921-2009)

I just read on Søren Jacobsen’s (Danish language) blog Skræk & Rædsel that James Whitmore died on Friday, aged 87. A prolific actor with more than 140 films and TV-episodes (one episode of The Twilight Zone among them), Whitmore is probably best known by genre fans for his role in the classic 1950s sci-fi flick THEM! (the one with the giant ants which in turn inspired Cinemaware’s computer game It Came From the Desert from 1990).

In later years, Whitmore returned to the horror genre with a role in Peter Hyams’ The Relic (1997), but the more casual film goer will probably know Whitmore best for his role as the sympathetic prison librarian in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

According to the ABC press release, in the episode “Locke takes on the burden to stop the island’s increasingly violent shifts through time. Meanwhile, Ben hits a roadblock in his attempt to reunite the Oceanic 6 and bring them back to the island”.

I also note with interest that the press release mentions John Terry guest starring as Christian Shepherd – I wonder if that’s in a flashback or in Christian’s new role as a spokesperson for Jacob? Under any circumstances everything points to next ep being as heavy on the mythological content as the previous ones have been. Goody, goody!

Watch the episode 5 promo below.

La Terza madre (The Mother of Tears)

So I finally got around to watch Dario Argentos La Terza madre, or The Mother of Tears as it’s known in English. It’s the final film in Argento’s “Three Mothers”-trilogy which started back in 1977 with Suspiria, followed by Inferno in 1980. It took Argento a long time to finish the trilogy; La Terza madre didn’t come out until 2007.

Everybody knows it’s been a long time since Argento was the king of Italian horror, but nevertheless he’s had good stuff among his output in later years (as well as some complete stinkers), so I was looking forward to La Terza madre – also after reading quite a few favourable reviews here and there. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed with the film.

Now get me straight: I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece like Suspiria or even Inferno, which – although definitely an acquired taste – is also a very interesting and satisfying film. I knew that La Terza madre would be much more plot oriented, and I knew from reviews to expect a fairly ordinary occult horror film. I just wasn’t expecting it to be as thoroughly ordinary as it really is. La Terza madre is like something we’ve seen a thousand times before, which doesn’t have to be bad as long as it’s properly executed. This is where the film fails, however.

The story is pretty simple: during some digging in an Italian cemetary, a box is found chained to a coffin. The priest, opening the box, is horrified at its contents (which as yet is unknown to us viewers), and sends it to a museum in Rome. He wants a certain curator there, who is knowledgeable in all things esoteric, to either confirm or deny his suspicions. Unfortunately the curator isn’t at the museum when the box arrives, so two conservation technicians open it, after which all hell breaks lose. One of the two women are killed brutally by strange characters that suddenly show up, while the other, Sarah Mandy (played by the director’s daughter Asia Argento) escapes.

Turns out the box contains some artefacts belonging to the last of the three “mothers” – powerful witches who, in the past, have wreaked havoc on Earth. The two other witches were dealt with in Suspiria (Mater Suspiriorum, or the Mother of Sighs) and Inferno (Mater Tenebrarum, or the Mother of Darkness). This last one is Mater Lachrymarum, or the Mother of Tears – the most beautiful and cruel of the three. Unwittingly the two museum curators have recalled the Mother of Tears (how or why is not completely obvious), and now bad things start happening. A spate of crime, suicides and violence starts to hit Rome, and witches from all over the world flock to Rome to usher in the “second age of witches”.

Asia Argento as Sarah Mandy

Good thing that Sarah Mandy’s mother was herself a powerful white witch when she was alive, and good thing that she shows up like Obi Wan Kenobi to help her daughter fight the bad witches. Too bad that it just doesn’t come off for Argento. Much of the story features Sarah fleeing from the witches, looking up people who can tell her what the hell is going on, only to have the witches or their henchmen show up and kill off Sarah’s would-be allies. When Sarah’s in danger, Ma Mandy shows up like Obi Wan – first as a disembodied voice, later as a shimmering ghost figure – to help and/or guide her. Finally Sarah manages to find the house of Mater Lachrymarum in Rome where she suvveeds in killing her in such blind luck that it’s quite unbelievable.

Apart from me thinking “Use the Force” and “You will go the Dagobah-system” quite a few times during the film, La Terza madre is also unintentionally funny in other respects. The apocalyptic events that happen in Rome are shown in halfassed scenes with a couple of dudes trashing a car, a mother throwing her baby off a bridge, and various hints at different crimes. While the ideas are fine, and the scene with the baby is quite effective, the whole thing lacks scope: we simply don’t believe that these things are as bad or as widespread as we’re supposed to. And this would have been so incredibly easy to achieve in an extended montage. Frankly, a lot of this stuff comes off as unintentionally hilarious – particularly the car trashing is just plain ole silly.

Furthermore, the witches who flock to Rome are made up to look like cheap trailer trash, sporting ridiculous make-up and bad over-acting. A scene where Sarah looks up a priest who knows something (played by Udo Kier) is even more funny. Apparently this fella is one of the last confirmed exorcists, and after Mater Lachrymarum has returned, he’s been beleaguered by people wanting him to exorcise their loved ones. Unfortunately the scene where we see the afflicted gibbering around in the courtyard of the priest’s house is worthy of a spoof – it’s just that funny. It’s not meant to be, but it is.

Trailer trash witches

The bloody murders which appear in the film – and they are quite bloody, indeed – come off as randomly placed in the film, and ocassionally fairly unmotivated. As if Argento knew it was expected of him to present some gory stuff. Other aspects seem equally mechanical – dark stairwells and other Argento staples crop up, as if he’s had a checklist of things people expect from an Argento-film. The final scene, where Sarah finds the lair of the Mother of Tears, features quick glimpses from a satanic orgy, but while it’s fairly gory, Argento definitely pulls his punches. He never goes for the all out, but teases us instead. This can work fine, but here it doesn’t. Instead it seems that he’s simply been afraid to cross some line, instead of really going for our guts.

From one of the murder scenes

In the end it’s probably the combination of the ordinariness of the whole thing and the mass of elements that don’t work, which makes La Terza madre a completely mediocre thing. The ordinariness would be acceptable if all the other things worked well, but they don’t. The story as such has a lot of good ideas, but they’re mechanically executed, making me suspect that Argento wasn’t really that interested in making this film at all.

La Terza madre not a decidedly terrible film, but it’s certainly not what you expect of an Argento-film. If not for the references to the Three Mothers, this could’ve been made by just about any director. It’s a terrible shame, but there you have it.