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Content by Paul A. Lewis
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Reviews Written by
Paul A. Lewis "Paul A J Lewis" (United Kingdom)
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The Diabolical Doctor Z
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| DVD ~ Jesús Franco |
| Price: CDN$ 23.49 |
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| Availability: Not in stock; order now and we'll deliver when available |
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Possible Franco's best 1960s Gothic, Nov 23 2003
The Diabolical Dr Z is one of director Jess Franco's best 1960s Gothics. The film oozes atmosphere and features some lush black-and-white photography, together with threatening shots of darkened corridors (in a prison, in the doctor's mansion, on a train) which feature prominently in Franco's early work (The Awful Dr Orloff, The Sadistic Baron von Klaus) and in many 1950s/1960s horror movies (for example, Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr Hitchcock); psychoanalysts would probably explain these shots by relating the use of this type of mise-en-scène to the concept of the 'spider woman' (or the 'monstrous feminine'), which is a central concern of this film and of the films of Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. Knowing that Franco often borrows ideas from Surrealism, however, it may be self-defeating to try to find this type of 'meaning' in his films: in his 1960s pictures, Franco simply delights in covering the intertextual quotation that takes place in his films with lashings of Gothic atmosphere. Franco's films are an exploration of excess, and could be likened to onions: once one layer of 'meaning' has been peeled away, the viewer is left with an indeterminate number of other layers. The Diabolical Dr Z also highlights Franco's anti-idealism: most of the characters in this film are simply out for revenge, or are seeking to further their careers, and think nothing of trampling on the people in their path. This theme would become more prominent in later Franco films, which expressed it through the metaphor of vampirism (The Female Vampire), the motif of the 'witchhunt' (The Bloody Judge) and the conventions of the Women in Prison film. With hindsight, Franco would have been the ideal candidate to film an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. The Diabolical Dr Z will probably not appeal to those whose interest in horror begins and ends with 'ironic' horror films such as Scream; as with the work of Mario Bava and Terence Fisher, although there is a large amount of intentional humour in Dr Z (via some very witty dialogue, particularly the comments made by Franco-in a cameo as a policeman-in the final scene), modern audiences may poke fun at its predominantly sombre tone, and will probably be alienated by both the use of black-and-white photography and Daniel White's atonal jazz score. This is a shame, because for me, Franco's 1960s films (together with some of his 1970s pictures, such as Exorcism and The Demons) represent some of the highlights of the horror genre.
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Blue Sunshine
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| DVD ~ Jeff Lieberman |
| Price: CDN$ 33.49 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks |
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A fascinating, underrated film., Jun 13 2003
Blue Sunshine (Jeff Lieberman, 1976)...Originally released in 1976, Blue Sunshine was directed by Jeff Lieberman. In the same year, Lieberman also made the creepy 'killer worm' movie Squirm, and in the 1980s he was responsible for the killer-in-the-woods flick Just Before Dawn (1981) and the science-fiction comedy Remote Control (1987). His last input into a movie released to theatres was as the screenwriter for The Neverending Story III (Peter MacDonald, 1994).Lieberman's second film, Blue Sunshine is a patchwork quilt of elements borrowed from horror, satire, science-fiction, Sixties drug movies, counterculture myths, urban legend and conspiracy theories. Like Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1973), Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1972) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Blue Sunshine is a reaction against the counterculture of the 1960s, detailing the decline of the youthful idealism associated with the late 60s as it exploded into the raw reality of the 1970s: the cumulative effect of the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, the failure of American forces in Vietnam, the shootings at Kent State University and finally Watergate was to add to an increased sense of alienation and despair within American society. This despair suggested that the counterculture 'project' had failed: love, peace and happiness had no place in the society of the early 1970s. The most memorable films made during this period are characterized by a sense of lethargy, an 'energylessness' that tapped into the zeitgeist within American society. Blue Sunshine is no exception, and for Nathanael Thompson (2003) the film 'now feels prophetic in its depiction of a post-1960s culture ripping apart at the seams as it tries to dissolve back into normal, capitalist society': like many genre/exploitation films, Blue Sunshine appears to be a way of 'working through' and coming to terms with the problems faced by the society in which it was produced. In a nod to one of Hitchcock's favourite plot devices, Blue Sunshine stars Zalman King as a man wrongly accused of murder. In the 1980s, King developed a reputation as a maker of erotic dramas: he was responsible for Two Moon Junction (1988), Nine and a Half Weeks (1986), Lake Consequence (1993) and the HBO television series Red Shoe Diaries (1992-2001). Here, he certainly does not prove his skills as an actor, but he gives a suitably hysterical, paranoid performance as a man embroiled in a mystery: a group of apparently respectable, upstanding Stanford graduates are losing their hair and turning into psychotic killers. The source of their psychosis appears to be a form of Lysergic Acid called 'Blue Sunshine' that they took ten years earlier, and which releases a 'chomosomal aberration' in their biological makeup. Around the basic premise, Lieberman constructs an increasingly paranoid, edgy satire, the targets of which are the idealistic baby-boomer hippies who 'sold out' and became the money-driven yuppies who allowed the New Right to seize power in the late 1970s. This narrative forms the basis for an extremely paranoid film that transgresses taboos as easily as it crosses traditional genre distinctions: for example, in one of the most memorable setpieces, a babysitter attacks her charges with a knife, and in the combative opening sequence a clown (Richard Crystal, Billy Crystal's brother) murders guests at a party by forcing them into an open fireplace. Within this apparently exploitative narrative, Lieberman includes some bizarre twists to rival those found in Larry Cohen's similarly perverse horror/SF thriller God Told Me To (also known as Demon, and released the same year as Blue Sunshine). Lieberman also executes some satirical setpieces: for example, a massacre in a discotheque and a sequence in which one of the 'infected' stalks a shopping mall (two years before Romero's consumerist satire Dawn of the Dead). Blue Sunshine had a strong impact on many of the young people who became involved in the Punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s: it spoke to their nihilistic instinct, hatred of hippies, and in its exploration of the boundaries of taste it shared its ironic stance with the early Punks. Consequently, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the film developed a strong cult following among young people, and in 1983, working with Steve Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees) The Cure's Robert Smith produced an album named after the film. Often described as 'Cronenberg-esque', Blue Sunshine was released before the films that went on to define the style of David Cronenberg (The Brood, 1978; Scanners, 1981; Videodrome, 1982), and consequently pre-dates Cronenberg's preoccupation with viruses that affect both human biology and psychology. Thompson claims that, like Cronenberg's movies, in Blue sunshine 'there isn't much aggressive shock material on display; the unease of [the film] lies instead in its queasy sense of the mind and body breaking down without any control' (op cit). The lack of 'shock material may deter some viewers, and in his otherwise enthusiastic review Thompson admits that '[f]or horror fans raised during the slasher glut of the '80s and afterwards, adapting to the socially twisted terrors of the 1970s can be an uphill battle' (op cit). However, like most Seventies horror movies (Saul Bass' Phase IV, 1974; Jerrold Freedman's made-for-television The Chill Factor/A Cold Night's Death, 1973), Blue Sunshine rewards patient viewers with a glimpse into a society (and a physiology) on the brink of collapse...
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