BATTLESHIP: One year later

At the risk of alienating the 50% of my regular readership that consists of serious film connoisseurs (the other half being my wife and mother - hi ladies!), I feel compelled to say a few more words about Battleship, last summer's resounding box office dud from director Peter Berg. In this piece, published last July, I speculated on why it might have been such a failure, while somewhat apologetically admitting that, for what it was worth, I enjoyed the film. At the end of my piece, I remarked that I'd likely end up buying a copy on Blu-ray if I could find it for ten bucks or less. (This price point has nothing to do with my opinion of the film; I'm pretty militant about holding out for good deals on movies, and I've acquired most of the Blu-rays in my collection for $8 to $15.) After nearly a year, this magic threshold was finally passed, and I am now the proud owner of a Battleship Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Copy combo pack.

Having watched the film again last night, I must say that my opinion of it has changed somewhat over the past year, or rather, my concern about what others might think about my opinion of it has changed. I'm tired of pretending. Let me state for the record that I unashamedly, unreservedly and without irony, love Battleship, and I don't care who knows it. After seeing it for the second time, it has become clear to me that, in its own way, it's a masterpiece. It's a given that American summer movies have come to mean one thing and one thing only: blowing shit up, and Battleship blows its shit up with the best of them while still managing to work on a human scale. I'm not generally a huge fan of CGI, as I think it's overused, and it usually makes movies look more like video games, but while a few of the sequences might have lost a bit of their lustre on the small screen, in general, Battleship's VFX work is stunning.

More than that, though, it's simply a likeable dog of a movie. I went back and reread some of the favorable reviews of the film from other critics (we're in the minority, believe me), and the consensus is that Battleship succeeds (at least in our eyes) by approaching its subject with an earnestness that's often absent from this type of film, and it presents us with characters we can feel great about rooting for in the midst of its apocalyptic fury. Folks, this is a film so big that it requires not one but two AC/DC songs on the soundtrack. It's an enormously loud and bombastic film that wears its heart on its sleeve. It approaches you, hat in hand, smiling its $209 million smile, and kindly asks you to check your logic and, let's face it, your common sense at the door while promising you a hell of a good time if you acquiesce. It's a film that extracts a naturalistic and even appealing performance from Rihanna, a person whose public persona irritates me to no end. It's a film that manages to celebrate the military in an entirely apolitical way, by pitting them against an extraterrestrial threat, which is a stroke of genius in my book, and it makes Battleship perfect for viewing this Memorial Day weekend, especially given the fact that it features real-life veterans, past and present, among its cast. It's a film that, I think, deserves a second chance.

Light 'em up.

Triumph of the Will?

As Hollywood grows increasingly bereft of original ideas, more and more classic films are being desecrated by unnecessary, unwanted and ultimately inferior remakes. Don't get me wrong - I think remakes are fine in certain cases. If the original film was technically flawed in some way, or if it missed an opportunity to make a salient point, or if the story can be updated in some way to make it more relevant for our time, then by all means have at it, but some films are so perfect, so timeless, that they should be off the table as far as remakes go. Sam Peckinpah's monumental 1969 Western, The Wild Bunch, is just such a film, but of course, nothing is off the table in today's Hollywood, and a remake has been in the works for some time. If that wasn't bad enough in and of itself, it was recently announced that Will Smith is on tap to star in the film. I have nothing against Will Smith; I've enjoyed him in many films, such as Independence Day and the Men In Black series, but the announcement of his (mis)casting in what is certain to be a cinematic travesty is the straw (dog) that broke the camel's back. I now present for you seven reasons why remaking The Wild Bunch, especially with Will Smith, is a bad, bad idea.

1. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, The Wild Bunch does not need to be remade. Peckinpah's original still retains its visceral power nearly 45 years after its release. It's arguably the finest film by one of the greatest directors in the history of American cinema, and there's really nothing about it that could have been done better.

2. Smith is a fine actor in the right role, but I'm not convinced that he's capable of fully conveying the self-loathing that is a crucial aspect of the main character in The Wild Bunch. William Holden did a magnificent job in the original film of demonstrating Pike Bishop's inner disgust at the man he had become. Smith just doesn't have the world-weariness or the gravitas necessary for the role.

3. The remake will not be a Western, but will be a contemporary thriller featuring Smith as a disgraced DEA agent. The whole raison d'être of the original was to tell the story of a group of outlaws left behind by changing times not long after the turn of the twentieth century. A remake set in modern times won't be capable of rendering that milieu with any sort of authenticity, which begs the question: what's the point?

4. The original was extremely violent and bloody, but the violence was presented in a realistic fashion meant to show the audience that death is an ugly business. The remake will undoubtedly try to top the original, but will showcase the violence in a flashier manner, with less moral weight - as modern action film audiences are accustomed to - and it will probably be rendered with fake-looking CGI blood, totally ruining the effect.
 
5. Smith rejected the title role in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (which eventually went to Jamie Foxx), reportedly because he felt it wasn't prominent enough (anyone who actually saw Foxx's rousing performance in the finished film should find such a sentiment laughable). If he's truly conceited enough to feel that he's not suited for any role other than the lead, then he has no business acting in The Wild Bunch. It's an ensemble piece, not a star vehicle.

6. The practical effects that were accomplished on the set of the original, such as the bridge that was blown up with actual stuntmen and horses on it, gave it a sense of realism that will likely be completely absent from the remake due to the overuse of CGI effects.

7. It's highly unlikely that the characters will be as morally ambiguous as they were in the original, which is what made them so interesting. I have a difficult time imagining that the remake's screenplay and performances will have the courage to walk the fine line between showing the audience that the characters are very bad people yet still allowing us to care deeply for them. That sort of nuance is hard to come by these days, at least in big budget, star-driven films that have to appeal to the widest audience possible if they're to have any hope of earning their production costs back.

Roger Ebert: 1942 - 2013

I think it's safe to say that the average moviegoer doesn't put much stock in the opinions of movie critics. If they did, the weekly box office reports would look a lot different than they do now. Although I'm far from the average moviegoer, I don't pay much attention to what most critics say, either. I read their reviews, sure, and I can usually take something of value away from what they say, but in the end, their endorsements or their condemnations mean very little to me. (For the record, I don't consider myself a movie critic, just someone who likes to write about movies.) The one, major exception to this rule has always been Roger Ebert, who tragically passed away a few days ago, leaving a gaping hole in the world of film criticism that will likely never be filled.

Roger Ebert has been a part of virtually my entire life as a movie fan. At some point in my young life, it became apparent to me that movies were more than just a way to kill a few hours; they were a form of art, and they could mean something. It was at this point that I began to watch the movie review show Sneak Previews, featuring Ebert and co-host Gene Siskel, on public television. Although I was frequently dumbfounded as to why they panned many of the movies I loved (often, their "Dog of the Week" was the movie I was looking forward to the most), it became apparent to me that their opinions stemmed from a genuine love of cinema. I also became aware that certain types of movies I might have dismissed out of hand could actually be worth watching. I continued to watch the various incarnations of their show for many years, with various co-hosts filling in following Siskel's death in 1999.

In more recent years, Ebert's online column was often my first stop when researching a new film, and his blog and Twitter feed found him branching out and writing about other subjects just as eloquently as he did about film. While he may have lost his ability to speak following cancer surgery several years ago, his robust online presence demonstrated that he had not lost his voice. So many critics seem only to care about demonstrating their intellectual superiority by ripping films apart, but if Ebert was hard on a film, it was usually because he was disappointed by its failure to take full advantage of what the medium is capable of. With that being said, Ebert was often able to find something worthwhile in films that other critics didn't have the time of day for. He was often remarkably prescient in appreciating the true value of certain films well ahead of others, such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch; he was able to look past the film's graphic violence and recognize it for the masterpiece it is now (almost universally) considered to be.

The increasing prevalence of online journalism means that practically anyone can be a critic these days, given enough time and exposure. A glance at some of the aggregated reviews on a site like Rotten Tomatoes presents one with a list of a few familiar names and many more unfamiliar ones. While this approach may provide a much greater quantity of opinions, it's unlikely that we will soon see another critic whose opinion will mean as much to me, and to many of us, as Roger Ebert's did. He was truly one of the greats.

What goes around comes around

Jeff Bridges, in King Kong (1976, top) and Heaven's Gate (1980)

There's been an odd sort of symmetry to my movie watching as of late, and I'm not referring to the intentional kind. Like most film geeks, I periodically embark upon my own, private "film festivals," during which I'll view multiple films by the same director or featuring the same actor, but this isn't that. I'm finding that many of the films I'm watching have a completely unexpected connection to another one recently viewed, whether it's an actor who appears in both, a thematic consistency or even a similar scene. It's actually a bit weird. I first noticed it about a month or two ago, but it hasn't been until the last week or so that I've started to make note of the phenomenon. It's almost like some weird version of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that I'm playing without realizing it.

For instance, the weekend before last, I rented Steven Spielberg's Jaws, John Guillermin's 1976 version of King Kong and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. It occurred to me after I had returned home with the discs that I had almost rented the original version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as well, which meant I would have had two 1970s films starring Robert Shaw, but that didn't even occur to me while I was at the video store. King Kong, of course, stars Jessica Lange, and we'd just finished watching season one of American Horror Story on NetFlix a few weeks before. Without really thinking about it, I'd watched Lange's first filmed performance shortly after seeing one of her most current. There had been other recent instances such as these, but I didn't pay much attention to them beyond an initial moment of surprise, chalking things up to pure coincidence.

The unexpected connections deepened this past weekend, when we watched, among other things, Michael Winner's The Sentinel, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The first two films were streamed on NetFlix, the last two were viewed on rented Blu-rays. The Sentinel, of course, highlights devilish goings-on in a New York City apartment building, as seen in Rosemary's Baby the weekend before, but strangely enough, both films also feature actresses who were once married to Frank Sinatra (Mia Farrow in Rosemary, Ava Gardner in Sentinel). The Sentinel also features a barely-there performance by a young Christopher Walken, who has a starring role in the very next film I watched, Heaven's Gate. I had been wanting to revisit the Cimino film ever since Criterion announced their restored director's cut Blu-ray release, so it was on my mind long before seeing Walken in The Sentinel. Another featured performer in Heaven's Gate is a young, bearded Jeff Bridges, who I'd just seen in King Kong. Heaven's Gate also showcases stunning views of Glacier National Park in Montana, as do the opening helicopter shots in The Shining, a fact I was completely unaware of until I looked it up on Wikipedia while watching the film. 

The oddest connection of all was between the Indiana Jones film and The Shining, both of which have brief scenes in which one character expresses a desire to talk meaningfully with another, prompting the second character to ask facetiously what the first character would like to talk about, leading to an uncomfortable moment between the two. It's not necessarily an unusual type of scene to have in a film, but I'm not convinced that I would have noticed this juxtaposition had I not watched the two films back-to-back, and the strangeness of witnessing these oddly similar scenes in two disparate films, one right after the other, resonated with me. Just to bring things full circle and to make sure I was paying attention, a few of the documentaries that were featured on the Blu-ray of The Shining had interviews with - wait for it - Steven Spielberg.

I'm not sure if I simply didn't pick up on these connections before, or if I'm actually gravitating toward films that have something in common. I do think having films available to watch instantly plays a big part in it. While I may not have had a conscious desire to see two Christopher Walken films in a row, having both of them at my fingertips via NetFlix perhaps allowed me to indulge a subconscious desire without fully realizing it. Maybe after seeing the older (but still stunning) Jessica Lange in American Horror Story, part of me felt like traveling back through time via the magic of cinema to gaze upon her younger counterpart. Whatever's behind this, it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues, especially now that I'm fully aware of it.

Italian Horror Blogathon - DEATH SMILES AT MURDER

This post is part of the Third Annual Italian Horror Blogathon hosted by Kevin Olson's marvelous blog Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. I participated last year, and I'm very happy to be a part of it again. I don't know why, but when writing reviews of these films for the blogathon, I tend to use a goofier style than normal. I guess the films bring out that side of me. Also, I lean toward describing the plots in obsessive detail (including massive spoilers), perhaps because so many of them are next to incomprehensible. Read on if you dare!

The late Italian director Aristide Massaccesi directed somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 films over a period of more than three decades, nearly all of them pseudononymously. The most famous of his aliases, and the one most commonly used when he's referred to, is Joe D'Amato, which I love, because isn't the whole idea of an Italian director using a pseudonym based on it not sounding Italian? Massaccesi worked in a variety of genres, but he was perhaps most prolific in the realms of horror and porn. He even combined the two on occasion, with such questionable films as Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. Many of his straight horror films, among them Buio Omega (aka Beyond the Darkness, Buried Alive) and Antropophagus (aka The Grim Reaper), were firmly aligned with the glut of ultra-gory zombie and cannibal films that emerged from Italy in the late 1970s/early 1980s in response to the success of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, but his first foray into the horror genre, which was also one of his first films as a director (and the only one he directed using his given name), was slightly more restrained than his later horror films. With that being said, 1973's La Morte Ha Sorriso All'Assassino (aka Death Smiles at Murder or Death Smiles on a Murderer) certainly more than fulfills its quota of nudity and violence. It's a curious hybrid between the earlier Italian gothic horror films, which were petering out about this time, and the newer, more violent giallo films which would come to predominate the remainder of the decade. It's a far from perfect film, but from a cinematic standpoint, it's an interesting glimpse into where Massaccesi/D'Amato's career might have led him if he'd focused more on quality than quantity.

A peeping Franz

Death Smiles at Murder takes place in the early 1900s, and begins with a sweaty hunchback named Franz (Luciano Rossi) grieving over the body of his dead sister (Ewa Aulin), who isn't named right away. Franz experiences a few flashback memories of sis, the first of which consists of him sexually assaulting her, our first indication that their relationship was rather, ah, unconventional. Afterward, Franz's sister begs him to take her away from the place they live, which is apparently awful (apparently, her rapist brother has nothing to do with the awfulness). The second flashback is of his sister flirtatiously running away in slow motion, only to fall into the arms of another, older man as Franz watches jealously from afar. This can't end well, but we already know that, don't we?

One of the earliest traffic safety films

The film then cuts to a wealthy couple, Walter and Eva von Ravensbrück, having breakfast outside their palatial home. A coachman comes roaring down the road only to crash a moment later; he ends up impaled by a piece of the overturned coach with his guts hanging out (a favorite motif of Massacessi's as we would see later in his directorial career). Walter looks inside the coach and finds a woman, who turns out to be - surprise - Franz's unnamed sister. Either this is another flashback, or it's not. She seems to be in shock, and she's taken back to the von Ravensbrück estate, where they summon Dr. Sturgess (Klaus Kinski) to examine her (if your doctor is Klaus Kinski, I advise you to find another primary care physician, stat).

Paging Dr. Kinski

Hang on, you've got something in your eye

During the examination, specifically when he's listening for her heartbeat, it becomes clear that Dr. Sturgess discovers something out of the ordinary that sets his forehead veins to throbbing. He sends everyone out of the room and tells the woman to get undressed, because hey, he's a doctor. He finds an amulet that the woman is wearing, which says "Greta 1906" (apparently three years before current events) on one side and has some funky hieroglyphics or something on the other. She also has a scar on the side of her neck. Then he pulls a pin out of his tie and STICKS IT RIGHT IN HER EYE! AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN CARE! The effect here is so convincing that I'm not sure I want to know how they did it. Since people usually object when you pierce their eyeballs with sharp objects, the doc quickly confirms that something is definitely fishy here.

The ground chuck school of makeup effects

A debutante ball for a dead girl

Meanwhile, the maid, who has been spying on all of this, starts having some sort of bad acid trip and sees threatening hallucinations of Franz. She becomes so distraught that she gives her notice, packs a bag and runs off, only to encounter an unseen assailant with a shotgun who shoots her in the face, leaving her looking like she's wearing a facial mask made of hamburger helper. Greta stays on as a guest at the insistence of the von Ravensbrücks, who throw a big party to introduce her to the locals, even though they don't know who she is ("Hey, rich friends! Come meet this total stranger!"). Later, while on a hunting trip, Walter confesses his love for Greta, unaware that Eva is watching. During all this, Dr. Sturgess has been working like a madman, mixing chemicals and studying the formula he found on Greta's amulet. It's apparently a means of reviving the dead (did something just click into place?), and he successfully reanimates a corpse in his secret underground lab by sticking an IV tube into the dead guy's neck (hence a certain scar), but immediately after the guy sits up, the doc is strangled from behind by, yes, an unseen assailant, who also offs the doc's assistant for good measure.

"I'm sorry I tried to drown you. Let's make out."

Nothing bad ever happens down in the crypt

Later, Eva tries to drown Greta in the bathtub, then confesses HER love for Greta, because nothing says "I love you" like pushing someone's head underwater; nude lesbian hijinks ensue. In fact, nude hijinks of various persuasions ensue, as we're treated to an interminable montage of softcore sex scenes depicting Franz screwing Eva, Eva screwing Greta and Greta screwing Franz (remarkably, knowing what the director would get up to later, there's no three-way action). Eventually, things get a bit awkward, and Eva decides she's had enough. She tricks Greta into coming down into the crypt with her, where she walls her up alive (note to self: never, ever follow anyone into a crypt). When Walter gets home, Eva tells him that Greta just up and left, and they seemingly move on with their lives.

Not so hot for me now, are you?

The party's over

A month passes, and the von Ravensbrücks throw a costume party, at which Eva is shocked to see Greta. She chases her throughout the house and finally corners her, at which point Greta appears to her with a horribly rotted face. Eva ends up falling out a window to her death. Walter's father arrives for Eva's funeral, and - surprise - it's Greta's older lover from Franz's flashback. During the funeral, he flashes back to Greta apparently dying in childbirth and Franz looking none too happy about it. After the funeral, dad takes a stroll through the cemetery and stops in front of Greta's tomb. She appears behind him and tells him it's OK, she's not dead, Franz just made it appear that way. Nevertheless, he starts seeing her with a rotten face just like Eva did, and he takes off in a panic. In what is probably the film's most effective sequence, Greta pursues him through the mazelike cemetery, leading him to duck into a handy tomb to hide. He ends up locked in the tomb, which just so happens to be Eva's, and to his horror, she opens her eyes, sits up and advances toward him, as we hear his screams reverberate.

He didn't have to wait until the morning after to regret his decision

Back at home, Walter finds Greta in his bedroom. He starts to make love to her, but of course, she turns all corpsey on him and he flips out. Greta then kills the butler by slashing his face with a straight razor. The cops turn up and find the butler's body as well as Walter spiked to the wall with the amulet in his hand. Trying to figure out what the inscription on the amulet means, the Inspector takes it to a professor, who spills the beans that a student of his - Franz - was working on deciphering the inscription, which indeed contains an Incan formula for resurrecting the dead, but gave up after his sister died. But he didn't really give up, did he? In one last flashback, we see him three years earlier, just after he's resurrected Greta, promising to take her away like she asked. In the film's single greatest WTF? moment, Greta throws a bunch of flowers at his face that suddenly turn into a cat that claws his eyes out. The inspector finds Franz's decayed body and wonders to himself if he'll ever solve this case. (My guess: no.) Back at home, he's telling his old, grey-haired, wheelchair-bound wife the story as she sits with her back to him; suddenly, she turns around and...no, I can't say it. You'll just have to see for yourself.

Death Smiles at Murder is truly an absurd film. At one point, the Inspector remarks, "I don't understand. None of this makes any sense," and that just about sums it up right there. Just when you think you're beginning to figure things out, random stuff happens that leaves you scratching your head, like the maid's hallucinations, the unexplained revival of Eva in her tomb or the flowers that turn into a cat. Despite its drawbacks, though, it's a highly entertaining, sumptuously made piece of trash cinema that holds up to repeated viewings. The production values are quite high, and it's beautifully shot, which isn't surprising given that it's the work of a cinematographer transitioning to directing films. The acting is fairly decent as these things go. Swedish actress Aulin, best known for appearing in the sex comedy Candy alongside such luminaries as Richard Burton and Marlon Brando, is the centerpiece of the film; the camera loves her doll-like beauty (except when her face is falling off). The lush score, by Berto Pisano, is quite accomplished, reminiscent at times of the music of Ennio Morricone. Best of all, the film contains some truly chilling moments, and though it's nowhere near the same level as Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil, it has the same sort of morbid, necrophiliac atmosphere in which sex and death are inextricably intertwined. Although Massaccesi would go on to make a handful of more notorious films (and a shitload of instantly forgettable ones), this one is probably the closest he came to a work of cinematic art.

Final Girl's SHOCKtober - Tombs of the Blind Dead

(Before I dive into the Italian Horror Blogathon, which starts today at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies, I figured I'd better post this piece, which is part of the SHOCKtober celebration at Stacie Ponder's blog, Final Girl. Stacie had planned on covering a different horror film each day in October, and today's film is Tombs of the Blind Dead, one of my all-time favorites. Although she's gotten a bit behind, I'm going to go ahead and post my review for posterity.)

The 1970s were arguably the golden age of the European horror film. So many filmmakers - among them Jean Rollin, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Paul Naschy and Jesús Franco - came to prominence during this decade that it boggles the mind. Of the many classic films released in this period, Amando de Ossorio's 1971 Spanish horror film Tombs of the Blind Dead (La Noche del Terror Ciego, or Night of Blind Terror) is for me one of the absolute best. Sometimes referred to as a zombie film, it's really more of a mummified, devil-worshipping vampire film, but whatever you choose to call it, it's a strikingly original work of horror, and over forty years later, it still retains its power to disturb and unsettle the viewer.

The Blind Dead of the film's title are the undead Knights Templar, a group of warriors who returned from the Crusades with a newfound appreciation for the black arts (somehow, I don't think that was the idea behind the whole campaign). After terrorizing the countryside with their bloody sacrificial rites, they were captured, put to death and hung from a tree, where their eyes were eaten by birds. Hundreds of years later, they rise from their fog-shrouded tombs as dessicated, skeletal corpses to begin their reign of evil once more. Having no eyes, they track their victims by sound.

The film introduces us to Betty (Lone Fleming) and Virginia (María Elena Arpón), two young women who went to boarding school together and who bump into one another at a seaside resort. Virginia is there with her sort-of-boyfriend Roger (César Burner), who quickly takes an obvious shine to Betty. Virginia is clearly jealous of the two, although as it turns out, she and Betty had a fling back in school, and Virginia still carries a torch for her. Roger invites Betty along on a train holiday he and Virginia had planned, but having had enough his and Betty's flirtations, Virginia hops off the train in the middle of nowhere and sets out on her own. She arrives at Berzano, an eerie, ruined monastery, and decides to camp out there for the night. Unlucklily for her, it's the burial ground of the Templars, and they rise up in the middle of the night and slaughter her, feasting on her blood.

Concerned about Virginia (but apparently not enough to have jumped off the train after her), Roger and Betty rent some horses from their hotel and ride back to Berzano in the morning. There, they meet the police, who inform them of Virginia's brutal murder, which is attributed to a local gang of smugglers. Shocked and saddened, they head home, but they're determined to find out what really happened, and they return to the area surrounding Berzano to investigate further. They meet up with the smugglers and prevail upon two of them to accompany them to Berzano, not the wisest choice as it turns out. They turn out to be not the nicest people, and conflict erupts, but soon the Templars rise again, and everyone but Betty is killed. Half-crazed, she manages to escape on the passing train, but the knights hop on board and slaughter the rest of the passengers (including, audaciously, a small child in her mother's arms). At the film's climax, the Templars make their way to a suburban train station, where they wreak havoc on the unsuspecting commuters (and, we are to assume, the world).

Let's be honest: much of the time, Tombs of the Blind Dead looks like what it is - a low-budget horror film from the early 1970s. On the surface, it often seems painfully dated. Nevertheless, the film gets under my skin for a variety of reasons, chief among them the sinister score by renowned composer Antón García Abril. Abril's acclaimed soundtrack is a revelation, avoiding the musical clichés of the era in favor of an atonal, droning mélange of piano, percussion and organ, topped off with spine-chilling Gregorian-style chanting and random shrieks and groans. It's deeply unsettling to say the least, and it cloaks the film in a suffocating, unearthly atmosphere.

Another thing that makes the film work is the Templars themselves. Although they're clearly stunt performers wearing basically immovable masks, their vacant eye sockets, wispy beards, bony claws and grimy robes are truly creepy to behold. As they inexorably close in on their next victim, it never fails to send a chill up my spine. It's a cliché in horror films to have the slow-moving monsters always catch up to the running victims, but it makes a weird kind of sense in Tombs of the Blind Dead. The Templars actually ride (dead) horses in pursuit of their prey, but de Ossorio films these scenes in slow motion, making it seem like time itself is being warped by the supernatural influence of the dead knights. (Peter Jackson had to have been influenced by these scenes when he filmed the Ringwraiths' pursuit of Arwen in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.) I also can't say enough about the decrepit monastery of Cercon outside of Madrid, which stands in for the fictional location of Berzano in the film. This has to be, hands down, one of the creepiest movie locations ever. It's almost a character unto itself, and it lends incredible production value to the film.

The film has its share of problems. Although its portrayal of the two main female characters is actually fairly progressive for the time, and their obligatory lesbian encounter is handled in as non-exploitative a manner as possible, another seemingly obligatory element is a rape scene (courtesy of the male smuggler character), fairly graphic but thankfully brief. The makeup and special effects, while certainly effective, are rather crude (this is one film that could probably benefit from a remake using modern technology). Additionally, there's a segment in which one of the Templars' victims inexplicably returns to life as a zombie, killing a morgue attendant and stalking a woman through a factory full of mannequins, a seemingly random plot point which was abandoned in all of the film's three sequels. Still, I can't complain too much, as these scenes are among the most frightening in the film. Despite its flaws, Tombs of the Blind Dead remains a nightmarish horror classic that still manages to scare and unnerve after more than four decades.

Italian Horror Blogathon

This begins tomorrow at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. Be sure to check it out every day. I should have my first contribution up by this weekend.