As the distinguished and eclectic Criterion Collection presses
on with film director/curator Martin Scorsese’s aptly named World Cinema Project boxed sets
consisting of obscure and rarely seen foreign films, now the UK based home
video company Arrow Video has decided to get in on the action. Presenting what is known as the American Horror Project Vol. 1, this
blu-ray boxed set comprises three all-but-forgotten low budget horror films
ranging from 1973 to 1976: Malatesta’s
Carnival of Blood; The Witch Who Came from the Sea and The Premonition.
Though separated by three different directors, each of
these nearly lost “tales of violence and madness from the 1970s” represent a
side of American horror rarely seen, discussed or given their proper due. Some of the surviving elements for each
picture show their age and technical as well as budgetary limitations, yet each
offering present an example of cinematic terror you’re unlikely to see anywhere
else. With this, the Movie Sleuth takes
a good hard look at the first of what will hopefully be many volumes of this
unique series of horror films ripe for rediscovery and appreciation by
cinephiles and horror fans the world over!
Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973)
The creepy carnival funhouse of horrors is as old as both
the genre and the medium itself, beginning with Tod Browning’s still unnerving Freaks in 1932 through Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls in 1962. Even the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre maestro Tobe Hooper got into it with
his 1981 thriller The Funhouse and
only recently we saw Darren Lynn Bousman’s continuing series of musical horror
films The Devil’s Carnival. Musician/film director Rob Zombie made two
films about it in addition to his very own amusement park. And yet after all these years, there is one
truly madcap psychedelic and surrealistic offering from 1973 which was thought
to be lost forever until it mysteriously resurfaced in 2003 on DVD by the
director himself and now makes its high-definition blu-ray debut: Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood.
Directed by Christopher Speeth and written by Werner
Liepolt in their one and only film production ever, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is a shoestring take on the creepy
carnival tropes yet with an audiovisual design that is completely unlike
anything that came before or would follow after it. While light on characterization with some
rusty acting and, at times, sophomore filmmaking, here we have an amalgam of
everything from the aforementioned Carnival
of Souls to Night of the Living Dead presented
in a way that feels like an acid trip gone horribly wrong.
There’s a sequence in it involving zombies in a movie theater
I have to believe played a part in the now infamous movie-theater chase
sequence in the equally obscure yet boundlessly imaginative Messiah of Evil. That the zombies happen to be watching the
silent horror classic The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari while throwing popcorn and body parts at the screen only serves to
heighten the madness oozing out of every frame of this crazy thing.
The film’s most recognizable actor is of course the late
dwarf actor Herve Villechaize (Fantasy
Island; Forbidden Zone) but the film’s real stars are the production
designers who have assembled one of the strangest looking and feeling carnival
sets in cinema history. Though often
consisting of common household items including tarpaulin, they’re built in ways
that inevitably forecasted the 1989 avant-garde freakout Dr. Caligari. How many films
can you name with an upside-down Volkswagen Beetle covered in red bubble wrap
designed to look like a carnivorous beast?
Have you ever seen cotton candy strung about the set like a cacophony of
internal organs? Blood and gore varies
from scene to scene, with some effects shots looking better than others.
While the plot is somewhat difficult to follow outside of
characters in peril, Malatesta’s Carnival
of Blood functions more as a mood piece than a coherent narrative with a
series of increasingly bizarre and grotesque images of the occult and
demonic. More than anything, the papier-mâché
sets and hall of mirrors are designed, like John Boorman’s still inscrutable Zardoz, to place you in an unpleasant
headspace you can’t escape from until the end credits roll. Despite the often amateurish student nature
of the picture and a meager running time of seventy-four minutes, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood as a film
will take you places far more expensive offerings of similar ilk have tried and
often failed to go. If you want to
experience the so-called funhouse of horror as a hallucinatory head trip
without relying on hard drugs, look no further than this.
Score:
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)
Shifting gears with Arrow
Video’s loose collection of obscure and forgotten horror films, the American Horror Project’s second
offering comes in the form of a disturbing descent into madness and murder
known as The Witch Who Came from the Sea. Filmed in 1971 but withheld from release
until 1976 before being branded a ‘video nasty’ in the UK for over a decade, The Witch Who Came from the Sea represents
an outlier in the pantheon of surreal psychological horror. Where the previous entry in the film series
aimed for shoestring atmospheric thrills and chills, on the contrary this
nearly lost and forgotten indie effort packs in far heavier concepts and images
that will sear themselves into your psyche long after the end credits have
rolled.
The story of a deeply
troubled middle-aged woman with an abusive childhood at the hands of her
seafaring father named Molly (Millie Perkins of The Diary of Anne Frank) who cares for her two nephews when she
isn’t harboring violent sexual fantasies involving the seduction and murder of
musclebound men, The Witch Who Came from
the Sea as a thriller is less concerned with coherence and logic than
trying to place viewers within the demented and fractured headspace of the
film’s troubled leading lady. Largely an
actor’s piece with a daring performance by Perkins who struts naked between
alluring and dangerous often in the same step, you the viewer are left as
uncertain as the supporting characters who can’t seem to figure out what’s
eating Molly and why physically fit sportsmen mysteriously begin turning up
dead.
Directed by soon-to-be Butterfly filmmaker Matt Cimber and
written by Robert Thom of Death Race 2000
infamy, both the title and poster suggest something completely different
from what I was expecting and as such it managed to burrow itself under my skin
when it was finally over. While not
particularly frightening, The Witch Who
Came from the Sea when it finally reveals itself will in its manner upset
and disturb the faint hearted, touching on subject matter most horror movies
were afraid to touch until Srdjan Spasojevic so ruthlessly burst the floodgates
open with his still nearly-unwatchable opus A
Serbian Film in 2010.
Much like the Spasojevic
film, The Witch Who Came from the Sea
despite the micro budget is expertly photographed, sporting early camerawork by
soon-to-be Halloween and The Thing cinematographer Dean
Cundey. Despite the rough nature of the
last surviving print Arrow Video located for this home video release, the
film’s widescreen cinematography of barren open beaches and an abandoned
carnival when it isn’t sporting carefully constructed close-ups of the actors’
faces is remarkably well done and inevitably forecast the eventual emergence of
one of Hollywood’s most beloved cinematographers.
Far from a masterpiece of
modern horror but impossible to forget once seen, The Witch Who Came from the Sea provides a unique example to a
different kind of horror that isn’t necessarily scary but is absolutely
horrific all the same. If there’s room
for improvement, the film’s electronic score by Herschel Burke Gilbert buoying between
subtle unease and stark terror doesn’t always work and much of the film’s blood
and gore isn’t particularly graphic despite implications of extreme violence
including but not limited to castration.
Despite the shortcomings and
a deliberate lack of coherence in an effort to draw viewers deeper into the
diseased mind of the titular character, The
Witch Who Came from the Sea will manage to deeply affect you on some level
or another, whether it’s outrage, disgust, fear or sickness. Whatever the case, it’s a powerful case study
of how child abuse can and often does negatively shape our adulthood that still
has the power to pack a really heavy punch.
Not for the squeamish or easily offended but not to be missed by staunch
cinephiles who don’t always want their horror to play nice.
Score:
The Premonition (1976)
Telekinesis, parapsychology and the use of hallucinatory, ghostly visions of the past, present or future as a subgenre of horror found itself catapulted into the mainstream with the release of Brian De Palma’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal horror novel Carrie. Also on the high rise was the horror film involving the innocent little girl after William Friedkin’s film of The Exorcist made tidal waves at the box office around the world. Naturally, many other offerings of this ilk would follow. Among the stranger and oddly disjointed entries in the telekinetic horror film came in the form of writer-producer-director Robert Allen Schnitzer’s 1976 psychic thriller The Premonition.
Telekinesis, parapsychology and the use of hallucinatory, ghostly visions of the past, present or future as a subgenre of horror found itself catapulted into the mainstream with the release of Brian De Palma’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal horror novel Carrie. Also on the high rise was the horror film involving the innocent little girl after William Friedkin’s film of The Exorcist made tidal waves at the box office around the world. Naturally, many other offerings of this ilk would follow. Among the stranger and oddly disjointed entries in the telekinetic horror film came in the form of writer-producer-director Robert Allen Schnitzer’s 1976 psychic thriller The Premonition.
The story of a young girl named
Janie (played by 7 year old Danielle Brisebois) whose foster mother Sherri
(Sharon Farrell) experiences a ghostly premonition that Janie’s biological
mother, Andrea (Ellen Barber), and her creepy circus clown partner-in-crime
Jude (an unforgettable Richard Lynch) are trying to kidnap Janie. As time bores on, the premonition starts to
become a reality with increasingly bizarre and violent hallucinations start
plaguing Sherri. Soon, as with most
thrillers of this kind, it becomes a race against time as a parapsychologist
joins forces with Sherri to try and track down the whereabouts of the criminal
couple in the hopes of finding Janie.
Initially it plays out as a whodunit police procedural before gradually
transforming into a somewhat illogical metaphysical battle of spiritual forces
between Sherri and Andrea…I think…
Easily the most frustrating
entry in the American Horror Project box,
I repeat that the film is disjointed thanks to editor Sidney Katz who
aggravatingly undercuts every single scene in the film. Whatever impetus William Friedkin had with
the fast pacing of The Exorcist,
trusting the audience to figure it out on their own, Katz whittles it down to
such a degree that whatever power the footage and shoestring visual effects
sequences had are nearly drained dry of their power. As a character happens upon a bullet point in
the script, a mere second later the film cuts to another bullet point, playing
just like that for all ninety-four minutes.
While sporting decent performances, handsome Mississippi location
cinematography by Victor Milt and boasting an overqualified score by Henry
Mollicone, all of the efforts are shortchanged by the editing with zero time
left for dramatic pause.
Watching The Premonition I was torn between
enjoying this unique spin on the telekinetic/unfinished business ghost horror
genre and wanting to choke the editor to death for effectively undermining the
whole thing scene after scene. There
have been times in the past where this kind of fast paced editing has worked
beautifully depending on the film, but here the consistency with which
every…single…scene was undercut just drove me crazy!
It’s a shame because
somewhere in The Premonition is an
effective little thriller with some indelible images despite being light on
scares. One image imprinted on the mind
involves Sherri witnessing her bathroom mirror and, later, the windows and
mirrors of her car icing over thanks to metaphysical misdeeds of the film’s
villainess. I remember, for a moment,
feeling vague tension as Sherri loses visibility of the road but before we can
see the vehicle crash, in keeping with Katz’ bullshit editing, we cut to police
pulling the mother from the car.
If nothing else, The Premonition, while worth a look
thanks to Arrow Videos studious efforts to bring this forgotten flick to light,
is a case study in how decent material can be all but destroyed in the editing
room. Whether or not this was
writer-director Schnitzer’s intention, we’ll never truly know, but I can say
keeping up this inexplicably disjointed rhythm did not add mystery, suspense,
intrigue or allow the thing to unfold like a puzzle. Rather, it just aggravated me to no end. Even the film’s climactic, extras-laden
finale felt abrupt. Whatever the case,
in the American Horror Project Vol. 1
boxes set, The Premonition is the
worst of the bunch.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki