In Brief: STAR TREK (2009)

The DVD prepares you for J.J. Abrams's revision of Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the Stars" with trailers for the home-video releases of G.I. Joe and the Transformers sequel. For the first few minutes of the actual movie, I feared that those previews had set the tone for the feature presentation. The prologue culminating in the birth of James T. Kirk is a lot of hysterical hubbub with a godawful payoff, and the introduction of little Kirk as a 23rd century rebel to the tune of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" did little to inspire confidence. But the film grew on me despite its drastic inconsistencies in tone and its contradictory compulsions to be different yet winkingly sound familiar notes. This is a movie in which billions of people are wiped out in a scene designed to be traumatic to characters and fans alike, and a few minutes later we're invited to laugh at Kirk being chased by a giant lizard sort of creature on an ice planet. It is overinflated and often much too busy, and it's the sort of origin story that really never needed to be told, but after the smoke clears the movie passes the crucial test. It proves that Star Trek as a concept, and its mythic original characters, have a viability that transcends the founding creative talent.

Just as William Shatner has heroically reinvented himself so that "Shatner" as a personality is arguably bigger than Kirk, Kirk has to be performable by other actors if the character isn't going to be just a footnote to Shatner's career. Chris Pine hasn't fully proved himself -- he won't until a sequel comes up with more characteristically Kirkian activities for him -- but he didn't botch the job, and Zachary Quinto as Spock passed the test quite admirably on the first try. As for the rest, Karl Urban really impressed me by evoking but not quite imitating DeForrest Kelley, while Anton Yelchin as Chekhov was insufferably obnoxious and Simon Pegg as Scotty was merely loud. John Cho lacks George Takei's exuberance as Sulu, though he gets to wield a retractable sword, and Zoe Saldana's Uhura is the most thoroughly revisioned character, evoking Nichelle Nichols on only the most superficial level while playing a more assertive, dominant character who is also the Enterprise's principal sex object. The actors in familiar supporting roles are all adequate, though I must ask why, if you're going to put Winona Ryder in middle-aged makeup, you don't just hire a middle-aged actress? The major failure in the cast is Eric Bana's villain, a disgruntled hardhat of a tattooed Romulan who rips apart the space-time continuum in pursuit of preventive vengeance. Here is a foreign actor playing an alien -- and he talks with an American accent, often in a disconcertingly casual way. He does get to utter awesome lines like "Prepare the red matter!" but despite his genocidal exploits he is neither redeemingly charismatic nor so despicable that you cheer every blow struck at him. That exposes a dissatisfying lightness to the film that is barely outweighed by the continued effectiveness of the core characters. Abrams has at least earned a second chance, and with that opportunity he should think more carefully about what might distinguish Star Trek from all the other FX-heavy smashups on the market. I concede that there is probably no way to make a feature film that resembles an Original Series episode (explore Strange New World, discover dominant High Concept, overthrow it if objectionable) because the stakes apparently need to be higher in a two-hour show. But while the new team shouldn't feel obliged to imitate Roddenberry any more than the actors should simply ape their predecessors, they should remember that Star Trek has a sensibility that leads people to expect a little more than slam-bang space opera. Abrams can add "a little rock 'n roll" to the concept as long as we still recognize the tune.

Wendigo Meets VAMPYRES (1974)

Last weekend I distracted my friend Wendigo from his current reading to take his first look at Jose Ramon Larraz's lesbian vampire extravaganza. He's plowing his way through L. J. Smith's Vampire Diaries novels, the books that inspired the current hit series on the CW. Aimed as they may be at teen girls, he likes them and, as vampire stories, likes them better than the Twilight series. They have more real horror and violence in them and are less romanticized (and less erotic) than Stephanie Meyer's books. In other words, they're more adult in some ways, and less in others -- while the TV show is more adult than the novels. He considers Meyer a better writer in literary terms, but in genre terms Smith is her superior in many ways. Going from those books to Vampyres, I thought, might be quite a leap for him.

Vampyres is an English film with a Spanish director and it has that certain European sensibility that shows serene indifference to the how and why of many things. So we spent a lot of time afterward pondering what exactly was supposed to have happened. Let's stick with some facts on screen.

We open with two lovely ladies making love in an English manor. The top-hatted shadow of a figure climbs the stairs as the gloriously nude women please one another. Since I tend to emphasize the lesbian side of the lesbian-vampire genre, I could watch this all night, but the story must get started, so let's let the shadow enter the bedroom, where it becomes a hand with a gun in a POV shot shooting our heroines (my heroines, at least) full of bloody holes.

But our lady lovers enjoy a happy ending of sorts. They are now vampires (or vampyres, I suppose) who play a hitchhiking racket. Fran, the dark haired one (Marianne Morris) thumbs a lift from drivers on the road to the manor while blond Miriam (Anulka) watches from the woods. While Fran enjoys the ride, Miriam hustles back to headquarters to join in the forthcoming bloodbath, after which they arrange things to make the men look like car-accident victims.

Before that's fully established we're introduced to Ted, a man checking into the local hotel. The old clerk seems to recognize him even after some years away, but Ted corrects him; he's never been there before. Soon enough he's on the road where Fran waits for her next ride. He picks her up and notes that she looks familiar to him somehow. But he never follows up on that and she never really responds to the suggestion. Anyway, most of the movie will deal with Ted's captivity in the manor as Fran bleeds him slowly, tiring him with arduous sex while Miriam grows slightly jealous. They pick up other drivers for quicker fixes, glutting themselves on one poor soul in a particularly messy scene that shows how their bloodlust seems to fuel the women's sexual attraction to one another, or vice versa. Fran and Miriam make up when Fran lets her share a helping of Ted, the blood and the sharing inspiring them to pleasure each other orally right next to his dazed form. Despite his weakened state, Ted realizes that something is very wrong here, what with the mirrors being papered over and that guy from the other night ending up dead in a car wreck.

Ted (Murray Brown) tries to meet cute with Fran (Marianne Morris), not knowingthat a fate like this guy's (below) may await him.

On this information alone we could speculate about what's going on, but there's a wild card in the story. John and Harriet are tourists traveling through in a camper. Sharp-eyed Harriet notices Fran and Miriam working their hitchhiker racket early in the picture, and later notices them scampering through a cemetery just before dawn. Her suspicions grow despite John's indifference, and aren't dispelled when she finally meets the ladies while painting a landscape on the manor grounds. Fran approaches her and says, "I always knew we would find each other. By this sign I will recognize you." She plants a thumbprint on Harriet's head. This is never explained, but by the time we realized that it wouldn't be we were getting used to that.

Everyone's a critic. Fran contemplates Harriet (Sally Faulkner, left) and her artwork.

John and Harriet are an objective element in the story that complicate any attempt to figure out what's happening. There are hints dropped throughout the picture, including a comment at the end about "the criminal returning to the scene of the crime" that lead Wendigo to suspect that Ted is either the man who killed Fran and Miriam or perhaps a reincarnation of the same. But neither Fran nor Miriam betray any knowledge of Ted as their killer and are interested in killing him later only to prevent him from reporting their racket to the police. The ending is vague enough to leave an "it was all a dream" option open, but that would require Ted's dream to take the form of the movie Vampyres as we see it, including the scenes with John and Harriet long before Ted meets them. That seems unlikely but it isn't impossible. In simplest terms, Ted is a man with a mysterious past who has a mysterious experience. As for Harriet and Fran's recognition of her, and Harriet's superior awareness of the vampyres, Wendigo has no clue whatsoever.

So how are Fran and Miriam vampires? Wendigo explains that murder victims traditionally were liable to return as vampires because they died unconfessed, through no fault of their own. But not every murder victim starts sucking blood, so perhaps the women's presumably adulterous, definitely sinful affair may explain their "curse." Of course, once you read enough folklore you'll realize that there are way too many ways you can become a vampire, and the Vampyres method is a relatively reasonable one. Otherwise, they're bound by folklore only by their implicit invisibility in mirrors and their apparent torpor after glutting themselves, while their apparent need to reach their graves by dawn (complicated by said glutting) is a vampire rule that dates back only to F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Another arguably folkloric element is the way watches and clocks stop at Fran and Miriam's house, which could also encourage a "dream" interpretation of events.

As for their being lesbian vampires, Vampyres differs from the Hammer "Karnstein" films, as Wendigo remembers them, in establishing that our protagonists were lesbians before they were vampires. Lesbianism and vampirism seemed like a good match at the time, with censorship going by the boards, as representations of female transgression and dangerous sexual power. It evokes male fear of modern succubi, sexually liberated and insatiable women whom men cannot please without possibly sacrificing all their vital powers. Of course, misfit that I am, I was rooting for Fran and Miriam all the way through the picture. Wendigo isn't as much of a girl-girl fan as I am, and isn't usually keen on the mix of sex and horror, but he thinks that Larraz mixed the two fairly well, especially by emphasizing how crazed and feral the ladies get when they feed on blood. Morris and Anulka convey quite effectively both the animalistic and erotic aspect of their bloodlust. Wendigo adds that their bloodlust could be partly explained by the especially bloody manner of their demise, as if they're perpetually trying to get back the blood they'd lost

Writing the still-mysterious elements of the story off as "dream logic," Wendigo thinks Vampyres is a well-done blend of European-style eroticism and traditional gothic horror. The loose ends do nag at him simply because he'd like a settled idea of Ted's backstory, not to mention the significance (if any) of Harriet, but the direction, cinematography and lead performances are good enough to outweigh his objections. Larraz has made a nicely atmospheric film with great locations and sets that Wendigo can recommend to horror fans in general, not just erotic-horror buffs.

Here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by DarkScoreReviews.

TODAY IT'S ME...TOMORROW, YOU (1968)

In his Spaghetti western survey 10,000 Ways to Die Alex Cox calls Tonino Cervi's film "a near perfect revenge Western." But Cox had reached a point in the survey where he was beginning to give perhaps too much credit to fairly ordinary films that at least didn't insult his intelligence, as too many "circus westerns" that depended on technical gimmicks or outlandish stunts were doing at this point in genre history. I'm not saying that Oggi a me...Domani a te is a completely ordinary film -- it's far from that -- but it's also further from perfect than Cox cares to admit.

The thing that bugs me right away is that our avenger hero, Bill Kiowa (Montgomery Ford a.k.a. Brett Halsey), spends the first third of the movie putting a gang together. It just seems to me that a nearly perfect revenge Western should have a lone avenger. Maybe I wouldn't be bugged by it if his gang had more going for it. It's a collection of types: a dandy, a gambler (William Berger), a veteran sheriff, and Bud Spencer doing here for what Cox says is the first time his standard spaghetti character of a big lummox. Spencer and Berger have a certain charisma, which explains why they became spaghetti stars, but the other two characters are ciphers; the one interesting thing the sheriff does is quit his job when Kiowa offers pay in advance and appoint his one prisoner as the new sheriff. Berger doesn't have much to do apart from delaying the plot a bit when he runs away from the gang, but he gets one good line later when he complains about bloodstains on his frilly white shirt. "I paid five dollars for it," he laments, "and I only got two years' use out of it." Ford/Halsey/Kiowa himself is dull (Cox euphemizes this as "unsmiling and obsessed") and we only gain interest in him when we learn what he's really out to avenge.

Montgomery Ford as Bill Kiowa (above and center below) and his gang in Today It's Me...Tomorrow, You.

At the beginning, Kiowa is finishing a stint in prison, having been framed by erstwhile pal James Elfego, a comanchero bandit. Kiowa needs extra men, I suppose, because Elfego has a small army of bandits to hit stagecoaches with. But he wants to deal with Elfego himself because, as a sepia flashback shows us, the wiry little cuss congratulates Kiowa on his wedding by raping Mrs. Kiowa and gunning her down in front of him.

The interesting, if not extraordinary thing about Today It's Me... is that Elfego is played by Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the titans of Japanese cinema. It's an incredible bit of stunt casting that nods to the genre's sources, since Nakadai played Toshiro Mifune's gun-toting antagonist in Yojimbo. More recently, he had scored hits in such diverse samurai fare as Harakiri and Sword of Doom, and bringing him to Europe was a coup just short of getting Mifune himself. Ironically, Mifune had already played a disreputable Mexican in a Mexican film, and he would finally confront the West on his own terms, as a samurai teamed up with Charles Bronson against Alain Delon, in the awesome-on-paper Red Sun. Probably by this point playing a bandit doomed to be dispatched by "Montgomery Ford" was beneath Mifune's station, but Nakadai, not so well known in the West, was game and gets into his work as the leering, sort of nervous seeming bandito.

Cervi was quite self-conscious about the stunt casting, and it shows in the Asiatic-sounding gong included in Angelo Lavagnino's score and in the way Elfego wields a machete like a samurai sword. This makes for one of the most peculiar fight scenes in spaghetti history, something you wouldn't expect to see outside one of those computer simulation scenarios that pit Spartans vs. Ninjas: Nakadai with the blade vs. Bud Spencer with a tree branch.

Spencer already has a bullet in his belly, and Nakadai carves a few rashers off of him before the rest of the good guys arrive to save the big man's bacon. I suppose that's another of the things that annoys me about this movie: given the number of expendable assistant heroes, not one of them is killed. And Dario Argento co-wrote the thing! You'd think he would have come up with some way to get rid of some of these guys. Not doing so leaves the impression that the deck is stacked in favor of the good guys.

Apart from the unique contribution from Nakadai, Today It's Me (also known as Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die) didn't live up to Cox's admiring review. It's not a terrible film -- we're not talking about White Comanche here -- but it struck me as fairly uninspired beyond the stunt casting. It lacks intensity for a large portion of the story and the action is too one-sided for it to be very suspenseful. On the other hand, I only paid $1.97 for it at a local FYE, the sort of store where you can still find obscure items that have long since vanished from other store shelves, so I don't feel that let down. It should throw Alex Cox's critical standards open to question, however, for anyone planning to buy that book.

Here's a mixed trailer with Italian dialogue and English titles, uploaded to YouTube by LindbergSWDB

VICE SQUAD (1982)

Vice Squad has one of my favorite trailers of all time. This copy was uploaded to YouTube by theflickfanatic.

It preps you for a fast-paced descent into an urban hell at the cultural moment when the Seventies turn into the Eighties. No film could deliver on the trailer's promise of relentless mayhem or squalor, but I remember the promise from when I first saw commercials for Gary A. Sherman's film on TV, when I was still too young to see the film in theaters. And I remember a bit of controversy on the premise that Vice Squad had plumbed new depths of depravity. The film doesn't quite live up to that reputation, either. It's more about violence than sex, for one thing, and in some respects it reminds me of urban-misadventure films that would come later in the decade.

We open with a mother (Season Hubley) prepping her little daughter for a trip to grandma's. The girl is going on a bus with a black nanny who makes a faux pas of sorts by calling her "Princess." Mom insists that that name never be used. But the offense is forgotten as she tearfully sees her child off.

But inside the bus station ladies' room, equipped with lockers for this purpose, a startling metamorphosis occurs.

"Princess" is an outlaw prostitute, a freelancer without a pimp. She gets fresh proof of the benefits of independence as she contemplates her friend and fellow hooker Ginger (Nina Blackwood) who is desperate to get free of her pimp Ramrod (Wings Hauser). Vice Squad eventually becomes the tale of a vendetta between Princess and Ramrod after the smooth-talking brute wins Ginger's confidence back long enough to beat her to death with a folded wire hanger. When intrepid vice cop Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) brings Princess in to show her Ginger's battered corpse, she agrees to wear a wire and help entrap Ramrod. Captured after a struggle in which Princess spits in his face and gets in some decent scratches, and Walsh utters the phrase "Make my day" a year before Sudden Impact, Ramrod swears revenge, and after he escapes two incompetent detectives in a moving car he resolves to hunt her down. Once Walsh learns that Ramrod is loose, he sends his squad to find her as well.

(Top and above) Princess vows revenge on Ramrod and helps entrap him, only to be imperiled for not the last time in Vice Squad.

This is where the movie goes into a digression that partially redeems it. Ramrod closes in after beating or otherwise extracting information from various degenerates, from gay bikers to a portly "sugar pimp" played by Fred "Rerun" Berry, and just as you think that Princess has stumbled into his clutches, she ends up getting a limo ride to a mysterious mansion where she's dressed up in a sexy bride outfit and escorted (with a warning not to speak) into a room dominated by a coffin. Inside the coffin is a little old man who happily pops back to life, only to break down in tears under a verbal assault from Princess. "She's not supposed to talk!" he bawls inconsolably as the chauffeur escorts Princess out and inquires whether she'll be working on his next day off.

The creepy set-up is sabotaged a bit when Sherman catches a cameraman in a corner of the frame at one point, but the random irrelevant eccentricity of all this happening in the middle of our story makes it one of my favorite parts of the film. It's also the part that reminds me of future films like After Hours that have that same that same anything-can-happen-in-the-city quality. Like those, I should emphasize, Vice Squad takes place over a single night of frenetic mayhem, and it has other bits meant for laughs like the incompetent detectives' encounter with an old Chinese guy who kung-fus them all over the place.

Probably the most memorable part of Vice Squad for many people is Wings Hauser's performance as Ramrod. He's not the typical pimp, which in this film still means the typical Seventies stereotype, and at first he seemed too ordinary, apart from being big and thuggish, to work as the villain of this piece. But Hauser gradually won me over with his bug-eyed, jut-jawed persistence. It's not a flamboyant performance with eccentric tics or memorable lines, but he stampedes through the film with admirable intensity and does a lot to keep the movie moving.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is pretty frickin' mean himself." With apologies to Raymond Chandler, Wings Hauser plays detective.

Regrettably, the movie ends in disappointing fashion. That's because it comes down to a chase and shootout between Ramrod and Walsh, which may be realistic but doesn't satisfy our expectation for an ultimate showdown between Ramrod and Princess. Had Vice Squad been made a little later, Princess may well have been the instrument of Ramrod's destruction, but Sherman and writer Robert Vincent O'Neill (who would go back to the secret-hooker well with the Angel movies) are either too realistic or too misogynist to believe that Princess could walk away from a one-on-one with Ramrod. Instead, he has her in his power and is about to administer another bent-hanger beating when Walsh comes to the rescue. But Walsh really hasn't been built up the same way that Princess and Ramrod have, and Gary Swanson is too bland a performer to earn his victory here.

I went into Vice Squad thinking it would be like a last stand of Seventies cinema, exploitation category, before the true onset of Eighties culture, but it ended up feeling more like an Eighties film. That might be because there's no pretension of "relevance" or social consciousness, no sense of the oppressive presence of The Man or The System. But it doesn't exactly candy-coat its setting. It accepts prostitution and related vices as givens, while Ramrod needs to be stopped less because he's a pimp (he's one among many, after all) but because he's a brutal pimp. There's an indifference to everything that makes Vice Squad feel more like a game or a "roller-coaster ride" experience than the sleazy expose it pretends to be. As such it's a pretty entertaining ride, but I can't help feeling that something is missing that might help make the difference between Seventies and Eighties cinema.

Nikkatsu Noir: RUSTY KNIFE (1958)

The director is different, but the second film in Criterion Eclipse's Nikkatsu Noir collection shows some consistency in the work of screenwriter Shintaro Ishihara, who co-scripted Rusty Knife with director Toshio Masuda. It has in common with I Am Waiting not just stars Yujiro Ishihara (the writer's brother) and Mie Kitahara, but a particular doubling approach in which two storylines mirror one another, metaphorically reflecting on each other. Given the fatalism of noir, this doubling or echoing of story details seems like a valid approach to the genre.

This time around, Ishihara the star is Tachibana, owner of the little Camarade Bar ("It means buddy," someone explains) and an ex-con who served time for stabbing to death the man who raped his girlfriend -- who hung herself out of shame. Like Ishihara's character in I Am Waiting, Tachibana is trying to make a fresh start, this time by keeping his nose clean and steering clear of cops and criminals alike. Unfortunately, for all the talk about two separate worlds, criminal and civilian, there's really no neat border. The Katsumata gang knows that Tachibana is one of three small-timers who witnessed the murder of a politician, which the gangsters staged to look like he'd hung himself.

The cops believe it because Katsumata paid the trio hush money, but now one of them is writing anonymously to both sides, demanding more hush money from the gangsters or a payoff from the cops for a confession. The culprit is actually another guy (Joe Shishido) who gets killed for his trouble, but the episode makes Katsumata interested in Tachibana and the other witness, Tachibana's bartender Makoto, while the cops know those two as the victim's cronies. Katsumata offers them hush money and Makoto takes it while Tachibana tries to remain aloof. This leads to a falling out with Makoto, who tells him off by explaining that the rape that provoked Tachibana to kill a man didn't play out the way he thought -- and that he'd killed the wrong man.

A symbolic honor killing? Tachibana throws his (t)rusty knife at a flashback apparition of his violated girlfriend.

So we have a tale of two hangings. The cops believe that the politician (the father of the journalist character played by Mie Kitahara) committed suicide, but Tachibana knows the truth. Tachibana believes he knows why his girlfriend hung herself, but Makoto knows some of the truth, and Katsumata knows more. As Tachibana plunges back into the criminal milieu in search of the ultimate truth, he realizes the need to tell the police the truth about the politician's "suicide." And wouldn't you know? The person behind that hanging and the one ultimately behind the death of Tachibana's girlfriend are one and the same.

Above, dramatic moments from Rusty Knife. Below, Mie Kitahara can't stand the suspense.

Rusty Knife maintains the "borderless" character of the Nikkatsu noirs, as nearly all the characters are thoroughly westernized and the gangsters look and behave more like American hoods than yakuza. Indeed, the one character who conspicuously wears traditional dress turns out to be a bad guy. The movie consciously deals with modern crime, explaining in an opening narration that post-war reconstruction attracted organized crime to the site of the story. And the emphasis on modernity identified with westernization seems fitting for a cycle of movies that are intended as youth films. For someone who's done five years hard time, Tachibana is quite a baby faced felon, and Yujiro Ishihara is a good deal younger than most American noir stars. Still, it's a story that could easily be translated into an American setting, though then it might be cast with older actors. These Nikkatsu films aren't classics in the league of the acknowledged Japanese masters, or even genre masters like Fukasaku or Suzuki (who directs the next film in the set), but they are structurally and thematically interesting, as well as well made, in a way that justifies the Eclipse collection.

THREE MONKEYS (2008)

This is my belated first stop in Turkey since I started my tour of the wild world of cinema last year. It was going to be this film or Tarkan Versus the Vikings -- and I will get to that one eventually. That's probably more along the lines of what people think of when they think of Turkish cinema, along with buccaneering copyright infringement and cargo-cult like recreations of western genre tropes. But serious Turkish cinema has occasionally demanded recognition, and it's only reasonable that Turkey should have some cinematic counterpart of Orhan Pamuk, the nation's Nobel-winning novelist (whose Snow would make quite a cool movie -- no pun intended). Right now the leading claimant for that position is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this picture, the sixth of his career and the third to make a strong international impression following Distant (2002) and Climates (2006).

The box copy for Zeitgeist Video's DVD pitches Three Monkeys as a kind of film noir, and a bare description of the plot won't exactly prove them wrong. The title refers to the iconic trio of "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil," and while Ceylan and his co-writer/spouse Ebru Ceylan don't assign specific dysfunctions to the members of the Ozturk family, this unhappy trio appears to have all the bases covered. Ezup, the father, is a chauffeur and stooge for Servet, a struggling politician who dozes at the wheel one night and runs someone over, then runs from the scene. Servet convinces Ezup to take the rap for him, promising that he'll serve six months at most while his family will be well compensated. It ends up being a year, and during that time Servet has an affair with Hacer, Ezup's wife. Meanwhile, young Ismail's life spirals out of control as he falls in with a gang and gets his ass kicked offscreen in a bloody rumble. An accident allows Ismail to discover his mom's dalliance. He smacks her around a bit but lacks the courage to tell his dad, who has his suspicions anyway. Once Ezup's out of jail Servet calls a quick halt to the affair, but Hacer has fallen hard for him, obsessively so, in spite of his threat to kill her if she keeps it up. But it's Servet who ends up dead, leaving us with a little murder mystery for the final act of the film.

Ismail (Rifat Singar) confronts his mother Hacer (Hatice Aslan) in their realistically cramped yet impeccably art-directed apartment.

On this evidence, Ceylan is a rigorous director whose work demands close attention. His images are composed rather than stylized, and painstakingly so in order to to sustain an illusion of social realism and everyday activity. Sometimes he goes pictorially overboard with portentous skyscapes, but that's still consistent with his use of landscape and atmosphere to evoke mood. Our surroundings often take on a more dramatic aspect in times of anxiety or other profound emotions, and for the most part Ceylan's patient long-take compositions achieve that subjective effect without going overboard.

Samples of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's compositions, with cinematography by Gokan Tiryaki.

The long takes also direct our attention to the emotional activity in his actor's faces. He sets the rule in the first scene of the film: a long shot of Servet driving through the night and struggling to stay awake. Ercan Kesel nails the challenge of working with his eyes alone. Elsewhere, you can always see the wheels turning in characters' minds. This is important because the Ceylans are concerned with their struggles to cope with undesirable revelations. None of the characters want to deal with the moral implications of their actions or inaction. All the Ozturks are complicit in a cover-up, after all, and it just comes naturally for them to cover things up from one another. Sometimes they simply don't want to accept what's happening. At one point Hacer seems ready to commit suicide. Eyup sees her crouch on a rooftop ledge, flees from the scene a short distance and stands there, clearly going through some moral agony but apparently incapable for some time of even asking her not to jump. This is one of several scenes in which Yavuz Bingol shines, and all the principals have moments of that kind. Rifat Singar as Ismail has a particularly eerie moment when we can see the transition from real time to dream time as a bead of sweat starts to run up the kid's forehead.

And there's a ghost.

Despite reassuring visits to the cemetery the dead don't seem to stay buried in Three Monkeys.

Ismail had a younger brother once who puts in occasional reappearances, popping in as if from a J-Horror film. Intriguingly, the Ceylans never tell us how this boy died, though we can safely assume that he drowned. It may have had something to do with a father-sons day out, because Ismail and Eyup both see the ghost, but Hacer doesn't. In any event, the ghost is just one of the details that hint at the dark intimate history of the Ozturk family, and it's enough for us to understand that there are unspoken issues (in keeping with the three-monkeys theme) without having them all spelled out.

I was impressed by Three Monkeys, and since I've been given the impression that it's not as good as Distant and Climates I'm now looking forward to seeing those. The Albany Public Library has Climates as well as this title, so you can expect a review of that earlier effort sometime in the New Year. For now, take a look at the Three Monkeys trailer, uploaded to YouTube by beno852:

HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB (1973)

The Spanish screenwriter and director Jacinto Molina died this week at the age of 75. Like the Japanese director Takeshi Kitano, who appears in films under the name Beat Takeshi, Molina used another name when acting, and it's as Paul Naschy that he earned his permanent citizenship in the wild world of cinema. A record jacket artist, cowboy novelist and champion weightlifter, Molina's love of horror movies was sparked by a viewing of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man when he was 11 years old. It's oddly appropriate that this formative experience has an uncanny echo in one of the greatest Spanish films: Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive (from the same year as El Espanto Surge de la Tumba), which portrays an impressionable little girl's traumatic viewing of James Whale's Frankenstein at a time close to when young Jacinto would have seen the other Universal film. Given how Spirit has cast a long shadow over the Spanish horror genre, especially the work of Guillermo del Toro, despite being only tentatively a horror film itself, it's as if the event that gave birth to Paul Naschy (not to mention Waldemar Daninsky) is inscribed obliquely in the history of Spanish cinema.

As Naschy, Molina is best known for playing Daninsky, a tragic wolfman in the Universal mode, in a series of films that put the character in a Maciste-like variety of settings and periods, ranging from contemporary Europe to feudal Japan. These films, and others in which Naschy played most of the other classic monsters, have led some critics to describe Molina as a cinematic atavism, obsessively reproducing the horrors of his childhood without the skill of his predecessors while throwing in exploitation elements (nudity, gore) for modern audiences. The same qualities that provoke contempt from some critics, however, have endeared Molina/Naschy to film fans around the world. His admirers see the Naschy films as recreating the experience and meaning of classic monster horror by translating them into a more modern cinematic idiom. At the same time, Molina does bring a distinct personal style to his work. In films like the one I'll eventually get around to describing, which he wrote and Carlos Aured directed, you could describe his sensibility as a sort of Swinging Gothic (compared to the lethal modernity of his Italian contemporaries), in which ancient evil casts its shadow across the modern mundane world, proving it can top our own vaunted decadence, and then some. Also, Molina became enough of an auteur to guarantee himself a following for which each film is like a chapter of the man's life, a story within a larger story in which the audience has a rooting interest. They recognize in him a fellow believer who has the charisma to keep the faith alive.

It's worth adding that not everything Molina did or Naschy performed in is as derivative as some critics claim. Horror Rises From the Tomb may remind viewers at first glance of Mario Bava's Black Sunday because of its opening curses hurled by demoniacs about to be executed, but Molina/Naschy's Alaric de Marnac quickly establishes himself as a distinctive menace who would appear again in the 1980s. Aured introduces him in medieval Spain being carted across a stark landscape to an execution ground where he'll be beheaded and his consort Mabille De Lancre (Helga Line) will be hanged for performing black masses and all-around evil. "You are vampires and lycanthropes" a herald declares hyperbolically. With arrogant spite, de Marnac and de Lancre promise to return and destroy the bloodlines of Roland, his chief persecutor, and his own brother, the local lord.

Two faces of Paul Naschy: Alaric de Marnac (above) and Hugo (below).

The lord's modern-day descendant is Hugo (also Naschy), a self-professed egotist torn between two girlfriends who scoffs at his friends' interest in local mythology, seances, etc. After sitting through a seance in which the spirit of Alaric apparently hurls a candelabra at him, Hugo and his pals head back home from Paris to hunt for a rumored treasure on the de Marnac estate. Hugo's best buddy Maurice Roland is a painter influenced by visions of Alaric which point him not to treasure but a cask containing Alaric's head. The head exerts a malign influence on the local rabble, who are pretty malign in the first place, some of them trying to carjack Hugo earlier only to be beaten back by Hugo's husky brawling. Alaric incites a bloodbath that will facilitate his resurrection, following the miraculous reattachment of head and equally well-preserved body. More blood (and some sort of necrophiliac ritual) are necessary to bring Mabille back into the game. Once reunited, our evil couple go on an all-out rampage. They are sexual predators as well as sadistic killers; they compel men and women alike to throw off their clothes for a little rough and tumble before the claws come out and it's hearts-for-dinner time. As Maurice and others succumb to the ancient evil, only Hugo and primary-girlfriend Elvira remain, and Hugo gambles that another old family artifact, a "Thor's Hammers" amulet, can save them from the Marnac curse.

The head of Alaric de Marnac supervises the exhumation of his body (above) while his thralls provide more fuel (below)

Naschy contemplates mortality.

It looks like we're being set up for a Naschy-vs-Naschy showdown, but perhaps for logistic reasons, or perhaps just to throw folks a curve, Molina eliminates his better self by having the possessed Maurice shoot Hugo in the back after the presumptive hero survives a zombie attack. It'll be up to others to stop Alaric's rampage, and while we've been told how it can be done, whether it can be done is an open question until the end of the picture.

Naschy is pretty free with a gun when facing the undead, but it's a different story when he's on the receiving end. Isn't it always?

You could easily accept a classic Seventies "evil wins" ending, so overwhelming has Alaric been once made whole. Costuming, makeup and Naschy's pure presence make de Marnac a great movie villain who earned his eventual encore, while Molina throws in enough eccentric elements (particularly the efficacy of Norse religion in Spain!) to make Horror Rises a singular experience. It may not be the definitive Naschy movie, since that would probably have to be a Daninsky film, but it's probably the one you should show to someone who thinks that Naschy only ever went over old ground.

The power of Thor compels you!

To be honest, I haven't seen many Naschy films, but all those I have seen are memorable. I first saw Horror Rises about six years ago, after it was one of my early DVD purchases in those heady days when every video store seemed to have a now-insane selection of global cult cinema. Finally seeing something from Naschy was one of my early priorities, and I didn't regret the purchase. It held up tonight when I watched it again to appreciate what we've lost, as well as what we retain. Jacinto Molina is dead, but in the wild world of cinema Paul Naschy lives on.

I can't forget the trailer, which was uploaded to YouTube by Wildwildwes23. And I can't help but laugh at the narrator's persistent disagreement with the text about the title of the film.