Wendigo Meets LET ME IN (2010)

In what might serve as an omen for the makers of the American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Matt Reeves' Americanization of Sweden's other big cinematic export, Let the Right One In, bombed utterly on its release last fall. It must have struck the producers as a cruel surprise, given how the Swedish film had become a cult hit as a film and DVD in America. My friend Wendigo became one of Let the Right One In's admirers once he caught up with it on DVD. He wasn't surprised when the remake failed, and he remains unsurprised now that he's seen Let Me In and found it a respectful remake and a good film.

The Swedish film was only ever an art-house or cult success, he notes, so any effort to retool it for mainstream multiplex moviegoers was doomed. At this time in genre history, the John Lindqvist story has nothing that mainstream American vampire films want. Above all, it doesn't have sex. When he heard that an American version was being made, Wendigo was afraid that "Oscar" and "Eli" would be turned into teenagers and their relationship romanticized in an effort to lure in the Twilight audience. But if anything, Reeves doomed his project by remaining faithful to the original and keeping the main characters as children, or in the image of children.

Let the Right One In impressed Wendigo as a uniquely creepy film because of the deviant relationship between the childish protagonists, the eternal-child vampire and her dysfunctional servant-to-be. He appreciated the intensity of Oscar's alienation and resentment, how the bullied boy could well have been a serial killer in the making even if he hadn't met Eli. The Swedish film is a portrait of co-dependency that emphasizes the neediness of both characters on many levels. It refuses to romanticize the relationship; it offers no fantasies of power or pleasure, but predicts a terrible future for Oscar in the path of the pathetic father-figure who fetches victims for the vampire. The barren Swedish landscape suits and helps set the movie's bleak mood. Above all, Wendigo liked it because it was different and original. He likes Twilight and will defend it against all comers, but he doesn't need or want every vampire film to be Twilight. As we've shown repeatedly, Wendigo likes the versatility of the vampire as a cinema subject, the variety of things that can be done with it. When he sees something new that's well done, he treasures it.

Ronald Reagan (televised, lower right) should get credit for a cameo role in Let Me In.

Let Me In, of couse, is not something new. It's a remake, sometimes shot-for-shot, of a story familiar enough for us not to synopsize it here, moving the location from Sweden to New Mexico but keeping the period the 1980s. If not for the original, Reeves' movie would have become one of Wendigo's favorites. The ranking isn't automatic -- Wendigo likes The Ring better than Ring, for instance. But in this case the Swedish film feels more spontaneous, and the American version a little too overproduced.

"I'm not a girl," the vampire says, and sometimes Chloe Grace Moretz makes you believe it.

Wendigo admits that the comparison is unfair on at least one level, since his unfamiliarity with the Swedish actors allows him to identify them more completely with their roles, while he couldn't help identifying Chloe Grace Moretz's "Abby" with her Hit Girl from Kick-Ass. But the American actors eventually won him over, and he feels that Moretz and Reeves were more successful than their Swedish counterparts (right) in stressing the femme vampire's disquieting androgyny, and complementing it with a certain androgyny in Kodi Smit-McPhee's "Owen." Moretz looks bigger, more robust than her counterpart, and wears pants and hoodies that sometimes conceal her femininity -- as is appropriate given the original character's backstory, while Smit-McPhee's abject wimpiness gets him called a girl by his bullying tormentors.

Who are these masked men?

Owen's uncool weakness only makes his fantasies of violence and revenge more disturbing, and his wearing a clear plastic mask parallels the garbage-bag mask used by Richard Jenkins's father-figure minion, tagging them as two of a kind. Jenkins makes a stronger impression than his Swedish counterpart because he adds a level of bitterness and resentment for both Abby and his own predicament. Moretz comes across as more compassionate and understanding toward Jenkins, though her eternal immaturity makes it impossible for her to fully empathize with him.

Wendigo hasn't seen Smit-McPhee's previous showcase film, The Road, so he probably doesn't see how the young actor probably hurt the film despite his strong performance. Smit-McPhee is the true Wimpy Kid of today's cinema, and I think that fact disturbs a lot of viewers who aren't really comfortable seeing such blatant weakness and neediness on screen. Many Americans would rather that everyone was cool, or at least self-reliant. I think guys especially dig seeing strong, self-reliant female and child characters, not because it's politically correct, but because it takes them off the hook. The thought that someone might become dependent on them might be scarier for a lot of us than many more conventional horrors, and the Lindqvist story, in both forms, is all about weakness and neediness. It's a real modern horror story.

Reeves does some interesting original things, from the odd way he never puts Owen's mother in focus, which emphasizes the mutual alienation of son and mother, to his reimagining of Jenkins's attacks. In America you can't just hang around someplace waiting for someone to walk past, so Jenkins carjacks folks, breaking in and hiding in their vehicles to jump them at railroad crossings. These sequences are nicely done, especially an admittedly Hitchcockian scene when unforeseen complications lead Jenkins from desperation to disaster. As Reeves notes elsewhere on the DVD, his intention is to get you rooting for Jenkins to escape his predicament, no matter how evil his purpose and how foredoomed he is to anyone familiar to the story. With us, he succeeded.

Abby is never so much an American vampire as at moments like this.

If Let Me In falls short of its original, that can be blamed on overproduction. There's a little too much CGI climbing and leaping, and Moretz gets to wear a CG "grr-face" that her Swedish counterpart never needed. Wendigo has nothing against "grr-faces," but he doesn't understand why nearly every American vampire film needs them. Why aren't fangs enough? Maybe they aren't cool or badass enough, and maybe effects teams do it simply because they can. The reductio ad absurdam of that mentality was Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing. Since then, excessive FX often makes it more difficult for Wendigo to take vampires seriously, a problem he never had with more minimalist vampires of the past and present.

The American film doesn't live up to the original's wintry cinematography, despite much imported snow, and Reeves reveals some limitations as a director following the stunt of Cloverfield. He seems to lose track of Owen's creepiness once he starts "going steady" with Abby, and other interesting angles end up underdeveloped. Reeves seems to have a reason for using clips of Ronald Reagan beyond establishing the period, but search us for what it was -- probably something to do with "evil," I suppose. He also lays the pop soundtrack on more thick than the Swedes did, in what struck us as an obvious attempt to sell an album. These complaints don't add up to a negative review. Wendigo stresses again that Let Me In is one of the better American vampire movies he's seen in a while.

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (2009)

Zhang Yimou didn't hide the fact that this film, also known as A Simple Noodle Story, is a remake of the Coen Brothers' debut movie Blood Simple, which I guess makes the period Chinese setting the most unlikely setting for a film noir since Anthony Mann set The Black Book in Revolutionary Paris. With Zhang at the helm, it may as well have been David Lean's version of Blood Simple. Older fans and history buffs will get my point. Lean made some great films, with some saying his black and white British films from the Forties are even better than Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia. But after a certain point Lean seemed unable to tell a story simply, and his comeuppance came with Ryan's Daughter, a film that seemed appallingly overproduced by the standards of 1970. After the global success of Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang seems to have reached that point. Noodle is a visual overdose that swamps mood with spectacle. When characters chase each other through the desolate hills, the hills are so gorgeously desolate that they dwarf the actors in every way. Zhang may have a narrative point to make about the characters' pettiness, but that point also gets dwarfed by the hyperaesthetic location cinematography.

I suppose Zhang has earned the right to make films his way, and we definitely should be grateful that he kept martial arts out of this one -- though now that I think of it, some slam-bang wirework might have accentuated the intentional absurdity of the piece. The closest we get to that sort of thing is an utterly gratuitous noodle-making scene in which three employees pass a pie of dough back and forth, each spinning and spreading it out until it's like a tent over their heads. Zhang piles the silliness on early, introducing a flamboyant "Persian" merchant who sells the Frances McDormand counterpart a gun and tries to sell her a cannon. For some reason the Persian and the Chinese woman haggle partly in English, and of course the cannon must be fired. The noise of the explosion introduces the soldier who'll play M. Emmet Walsh's part in the story. The first third of the movie is broadly comic, as if Zhang were remaking Raising Arizona by mistake. Everything is over the top, from the mere presence of a fat bucktoothed oaf of a noodle chef to the usual Asian indulgence of crying and screaming. The plot of Blood Simple is being followed fairly closely, but the tone is totally off. Zhang isn't necessarily obliged to reproduce the original's tone, but his own tone seems off. He can't balance plot, performances and visuals in a way that rings true, at least for American viewers.

An unfaithful wife...

A vengeful husband...

A man who kills for money....

Past the halfway point, however, as Noodle grows more recognizably imitative of Blood Simple, Zhang's commitment to reproducing the original's suspense brings the film under greater control. Things slow down as Zhang ratchets up the tension, putting his soldier over as a convincing menace to set up the final showdown with the wife. Apart from the aesthetic excess of slow-mo shots of arrows flying through the house, the climax works nearly as well as it did the first time around. The Coens wrote a strong scene, and I was tempted to say that it works in spite of Zhang, but I realize how easily it could have been botched. Zhang deserves credit for reclaiming suspense and some entertainment from what looked like a lost cause.

Anyway, it's nice to see the influence running the other way for once. We're so used to seeing Hollywood poaching foreign cinema for story ideas that it's almost reassuring in a backhanded way to see foreigners borrowing from American movies. Of course, Zhang didn't make Noodle to preempt Blood Simple from Chinese screens, so it's not quite the same thing that Hollywood usually does. Since the Coens themselves aren't above remakes, and even did a good one last year, seeing one of their own films remade is kind of like the circle of life in motion, to be sappy about it.

Straight from Sony Pictures Classics, here's the American trailer, for which the film's unoriginality is its main selling point.

WINTER'S BONE (2010)

Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the resemblance if I'd bothered to see Debra Granik's Oscar-nominated movie when it played local theaters last summer, but now that I've watched the DVD I can't help being reminded of True Grit. It strikes me that Granik's adaptation of a Daniel Woodrell novel is more the modern version of Charles Portis's story, in either sense of the word, than the Coen Bros. remake of the Henry Hathway movie. It's definitely the darker telling.

Both stories deal with a girl on a dangerous mission. In Winter's Bone, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) has a week to find her missing father so he can make a court date, or else her family will lose the home he's put up as bond. At first it looks as if Dad might simply have absconded, being the best meth cook in Missouri and all, but the story gradually takes on a stronger resemblance to the basic True Grit situation. Even so, Ree's got to have proof in order to ward off the bondsmen, even if her own acceptance of the country omerta means giving up hope of justice or even revenge. Like the heroine of True Grit, Ree is a premature matriarch due to the absent dad and an incompetent mother. It's up to her to raise a younger brother and a six year old sister, both of whom she has to teach how to use a squirrel gun for survival's sake. Ree isn't perky or quirky like your choice of True Grit actress; the Oscar-nominated Lawrence seems closer to what the Portis-Hathaway-Coen heroine should or probably would have been like. She is hard, grim and bitter, without ideals and only better than her relatives and neighbors because of her sense of responsibility and the fact that she isn't on the meth yet.

A Rooster Cogburn counterpart even emerges in the form of Ree's Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), a hardcase addict feared by the local law and lawbreakers alike who tries early to warn Ree off of asking too many people where her Dad might be. He finally stands up for Ree when her stubborn nosiness puts her in danger of death at the hands of the local meth patriarch and his clan. By doing so, he puts himself in permanent peril, taking responsibility should Ree ever squeal or otherwise betray the community's secrets, including the fate of Teardrop's brother. He warns her never to tell him if she does find out who might have killed her father, but it's unclear whether he refuses the knowledge because it'd make his own life forfeit or because he'd be compelled to make a suicide-run for revenge. It's probably both, and it makes his departure at the end, after he tells a still-ignorant Ree that he's found out himself, a grimly sad moment of abortive redemption.

Forty years or so ago, this wouldn't be so unusual a film, but it would've been quite different. Hillbilly or country crime movies were a popular subgenre in the Seventies, but they were mostly exploitation films. In those days a slightly older Ree might have been Claudia Jennings in cutoffs and there'd be no question about her taking revenge, however unlikely, on all comers. There would have been car chases and explosions and skinny dipping -- the title might've been Summer's Bone to facilitate the nudity. I would've been reminded less of True Grit in that case, but I don't think it was Granik's plan to plant that thought in my head anyway. She's made a hard film about modern American poverty, an unpopular subject in Hollywood these days.

The poverty was taken for granted in those Seventies films, but it only formed a backdrop for fantasies of rural degeneracy -- fun as they sometimes are -- that dated back to Tobacco Road or God's Little Acre. The world of Winter's Bone is still pretty degenerate, but Granik doesn't make a spectacle of it. Hers is a deliberately ugly film portraying an ugly, littered landscape. There are few signs of stylization. Granik's stark approach and Lawrence and Hawkes's terse, convincing performances tellingly portray potential crushed or in the process of being crushed in a ruined socioeconomic landscape. The stuff of Seventies exploitation is now the stuff of 21st century independent cinema. What that tells us about the movie business and the American audience is hard to say.

WESTBOUND (1959)

While making the films with Budd Boetticher for Columbia Pictures that have made his latter-day reputation as a western star, Randolph Scott also made pictures for Warner Bros. For his last Warners picture, the studio hired Boetticher to direct. Neither the producer nor the writers had worked with Scott before, and it's unclear whether the actor had anything like the creative control he enjoyed over his Columbia efforts. The end product still seems like a Randolph Scott movie, if somewhat less like a Boetticher film. The Civil War story lacks the spare clarity of the team's Columbia pictures, but remains grounded in certain story situations typical of later Scott films. Scott and Boetticher may also be responsible for a graver mood that prevails here than in other comparable patriotic Fifties westerns.

Scott plays John Hayes, a Union cavalry officer assigned to securing the Overland Stage route through increasingly hostile territory and assuring that Union troops in the West get paid. The deteriorating situation is made clear to him at a station where the manager insults a maimed veteran (Michael Dante) by putting salt in the young man's slice of pie. Hayes is a man who takes crap from no one and will not let anyone give crap to a brave man who gave up an arm for his country. He forces the station master to eat the pie. The situation sounds absurd but it establishes Hayes's understated power of intimidation.

After dropping Rod, the veteran, off on his farm for a reunion with his hardworking, feisty wife Jeanie (Karen Steele), Hayes discovers that the Overland agent in the next town has quit his job and gone over to the Rebs. Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) was an old friend of Hayes' until he won the woman (Virginia Mayo) both men had courted. As Hayes struggles to reestablish an Overland presence in the town, he finds allies in Rod and Jeanie and a dangerous enemy in Mace (Michael Pate), who becomes Putnam's right hand man in the Confederate effort to stop westbound stage traffic.

Good guys (Karen Steele and Michael Dante, above) and bad guys
(Michael Pate and Andrew Duggan, below) in Westbound.

Mace emerges as the real villain of the piece, while Putnam proves the sort of ambivalent antagonist you'd see in the Columbia pictures. With Hayes having reappeared, Putnam clearly feels insecure in his marriage and succumbs to alcoholism. But strangely, precisely because Hayes is his enemy, Putnam refuses to turn a wartime conflict into a personal matter. While Mace advises that the easiest way to resolve the situation is to assassinate Hayes, Putnam refuses to consider that option. He thinks he can drive Hayes from the field by pressuring stage drivers or stealing the Overland's horses. It's as if Putnam wants to prove to everyone that he doesn't fear Hayes as a returned romantic rival, but his choice of strategy enables Mace to commit a series of escalating atrocities for which Putnam is, for all intents and purposes, to blame.

Randolph Scott often plays a loner whose arrival in a community, no matter how righteous his purpose, tends to disrupt the local order. That makes him different from John Wayne, whose influence wherever his characters go is almost entirely positive and uplifting. Scott and Boetticher could play the star's subversive potential for laughs, as in Buchanan Rides Alone, or to more tragic effect in Decision at Sundown. His disruptive potential extends to the domestic sphere. Scott's films often include a female character whom we recognize as a suitable mate for the hero, but is burdened with an unfit husband or fiancee. The man may be unscrupulous or he may merely be weak, but Scott's superiority provokes a domestic crisis that is often resolved by the other man's demise, whether Scott ends up with the girl or not. The final Scott-Boetticher collaboration, Comanche Station, gives a twist to this gimmick as the Scott character and others spend the film questioning the character of a man who wouldn't venture out to rescue his captive wife, only to learn at the end that the loving husband just happened to be blind. Westbound anticipates this device by tying one of Hayes's potential mates, the stalwart Jeanie, to Rod the amputee who takes to heart the townsfolks' labeling of him as "half a man." But Hayes proves a subtle mentor to the troubled Rod, offhandedly showing how a man can use a rifle with one hand without any condescending motivational speeches. Westbound is also unusual in offering the Scott character two potential mates, including the more age-appropriate Norma Putnam, creating some suspense over which woman, if any, Hayes will end up with. But the filmmakers don't stack the deck in Scott's favor. Jeanie loves Rod despite his handicap, and Norma, as we eventually discover, loves Putnam despite his faults.

But because the Scott character has two potential mates, Westbound makes the fates of the two husbands a matter of further suspense. If Hayes deserves to get a girl, then one of the men must be doomed. Boetticher maintains this suspense during a drastic ratcheting up of violence. After Hayes and Rod recover horses stolen by Mace's men, Mace escalates the conflict. Going against Putnam's order, he sets up an ambush to kill Hayes, but Rod ends up walking through the fateful doorway instead. In an unusual approach, Rod is allowed to linger despite a doctor's declaration that his condition is hopeless. This being a movie, you can believe that his condition isn't hopeless, and the longer he lingers, the more you might believe it. Meanwhile, Mace perpetrates his supreme atrocity, wrecking a coach full of women and children and killing them all. Moments after Hayes is hammered with this news, Jeanie informs him that Rod, offscreen, has finally succumbed to his wounds. Now a reckoning between Hayes and Mace, who had humiliated our hero in town earlier in the picture, is unavoidable, but a desperately repentant Putnam becomes a wild card in the scenario. And after the climax of violence comes Hayes's ultimate choice, if the choice is his to make, between a once-lost love and a love yet to be....

See enough Randolph Scott films and the pattern of a "Randolph Scott film" becomes more recognizable. The man and his associates knew, by the 1950s, the sort of stories and situations that worked best for him. Whether Scott and Boetticher gave it a personal touch, or the Warner people tailor-made a story to suit Scott's strengths, Westbound is plainly a Scott vehicle. While the story in simplest terms is something Gary Cooper or any other Hollywood westerner could have performed, I suspect it would have been inferior with any other actor starring. Whether it would have been inferior with some one else directing is another story. While Scott was clearly comfortable with Boetticher by this point, I imagine that the other top Western directors of the decade -- Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, etc. -- could have done just as well with the actor and the material. I don't have any problem with Boetticher's work here -- the image seems little compromised by the fullscreen "Starz Play" stream available on Netflix, except for the sequence when Mace's horsemen pursue a stagecoach across a too-sweeping expanse of road -- but the film overall plays less to the director's strengths, which I identify with a certain stoic minimalism, than it does to the star's. Boetticher probably should get credit for keeping the film personal as a Scott movie and getting the usual strong performance from the actor. I haven't seen enough of Scott in other hands yet to determine how much of his definitive screen persona is Boetticher's (or Burt Kennedy's) creation, but for now I'm inclined to give the director the benefit of the doubt. As a team, Boetticher and Scott were seven-for-seven. None of their collaborations fail to impress. Individual works by other directors and other stars may have been better films, but Boetticher and Scott were the most successful team in terms of quantity and quality during the greatest decade of Hollywood westerns.

Wendigo Meets BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957)

The question we had going into this film by producer Herman Cohen and director Herbert L. Strock, the team that gave us I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, was: why isn't this one called I Was a Teenage Vampire or, if you prefer, I Was a Teenage Dracula? The answer, apparently, has to do with the fact that Blood of Dracula was released on a double bill with Teenage Frankenstein in November 1957. It would look pretty absurd to have two "I Was a Teenage..." movies on the same program, but that means that Blood goes through history as the poor stepchild of the "Teenage" trilogy (Werewolf, Frankenstein and How to Make a Monster). Is that fair? Well, some of you may recall that Wendigo included Blood of Dracula in his list of ten worst vampire movies, but he reminds us that that was really a list of the movies with the ten worst cinematic vampires, not necessarily the ten worst movies that happened to have vampires in them. So while the Strock film has one strike against it going in, it might yet have redeeming qualities. Since AMC ran it one night last week, Wendigo decided that we should give the thing another chance.

What we found was a story so totally stacked against its putative heroine that the unfairness of it all was almost offensive. Blood of Dracula is the sad story of Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison), a teenage girl whose father has remarried within mere weeks of her mother's death. Dad celebrates his honeymoon with his new trophy wife by dumping Nancy at a boarding school. She is a bit of a killjoy, we must admit, sulking and not even bothering to conceal her contempt for her father and her hatred for her new mom. No matter, though: we'll never see them again. Nancy becomes a virtual orphan in a virtual orphanage dominated by the "Birds of Paradise," a clique of mean girls who instantly ransack Nancy's stuff. The noise rouses the school staff, but Nancy observes the omerta of adolescence, refusing to rat out anyone and taking a small step toward acceptance.

Nancy falls under the influence of her chemistry teacher, Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), one of this era's rare female mad scientists. Along with the usual madness, Branding has a feminist axe to grind. She thinks it's only because she's a woman that the scientific community has rejected her thesis that a destructive potential can be tapped in human beings that would make atomic power look paltry. It's also only because she's a woman, we must suppose, that they reject the idea that a demonstration of this destructive potential would scarify the nations into nuclear disarmament. Perhaps a fait accompli will wake them up from their sexist stupor. Aided by her loyal classroom assistant Myra, Branding stages an accidental sulfuric acid spill in order to recruit Nancy as her test subject.

Will Nancy become an atomic superwoman who'll rule the world? Thankfully, perhaps, Branding thinks a more modest demonstration will make her point to the world. The science of it consists of hypnosis, aided by an amulet acquired in the notorious Carpathian Mountains. The scientific properties of the amulet remain a mystery, but using it, Branding can induce a post-hypnotic transformation proving her thesis of human destructive potential -- but not before three overaged guys, including the house groundskeeper and resident boy-toy, crash a dorm party and stage a musical number while Tab (singer Jerry Blaine in his second Strock movie and final film appearance) performs the deservedly less well-known version of "Puppy Love." There's choreography and everything -- presumably spontaneous but somehow not seeming that way. It stops the film dead, and it never comes fully back to life -- not that it had been fully alive beforehand, though.

"Puppy Love" only delays the long-awaited first transformation, which occurs while Nancy skulks in a supply closet in the basement while a classmate grabs lab supplies for the next day. Wendigo finds the vampire girl an odd-looking thing. Her hair's styled so that she has an almost flat head, with bushy eyebrows arching toward her temples. She has pointy ears, pronounced raccoon eyes and gnarly oversized fangs that extend below her lower lip. It remains one of the worst vampire makeups Wendigo has ever seen, because there's no way this creature can be seductive the way a female vampire is supposed to be. Instead, she's just a female version of Michael Landon's Teenage Werewolf, a snarling subhuman monster. Maybe that's what Cohen and Strock thought a modern vampire would be like. Blood of Dracula was part of the short-lived trend of modern-vampire films that emerged in the U.S. in the late Fifties before Hammer's films re-established the dominance of Gothic tropes. It also helps explain why the trend was short-lived. Nancy has no demon-lover potential at all, nothing with which to capture our imaginations.

What all of this has to do with Dracula remains nebulous. As with The Return of Dracula, filmmakers felt comfortable using the D-word in their titles, but less so about invoking the D-man in their stories. Here, it seems as if writer Aben Kandel (alias Robert Thornton) was given a quota of name-dropping. He introduces a young police detective who happened to have a college roommate who came from the Carpathian Mountains and is therefore familiar with "the vampires, the Draculas" who terrorized that part of the world. The condition of the boarding-school killer's victims seems all too familiar to him. "The killer, the sickness, the victims, just as he described it to me," he tells his colleagues, "as if it were true...and Dracula." Wendigo and I just adore that tacked-on "Dracula." It's a perfect exploitation moment, and you can make a game of it, too. Listen to any line later in the picture and decide for yourself if it'll be enhanced by adding, "...and Dracula." You'd be surprised.

But of course, no modern policeman is going to listen to this greenhorn's dissertation on Carpathian folklore. The investigators have their own theory about the crimes: "It's definitely the work of a paranoid, somebody with a compulsion neurosis to kill," an expert concludes. Maybe it's because they fail to recognize the killings' basis in cutting-edge hypnotic science that Miss Branding has Nancy keep killing, even as the girl begins to realize that something's terribly wrong with her. A final test of wills is inevitable, a clash between mad science and its monstrous byproduct, with the life of Nancy's boyfriend at stake, and a sort-of stake conveniently placed in the middle of everything. But what's the point of it all?...

On one level, the film has the usual mad-science moral. "There is a power greater than science that makes the earth," a teacher tells Branding's assistant, "and those who twist and pervert knowledge for evil only work out their own destruction." True enough, but what had Nancy done to deserve what befalls her in this picture? She starts out miserable and wretched and ends up more miserable and more wretched. Does deserve have anything to do with it? Not really. Cohen and Strock seem to have an idea that Nancy was a consistent victim of a poor upbringing, tossed from the frying pan of a neglectful family into the fire of a manipulative, corrupting environment of the boarding school. A character gets to make a little speech decrying the use of such schools as a dumping ground for unwanted teenage daughters. The dumping is doubly bad because it confirms parental neglect and because it gives suspicious educated females too much influence over impressionable girls. You have to reach for it because there's no gay vibe of any kind in the picture, but you probably could argue that Branding's hypnosis and experimentation on Nancy symbolize something more salacious that couldn't be shown more explicitly in a Fifties B-movie four years before William Wyler's The Children's Hour broached the taboo subject of lesbianism. Wendigo would rather dismiss the screenplay as the work of a writer who shows no empathy whatsoever with the experiences of a troubled teenaged girl. You could have told the same story with an all-male cast, he suspects -- not that it would have been any better.

Whatever the subtext, Wendigo found the film as lame as ever, uninspired on every artistic level, and perhaps more lame for making so little use of a promising setting for a vampire picture. If fails almost completely as a vampire film because it has so little of what makes a vampire interesting. There's nothing wrong with making a vampire no more than a snarling monster (see Dan Curtis's The Night Stalker, for instance), but somehow when it's a female vampire it seems like a waste. Wendigo suggests that Nancy may be cinema's worst female vampire -- and I'm in no position to argue with him.

In lieu of our usual number of screencaps, here's the trailer for Blood of Dracula, uploaded to YouTube by TrashTrailers.

CRY OF A PROSTITUTE (Quelli che contano, 1974)

As censorship receded around the world in the 1960s and afterward, the U.S. embraced sex while Europe embraced violence. This is a very broad generalization, but I'm still grappling with the importance of cruelty and brutality in European popular cinema and some of its art cinema. In many cases, it seems to be a kind of reality principle, a sign that the filmmaker is trying to tell it like it is. It's a conscious rejection of romantic idealism and enforced optimism, a crude antithesis to the romanticism often expressed in the films' own lush and soaring scores. What were audiences supposed to make of it all? We assume that they got a kick out of the violence, but how did they react to the worldview, the cynicism and pessimism that so often prevail in these films? In historical films, I've described it as an acknowledgment of the injustice that prevailed in the past, whether in medieval Europe or in the savage border country of spaghetti westerns. What about cruel pictures set in the present day? Did audiences accept those as truth-telling exposes of modern injustice? Were these films consciousness-raising exercises or did they contribute to conservative complacency? Did they tell viewers that there was no hope in a violent world, or did they suggest that violence was the only answer?

Watching Andrea Bianchi's brutal Mafia potboiler, whose Italian title translates literally as "Those Who Matter," I couldn't help wondering whether people were meant to enjoy the experience, or whether they were supposed to be satisfied by recognizing some sort of violent truth in the derivative story. In fact, the story is derivative of spaghetti westerns. It has the Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo/Red Harvest element of a protagonist playing two factions off each other. It also has the Once Upon a Time in the West element of a killer who performs his own theme music with mysterious significance. Instead of playing a harmonica, Tony Aniante (Henry Silva) whistles an enigmatic, strangely amplified tune while enemies stand about stupefied or confused until Tony steps out of cover and shoots them. He's an American gangster sent to Sicily to settle a local squabble over heroin, some of which was being smuggled inside of "cut up babies." He also has an agenda of his own, hinted at by the whistling and the occasional black and white flashback to some scene of uncertain relevance. Tony is not quite a spaghetti western bounty hunter transplanted to Seventies Sicily, however.

Silva gives a laconic, tightly wound, uncomfortable performance. He talks (dubbing his own voice) in a stilted way, as if keeping in sync with the rest of the cast (dubbed with other people's voices). His delivery gives lines like, "I am a damn good driver!" an unintentional mock gravitas. Silva seems to have worn the same yellow shirt through the entire shoot in steamy Sicily, often under a jacket, and you can believe that every sweat stain is real. There's something robotic about Tony Aniante, but you eventually realize that this is self-restraint, that he's keeping something essential about himself in check -- and not just his secret revenge agenda.

Margie (Barbara Bouchet) hints ever so slightly that she's attracted to Tony

Margie (Barbara Bouchet), the trophy wife of one of the rival gangsters, challenges Tony's resolve with some of the least subtle come-ons in movies. She comes across like a character out of a soft-core sex comedy, pouring milk over herself and sucking a banana to get Tony's attention. She gets it, in spades. Tony likes it rough, it turns out, if he can even be said to like it. It's enough to drive her wild the first time, and he can't get her out of his mind. He daydreams of her while her husband plots strategy with him, but he clearly resents his own desire. Maybe it just gets in the way of his job and his secret agenda.

He warns her to stay out of his way but she won't listen. The next time he gives her all he's got. He beats the crap out of her with his fists and both ends of his belt before raping her in a barn. Not long afterward, she kills herself. Notified of this in the middle of a final showdown with her husband, Tony says, "I'm sorry," but by then his own problems have escalated and he's a bloody, sweat-stained mess in his own right. Even if he gets out of this predicament, he still has his own business to settle, and that flashback to explain....

But how can you root for Tony after what he does to Margie? Is it a mitigating circumstance that he has a murder in his past to avenge? I doubt it. But I also question whether Italian (or later American) audiences were meant to cheer as Tony destroys Margie. The rape scene strikes me as an instance of cruelty as a reality principle, a refusal to turn this tough crime picture into a romance. We're supposed to be satisfied to have it confirmed that Tony is a vicious beast, and that such men tend to prevail, however implausibly in plot terms. Tony's behavior probably serves to confirm a worldview viewers already had. They could tell themselves that this film didn't insult their intelligence -- though their sense of cinematic taste might still be a casualty.

It's hard to judge Quelli che contano as a cinematic experience on the evidence of the Substance DVD. This pan-and-scan edition of the American dub looks like a VHS tape that's been dragged out of the earth. The picture quality is on the level of a Mill Creek DVD -- though many Mill Creek editions actually look better. Somehow, the presentation seems appropriate to the content. Cry of a Prostitute is an experience that should be as little aestheticized as possible. Whatever virtues it has shouldn't be dependent on lighting, vivid color or balanced compositions. At its worst, morally speaking, it's riveting in an appalling way, as if part of the point is the way the film dares you to watch. That's in keeping with Italian exploitation, if not with the wider European cinema of cruelty. Whether you care to watch depends on whether you think the truths of these films are worth telling, or whether they're the truth.

A MAN IN OUR HOUSE (Fi baitina rajul, 1961)

Fifty years ago, movie cameras showed Egypt in revolt.

This was a re-enactment, however. The scene was staged for a film set approximately thirteen years earlier, when Egypt ("Misr" to its Arabic-speaking natives) was still ruled by a monarch who was himself little more than a puppet of Great Britain. In his time, King Farouk was a byword for decadent if not "Oriental" luxury. He was at least as much a kleptocrat as Hosni Mubarak is reputed to have been. Mubarak's fall from power last month appears to have marked the end of an era that began when the "Free Officers" deposed Farouk in a military coup in 1952. That coup was the "miracle" mentioned in the spoken prologue to our film. By the time Henry Barakat directed this patriotic romantic thriller, Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt as a strongman. Though he was decried as a dictator by the West for his nationalization of the Suez Canal, his violent repression of Islamist dissidents, and his encouragement of a global "non-aligned" movement, Nasser is recognized in retrospect as someone who at least lived frugally and retained the loyalty of the masses until his early demise in 1970. According to Wikipedia, the Egyptian film industry stood at the brink of greater state control in 1961, with Nasser entirely nationalizing the business later in the decade. A Man in Our House thus needn't be treated as state propaganda, but it certainly isn't art for art's sake, either.

Egypt's great gift to global cinema, many will say, is Omar Sharif, who stars here shortly before David Lean and the world claimed him. He plays Ibrahim, a heroic student radical caught with hundreds of others on a railway bridge as sitting ducks for government troops. Many men jump from the bridge in panic; one of them, a friend of Ibrahim's, can't swim. Ibrahim leaps over a railing and into the water to rescue him. Later, he accepts the grim task of assassinating the country's prime minister, a deed done off-screen.

Arrested and roughly interrogated, Ibrahim manages to escape with the help of collaborators with the underground. With a price on his head, he has to hole up with the family of a sympathetic police inspector. The situation becomes something like an Arab Nationalist appropriation of The Diary of Anne Frank, as Ibrahim must spend every hour in the house and worry about every visitor. The most worrisome visitor is Abdel Hamid, an obnoxious cousin of the inspector with an eye on the same younger daughter of the house to whom Ibrahim is attracted. The cousin's habit of inviting himself to holiday dinners sets up one of the film's mundanely suspenseful scenes as Ibrahim hides in the sisters' bedroom, the one room in the house where the cousin won't just barge in. But the cousin notices the obvious, that there's one extra place set at the table, but the family hadn't been expecting him. As it becomes impossible to keep the truth from the cousin, he and Ibrahim play a human chess match, the cousin hoping that Ibrahim will name names of his underground colleagues while Ibrahim feeds him false names in order to discredit him with the underground and the police alike.

The beleaguered family

Finally, Ibrahim has to make a break for it. He takes his leave in a stolen military uniform during a virtuoso performance (to these ears) of the call to prayer, the moment of parting with his new love and the suspense of his escape made more poignant by the potent vocals. There's a nice romantic touch and a cultural lesson for someone like me in the ritual in which Ibrahim and his love each write out the shahada ("There is no God but God...") on a single sheet of paper and tear the sheet in half. Each keeps the half on which the other has written. According to folklore, this ensures that parted lovers will be reunited. But with further plot complications and another risky mission to come, their reunion remains uncertain....

At 152 minutes (Netflix claims 159), A Man in Our House is longer than it really needs to be. Ibrahim's last mission seems tacked on to pad the film out to something like epic length, though it's curious that while the violent last act feels padded, the domestic drama of the long central act inside the house didn't seem padded at all. Barakat has a decent ensemble cast at his disposal, though my unfamiliarity with them as movie personalities may make the characters seem more real to me than they may have to regular Egyptian moviegoers. As a director he makes the most of his main interior set, which gives him plenty of opportunities for compositions in depth of family members moving through doorways and hallways. The domestic drama of Ibrahim's extended visit apparently interested him more than the more conventional heroic stuff toward the end, though the early scene-setting mass protests are also impressively staged. As for Omar Sharif, you probably only had to look into his eyes to see that he was destined for the big leagues. His star charisma is indisputable, and it's a tribute to the rest of the cast that he doesn't overwhelm them.

The stalker stalked. A nice noirish moment filmed on location.

Barakat's film is also a relic of a time when largely secular optimism prevailed in Egypt and the wider Arab world. While Ibrahim and other characters keep the religious holidays and express routine piety, there's hardly a sign of anything you could call "Islamism" anywhere on screen. While the matriarch of the house dresses in modestly traditional fashion, her daughters wear western clothes without anyone fussing. All the mother asks is that they take their shoes and stockings off indoors. Ibrahim himself is no bearded extremist but a clean-shaven man, no doubt designed as a role model of Egyptian modernism. Had I watched A Man in Our House a few months earlier, I might have found it a more poignant glimpse into a more irretrievably lost world. But the impression I've gotten from Egypt in 2011 is that the Ibrahims and their comrades and their world are still there, even if Nasser's political legacy is doomed to the historic ashbin. If anything, with no prime ministers needing killing...yet...they may have gotten things more right this time. If so, then Fi baitina rajul, though no great film by any means, may have historic significance as a testament to Egypt's enduring resilience against tyranny.