THE AMERICAN makes '10 Worst Movies' List

John Gray is a local news anchorman who writes a weekly column for one of my area's newspapers, the Troy Record. In his current column he confesses that, as a kid, he wanted to be Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert when he grew up. " It wasn't until I grew up and started watching a lot of movies that I realized how horrible it must be to have to watch everything that came out," he writes. His own experience has been selective, and he prefaces his list of the 10 Worst Movies He's Ever Seen with the disclaimer that he isn't claiming that they're the Worst Movies Ever Made. As Gray explains, " I'm not stupid enough to watch "Daddy Day Care 2," "Howard The Duck" or "I Spit On Your Grave." And he probably hasn't even heard of The Room. That means we can expect an idiosyncratic list from Gray, without many of the usual suspects.

Apparently, when Gray grew up and started watching a lot of movies he never bothered watching older films. No film on his Worst list is more than 20 years old. Perhaps we should infer that he thinks They Don't Make Them Like They Used To, but this means that while his list will be different from many others, it's also inherently limited in scope. Since Gray apparently doesn't actively seek out "bad" films, we shouldn't expect to see anything that qualifies as So Bad It's Good (or at least Funny). Gray's list won't be a connoisseur's selection of badness, but a recounting of hateful filmgoing experiences, the movies that entertained him the least.

As my headline has already told you, the joker in Gray's deck, the choice that throws his standards into question, is Anton Corbijn's Euro-set chamber thriller The American, a film I feel defensive about because I happened to like it quite a bit. Here's what Gray says about it: "George Clooney is a hit man who travels to Italy to sleep with hookers and drink coffee. Oh he also stares out the window and frowns a lot. I'm not kidding, that's the whole movie." Since Gray goes on to reveal that he's included two films on the list -- The Girl Next Door and Showgirls -- despite having never watched them in their entirety, I have to wonder whether he spent a lot of time in the bathroom during The American, or whether he simply zoned out during the parts that didn't involve whoring, coffee drinking and frowning.

Gray doesn't enumerate his list, though we can guess from his saving it for last that the Worst Film He's Ever Seen is none other than Ron Howard's firefighting melodrama Backdraft. Of that he says, "I know I'll take heat for this (no pun intended) but let's be real. Macho firefighters punching each other and running into burning buildings with no masks on. Sex on the fire truck as it races to a call and a creepy arsonist who says things like, 'Did the fire look at you?' and 'Did you dance with the animal?' I was looking for the fire exit to escape this movie."

Backdraft certainly was a bad movie -- I have more memories of the Universal Studio theme-park attraction than of the film itself -- but it's also an unusual choice for The Worst, especially when Showgirls,a more predictable choice, is also on Gray's list. Speaking of which, Paul Verhoeven is implicitly the Worst Director in Gray's book, since Starship Troopers also made the roll of dishonor, and no other director is represented twice. If there's any overall bias on Gray's part, it's against cheesy sci-fi involving aliens or oversized animals. Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea and Independence Day also live in infamy for him.

I was intrigued by this contribution from someone who doesn't claim expertise in cinema and has a pretty unambiguous notion of badness. Some regular readers of this blog may dispute not only The American but other selections, or some of those if not the Corbijn film. "Bad" and "Worst" remain slippery categories for moviegoers, with an objective consensus on the least entertaining films an impossibility. People are entertained by so many different, contradictory things that there's probably always someone out there who enjoys something that someone else, if not everyone else, despises. Gray doesn't like to have his intelligence insulted by implausible special effects; many movie fans are more indulgent, just as some can contemplate The American with more patience than Gray cared to employ. The pursuit of the Worst films continues to fascinate me because of its paradoxical nature. Many people still seek out the Worst expecting to be entertained by them, while the objective Worst, I still believe, must be that film, whether it currently exists or not, that entertains no one. The mystery of Worstness is inextricably intertwined with the mystery of entertainment itself, and I can't help finding it entertaining in its own right.

THE HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE (El jorobado de la Morgue, 1973)

There's a timeless quality to the work of horror auteur Jacinto Molina and his onscreen alter ego Paul Naschy that transcends the often dated fashions and music of his films. He consciously continued the traditions of classic horror into a more explicit era, and few of his movies are as steeped in tradition as this one, co-written by Molina and directed by Javier Aguirre. If many Naschy vehicles hearken back to the archetypes of Universal Studios, El jorobado de la Morgue reaches even further back into the past. If Naschy often appeared to be Europe's answer to Lon Chaney Jr., he ventured into Chaney Sr.'s territory this time in a story that could well have been a silent film, only with bare breasts and more blood.

Set in a German town, The Hunchback of the Morgue chronicles the misfortunes of Wolfgang Gotho (pronounced "go-toe," not "goth-o"), a shaggy-haired misfit who is "retarded mentally," as the English language dubbing puts it. Gotho (everyone calls him by his last name) has a crush on a terminally ill girl with a love for flowers and an affection for the man who brings them every day. A random fight with some obnoxious orderlies makes him just a minute late for the poor girl's death. Enraged by the cavalier attitude others take toward her corpse, Gotho chops an orderly's head off, disembowels another, and steals the body, storing it in an underground crypt. He still brings flowers regularly, but is chagrined to discover rats gnawing on the untreated cadaver one terrible day. After fending off their feral leaping attacks on his own person, the outraged hunchback puts the vermin to the torch.

Wolfgang Gotho (Paul Naschy) mourns a lost love, and rages at those rats who dare mock his mourning.

Gotho manages to dodge a police manhunt, but a couple of maddened scientists are quite aware of his hiding place. It strikes them as a perfect place, and Gotho as a perfect assistant, for their own experiments in creating life by "alimenting" corpse matter. As one of the doctors says, the hunchback is "a person who, apart from his insignificance might be of extraordinary value." On the other hand, "Dealing with a killer is not only repugnant, but might also cause complications." But these are small worries when science is at stake, and Gotho is soon put to work with a promise that his girl can be brought back to life. He's tasked with collecting body parts that appear to be destined for a blender, or else are meant to ferment somehow. It's all part of the all-important alimentation process, but once the doctors discover that their evolving creature "repels dead cells" (and loudly, too), they determine that "we must aliment it with material that is alive."

By this point all hope of restoring Gotho's girl is gone, since some lackeys, sick of the stench from the still-untreated stiff, have thrown her into an acid pit. Gotho tosses one of them in after her and is about to give his notice when he's assured that the scientists can make another girl for him from scratch. That keeps him in the killing business, even as he befriends a more benevolent, more beautiful doctor (Rosanna Yanni) who longs for a love as pure as that Gotho had for the dead girl. Soon our hunchbacked hero is moving up from kissing her feet to bedding her. Inspired by his new love, he resolves to put an end to the scientists' experiments, just as "the Primordial" is roused by insatiable hunger to violent life.

To love a hunchback as Rosanna Yanni does is to put oneself in harm's way, or at least in front of harm's way.

How to describe the Primordial? He's been grown through alimentation, and the alimentary canal is the channel that food travels from mouth to anus. What comes out of the anus? Suffice it to say it's pretty primordial, as in "primordial ooze" or something along those lines.

While the concluding battle of monsters is straight out of 1940s Universal, the prevailing sensibility is more archaic. Naschy's Gotho is a variation of Chaney's Quasimodo, a pitiable wretch longing for love and companionship yet driven constantly to violence. He milks the role for as much pathos as he can, but Naschy always seems to miss the point of pathos. You're supposed to pity a character who can't have or has even renounced what we all long for, but Naschy wants your pity and to score with chicks on screen at the same time. Even with a hump on and a fright wig, he has a hot number stripping and throwing herself at him. That guileless egoism is actually part of Naschy's special charm, and I'd never begrudge him his moments of gratification, since he usually knows better than to have a happy ending afterward.

If the story feels like something out of the Twenties, the direction is nearly as primitive. Like most Euro horrors, Hunchback benefits from picturesque locations, but it's no exercise in directorial style. With the dumb dubbing thrown in, the film has a Poverty Row feel that actually feels right in the circumstances. In any event, style is secondary for a star vehicle like this; a director may as well plant his camera and let Naschy do his thing. You'll usually be entertained, if you have a taste for such stuff in the first place as I do, and as a Naschy vehicle El jorobado did not disappoint. It actually does earn some pathos for its protagonist in spite of itself.

Here's an American trailer, uploaded to YouTube by bgart13.

99 RIVER STREET (1953)

When I was young, I steered clear of movies with John Payne in the cast. This was a perfectly irrational aversion, based on a childish notion I had that Payne had to be a cheap knock-off of John Wayne, cast in movies to trick gullible viewers. The only Payne film I recall actually seeing back then was Miracle on 34th Street, and he didn't exactly register strongly there. Later, I learned that he had some solid film-noir credentials, including this Phil Karlson movie that has been talked up quite a bit recently by noir fans. It's been talked up for good reason; 99 River Street packs a potent punch, both pictorially and by virtue of Payne's performance, a Dick-Powell style transformation from bland to brute.

Payne plays Eddie Driscoll, a washed-fighter who watches his career-ending defeat (the bout was stopped due to cuts) on TV while his wife impatiently puts dinner on the table. Wifey (Peggie Castle) wants more from life than a cabbie can provide, and is willing to risk a lot to get it. Insulted and humiliated by the missus, Eddie's bad night is only beginning. Getting back some money he lent to an actress friend (Evelyn Keyes) is small consolation, and nearly forgotten when Eddie goes to pick the wife up from her flower shop job and finds her smooching another man. He's in no mood to be helpful when Linda, the actress, meets him again and begs for his help, but when she says she's killed a man he feels he has no choice but to help. She takes him to the theater, shows him the corpse, and goes into a suspiciously elaborate account of her fatal encounter. It's suspicious because you suspect that Linda must be crazy, but it's really suspicious because it's a set-up. Once Eddie agrees to help her dispose of the body -- psyche! -- it turns out that she was auditioning for the producers, proving that she's so good in her theater role that she can make a dumb lug like Eddie believe her and want to help a killer. Eddie doesn't appreciate the art of it and starts slugging theater people. There's no hard feelings from the show folks, though; they only want to have him arrested in order to stir up publicity for the play.

Viewers are probably taken in as easily as John Payne is by the sinister set-up for 99 River Street's disorienting practical joke, delivered by Evelyn Keyes.

By this point, 99 River is shaping up as a "night from hell" picaresque of the sort that became more common starting in the 1980s, with an added element of tension in Eddie's mounting rage. His frustration and anger at being manipulated for a joke, his sudden desire to fight again because all he really knows how to do is hit people, make him a real menace to Linda when she runs to his department to beg forgiveness. He's packing to leave town, not only to quit his marriage but because that frivolous arrest warrant could mean hard time for him; as a boxer, his fists are registered weapons, so he won't just get fined as Linda believes. He barely restrains himself from beating her up, but she's determined to follow him out the door and into his cab, only to share his shock when he opens the car door and finds his wife's corpse inside.

Mrs. Driscoll had become the accomplice of her lover, Rawlins (Brad Dexter) but had become an impediment to negotiations between Rawlins and his fence. Knowing the score between the Driscolls, Rawlins contrives a way to get the woman out of the way and frame Eddie. The theater contretemps is forgotten as Eddie now must find Rawlins to clear his name without getting killed along the way, by Rawlins or the fence's goons, who think he's Rawlins's accomplice. Linda determinedly tags along, ultimately taking a reckless chance on her thespian talent to lure Rawlins into a trap, little knowing that a more lethal trap has been set for Rawlins and anyone involved with him....

The noir city, visualized by Phil Karlson et al.

The importance of acting to the story adds an element of strangeness to the noir conventions of 99 River. This angle threatens to take the story in too melodramatic a direction, and Evelyn Keyes definitely hams it up throughout the picture. But her excesses are outweighed by three overpowering features of the film: an extraordinary pictorial presentation by Karlson, cinematographer Franz Planer and art director Frank Sylos; a high volume of hand-to-hand brutality, most concentrated in a vicious fight between Payne and Jack Lambert as the fence's head goon; and Payne's own open vein of rage.

The worm turns: John Payne goes kill-crazy.

Battling for his good name, and later his life, Eddie Driscoll releases years of pent-up frustration and anger and may not know when to quit. The slightly absurd set-up, involving the theatrical subplot, actually reinforce the sense that Eddie's a loose cannon who might lash out at anyone. Payne portrays a genuinely dangerous-seeming man, arguably the most menacing cab driver in cinema before Travis Bickle, yet always the object of our sympathy -- and our anxiety that he might go too far at any moment. The film as a whole rises to the level of Payne's intensity. It's a real sleeper that's taken more than half a century to get the appreciation it deserves.

Here's a trailer from TCM.com

CARLOS (2010)

The Sundance Channel deserves an Emmy just for scheduling Olivier Assayas's 5.5 hour epic about the career of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, not to mention taking part in the production. The film played out over three nights earlier this week in advance of a limited theatrical run, but I won't wait until it hits the big screen to call it one of the best films of the year.

Under his nom de terror, Carlos Martinez, or the unwanted sobriquet "Carlos the Jackal," the Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez cut a flamboyant swath across Europe and the Middle East from the 1970s until his capture in Sudan in 1994. First as an agent of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and then as a freelancer, Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) was dedicated to armed struggle against imperialism as his route to glory. As Assayas's film shows, Carlos was one of many young people with similar dreams in the aftermath of the Sixties. The first third of the film emphasizes the sociability of Carlos's milieu as the would-be revolutionaries party and screw and argue over strategy and tactics. Carlos's sexuality is foregrounded -- Ramirez gives us the full monty within the first few minutes -- as is his sexism. Revolution is a turn-on for Carlos's crowd; he uses a hand grenade for foreplay with an enthralled girlfriend. There are always girlfriends for Carlos; while they're usually revolutionaries like he is, he often treats them in an inegalitarian fashion. In the second half, he tells Magdelena Kopp that, as his lover, she must accept revolutionary militant discipline. That extends to accepting his cheating on her after she's given birth to his child because he has "needs." Near the end, this leftist warrior is indulging in a most exploitative form of sexuality, the restroom blowjob, and as if as comeuppance he's nearly crippled by bouts of severe testicular pain. Carlos is no ascetic, and arguably no fanatic. He talks the talk of revolution, but it may all be a matter of self-gratification (or "glory") for him.

Terrorism was different in Carlos's time. Throughout the film, there's an implicit contrast with the puritanical zealots we identify with terrorism today. Though Carlos late in the game talks about embracing Islam to butter up prospective Iranian sponsors, revolution was never about self-denial for him. While he tells people that he expects to be killed at any time, he doesn't believe in suicide. That point is driven home in the central sequence of the long film, Carlos's raid on the 1975 OPEC summit in Vienna. His scheme is a dizzying success, except for the accidental killing of a Libyan diplomat that complicates his plan to escape with hostages via Libya to Iraq. His decision to release the hostages, including the Saudi oil minister, in return for $20,000,000, enrages his PFLP and Iraqi handlers, who had ordered him to kill the minister. Carlos sees only good in taking the money, which he sees as his only way of getting out of the situation alive, but his handlers feel that he should have obeyed orders and killed the Saudi at all costs. They think he's more interested in being a celebrity terrorist, and while he makes good arguments to the contrary, you can't help thinking that they're partly correct. And while Carlos basks in his clandestine celebrity, it'll be downhill from here for him. It's downhill not just because he's given in to egoism, but because his original revolutionary fervor has been subordinated to the power politics of nations. His plans are subject to the national interests of Iraqis, Syrians, Hungarians, East Germans and so on. When he accepts asylum from these states, he also puts himself at risk of being thrown out at any convenient moment. Time is also passing him by. Late in the Seventies Soviet KGB chief Yuri Andropov meets with Carlos and other top terrorists and puts an open contract on the life of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. After two years of desultory planning, Carlos's gang is beaten to the punch by an Islamist conspiracy. The film still has nearly two hours to go, but from that point Carlos himself is basically obsolete. He has one good run left when he terrorizes France to force the release of two captured comrades, but after that he lives on a reputation that also makes him a liability to anyone who harbors him, especially after the communist bloc collapses and everyone wants to cut a deal with the U.S. Carlos's changing fortunes are a history lesson on the global political upheaval of his time.

As a film, Carlos is what I call a Scorsesean epic, a rise-and-fall story in the manner of Goodfellas and Casino with a rocking soundtrack of oldies. Given how the film opens with the car-bombing of a Palestinian terrorist, you could also see Carlos as an unofficial sequel to Steven Spielberg's Munich. If you envision Carlos in high-concept terms as a cross between Munich and Goodfellas you may come close to its essence. Like Scorsese does, Assayas and co-writer Dan Franck delineate the rise of a corrupt yet successful system that inevitably declines, but while Scorsese focuses on the internal, personal corruption that kills the system, Carlos, perhaps in keeping with its subject's preferred mode of historical analysis, links his decline with the collapse of the Cold War environment within which he thrived, while leaving room for the damage done by his own ego and other failings. Appropriately, Edgar Ramirez carries the film with a DeNironian performance of body modification, transforming from buff Seventies stud to bloated fugitive, briefly back again and finally to middle-aged thickness, stiffness and exhaustion. Ramirez can talk the ideological talk and belie it by swaggering through the selfish, sexist glory-seeking walk. Fluently multilingual, he's the perfect star for a film half in English, half not, holding the polyglot action together and keeping it intense in all languages. Carlos ought to be a star-making film for him. He has a serial harem of attractive support, Bond girls of terror, most notably Nora von Waldstaetten as Magdalena Kopp and Julia Hummer as the alarmingly bloodthirsty Nada, in whom Carlos has no romantic interest.

Assayas taps into a deep tradition of French genre filmmaking, from the silent supervillain serials of Louis Feuillade (to which he'd already paid homage in Irma Vep) to the caper-thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville. He also manages to fit in an apparent homage to The Godfather (involving a bathroom break to fetch a gun) along the way. Working on an unprecedented scale, he keeps things intriguing with bursts of bloody violence as well as more elaborate set pieces like the Vienna raid. Some moments even feel blackly comic, as when Carlos's cronies twice bungle attempts to hit El Al jets with rocket launchers. The ease with which the terrorists stroll into airports and set up their weapons in the middle of crowds is doubly absurd from today's perspective. The film may appear episodic, but the script keeps you aware of the relationships, both political and romantic, that complicate Carlos's life and the stakes involved at every point in the movie. Over five hours and change I was never bored. A theatrical version less than half the length of the original has been prepared for release and may be available already on demand. Perhaps understandably, I say accept no substitutes and watch the full version whenever or wherever you can find it.

Here's a trailer from IFCFilmsTube:

On the Big Screen: THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)

Count me among the multitude who thought that the founding of Facebook could never be a cinematic subject. Some of my friends still question my decision to spend money on David Fincher's new film, but a week's worth of nearly unreserved critical acclaim broke down my resistance. Fincher is due some benefit of the doubt as well, having directed Zodiac, my favorite film of the last decade. But Fincher wasn't enough to get me out to Benjamin Button, and I still haven't seen that movie. With The Social Network I had a notion that Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin were using the story of Mark Zuckerberg to say something about the society and the cultural moment in which Zuckerberg and his disputed creation have flourished. I have little interest in Facebook itself -- I suppose I'm narcissist enough having a blog without going there -- but the creation and the dispute could well illustrate things more worthy of our attention.

The screenplay brackets the Facebook mystery -- who really deserves credit for its creation? -- with the mystery of Mark Zuckerberg himself. In the first scene, a girlfriend (Rooney Mara) dumps him after a contentious conversation in a bar. She tells him that he shouldn't assume that people won't like him because they think he's a nerd; it'll because they know he's an asshole. Zuckerberg does much subsequently to prove her point, but near the end, a lawyer tells him, "You're not an asshole. You just try so hard to be one." Does that mean he's a nerd after all, or none of the above? A different perspective on Zuckerberg might portray him as the avenging nerd who triumphs over snobs, jocks and capitalists through sheer brainwork and sitzfleisch. But Sorkin and Fincher seem to think that the Internet age and the pre-existing "social network" that Zuckerberg hacks into and expands empower the transformation of the once lovable or at least sympathetic nerd into something darker, someone who can infuse pure id into the bloodstream of collective consciousness. The filmmakers close the story with a pass at pathos as Zuckerberg tries to "friend" the girl who dumped him and refreshes his screen repeatedly hoping for confirmation. They could be saying that he's a lonely nerd after all, but the attempted friending could just as well be the sort of sentimental, self-pitying gesture we'd expect of Charles Foster Kane.

That ending reminds us of the last time we actually see the former girlfriend on screen, when she unforgivingly rebuffs Zuckerberg as he repeatedly demands a minute alone with her to explain himself properly. This is one instance where he can't get the proper hearing to which he feels entitled. Another more damaging instance comes when his lawyers advise him to settle with his several plaintiffs. While he believes himself sincerely to be the sole inventor of Facebook and wants to prove that to a jury, the lawyer who calls him "not an asshole" assures him that the toxic combination of the charges against him and his personality would doom Zuckerberg before his presumed peers. Sorkin's larger point seems to be that Zuckerberg is a victim of his own creation. He's accelerated the evolution of a culture governed by instantaneous, apparently irreversible personal impressions based on superficial information, and he eventually pays a hefty price for it -- monetarily at least.

The same scene, which denies us the courtroom drama we might have expected from such a story, echoes the earlier scene in which the Harvard president rebuffs the Winkelvoss twins (Armie Hammer) when they demand that the school take action against Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for "Harvard Connection" to create Thefacebook. On a gut level, you can't help agreeing that Zuckerberg stole their idea, even if they had nothing like his ambition and vision, but the president, once a Secretary of the Treasury, basically tells the twins to grow up and go invent something else. One of the twins had hoped that their dispute with Zuckerberg could be resolved in a matter befitting "gentlemen of Harvard," but honor has nothing to do with competitive commerce now, while Zuckerberg's scene with the lawyer warns that the rule of law itself has come unmoored from any notion of justice grounded in objective truth. Zuckerberg and the "Winkelvii" will not be judged according to any criteria that they can agree on as objective, leaving it impossible for a movie audience to determine whether the twins finally got more or less than they deserved.

As for the truth behind the creation of Facebook, the whole truth may be more than the sum of the individual parts, including Zuckerberg's naive capitalist partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). Fincher's portrayal of the decadent academic milieu where FaceMash and Thefacebook were born leaves me assuming that the audience for Facebook and its bitchy superficialities was already in place, and that someone else would have done it -- maybe even crackpot visionary Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) -- if Zuckerberg hadn't happened to get there first. The Social Network is a kind of jeremiad against the last decade, equating the construction of Zuckerberg's virtual social network with a real-world social breakdown in which all values -- even the conventional capitalism that should have made Saverin a billionaire -- are coming apart in a perpetual clash of egos and ids. Hiring Trent Reznor to collaborate on the ominous soundtrack was an inspired choice that makes this story of business rivalries sound quite like one of Fincher's brutal genre films.

The film itself, despite or because of its fragmented flashback structure, speeds across the screen compared to the epically-constructed Zodiac, shaving nearly an hour off the earlier film's running time. At that, Social Network could have been shorter still, since a sequence showing the twins losing a regatta in England to the music of Grieg feels completely superfluous. It may be there to give Fincher some action to film, or it may reflect his feeling that he has a winner in Armie Hammer's seamlessly CGI-enabled dual role. It may be unfair that, as one twin says, there are two of him on screen, but I think he's worthy of Oscar consideration for Best Supporting Actor. Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg should be considered for Best Actor; his implacably intense performance really won my respect. To go off on a tangent for a moment, I have to say that Andrew Garfield was good here as arguably the most sympathetic character in the movie, but he still looks all wrong for Spider-Man -- the wrong body type and too old-looking already for a supposedly younger version of the character. But I don't hold that against his work here; the guy's got promise.

I'm not here to convince anyone that The Social Network is interesting enough to claim your money at the multiplex. The subject matter, even in a larger context, will probably seem hopelessly dull or pointless to many people -- though not as many as I first assumed, given its success at the box office. Whether the subject interests you or not, Fincher's film is still the best theatrical release of 2010 that I've seen so far.

Wendigo Meets BLACK SUNDAY (La Maschera del Demonio, 1960)

As a vampire-movie fan, my friend Wendigo is also a horror-film fan, but he doesn't necessarily judge vampire films by horror movie criteria. I asked him recently whether any vampire movie had ever actually scared him. He said that he couldn't recall one doing so, and then he recounted three films that did scare him. The first that came to his mind was the original version of The Blob; the mere concept of the creature and the fact that it could kill you while you were sitting in your chair simply by brushing against your foot spooked him as a kid. A more surprising film was Gore Verbinski's The Ring, as opposed to the Japanese original, which he has also seen. The American version didn't shock him as he watched, but the memory of the dead, wet girl's awkward, unnatural movements haunted him for nights afterward in troubled dreams. The other film was Mario Bava's landmark gothic horror from 1960, that annus mirabilis (or terribilis) of global horror cinema. But Wendigo had only the dimmest memories of what frightened him, though he remembered the spiked masks the condemned Satanists were forced to wear and the holes in Barbara Steele's face when her mask was removed -- not to mention her big, creepy eyes. It just so happened that I have Black Sunday in an Anchor Bay box set of Bava films, so I played it to jog his memory -- and it was then that we realized that it is, in fact, a vampire film -- or at least a film with vampires in it.

Wendigo remembered two characters, Asa and Javutich, being condemned as witches and cursing their Moldavian persecutors before the masks of Satan were hammered onto their faces. The shot of the mask being driven into Steele's face, and the mask bleeding blood (in black and white) brought back uneasy memories for him. It's about the most gruesome form of execution that he can imagine. The visceral though not gory quality of this scene set the tone for everything to come.

Two hundred years later, Steele plays Katia, a lookalike descendant imperiled when a visiting professor breaks the glass window of Asa's coffin while beating a bat to death, lifts the mask of satan from her eyeless and spike-pocked face, and cuts his hand on the broken glass. The blood revitalizes Asa (who wasn't burnt as she should have been in the first place because rain put out the bonfire), starting with her once maggot-infested eye sockets, but she expends her reviving power to resurrect Javutich, who still has to dig his own way out of his grave and pull his own mask off.

He eventually lures the professor back to Asa's crypt to watch her blow up her coffin. She mesmerizes the professor with a promise of power and pleasure and takes more of his blood. The professor becomes her instrument to avenge herself on the descendants of her persecutors, killing Katia's father before the professor's innocent assistant and a knowledgeable priest destroy him in his daytime resting place. By now Asa and Javutich don't need him any more as they aim to destroy the rest of Katia's family and have Asa herself take Katia's place. It's up to the assistant, the priest, and a helpful mob to save the day....

Asa's dependence upon blood, and blood's capacity to resurrect her, make Black Sunday quite like a vampire film, and by the time a victim is described as having puncture marks on his neck there was no more room for doubt. This film taps into Eastern European folklore and literature (namely Nikolai Gogol's "Viy") including the unusual detail of destroying a vampire by staking it through the literally evil eye. Wendigo may have been thrown off the scent way back when, however, by the emphasis on Satan in Bava's film. While western folklore often traces vampirism to demonic possession of corpses (hence the vulnerability to crosses and other holy symbols) the idea that vampires are primarily servants of Satan is downplayed in the Anglo-American post-Dracula tradition. There's a hint of Satanism is Hammer's vampire films, but when you hear about a "vampire cult" you usually assume that the cultists are worshipping Dracula himself or some other master vampire. Black Sunday is almost unique among movies in stressing the vampires' Satanism (though The Satanic Rites of Dracula is another obvious case), and Wendigo would even concede the point if someone would still rather see Asa as a witch or Satanist rather than a vampire. It might not be deemed a vampire film if your sine qua non is the money shot of someone biting a neck, since that never happens here. But for his purposes it's a vampire film because vampiric powers allow the villains to come back from the dead and attempt to fulfill their curse. In any event, Wendigo doesn't consider categories mutually exclusive, so define Black Sunday as you please.

European horror films are still a tough sell for Wendigo despite his admiration for some of the movies I've shown him for our series. Black Sunday goes back before Euro horror got arguably too "European," however, and his recollections made him willing to rewatch the film. He's very impressed by Bava's direction, set design and cinematography, though even this master of making the most out of limited resources couldn't do a decent bat effect. The film has a strong gothic atmosphere throughout, a visual quality Bava enhances with remarkable events like the swirling sky as Javutich whips his carriage down a dark road. It probably represents the summit of black-&-white horror, from a director who would prove only more masterly in color. It also has a human special effect in the form of Barbara Steele in her star-making performance, ably assisted by Arturo Dominici as Javutich, equally creepy masked or unmasked. Wendigo finds Steele both stunningly beautiful and frightening, thanks to those powerful eyes. Her meteoric rise to horror stardom, not to mention Bava's rise to global fame, are perfectly understandable to him based on this film.

Barbara Steele: The good (top), the bad (middle), and even with the makeup there's no ugly here.

Wendigo didn't find the film very "European" because Bava didn't sacrifice narrative substance for the sake of style or sensation. Black Sunday doesn't deal in "dream logic," but tells a good old-fashioned yarn. It's more than the sum of its set pieces, while Wendigo finds many Euro horrors to be less. More to the point, it was just about as creepy as Wendigo remembers from his childhood. It's a film anyone will remember, even if disturbingly dimly, long after they've seen it. It isn't a landmark of the vampire subgenre, but it's certainly a classic of horror in general.

The American trailer was uploaded to YouTube by ennemme.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (Tutti i colori del buio, 1972)

Sergio Martino's film opens with a dream of a three women murdered -- a naked pregnant woman, a spastic crone, and an attractive young woman. The dreamer is the dreamy Edwige Fenech, playing Jane Harrison, an Englishwoman who suffered a miscarriage in a car wreck. This is one of those Italian horror films that sets the action in England, as if that were the realm of horror par excellence -- just as the English set many of their own horror films somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Anyway, Jane isn't fully recovered from her ordeal yet. The mental part is the hardest. She imagines herself stalked by a blue-eyed slasher, and Martino will have you believing it, too. That stalker, real or not, proves to be the least of her worries.

The many faces of Edwige Fenech

When psychotherapy proves inadequate to ease her fears, her new friend Mary suggests joining this lovely group that she belongs to. It's the kind of group where you change into robes and go barefoot into the basement, and the host welcomes you with a draught of fresh dog's blood, and then everyone rapes you during a Black Mass. If it all happened, that is.

I last saw Julian Ugarte as a religious-fanatic outlaw in The Stranger and the Gunfighter. He seems to have been Europe's go-to guy for crazed zealots in the early 1970s.

Tutti i colori del buio keeps reality uncertain until very near the end. Any atrocity you see could just be a vivid dream or one of Jane's paranoid delusions. It grows more suspenseful as the stakes rise, especially once the cult leader (the typecast Julian Ugarte, sporting press-on talons) induces Jane to kill Mary, though Mary helps a lot by virtually throwing herself upon Jane's dagger. Now determined to escape the cult's influence, Jane takes flight, with the blue-eyed slasher in apparent pursuit. But is the cult pursuing her or guiding her hand to strike at its enemies through her? Who can say so long as, at one moment, she's stabbed her husband to death in an elevator, and in the next he's alive again? Anything you see might be the delusion of a madwoman, but none of it can be dismissed as long as we don't know for sure.

In short, All the Colors of the Dark (which reached the U.S. in 1976 as They're Coming to Get You, a title that taps into the paranoid vibe but lacks the original's enigmatic elegance) is an often-effective psycho-Satanic thriller. It works as a story thanks largely to Edwige Fenech's intense lead performance. She delivers the goods both as indisputable eye candy and as a convincingly disturbed but never helpless heroine. Above and beyond the story, Colors works even more effectively on a pictorial level. It's an Italian film that shows the recent influence of Vittorio Storaro's work on The Conformist, down to the low-angle shots of blowing leaves. Miguel F. Mila and Giancarlo Ferrando make the most of the English landscape and architecture to give the film a neo-gothic atmosphere, while working the dreams and dreamlike ordeals of Jane for maximum weirdness.

Martino pulls off some disorienting tricks of his own, repeating shots of Ivan Rassimov as the blue-eyed attacker as if the scene was looping out of control in Jane's head. In this movie "dream logic" is essential to maintaining suspense rather than a distraction from it.

Ivan Rassimov makes a point, repeatedly, in All the Color of the Dark.

Strangely for an Italian film of this period, the one area where Colors drops the ball somewhat is the musical side. The otherwise-dependable Bruno Nicolai contributes some effective suspense music, but the main theme for the cult doesn't strike the right note of menace. It sounds too festive, almost too campy to sustain the appropriate sense of dread while the cultists work their mojo on Jane. But at worst the false notes of the score are distractions, not handicaps, and in any event Colors is more an entertainment than a classic horror film. It has plenty of anxious and creepy moments, but it's a film to be enjoyed as a visual experience, both for Martino's expert direction and the natural wonder of Edwige Fenech. The best recommendation I can give this film is the fact that I'm off to Netflix to find more films from Martino and Fenech.

Here's the original English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by braniki1:

And here's an American trailer for "They're Coming to Get You," uploaded by MediaB: