OctoBOOr 11th: La Chiesa/The Church, dir. Michele Soavi, 1989 (Italy). 3/5 pumpkins. “Why isn't anybody doing anything to get me out of here?”
Is The Church a surreal meditation on the evils men will do in the name of religion? A haunting Eurocentric take on genocide and the ghastly cost of burying the past? Or, given its origins as an intended third installment in the Demons series, just a slightly more artistic take on its goop-and-guts laden predecessors? The suitably operatic score by such luminaries as Keith Emerson, Phillip Glass, and Goblin would argue for the former interpretation; the plain fact that the film really doesn’t have any coherent through-line once all’s said and done makes the latter a more convincing reading. Still, first-time director Michele Soavi does his level best to impart a sense of stateliness and dignity to the proceedings. After the film’s initial burst of ultraviolence, in which a group of 12th century Knights Templar massacres an entire village for the crime of devil worship, Soavi slows down the pace to a deliberate slow-burn, allowing his protagonists to be ever-more shrouded in the detective mystery of the titular church’s origins and growing dread. Once the evil (or just wronged innocents out for revenge?) are unleashed, Soavi engages in an orgy of surrealistic dream sequences and increasingly out-there kills, culminating in a coupling that Rosemary’s Baby would only glance at sideways. There’s a suitably gothic atmosphere drenching everything, but the problem really seems that Soavi is held in check by the otherwise straightforward narrative. A looser plot and greater degree of creative freedom in the future allowed Soavi to truly craft some impressive, impressionistic horror in Cemetery Man, his real opus.
OctoBOOr 9th: La Maschera del Demonio/The Mask of Satan/Black Sunday, dir. Mario Bava, 1960 (Italy). 5/5 pumpkins. “You have no reason to fear the dead. They sleep very soundly.”
Black Sunday (the film’s American title, although I prefer the pulpy, more direct translation) is a lurid, wicked phantasmagoria; an unflinching shadowplay of gothic horror. Unbelievably Mario Bava’s debut feature, the film demonstrates his supreme, preternatural command of craft and manipulation of mood. It is resolutely unflinching in its portrayal of violence and sexuality, quite shockingly so, given the timeframe. If the British Hammer films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s wear their artificiality on their sleeve, Black Sunday positively revels in this. I’m pretty sure every single scene is done in a soundstage, providing a surreal, cloistered atmosphere that’s palpable in every frame – the omnipresent fog smothering the landscape threatens to choke out any and all good feelings. The plot, which is taught and free of extraneous fat, concerns the centuries-old promise of a witch to gain revenge on her own family. It’s almost secondary, however, to the feast of visual delights on display – a baleful Barbara Steele, draped in ebony and lying prostrate in her tomb, beckoning the weak-willed with burning, manic eyes; her vampiric lover stalking the corridors of the ancestral castle, flames dancing off his deformed face… Bava is absolutely drunk on filmmaking here, and the result is a searing fairytale that is nailed into your brain as surely as the titular mask is affixed to our antagonists’ faces in the prologue.
OctoBOOr 5th: Phenomena, dir. Dario Argento, 1985 (Italy). 4/5 pumpkins. “I love you. I love you *all*.”
…in which Jennifer Connelly gets a beetle all hot and bothered, so much so that it squirts its approval on Donald Pleasance. That’s not even the weirdest thing which happens in this film. The chosen quote is spoken by Connelly in a backlit Jesus pose to a swarm of descending, avenging flies. As far as Argento narratives go, Phenomena is rather straightforward. A killer is loose in picturesque Switzerland, Connelly is sent to a cloistered boarding school, she has a telepathic connection with insects, Donald Pleasance determines the age of severed heads through the cunning use of maggots, there’s a helper monkey – remember, I said straightforward for Argento. The Italian horror maestro is always on firmer footing, I believe, when his films are centered around the supernatural. The dream (nightmare?) logic his films adhere to works better when the trappings are a witches’ coven in Germany, or the fairytale setting of the Swiss Alps, rather than your standard giallo thriller. Nothing in here makes much sense – the dialogue careens randomly from English to German to Italian, the musical cues are wildly mismatched (a driving proggy synth arpeggio for a dreamlike sequence where a lightening bug leads Connelly to a crucial piece of evidence; Iron Maiden for the aftermath of a tragedy), plot threads are picked up and abandoned as soon as Argento sees the next shiny thing. The film has style to burn, sympathetic protagonists, and a real sense of forward momentum, though. It’s batshit crazy, yes, but consider that later this same year Connelly was traipsing around in stink swamps with David Bowie, his engorged codpiece, and a bunch troll Muppets. Is being a fly whisperer to seek out dead bodies really all that odd in comparison?
