Saw AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON or 'Robots smashing Robots in endless pixelated scrimmage II." Was it entertaining? Sure, but also spectacularly uninvolving, battle-wise. There was a time when we'd dread the sight of a flashing knife going into a stomach. Hurling a spear or waving a sword took at least some muscle or dexterity. But watching our amped-up immortal superheroes battle Ultron and his many robot soldiers, everyone armored up and invulnerable and so fast and so absurdly dextrous and so little is at stake, no one can really die, or really get hurt, unless they're machines, all investment is lost, like being a teenager who plays the same video game every day after school, repeating levels 1, 2, 3, 4, trying to climb to the next, but each lower level is now down to a science, not a move wasted, each opponent conquered in a few 'hack' moves practiced daily.
That stultifying level of control and savvy how narrative works, that's not a problem in the 80s. Especially not in the disreputable world of exploitation, and especially not in in Italy, and even less when those Italians are hiding who they are and trying to seem American. Then you're about as far from ULTRON's problem as it's possible to get.
So far away, in fact, you're practically all the way around again.
I didn't come here to bash, though, I came to make a ridiculous claim, that the new GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY Blu-ray double feature is better than ULTRON, that 80s nostalgia goes deeper than pouffy hair and rotary phones. It goes to the innocent time when we were still too young to not be horrified at the sight intestines being pulled out of a screaming Tom Savini. We dreaded it --every slow walk through a darkened hallway was fraught with an anxiety we could feel in our gut. We needed to be able to sneer at the fakeness of the gore. Our dates would be closing their eyes over those parts anyway. And when we just laughed, we seemed like warriors...
It's important to note, though, that by this late in the 80s, no one cared about these kinds of films, except video stores and indiscriminate late night cable programmers, which is where most people who saw either of these saw them, and if they were too young to know better, they may have been scared or at least bemused, and now they're older and these films remind them of being young, easily scared and bemused. I admit I would have felt that these sorts of movies were irredeemably vile back in the late 80s. But now I'm a fan, and anyway maestro di Mario himself invented the formula long before even Jason's mom was the killer. No matter what kind of slasher fan you were or weren't back then you had to appreciate their dogged attention to high weird style, and even if we never saw these films back in the day they have become cherished nostalgia and leave only a vaguely nauseated after-taste when their nasty Italian Inquisitional sadism surprises us.
By us I mean me, of course. I hadn't seen either of these ever before getting this disc... and I blame society. But now I'm experiencing nostalgia anyway, just because of the look, the music, the vibe, the pre-CGI analog, and the way time numbs all wounds, well almost. Either way revisiting these monstrosities now on Blu-ray is a unique experience, somewhere along the line between what's known in academic circles as 'body horror' and the so-bad-it's-good 'did a child write the script?' ineptitude. American actors lured overseas by the promise of any work included Linda Blair and David Hasselhof. What they find are windswept shores... in New England. It's Lovecraftian mouth-sewing madness, international style!
And the cheaper the better, for this was also before HD video, so they were still shot on film, and they were Italian and had to go for drive-in dream logic distance. And considering the brutality and lax safety regulations on a wild and wooly Italian set, the casual attitude towards sadism that a childhood spent hearing about and possibly enacting 'the Passion' made the traumatizing violence seem heartlessly real in ways it just wasn't outside of the grindhouse, or the video stores in the days before censorship figured out a way to monitor what kids were renting. These movies were made for that kid, the 'this ain't your momma's POLTERGEIST, son," crowd, clearly meant for the bottom of the drive-in bill for something like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV or WAXWORKS if at all, before coming straight to video... then to complete obscurity... gone and unmissed... but now, restored on Blu-ray in a double set from Shout, GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY demand your agog disbelief!
"La Casa III" (1988) Dir Umberto Lenzi (As Humphrey Humbert)
"Oh Paul, I saw death..."
Soon murders in the basement, set to the creepy clown song and the girl's Melissa Graps stare; the kids squatting there / camping outside all wonder what to do about how they're all getting murdered. I mean, they couldn't just leave... right? Considering they're all trespassing on private property. And have a camper, which is mobile... they could split any time. But the cops don't even suggest that maybe trespassing on private property in order to be murdered isn't a highbrow way to spend a weekend. There's a visit to an undertaker, and other elements I forgot as soon as I saw.Considering it's Italians disguised as American and dubbed you'd think they'd get good actors for the voices - but the lead kid is up there with the cast of TROLL 2 as far as gleefully flat amateurish performances- everything sounds like a cold read at a junior high school audition.
On both, the Blu-ray image reflects a problem with some of these Italian films transfers, wherein somewhere between the HD transfer and the pancake make-up used by the make-up artist, everyone looks very sickly pale and you can see the thin color differentiation where the make up line is around the base of their necks. The result is the impression the entire cast has been living in a basement for the past decade, or worse, England. Is this a gambit to make Italian actors look more Nordic, along with the general obsession with red hair in these films, resulting in one little legitimate redhead, Satanic, snaggle-toothed moppet, Nicoletta Elmi, appearing in a slew of horror films - and dozens of other clearly swarthy actors with terrible red hair dye (as in the grotesque McBain family wiped out by Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST). Either way the cumulative effect is... demoralizing.
But there's joy in the little life-affirming details: the way the shot of a hand swinging a hammer down on a guy's forehead lasts just a lazy frame or two too long, so we see the hammer slow to a stop an inch from the guy's real head before the cut comes, a little accidental Brechtian relief, with the reverse angle make-up shot of the hammer buried in the forehead, like the director presumed the editor would cut those frames out so it moves from the fast part of the swing to the gore reverse shot. But why bother? That kind of mistake is why we're here. As GHOSTHOUSE lumbers towards its required 90-95 minutes, one kid drowns in a lake of cream of wheat brought to a boil - surrounded by skulls-below the basement floorboards, a cheap great din of 80s Suspiria wannabe howls in the bones of the soundtrack; the little sister is cut in half at the waist - another by a fan blade - blood comes out of the sink. The clown doll is too similar to the one in POLTERGEIST and the scenes of tombs recall all the touchstones of the Fulci and Argento canons (in the best of worst ways) for some reason there's a ghost doberman like in FACE OF MARBLE, probably because of THE OMEN.
WITCHERY
"La Casa IV" (1988) Dir Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin)
WITCHERY is both much worse that GHOSTHOUSE as far as nauseating yet unrealistic gore scenes, but better as far as cast, with several American names, and a more understandable reason for hanging around as your fellow travelers are picked off (stranded on an island). Linda Blair is a pregnant lady looking to buy or sell a remote casa (IV), a former hotel, its gray shingles flapping in the ocean wind. Catherine Hickland is squatting there while writing her term paper on the 'witch light' that occasionally appears out of the window. Hickland's then-real life husband David Hasselhof plays her sexually frustrated boyfriend/photographer who keeps pressuring her to have sex but her grimoire book says "that virginity can be a virtue and not the barrier that separates innocence from knowledge." He can't argue with that, though he knows it's really a fear of penetration, and he can't argue with that either.
I've never seen Hickland before but I like her; she has a great slurred drowsy way with a line, like she spent the whole shoot on Valium, but who could blame her? Last imdb.com heard, she was working as a hypnotist, which makes perfect sense as her delivery and pacing with dialogue makes her a natural to put conscious minds to bed, which is a skill not everyone has. And as in the top shot, she's not afraid to show her dismay at the shitshow project she's involved in, and though we feel for the horny but patient Hasselhof, it's again a bit like the kids who could just leave but won't.
Dude, if you want sex go get some. Dost thee not know how Hof thou art!?
WITCHERY is brilliantly summarized in Leonard Maltin as "uncomfortable." I don't mind a certain level of gross-outs, but the victims here get sucked into some kind of HELLRAISER dimension, consisting of what looks like a barn converted into a crappy haunted house without removing the straw; there's a mocking old lady and Pagan looking dude ("Satan")--who look a lot like rejects from a Bruegel painting--thar reach out through a wooden fencing as victims try to pass by, very very haunted house carnival-style attraction, but much more depressing; all that's missing is the chicken wire fencing and cheap strobe light., it would be e relief. Each victim stranded on the island is there for a special reason of the stern German witch's spell as it goes through the seven deadly sins, or something: For the pregnant Linda Blair the Bruegellish duo fight over and then eat a premature infant; the bossy Jewish mother real estate mogul gets her nails broken off, her lips sewn together and hung upside down in the chimney with care and so can't yell for help when they start a fire right under her hanging head; Hickland is afraid of sex and a virgin so--in the most vile sequence--gets raped by a sickly youth with his own lips sewn shut, while the Bruegel twins and co. chant Satanic -- Yeccch!!
All that unpleasantness, plus Hildegard Knef as the modern-era witch lady--most unseemly with super pale make-up over aging skin offset cruelly by tacky bright red lipstick and an abrasive Germanic manner-- made me ill. And while I never find fault with Shout's impeccable transfers sometimes they do err on the side of washed-out, missing chances to go for bold or warmer colors in the interest of being as true to th source material as they can (I just turn up the color, but the damage to my sensitive stomach is done ). Now that the HD is here we can see the line between where the actors' pancake make-up ends and their real skin begins (it's especially glaring in the lips sewing sequence). But when the nympho real estate girl starts seducing the Matthew Broderick-ish dweeb real estate guy and there's a big swordfish on the wall, you start to gird your misogyny-dar loins, but instead they're thrown into the dimension of fire. Crucified in ways Eli Roth might like, though thank god their suffering is nowhere near as well acted as it might be. But also lacking is the kinky equilibrium of Clive Barker, who would be too outrageous and creative to let the nausea sink in. What is real and what illusion? In the Barkerverse you understood both things as real while here both seem false. In Barker they were funny, here they're just 'uncomfortable.'
There's other solid elements here too though. Set fifty miles from Boston, a remote island the boat to which has been set adrift through witchy ways. Much more so than GHOSTHOUSE it has a certain inexorable tick-tockality and eerie isolation there at this remote building (though the gray shingle-based American bland architecture is dispiriting compared to the wild buildings of, say Escherstrasse in SUSPIRIA), with the eerie wind and dim lapping waves. No one dares take a boat out to rescue them, because the ocean is allegedly so choppy no one dares go, even though it's just slightly overcast, and I like that --like this is some kind of lost zone where everything seems tranquil but nothing is. Linda Blair's hair gets wild and she gets possessed-ish of course, and there's other elements that make it almost add up to something, just get high or drunk to ease the nausea if you're going to make this jaunt, and let the slurring mellowness of Hickland guide you through.Oh and Shout, if we're listening --keep up the good work, but for god's sake, add some merciful color to those poor complexions, your super clear Blu rays are a terrible revealer of every last pore and blemish, every congealing spot of badly dried pancake make-up and error in coloring between neck and face. Sure, past versions were layered through what looked like sunglasses to get things right, but some slight color alterations will make it all work 100 times better. I'd feel safer anyway...more comfortable... Instead of feeling sick imagining the pale old skin of Knepf with those hideous red lipstick.... with a little attention to lighting she could have been scary (ala the Mother of Tears) or disarming (ala the Castavets), instead of just... as depressing as a visit to a real German grandmother who still tries to pass for 35.
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