FRIGHTFEST - Day #2

FRIGHTFEST Day 2, 2018

FRIGHTFEST: BENEATH THE DARK HEART OF CINEMA

Chris Collier, 2018, UK

A documentary about this very festival with talking heads from its directors – Alan Jones, Ian Rattray, Greg Day and Paul McEvoy – and film directors and fans. All are faces frequently seen in the lobby and I remember some of the archival footage too (I was there for ‘Big Bad Wolves’, the very last film shown in the huge Empire auditorium before it was IMAXified). Indeed, Collier’s documentary is surely a marvel of editing down what must have been a mountain of footage (editor: Craig Ellis) covering almost twenty years. It balances a focus not only on the films and how influential the festival is on the genre industry, but also on the fact that the audience is fundamentally its driving force. From the Prince Charles to the Vue to the Empire to Shepard’s Bush and back to the Empire, this covers key moments from each and paints a picture a small group of very different organisers united by common cause. I mean, of course I love the festival, a period of life where all you have to worry about is getting to the next film and then talking about it with people whose name you may not know just yet. When you tell people you’re going to a film festival, it doesn’t convey to them how much of a party it also is. Collier’s documentary does capture much of that spirit and provides a concise glide over its long history that will surely satisfy regular attendees and intrigue genre fans that are yet to indulge in its goodies. 

BRAID

Mitzi Peirone, 2018, USA

Three women holed up in a mansion, psychologically crumbling in a miasma of abstraction, toys and childhood games. …and in this way, perhaps it can be seen as similar to Pascal Laugier’s ‘Incident in a Ghost Land’ as they both follow the In The House We Go Crazy template, but they are poles apart. Peirone begins as she means to go on from the start with beautiful, arty images and equally arty camerawork, but this also means there is nowhere to go to, aesthetically. This all fits the temporal displacement and the circular trajectory of the narrative but ultimately there is no progression.

It’s a mood piece, then, and as a style-over-substance experience it’s pretty and looks like an unhinged photoshoot from some ‘Homes & Gardens’ magazine. There is a tale being told on the periphery and possibly a second watch will bring it all into focus, but for all its successful fragmentary mood, there is the sense that something at the centre isn’t quite gelling. 

PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH

Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wikund, 2018, USA

Well, you surely know what you’re getting with a title like that and the main point of intrigue was that this is written by S. Craig Zahler who, like Jeremy Saulnier, is one of the most interesting and thrilling voices on movie violence currently working. To that end, perhaps there is a slightly higher quality to the dialogue and it’s perhaps a dash less tacky than expected, but it is what you expect and no more. They’d probably be silly for trying anything truly different. There’s a wonderful animated credits sequence and then there’s gathering in a hotel of people about to sell their antique puppets, but the puppets have plans and prejudices of their own. The best kill is perhaps the man who gets to piss on his own decapitated head and the most outrageous (of the entire festival) is the puppet gutting a pregnant woman.

So when you have gore humour as your chief aim, the allusions to the Holocaust isn’t really going to stick. But it’s all amusing enough in a bad taste manner.

THE MOST ASSASSINATED WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Franck Ribiere, 

Belgium/UK, 2018

This is the one that I saw that surely deserved more attention. Based around 1930s Grand Guignol theatre and its celebrated star Paula Maxa, the actress killed onstage more than 10,000 times in 60 different ways (it says). It’s a fabrication based on her biography and a sporadically successful look at masochism and the use/need of horror for entertainment and expression. It throws in a serial killer, moral outrage and a so-so romance. Most of all, it’s evocation of the plays and atmosphere are fascinating, raw and convincing; equal to ‘The Limehouse Golem’ in reconstruction of performances, and in capturing the thin line between the audience and the stage. Here’s the origins of FrightFest. The old-fashioned Gothic atmosphere hooks even as the sensibility and convolutions has a decidedly contemporary genre self-awareness. Flawed but evocative in all the right places.

INCIDENT IN A GHOST LAND

Pascal Laugier, France/Canada, 2018

Pascal Laugier seems to me to be a most divisive director, but I will always love ‘Martyrs’ for being an uncompromising and angry slab of horror with a real target. ‘Incident in a Ghost Land’ may prove similarly gruelling/tedious for some: the man next to me said, “I dozed off and when I woke again, some woman was still being battered around and then there were two or three lines of dialogue.” It’s hard to argue with that but Laugier here presents something that ‘Martyrs’ might have been if it been more a routine horror without such a furious agenda. Typically, Laugier plays with genre a little: home invasion… wait, is this a ghost story? A Gothic home full of dolls and toys. Antagonists straight out of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Some deception… It may seem a mixed bag, but Laugier is like a brutal Ti West, attuned to genre and aiming for something higher. Dennis Harvey writes, “The rest of us will again feel a tad queasy about the way Laugier meticulously showcases sadism while seeming comparatively indifferent to matters of basic storytelling logic and suspense.” But few directors seem to convey the relentlessness and visceral nature of these kinds of horror films quite so artfully (and nobody seemed interested in the more elegant ‘House of Voices’ or ‘The Tall Man’). And he seems to push for the truths on the other side of the volence. Don’t be distracted by the sadism into thinking there is not a clear intent. All those hints of tales within tales and alternative realities may be a further clue. There’s always more at work beneath the surface of a Laugier film.

BOAR

Chris Sun, 2018, Australia

A fine old school monster movie with clunky-impressive practical effects rather than CGI. Something is rampaging through the fences and livestock in the Australian outback, just as a typically squabbling family is paying a visit to a relative. You know how this goes, but there’s the wonderful Mick Jarret whose friendship with another old timer is genuinely as touching as it is brusque; Nathan Jones goes hand-to-tusk with the oversized beast; women give as good as the get; there’s gore and a little no-nonsense mercilessness to the kills (mostly). Not remarkable but hugely likeable creature feature. 

FrightFest - Day 1

FRIGHTFEST DAY #1,  2018

It’s that time of year to binge-watch genre films of a more hard-edged if not outrageous nature. The Empire Leicester Square has been upgraded so that now it is moodily underlit and promotional vids are projected on the stairs as you walk in – and it’s quite trippy walking up FrightFest artwork and dripping blood for the screens. This year, there were more adverts, less Q&As and – as I was in the main screen – cheering and applause each time a film was fronted by a disclaimer that it was not the IMAX experience. If nothing else, it’s great to see these films on such a big, big screen, so big that you can see the grain on some prints. I always pledge to spend more time in the lobby, but then I find it so crowded that I just have to get outside. And outside in Leicester Square, there was a Pennywise the clown and a short Predator to pose with. Inside, there was a giant predator statue to queue up to for alternative screen tickets and some guy walking around as “The Nun”, which is apparently the next horror icon. And so to the films…

THE RANGER

Jenn Wexler, 2018, USA

‘The Ranger’ follows the regular and reliable formula of taking an authority figure and endowing him with psychosis and one-liners and then unleashing them on a group of obnoxious teens. It’s a version of the ‘80s – introducing the film, director Wexler talked of the period being deliberately vague – and the young punks are on the run after a druggy night out goes wrong and decide to hide out in the woods in a deserted cabin. It’s Chelsea (Chloe Levine – from favourites ‘The Transfiguration’ and ‘King Jack’) who knows the place – it was her late uncle’s – but her punk friends don’t quite fit in with a rural, peaceful scenery and soon she’s pissed at them for tagging trees with graffiti. They’re quite the obnoxious bunch, the kind of nihilistic punks you find in ‘80s genre flicks, so for sure the park ranger they bump into will teach them to respect the greenery. The first big audience FrightFest cheer was when he shoots the blaring boom box and one of the punks. Jeremy Holm makes for an endearing rather than shit-eating psycho and Levine probably provides more texture than needed and there's a smidgen of ambiguity to her character and stirs a little intrigue. There’s inventiveness enough to the kills with the one-liners doing the necessary punning, but it’s undemanding and easily disposable.

SUMMER OF 84

François Simard &; Anouk Whissell & 

Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2018, Canada

‘Turbo Kid’ was a favourite with me and a brilliant recreation of Eighties low-budget straight-to-video sci-fi cash-ins. This time, in a filmed introduction to their new film, the directors warn this will not be like ‘Turbo Kid’ but they do a similarly consummate job of capturing the era this time without it being part of the humour. In fact, ‘Turbo Kid’ is likely to be the kind of thing that ‘Summer of 84’s shabby group of teens are likely to rent on VHS. They’re just a regular mixed bag, although the film doesn’t make anything of their outsider status but plenty of their convincingly ripe dialogue. The problem is that imaginative soul Davey (Graham Verchere) is convinced that his neighbour Officer Mackey (Rich Sommer) is actually the Cape May Slayer that’s been putting so many faces on milk cartons. Soon, he has convinced them all to embark upon a teen detective mission that is as old as ‘Emil and the Detectives’, ‘The Famous Five’, ‘The Hardy Boys’ and all that: kids against the wrongdoing adult world. And that’s how it plays out for the most part, against a milieu of period detail that is pleasingly organic and underplayed.

But by the end, the true horror of doing the right thing leading to loss, trauma and paranoia makes this an upsetting and deeper tale than perhaps expected. Davey sobbing alone against a backdrop of board games symbolises that some games and adventures lead to dire consequences. It’s more haunting than expected and proved a FrightFight highlight. This is a directorial team that is proving reliable in delivering the goods and I will always be interested in what they do. 

MEGA TIME SQUAD

Tim van Dammen, 2018, New Zealand

Pulling a small-time robbery, John (Anton Tennet) finds himself in possession of a Chinese time-travel device that comes in handy when he falls foul of the local small-time criminal boss. Soon, he is forming his own gang by duplicating himself with the intention of becoming a criminal mastermind.  So no, it’s not horror but it’s very funny genre excursion, benefiting from van Dammen’s insistence on riffing on colloquial dialogue. It treads that very fine line that Kiwi comedy has of making its characters amusingly dim but not stupid (whereas an American comedy is more prone to plunge headlong into the stupid), between the zany and attentiveness to genre needs. Van Dammen provided special-effects for another FrightFest comedy winner, ‘Deathgasm’, and here the many Johns multiply seamlessly with the otherwise staple lowlife criminal shenanigans. And all the time, it treats its genre conceit with restraint and credibility. It’s the frequently irreverent and antagonist interplay that provides most of the humour and the slyest gag is that, in the end, the person John can trust least is himself. 

Angus

Patrick Read Johnson, 1995        - USA/UK/Germany 

screenplay: Jill Gordon ~ from a short story by Chris Crutcher

“Fat kid” Angus’ (Charlie Albert) ambitions in life veer between talking to Melissa, to stop being picked on and to go to Jefferson. His only friends in this are his truck-driving mum, his ever-dozing grandfather who is over seventy and just getting married, and his geeky pal Troy. Luckily, coming-of-age conventions will help out and he’ll get his moment.

          ‘Angus’ is conventionally and agreeably on the side of the big kid, and it’s funny and winning enough and not quite as smug as something offered by John Hughes, but it’s firmly embedded in tropes and predictability. You’re unlikely to miss its message of “freaks” being absorbed into the “normal” – his suit is plum and everyone else is in blue: wow! the same colours as his science experiment!* – but if you do somehow miss it, even though it’s been hammered home many times, Angus will speechify it at the prom showdown. For the most part, the agenda reaches the tenor of one of the tossed-off faux-poignant slogans projected on Troy’s bedroom wall: “Love stinks / Reality Bites”. It’s set at the same level of insight and symbolism as a TV show for tweens… and it’s true I probably bought into liked it more when I was younger. It’s one of those American Teen movies designed to be a reassurance and outcry against the realities of an outsider’s existence.

Each character is defined by how they don’t quite conform, as if they’re wearing allocated badges. Angus’s mum is a truck-driving, arm-wrestling female, challenging gender stereotypes but sadly not using Kathy Bates enough. There is Grandpa Ivan (George C Scott), dozing off at strategic moments, playing chess in the park, but at 72 (oh, 73) about to get married to a women thirty years his junior, challenging ageism. And even Angus himself is not your average nerdy, dejected fat kid, for he makes his worth at football (the point being that others overlook his contribution to the game) and just wants to get along and can stand up for himself. In fact, one of the more successful subversions of stereotypes has Angus frequently breaking the nose of jock bully Rick from the age of five; the unspoken gag/point is that here’s a bully we see continually getting hurt and pounded as a result of his own pranks, yet never stops bullying (but don’t worry, because he’ll get his). But there is a moment when Angus’ mum lists some of the humiliations her son has to go through at school which seems to hint at a parallel film, perhaps a less broad and less contrived exploration of his plight more in tune with the minutiae of his experience.

And then there’s Troy (Chris Owen): he’s Angus’s best

friend, small, big-eared and socially inept ~ surely a missed poster-boy for ‘Gummo’ ~ who isn’t challenging anything really, but just sticking by his big pal. It’s probably this friendship and Angus’ relationship with his Grandpa that resonate most: they are fluid, funny and relatable. Much is made of the childishness of both Angus and Grandpa Ivan: they bicker like siblings; they both have big dates with idealised women (females don’t do well here); the two run parallel with grouching Grandpa George C Scott representing lost chances. It is also only late into the film that it is obvious that Troy is far more physically abused than Angus and yet seems to be intent only in aiding and abetting Angus’s goals in life, thereby revealing Angus in a more self-pitying light. But the film only briefly touches on this foible. Again, the film misses a chance to delve deeper into character and instead goes for tired chess analogies instead. Even so, the film holds its own with the endearing performance of Charlie Talbert as Angus ~ reputedly found in a Wendy bar queue.

And what would a coming-of-age film without a great soundtrack of the times? Personal highlights are opening credits with a marching band playing along to Love Spit Love’s ‘Am I Wrong?’, starting things on a high, and slow-dancing to Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’.

     

• And much is made of the embarrassment this plum suit, but we see him a black suit for the wedding, so…?

Lean on Pete

Andrew Haigh, 2018, UK

An excellently performed little heart-breaker, directed by Andrew Haigh with restraint and the deliberate tempo of barely stifled tragedy. The title and premise – a boy and his horse – probably conjure something more fluffy and more obviously manipulative, but ‘Lean on Pete’ has more in common with the subdued tone of its young star Charlie Plummer’s debut film, ‘King Jack’. 

Plummer proves to be one of what must be the most naturalistic and convincing teenagers in cinema and can carry an entire film effortlessly. As a character, Charley is mild, resourceful, vulnerable and capable in equal measure with the determination to just keep going on his own terms: this isn’t rebellion or defiance; it’s just what he knows. He comes from a negligible and unstable but not uncaring home-life with his dad (Travis Fimmel) and falls into work with the irascible Steve Buscemi who races horses into the ground for a meagre living. Charley is looking for something to call his own and soon takes to the horses, especially one called Lean on Pete who becomes his confidante as things get tough. And yet, this otherwise admirable independence alludes to the neglect and displacement that Charley has subsumed into his character: his indifference to authority isn’t a sign of insurgence but rather his inability to see and accept more official forms of assistance because he doesn’t feel a part of a more mainstream culture.

All the characters appear to have reached points of acceptance of their lot; this is not a world of aspiration. Charley’s dad is more a best buddy than a father, getting by on what remains of his shit-eating good-ol’-boy charm to win women as he forgoes stability. Buscemi is a master of projecting a twitching humanity suffocated by disappointment and self-loathing but even his Del seems to be trying to find a way to be empathic to the boy despite himself. Chloë Sevigny is the obvious port-of-call for sympathy but even she is broken by the knocks she has taken and callously repeats that you can’t treat horses like pets: “…they’re just horses”, she repeats like a mantra trying to convince herself. Later, Charley falls in with a couple of jocks who just want to play games, drink and sleep. They barely seem to care when he joins them. Elsewhere, dramas of abusive relationships play out across assumptions of what gender roles should be. It feels like a dead-end environment where empathy rears up regardless of the cruelty and apathy it’s up against. In that way, it captures the tone of drama lived rather than always announcing itself.

It’s a film that never quite does what you might expect. It’s not that Charley is always badly treated, but he just wants to do things his own way and walks away from official help multiple times. You get the impression that most people he leaves behind really would want to know he’s okay. He gets by on charity, pity, luck and just plain kindness. And when it calls for it, the strength to hit back: don’t mess with a downtrodden and determined teen with nothing to lose. It’s what Common Sense Media calls a “traumatically beautiful drama”, which may seem a somewhat clumsy description but is indicative of the contrasting forces always at work visually and dramatically.

Magnus Nordenhof Jønck’s cinematography presents bright and clear vistas of the Pacific Midwest, through which Charley marches on, resolute to reach his aunt through chronic sunburn, loss and homelessness. The scenery is wide open to him but, as placid as he may seem, it’s no match for his determination. All the time, the slow burn on misfortune and luck carry him onwards. Peter Debruge finds Haigh’s low-key approach distancing and problematic, but this isn’t so much making Charley unrelatable as the film giving him a respectful space to do things his way. It’s a careful tone that doesn’t high-light self-pity because it’s protagonist doesn’t. In this way, it’s more like the more observational coming-of-age dramas like ‘American Honey’ or even ‘The Florida Project’, but it’s still something warm and ragingly empathic. Ultimately, it is a thoroughly moving ramble through a rites-of-passage that doesn’t even feel like heroic overcoming-of-the-odds, but rather just how things are for this kid. 

The Secret of Marrowbone

Sergio G. Sánchez, 2017, Spain 

Evidently running from domestic horror, a mother and her children escape to a remote big house and call themselves Marrowbone (now there’s a name that’s trying hard). There, they try to hide away and keep to themselves, at least until Jack (George MacKay) turns twenty-one. But the ghosts of the past are not easily shaken, even when she declares that they should all have collective amnesia of it.

While other recent horrors are trying to stretch the ambient and ambiguous corners of horror, and where dramas like ‘First Reformed’ and ‘Custody’ utilise horror techniques and atmospheres, ‘The Secret of Marrowbone’ is agreeably old school in its gothic genre intents: there’s a family secret and there’s a crumbling house. These are essential ingredients for this kind of thing and, mostly, Sergio G. Sánchez’s script directs with attentiveness to shadows and delivers with decent scenes of creepiness – the youngest son chasing after dice and a descent through a chimney, for example. But there’s some negligible dialogue, some confusing geography and messing around with temporal displacement. There’s also an archness that belies a faint air of awkward over-insistence as things are put in place, but after the set up it gradually settles down and gets better. Like Sánchez’s renowned script for ‘The Orphanage’, there’s obvious thought and planning here that means that the final revelation is mostly earned. Or you may roll your eyes. But it’s a decent if minor and self-conscious thriller where – as with ‘The Orphanage’ – Sánchez proves ultimately as ruthless as he does sentimental.  

Lunar Engine: "From the Fake Beach Hut"

Here is a new EP from Lunar Engine which was recorded by Ben Brockett at Route 49 Studios, Brighton. It was a very nice afternoon and the sessions included half old and half new material. 

First Reformed

Paul Schrader, 2017, USA

Words such as “austere” and “serious” are the kind of expressions made to pepper reactions to Paul Schrader’s character study of a priest descending into an irrevocable despair. After all, we can begin with the protagonist – Ethan Hawke – being named Ernst Toller, the same name as the left-wing playwright that committed suicide. If Ingmar Bergman was American streetwise, it might feel like this. The colours are so drained that – as Simon Mayo says – it feels as if the film is black and white.  Indeed, it’s so dour that it’s moments of oddness and surely black humour can get lost under the weight of it all: a choir singing jubilantly about being purified in the blood of lambs (this is as darkly amusing and disturbing as a typical moment in a horror film); or when they sing a Neil Young protest song when ashes are being scattered in polluted waters. 

But overall, it’s a masterclass in letting dialogue and actors carry the drama with conversation and performance. The conversation between Toller and Michael (Philip Ettinger) for example: Michael’s wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is concerned about Michael’s deteriorating behaviour after he’s just been arrested for environmentalist activism and asks Toller to counsel him. It’s a compelling and convincing conversation and exposition is organic, the performances thoroughly disarming, intimate and moving. It’s also when I first started thinking, When did Ethan Hawke have that face? It’s a compelling face that is as once stolid, lined, vulnerable, frequently seemingly on the verge of tears or a breakdown. It’s sure to be one of the performances of the year. Toller used to be a military man who encouraged his son to join up; when his son died soon after, Toller’s marriage fell apart and he fell into a pit of darkness and conflicted faith. Although Toller appears to be available to his meagre congregation and his duties – he ministers a “souvenir shop” Church in a somewhat tokenistic position – he is an alcoholic and will not face-up to his mortality. He writes a journal in lieu of prayer – and here is a narration as colour rather than a tour guide, showing that Schrader is again a master of the voiceover – and finds that his crisis of faith leaves room for a political awakening. When he cannot forgive himself, it’s surely a small step to the conclusion that God will not forgive us either. 

Elsewhere, characterisation is wittily measured just right so that, for example, the out-of-touch opinions of Reverend Joel Jeffers (Cedric Antonio Kyles, or a.k.a. Cedric the entertainer) is both recognisable and amusing without being condescending; or the conversations between Toller and Mary that feel both revealing and chaste. 

It’s filmed with the tenor of slow horror with something tense, pending and uncanny as a watermargin (it’s not so dissimilar to the first act of ‘Hereditary’, for example), set by Brian Williams’ foreboding score. Then it moves into magic realism and an ending that is sure to provoke debate (confusion as a first stop, but perhaps dissent too). It’s bold and although there may be accusations that the ending is unfounded the ambiguity is surely a bold move from the tidier and perhaps less striking and troubling endings that might have been. It’s a riveting work that can’t help but echo Schrader's ‘Taxi Driver’ (and it knows it and references that too), but it’s another crucial portrayal of a man both imploding and exploding in slow motion. When faith and activism and violence blur so much in the news, ‘First Reformed’ finds that moment where they crash and is intelligent, empathic and vital viewing.

Xtro - and excess

Harry Bromley Davenport, 1982, UK

This was one of those VHS covers that promised so much when you held it in your hands as a youth in the video store. And it didn’t disappoint, having many moments that you could relish telling your pals about in simple gleefully shocked sentences. Not least of all a woman being raped by an alien and giving birth to a fully grown man. But there’s also the eating of the snake eggs, the panther, the… Well, ‘Xtro’ seems to pack so much random stuff in its primary location of an upmarket flat – even a naked Maryam d’Abo – that this is what makes it special: the idea that even on a limited budget and location, all is possible.

The inspiration seems to have been not only to cash in on the extremism agenda of the contemporary horror movement and the fad for Scott’s ‘Alien’, not only to present a counter-‘E.T.’ (“Not all aliens are friendly”), but (according to Davenport) also to mimic some of the spirit of ‘Phantasm’. Davenport long disliked ‘Xtro’ and certainly, when reflecting upon its genesis, seems very much to have conceded with whatever leftfield idea was asked of him (“A panther? Sure…”). Now, having seen that fans are happy to follow its waywardness if not see it as welcomingly unpredictable, he seems to have made his peace with it (with Second Sights’ wonderful new release).

‘Xtro’ justifies its nightmare logic by having random psychic powers as the reason for anything and everything unsystematic that happens. Some find it confusing and messy, but when you accept that psychic powers mean that anything goes, there arguably isn’t a thorough need for logic, just inventiveness. In that, it follows the psychic terrors of films like ‘The Fury’ or ‘Carrie’ or especially ‘Harlequin’; but its Eerie Child angle also hints at ‘The Omen’. As a kid, I was particularly taken with psychic horrors like ‘Harlequin’, ‘The Shout’ and ‘The Medusa Touch’ where the imagination seemed to bend reality to its will. I found that scary (and perhaps The Twilight Zone’s ‘It’s a Good Life’ provides a great epitome of this). And if this sounds as if it’s strayed from an ‘Alien’ rip-off, the joy of ‘Xtro’ is watching it mash everything together in the kitchen sink and to go wherever the hell it wants. Apparently the producer wanted a panther in the flat, so there it is, and it doesn’t seem ridiculous but simply a highly evocative part of the madness (Davenport notes the panther in the white corridor as the film’s best shot, but there are many). Certainly the seemingly arbitrary built on the peaks of odd moments were the kind of narratives my undisciplined teenaged brain was making and that’s how I read ‘Xtro’, but rarely does such random plotting work as successfully as it does here: it’s a fun-ride of surreal horror and contemporary excess underpinned by a kitchen sink drama. It works as a portrayal of reality breaking down along with the family unit.

And beneficial, as usual in these B-cases, is that the lead actors Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers take it all seriously and deliver above-average performances to ground the absurdities and accentuate them. Perhaps Simon Nash as the boy just waiting for his alien abducted dad to come home isn’t particularly good, his ‘Grange Hill’ volume and working class accent puts him at odds with everyone else’s naturalness. Nevertheless, he fits the special grubbiness and low-rent British Eighties-ness that can’t be affected and only gives a solid foundation for the outré incidents. It’s an example where that particular low-rent feel becomes an asset. The soundtrack by Davenport is at once unforgettable, a little hokey, quintessentially Eighties synth and somewhat resembles the Dr Who scores of the time (and included in Second Sight’s release; a real bonus). The effects are both tacky and vivid: yes, the man-sized birth is appropriately icky, horrid and in bad taste, but no less memorable are performers Tik and Tok as the Action Man come to life and as the alien – the alien that wastes no time in being seen, a simple, slightly stiff but unforgettable.

There are two endings to ‘Xtro’ and although Davenport thinks that the ending with the clones of Danny doesn’t work, I disagree: surely it fits the nightmarish and haphazard tone and provides more motivation for the alien visit; the other ending is more just an ‘Alien’-style shock that leads nowhere. So no, I can’t really say ‘Xtro’ is “good”, but it reaches places other more prestige films don’t and exists totally in its own realm, however much of a B-movie rip-off it was intended to be. I have always been very fond of it.

What have you done to Solange?

Massimo Dallamano, 1972, Italy-West Germany

Italian gym teacher Enrico “Henry” Rosseni (Fabio Testi) is drifting down the Thames (apparently) and carrying on an affair with his student Elizabeth (Cristina Galbo) when she sees a murder on the embankment. But he’s too busy trying to have his way to believe her, insisting her protestations that she witnessed something is just a tactic to avoid intimacy (but he does take “No” for an answer, albeit much perturbed). Someone is killing the girls at a school run by somewhat skeevy white middle-aged men, who Elizabeth turns to after some time rather than the police. (Wait: why does she wait…?) The first thing that Inspector Barth (Joachim Fuchsberger) does is to show the school staff explicit pictures of the girl’s body with a knife in her vagina: “It’s a necessary formality,” he says (?) – and he doesn’t even seem to have spoken to the parents as yet; and when he does, he shows the x-ray of the killing to the father (!). Anyway, when Elizabeth is murdered too, Rosseni investigates the murders (as immigrant teachers are prone to do) – which includes roughing up potential leads in the style of tough-guy cops from the movies – even as he is in conflict with his frigid wife (Karina Baal). Well, actually she becomes totally sympathetic and lets her hair down when Elizabeth is killed and is told she was a virgin. And where would the police be without Rosseni turning up where dead bodies are? But he’s never under suspicion, really. And then in the third act, Solange (Camille Keaton) herself turns up in earnest and proves the key to it all - her hair long and unkempt and her finger permanently hovering at her bottom lip to signify she isn't quite all there but yet conveying some kind of broken innocence.

“Only sixteen and surrounded by secret boyfriends, petty jealousies, orgies and lesbian games,” Rosseni laments, apparently shocked and unaware that his own affair contributes to this tapestry of scandal. "I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the drug scene too." Of course, this also reads like a checklist for a certain male fantasy. Adele of Foxspirit gives ‘Solange’ a more feminist spin: 

"Set in London, but using Italian dialogue, What Have You Done to Solange? chafes against the restraints of the typical Giallo by contrasting the conservatism of a Catholic girls’ high school with the sexually charged atmosphere of Italian cinema."

But I always found such analysis is left a little unreinforced by the text; that it doesn’t align with the mixture of silliness and salaciousness that typifies giallo. All the females here are a response to masculine priorities with their autonomy often dismissed by the generally creepy men: a little more substance to the women would have made this more a persuasive criticism of misogyny, but the all-round shallow characterisation has no gender preference. 

Mark Edward Heuck gives context for Dallamo’s “scared schoolgirls” trilogy – but not to worry if you don’t work out the mystery because Inspector Barth will helpfully explain it all in closing, even if it’s doubtful he would have worked it all out at that point as he’s been pretty clueless all along. What we get is a parade of pretty girls and a ridiculous police procedural that isn’t convincing at all as a killer goes around murdering girls in the most lurid manner. As Kyle Anderson says, these giallo films “exist in worlds where logic in narrative doesn’t mean nearly as much as shocks and salaciousness.” Giallo doesn’t exist in realism, but in an alternative realm seemingly made of adolescent horror and fantasy, grazing against nightmare logic but never usually competent enough to truly achieve this, despite the often excellent aesthetic. Of course, you have ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Footprints on the Moon’ as examples where this does work, but ‘Solange’ is more of that which is fun for the daft character outbursts and dialogue, for the sensationalism and exploitation. But it's most confrontational framing is reserved for the abortion scene and indeed it's whole tone is more like one big tut at the goings-on of the young with a bit of a lurid cautionary tale for girls to keep their legs closed. 

What this does have less of is bad dubbing which is often part of the fun: they are dubbed but the actors are speaking English so the incongruity between the soundtrack and the visuals are less likely to induce amusement. And of course the whole sordid enterprise is given oodles of credibility and atmosphere from Ennio Morricone’s dreamy score.