setsuled

A girls' art school is cast into turmoil when some students start using a magical staircase in 2003's The Wishing Stairs (여고괴담 3: 여우계단). Sometimes, I see a movie and I get the impression the screenwriter and/or director passionately hated all the characters. All the girls in this movie are assholes, giving one a sense of general misanthropy. Combined with the pretty standard Japanese and Korean horror effects (the girl with black hair covering her face, the weird crawling, etc) nicked from The Ring and David Lynch, it was kind of a tedious film to get through.

The plot primarily concerns three girls; Jin-sung, So-hee, and Hye-ju. Jin-sung and So-hee are best friends but Jin-sung is starting to find So-hee's manic behaviour kind of annoying. So-hee's possibly heartfelt affections are oddly aggressive and she seems to delight in frustrating Jin-sung. So-hee crawls into Jin-sung's window uninvited, gives her an unflattering hairstyle, and takes a picture. When Jin-sung idly walks along a stair railing, So-hee grabs her ankle from behind, nearly causing her to fall.

So-hee and Jin-sung are studying ballet and So-hee is the better dancer, meaning Jin-sung won't get a chance to get into a good ballet school. Meanwhile, Hye-ju, whose chubbiness is played for broad, obnoxious comical effect, discovers the magic wishing stairs; if you ascend the stairs while counting them, an extra step appears at the top and your wish will be granted. Hye-ju wishes to lose weight and she does. Hearing this, Jin-sung wishes to get into a good ballet school. But as with the monkey's paw, the wishes come at dreadful costs. Hye-ju gets bulimia and So-hee falls and dies.

The whole school becomes jealous of Jin-sung and starts pulling pranks on her. Meanwhile, the ghost of So-hee possesses Hye-ju. Pranks turn into murders. I mainly came away with the feeling that it would be exhausting being around these people.

Wishing Stairs is availableon Bilibili.

An earthquake occurs in the middle of a sermon and unleashes a horde of fire-breathing cockroaches from the depths of the earth. 1975's Bug depicts these traumatic events and those that follow. It's cheesy, the screenplay was co-written by William Castle, but a cheap '70s horror flick sometimes can feel like a balm.

The insects crawl up from a big crevasse opened by the earthquake. They bag their first kills in the form of an old man and his son who try to get their truck started, not knowing some of the fateful cockroaches have crawled into the tailpipe. So they explode.

As is often the case with '70s movies these days, I want every single shirt the men are wearing in it. You know that western style shirt with the pointy pockets and the yoke on the shoulders, they're usually plaid? I saw John Foggerty on Club Random a couple weeks ago wearing one. He said his wife makes them because they can't buy them anymore. Actually you can find a few on Amazon. I have two. One of them was a very lucky find at a Sears that was closing six years ago, it was less than ten dollars.

Anyway, bugs keep attacking. There are two scenes of them preying on young women. In one case, the bug camps out on a telephone receiver and when she unwittingly puts it to her ear the bug latches on. She runs around screaming, for some reason not even attempting to pull the bug off while it starts to set fire to her ear canal. "Make an effort," I said to the screen.

Much of the film follows a professor (Bradford Dillman) who tries to preserve this quirky new species in spite of everything. He's pretty good, he has slight Herbert West vibes.

High school kids have to deal with a serial killer and their own hidden connexions to him in 2010's My Soul to Take. The last film to be both written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream 4 was his last film as director), it seems clearly intended to be his magnum opus, like he was just throwing everything he could into the pot. I kind of loved it but it's honestly a train wreck.

The influence of Lost Highway is pretty obvious right from the start. We meet a man working on a hobby horse in the basement who hears a news story about a local serial killer with a distinctive knife. Almost immediately, he trips over that very knife and is confused by the familiar way he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. This is all part of a rapidly told prologue segment that ends with the killer apparently meeting his end--but of course he didn't really.

Sixteen years later, seven high school kids who were born at the time of the killer's death supposedly somehow inherited aspects of his personality or are just considered cursed. The dialogue has lots of references to identity and how identity is defined. The main character, Bug (Max Thieriot), for instance, has some amusing dialogue with his best friend, Alex (John Magaro), about how being a man means pretending to enjoy pain and that being a man is entirely defined by pretense.

Where the departures from plain logic in Lost Highway always work as possible delusions of the protagonist, there are many lose threads left in My Soul to Take that just feel like sloppiness, particularly the many little suggestions that Bug has killed people and his memories have somehow been repressed. The movie totally forgets to explain or follow up on that. I kind of liked, though, how Craven doggedly avoided a lot of exposition, leading to a sometimes bewildering experience, as in one scene late in the film when we suddenly learn two characters had been siblings all along and it wasn't even a secret.

For all its faults, the movie has a sense of an artistic identity you don't often see in movies anymore. It definitely has the distinct flavour of Wes Craven.

What seems at first a perfectly innocent lesbian romance turns into naked girls screaming in convents, covered in blood. Such is the fate of characters in 1977's Alucarda, one of the many movies based on Le Fanu's Carmilla. This one has some amazing sets and beautiful girls but becomes overburdened with people screaming and running around.

Tina Romero plays Alucarda, this movie's version of Mircalla/Carmilla, and her first lover/victim is Justine, played by the beautiful Susana Kamini. They're terrific to watch, particularly Romero who infuses her role with reckless teenage passion. Many of the early scenes seem to be borrowed from Hammer's The Vampire Lovers, particularly a funeral scene, but from there the influences seem to be more Satanic nun movies like Mother Joan of the Angels and Ken Russell's Devils as the convent that raised Alucarda is overtaken by hysteria.

The sets are by no means realistic but sort of expressionistically grisly, like they were designed by Goya. It's a fantastic movie to look at but it becomes a bit cacophonous. I kind of like how Alucarda and Justine's pact with Satan means they're in a state of constant psychological torment from then on, so much so they have to constantly scream and writhe, but it does get slightly monotonous.

A young woman narrowly survives a cult suicide and the ghosts of the other cultists won't let her forget it in 1988's Bad Dreams. There are a lot of nice jump scares in this one.

Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) lives in a hospital after recovering from a coma caused by the failed suicide. She's haunted by dreams and visions mostly involving the cult leader, played by the reliably menacing Richard Lynch.

The other headcases in Cynthia's therapy group are soon also beset by nightmares that drive them to grisly deaths. The movie's pretty creative in how it mixes reality with phantasm attacks. I liked one male patient with anger issues who first cuts through his hand and then starts tearing up a room, hoping that by expressing his rage he can fend off the ghosts. No such luck, but the weirdness and violence amps up the tension in a nice way.

Jennifer Rubin is pretty good as a vulnerable, beautiful young woman at the centre of this hurricane of carnage.

X Sonnet #1818

No second ghost could use the syrup bar.
With pleasing dremas we open shop at eight.
But next we push a hand on lazy tar.
And so we locked the only child's gate.
A crimson hood was bobbing over shrubs.
Persistent knights were labelled naught but geese.
Romantic lyrics change to stupid blubs.
Prospective mayors swap a rancid fleece.
The crazy word was placed in normal spots.
When people say they're sane, the rootless run.
The kings would force a meaning onto blots.
But all would fade beneath this blazing sun.
Across the forest, hunters track the vamps.
The drinkers hide in mouldy forest camps.

Will Dracula rise again? With a title well ahead of you is 1968's Dracula has Risen from the Grave. A Hammer horror film directed by Freddie Francis, it features Christopher Lee as Dracula but no Peter Cushing this time around. His adversary is a steadfastly honest young baker played by Barry Andrews, a dead ringer for Roger Daltrey.



I kind of hoped it was Daltrey when I saw him, despite not seeing Daltrey's name in the credits. The Who versus Dracula? I'd be down for that. But Andrews is charismatic in his own right.

The story feels suspiciously like a screenplay originally written without Dracula or even supernatural horror in mind into which Dracula was inserted. Screenwriter Anthony Hinds seemed preoccupied with the worth of honesty. Paul, Andrews' character, wants to marry the daughter of the Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who's just gotten home from putting a big crucifix on Dracula's castle, to make sure the Count never, ever rises from the grave. Along the way, he inadvertently attracts the eye of Dracula, who has already risen from the grave.



Paul's father is played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper, once again playing a tavern keeper. He advises his son that honesty isn't always the best policy, that he should know when to play things close to his chest. Unfortunately, Paul wants nothing to do with tact, and when the clergyman he hopes will be his father-in-law asks his religion, Paul happily owns himself an atheist.

You'd think the rest of the film, in which Paul's fiancee (Veronica Carlson) and the buxom tavern wench (Barbara Ewing) are both bitten and enthralled by the famous vampire, would cause him to reexamine his beliefs. But the plot proves to be more about the monsignor accepting Paul as his daughter's chosen.



Freddie Francis delivers the goods again as one of the better Hammer directors. I particularly like a rooftop set/matte painting combination he uses repeatedly throughout the film, making it the choice location for battles or even just the routine route for clandestine young lovers.

Dracula has Risen from the Grave is available on HBOMax, one of four Hammer films, the others including Hammer's first Dracula film, their first Frankenstein film, and the Hammer version of The Mummy. I'd say The Mummy is the best of the group with Frankenstein in second but, despite loving Hammer movies, I've never been fond of their first Dracula entry. It's a shame Warners doesn't have some of the better Hammer films on HBOMax, like Frankenstein Created Woman, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Brides of Dracula, She, or The Vampire Lovers.

Despite the Halloween season being over, I've kept up reading H.P. Lovecraft Selects, a collection of stories drawn from Lovecraft's famous essay on supernatural horror. To-day I read Rudyard Kipling's "The Phantom 'Rickshaw". Lovecraft describes Kipling as approaching greatness despite "omnipresent mannerisms". These may be the pervasive bits of local colour Kipling is famous for and it is a great and subtle addition to the story of a man seeing his dead lover stalking him in a 'rickshaw. That one element of strangeness is made the more striking for the abundant evidence of the author's casual familiarity with the reality of the place.

This piece of window dressing even comes to the fore as the story's narrator tries to use it as a tool to keep himself sane;

Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud: “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t forget that—I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So’s horses—anything, in fact, that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses.

As for the story itself, the poetic justice of a man undone by the ghost of a woman he so cruelly spurned isn't as satisfying as it is horrific. There's a surface of a basic, functioning morality--man does wrong, man gets punished--but the strangeness of it against the authenticity of the location emphasises a dreamlike quality in the proceedings. She may indeed be a manifestation of the narrator's conscious or self-loathing. It's an effective story at any rate.

Can the quest for moral perfection lead to the creation of a perfect monster? Or is the idea of such a quest indicative of a monstrous nature from the outset? One way in which Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is discussed is in how truly either persona reflects the central character's essential nature. It's a story that both pays tribute to and counters the ideas of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Both stories warn of the dangers of man imitating God through scientific experiment but where Mary Shelley clearly has a lot of sympathy for her monster, Hyde is presented as more thoroughly repulsive. And yet it's not quite so simple as that.

Jekyll at first describes the temptation of the Hyde persona as a kind of "slavery" but in the very next paragraph he uses the word "liberty":

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.

It almost sounds like the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and the sort of freedom Jekyll describes would be familiar to the average Internet troll. But is "liberty" an altogether accurate term here? John Milton once wrote, ". . . none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence." Like Elster in Vertigo, the freedom that Jekyll describes is dependent on his licence or, to use the preferred term of to-day, privilege. Hyde knocks over a child in the street or even murders a man because he disregards the right of his victims to walk safely in the city. Meanwhile, Hyde himself greedily clutches at protection, hiding behind the wealth and facade of Jekyll.

Of course, Mary Shelley saw Milton from a very different perspective. Her monster is obsessed with Milton's Paradise Lost, identifying with the figure of Satan in it. No surprise given Mary Shelley was influenced by the general love the Romantics had for Paradise Lost, leading to the creation of the "Byronic Hero". Figures like Lord Byron's Manfred who threw off the influence of good and evil to assert their own minds and powers. The idea holds an undeniable appeal but between the publication of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the concept of asserting personal passions without regard to others was criticised in a diversity of great works from Moby Dick to The Masque of the Red Death to Madame Bovary to Crime and Punishment. But the effectiveness of these works is in their complexity; the fascination we feel for Ahab, the horror we feel of the Red Death, the sympathy we feel for Emma, and the stimulation we feel from Raskolnikov's argument. The revelation isn't that these seemingly good ideas turned out to be bad after all but that the consequences of true insight into human nature are tragic and horrifying.

We don't see much of Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, what we learn about him is mostly from characters discussing their impressions of him. We learn more about Jekyll's internal life and his feverish efforts to not be Hyde. Most of the story is told from the perspective of Jekyll's friend and lawyer, Utterson, who until the end believes Hyde and Jekyll are separate entities. Utterson worries about Jekyll's association with the infamous Hyde and after the murder Jekyll says to Utterson, "I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed." No real thought to the victim of the crime anymore than he had real sympathy for the other victims, only a horror at what damage there might be to his reputation. When one considers Jekyll's original motive when he created Hyde, to separate and therefore somehow purge all his negative impulses, it seems all of Jekyll's supposed goodness is but vanity. His interest is more in crafting his purity than in any action that might do effective good. This is a product of the idea of good and evil as abstractions--where they are two concrete states that one can be, then one can focus on them instead of evaluating individual actions based on their real merits. It's the ultimate indictment of Puritan psychology. Of people who can't look directly at their own preoccupations with self-image because fundamental to the drive for salvation is to be worthy rather than to attain worthiness through achievements that can be measured empirically. And this cuts both ways. Jekyll describes the aftermath of his decision never to be Hyde again:

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly in the last months of last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.

Not only do the good acts seem worthless to Hyde who doesn't attempt them, they seem worthless to Jekyll after he's done them. The good acts Jekyll refers to are never sufficiently satisfying because he's always aware he's motivated not by the actions themselves but for how those actions might reflect on him, in terms of his reputation and his self-image. When he defines his goodness in terms of an abstraction made concrete by two physical states then no number of positive acts will ever be sufficient. Hyde is naturally a more satisfying persona because Hyde casts off this moral preoccupation entirely. The phoniness of Jekyll's motives make Hyde's base motives seem more legitimate. As a system designed to regulate indulgent, destructive behaviour, the moral sphere to which Jekyll belongs begins with a crack that widens to complete destruction when put into practise.

The question was always there but few have dared to ask it: what if Nazis could breathe underwater? This is the nightmare realised by 1977's Shock Waves. It's elevated from simple, entertaining schlock by cool locations and very good performances, particularly from John Carradine and Peter Cushing.



Carradine plays the captain of a small boat taking tourists sight seeing in the Caribbean. I love his character--the way he scoffs at the beliefs of the ship's cook (Don Stout) in paranormal phenomena at sea is so strident that you get the impression he knows all the stories are true but he's wise enough to know people are better off not believing. Carradine is just the right actor for this part, his aged face reflecting his depth of experience along with the tone of flawed authority that made him perfect as Aaron in The Ten Commandments and as preachers in John Ford movies.



Among the tourists, Brooke Adams as Rose is presented as the protagonist but mainly she's relegated to following along as the men make all the decisions or running in terror. A natural enough reaction when encountering water breathing Nazi zombies--as they do when they shipwreck on an island. Also in residence is Peter Cushing, sole occupant of a great abandoned luxury hotel.



He has top billing but not a lot of screen time. Playing a former Nazi commander about whom we learn little he's around long enough to make a monologue on genetically engineered, aquatic Nazi super soldiers sound gravely serious.



They're pretty menacing though the tourists' worst enemy, as is often the case movies like this, is their own foolishness, particular a couple of them who do really stupid things when they panic. But the best death in the film comes courtesy of sea urchins. This movie was a real pleasure to watch.

Twitter Sonnet #1092

A poacher's plate advanced along the Rhein.
Announcements fell beneath the azure cloud.
A pair of pumpkin eyes betrayed the mine.
It's thought the written note was something loud.
Entire bottles face a plot returned.
Away to office lunch a cable's sent.
A lesson stacked in woods was swiftly learned.
Occasion told antennae too were bent.
The alternating green accepts.
A face ingests the proffered wine alone.
Detect the taste of brain on clean forceps?
The vinegar and lemon *can* atone.
A citrus shoe delivers feet to C.
An hour shaved delivers time to sea.

1958's Blood of the Vampire has lots of blood but not much of a vampire. This is despite the fact that it was written by Jimmy Sangster, stars Barbara Shelley, and has some classic horror fantasy visuals. Also in spite of these facts, it's not a Hammer film. It's not bad but it suffers from a lack of strong performances apart from Shelley's.



Dr. Callistratus (Donald Wolfit) runs a prison for the criminally insane in Transylvania. He conducts secret experiments involving blood transfusion in the hopes of curing his own mysterious blood ailment, presumably something like vampirism, since we witness his resurrection from the grave early in the film with the help of his Igor-like assistant, Carl (Vincent Maddem).



Callistratus arranges for the film's protagonist, Dr. Pierre (Vincent Ball), to be wrongly convicted and sent to his prison in order to help with blood research. Pierre is a complete drip--played by Vincent Ball he has all the dynamism of the owner of a discount furniture store appearing in his own commercial.



Somehow he's managed to win the heart of Madeleine, his fiancee, played by a far superior Barbara Shelley. The film picks up a lot in the last third when she suddenly turns up posing as Callistratus' housemaid. It's a scheme that makes very little sense and there are a lot of questions completely ignored as to how it happened--how did she know Callistratus lied about Pierre dying in a prison break? How did she know he needed a housemaid?



Unfortunately, Callistratus' collaborator is a prison official named Auron (Bryan Coleman) who recognises her and tries to blackmail her into sleeping with him. Fortunately, Carl, like many a disfigured henchman in many horror movies, has fallen into an utterly selfless love for the female lead and helps her.



With a stronger actor in Ball's place, this might have been a really good movie. As it is, the mixture of bizarre medical fantasy mixed with vampirism still functions kind of well. It manages to make something slightly weird out of the too familiar monster.