Three… Extremes (Dir: Fruit Chan, Takeshi Miike, Chan-Wook Park)
Tartan Asia Extreme (18), Out Now
Let’s face it, with the notable exception of the classic Dead of Night, cinematic horror anthologies are generally less than brilliant. Anyone who has sat through creaky ensemble pieces such as Asylum, Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Demon Knights, and Body Bags will know how these things usually go: with any luck, there will be one adequate entry, but the rest are almost always guaranteed to be inferior instalments characterised by ropey acting and predictable twists. Even Dead of Night had a rather twee middle segment about a haunted golf course. In other words, whilst literary horror is often at its finest in short story form, filmic horror has rarely been at its best when confined to a reduced running time.
However, when the anthology in question features work by three of Asian horror’s most interesting talents, the prospect is intriguing. At a time when mainstream Western horror films have all but run aground in a sea of their own mediocrity, and the blazing talents of the 70s horror boom have, with the notable exception of George A. Romero, lapsed into relative obscurity, discerning horror fans have learned in recent years that they should look further afield if they want to see genuinely interesting, innovative work within the genre. The recent DVD release of Three… Extremes – featuring short works by Hong-Kong based Fruit Chan; Japanese provocateur Miike Takeshi (of Audition and Gozu notoriety); and Korean hyper-kinetic stylist Park Chan-Wook (Old Boy, Lady Vengeance) - again suggests that western film makers would do well to try and inject some of the energy, extra-morbid black comedy and sheer stylistic verve on display here into their own efforts, even if the offerings on display here are at times somewhat uneven.
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu famously alerted the west to the fact that horror films could still actually scare people, and that film’s unprecedented success (as well as the speed at which an inferior, but generally well-received American remake was produced) meant that it was suddenly much easier to get a hold of Asian films in Europe thanks to distributors such as Tartan and Optimum Asia. The boom has produced many excellent movies (A Tale of Two Sisters, Lady Vengeance); some interesting, but flawed (The Grudge, Hypnosis, Audition); a few very dull ones (Pulse, Uzumaki); and the occasional movie that is downright offensive (Freezer, Visitor Q), as well as having an important impact upon western filmakers. Note to Eli Roth: buckets of gore, vomit and self-righteous xenophobia do not a westernised Japanese horror film make, even if you have somehow convinced Miike to make a cameo appearance. Three… Extremes, which is clearly being targeted at those who prefer their horror gory rather than ghostly, falls into the interesting-but-flawed category, but should still be required viewing for anyone remotely interested in Asian horror and cinema.
The anthology opens with Fruit Chan’s satirical, stomach-churning offering Dumplings, which is probably the best of the lot. The premise is this: beautiful Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), who claims to be considerably older than her looks suggest, makes a living
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out more about where Mei gets them from. Not only does she surreptitiously procure flasks of foetuses from the local hospital, but she also performs the occasional late-term abortion herself (in a particularly gruesome aside, it is revealed that the older the foetus, the more powerful its effects).
One such operation, carried out on a pregnant schoolgirl, is graphically depicted, and the scene allows Chan to make a sly reference to the nature of the relationship between Hong Kong and mainstream China. The witchlike, ageless Aunt Mei hails from the old world, and is here associated with folk medicine and magic: she also seems to take great pleasure in having so much power over the fashion conscious, westernised and intensely materialistic local women who flock to her door. “They never get rid of boys in China”, she notes, in an aside which obviously refers to her native land’s famously restrictive one-child family policy. Cut down from a full length film, Dumplings proceeds briskly to a suitably disturbing final shot, in which Ching, having been deprived of Mei’s recipe, decides to make some dumplings of her own. Not for all tastes, it’s nevertheless an uncompromising and at times darkly comic tale of vanity and greed, although at times the narrative does seem rather choppy, a reminder of the fact that it was originally a much longer piece.
it all concludes with some tense last-minute twists, and a satisfyingly ironic fate for the psychopath who has engineered the whole grisly scenario. The final minutes also offers a rather baffling scene in which the director conclusively proves that he isn’t a nice guy anymore. Despite the intriguing film-within-a-film opening, a satisfyingly bleak cruel streak and some impressive visual flourishes, ultimately there is rather more style than substance on display here.
However convoluted the closing moments of Cut are, they still make more sense than Miike’s Box, the impressionistic, often hauntingly atmospheric but ultimately too bizarre to take seriously tale of a young novelist tormented by visions of her dead (twin) sister. Much of the film takes place in silence, and it jumps without warning from (seeming) reality to fantasy throughout.
here either. Ultimately, though occasionally uneven, Three… Extremes is still well worth watching, and while there is a lot of gore, it is generally used rather more intelligently than in pretentious American torture-porn like Hostel. To sum up: recommended. The DVD also comes with knowledgeable film notes and a behind-the-scenes documentary.
Year of the Remake: The Omen 666 and The Wicker Man
Jenny McDonnell
The current trend for remakes of 1970s horror movies continued throughout 2006, with the release on 6 June of John Moore’s The Omen 666 (a scene-for-scene reconstruction of Richard Donner’s 1976 The Omen) and the release on 1 September of Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man (a re-imagining of Robin Hardy’s 1973 film of the same name). In addition, audiences were treated to remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, Black Christmas (due Christmas 2006) and When a Stranger Calls (a film that had previously been ‘remade’ as the opening sequence of Scream). Finally, there was Pulse, a remake of the Japanese film Kairo, and another addition to the body of remakes of non-English language horror films such as The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water. Unsurprisingly, this slew of remakes has raised eyebrows and questions alike about Hollywood’s apparent inability to produce innovative material. As the remakes have mounted in recent years, from Planet of the Apes to King Kong, the cries have grown ever louder: Hollywood, it would appear, has run out of fresh ideas and has contributed to its ever-growing bank balance by quarrying the classics.
Amid these accusations of Hollywood’s imaginative and moral bankruptcy to commercial ends in tampering with the films on which generations of cinephiles have been reared, it can prove difficult to keep a level head when viewing films like The Omen666 and The Wicker Man. Their originals have become deified and venerated since they first appeared: the release of the two remakes in 2006 has led to public outpourings of dismay and anger from horror aficionados who regard the originals as untouchable cultural artefacts. As a popular medium, though, film has always been reliant upon adaptation, and the embryonic years of cinema produced numerous literary adaptations and remakes; likewise, horror cinema has always thrived on such adaptation, from Nosferatu to the Universal classics produced from the 1920s to the 1940s. As the medium has grown in status and stature in the course of the twentieth century, it has produced countless cinematic texts: and it is logical that filmmakers should consistently turn to this vast body of work (as well as to other forms) to provide inspiration for new versions of old stories. With a little originality of vision, adaptation within the medium of film has proven successful time and again: Seven Samurai was successfully transported to the American West for The Magnificent Seven; Rob Reiner updated ItHappened One Night for the 1980s and gave us The Sure Thing; and had Howard Hawks not adapted the stage-play The FrontPage (which had previously been filmed in 1931) and changed the gender of one of its lead characters, cinema would have been denied His Girl Friday, and with it the sublime, fast-talking screwball pairing of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. In theory, then, remakes need not be heinous crimes against cinema; in practice, though, inspiration and originality of vision are not always evident in remakes, and for every His Girl Friday, there’s a Switching Channels.
Within horror there have been instances of remakes which have gained formidable reputations of their own: John Carpenter’s The Thing, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, for example, all proved iconic updatings of 1950s B-movies: the latter two are being given the movie remake treatment again and are due for release in 2007 (Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Visiting and Todd Lincoln’s The Fly), but the long-proposed sequel to The Thing has as yet failed to materialise (except in the form of a video game). While it is apparent that not all remakes can achieve the status as Carpenter’s definitive ice-bound classic, they needn’t all be hailed as pointless an exercise as Gus van Sant’s notorious updating of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1998, which famously only succeeded in transforming Norman Bates into Master Bates in glorious Technicolor. Similar projects in other genres have proven more palatable to audiences and critics alike: Todd Haynes, for example, meticulously recreated the world of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and garnered rave reviews and awards a-plenty with Far From Heaven (a technically brilliant exercise in film-imitation, but its sumptuous reconstruction of Sirk’s style was not accompanied by the corresponding substance: the emotional heart that characterised his work). Van Sant’s Psycho was fundamentally hampered by the fact that it seemed an exercise in futile imitation, a re-enactment of a classic thriller which pivots on a now well-known but originally ground-breaking and unsettling double-whammy of twists: Janet Leigh’s untimely demise in the shower and the climactic unveiling of Mother. Iconic endings will always pose a problem for directors of remakes, as Tim Burton gamely proved with the incomprehensible twist in his re-imagining of Planet of the Apes that fails to challenge the original’s legendary closing scene. It’s not just the endings that are tricky, though, and the director that takes on an iconic horror film will always have his or her work cut out for them if they’re pitching their work to a genre-savvy audience. This is true whether they deliver a scene-for-scene remake such as The Omen 666 or a ‘re-imagining’ such as The Wicker Man: stick too close to the blueprint and run the risk of an exercise in carbon-copying; but tamper with things too much and face the wrath of outraged film enthusiasts.
Both The Omen and The Wicker Man are iconic 1970s horror films with famously downbeat endings and thirty years of nostalgic nightmares behind them. Obviously, an informed audience will know as much when viewing the remakes, but this prior knowledge is further heightened by the general cine-literacy of contemporary horror audiences, who are notoriously aware of the ‘rules’ of their chosen genre, as has been evident in the move towards post-modern self-awareness in the likes of Scream and Final Destination. Generic rules have now been unpicked within the genre and parodied in the unnecessary and unfunny Scary Movie series. The informed audience for the horror remake, then, is one that is doubly invested with a sense of authority that undermines the fundamental element of surprise on which storytelling relies. At the same time, the authority of the filmmaker is destabilised when telling a story that is familiar and which may have lost its power to effect an audience on the primal level on which horror should function. The best horror films are frightening on a first viewing, and unsettling experiences thereafter (The Exorcist, 1973); the very best prove frightening on every single viewing (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974). But there’s a cosy familiarity about horror remakes, which counteracts all of horror’s main impulses to terrify its audience, and it’s an obstacle over which the recent remake of The Omen inevitably stumbles.
On the face of it, The Omen 666 remake looks like the worst kind of cash-cow filmmaking, a scene-for-scene remake, released on 6/6/06, taking opportunistic advantage of the commercial potential for a demonically-themed horror movie released on the once-in-a-century number-of-the-beast-tinged date. The gimmick apparently worked: the film did respectably at the box office, and when I tried to see it on opening night, two different cinemas were sold out (forcing me to see another remake, Poseidon, instead). But the gimmick had been used before, also with some success: the UK release of the original Omen was on 6/6/76, as close to the number-of-the-beast as the 1970s would allow. The Omen franchise has always had a commercial eye on its audience, and even on its initial release, it seemed a little familiar, with a hint of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist about it: the ‘derivative’ tag that haunts so many contemporary films is equally applicable to this, a film that really paved the way for the commercial success of horror throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. Its 2006 incarnation merely capitalises on this commercial savvy for a new generation, and even flaunts its derivative nature by casting Mia Farrow as Mrs Baylock in a nod, not to the original, but to Rosemary’s Baby, a film that the original was accused of ‘ripping off'. It’s a witty gesture in what is otherwise standard remake fare that makes everything bigger and bolder with louder explosions and more elaborate deaths.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, since David Seltzer is credited as screenwriter on both the 1976 and 2006 Omens, that the plot is an exact photocopy of the original: Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber), U.S. ambassador to Italy at the beginning of the film, chooses not to tell his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles) that their first child died at birth, instead opting to pass off an orphaned infant as their own progeny. Damian (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), of course, turns out to be the spawn of Satan; his nanny, the priest who tries to warn Thorn that his son bears the number of the beast, and Jennings, the photographer who gets caught up in matters, all meet satisfyingly nasty ends; and, after the untimely death of Katherine Thorn, the film climaxes with the equally untimely death of Robert Thorn, who fails to kill young Damian, thus leaving him free to pursue his true father’s work, as well as giving Hollywood an excuse to tackle (and hopefully improve) the sequels in which Damian paves a path to the White House. There is little new in the film, save some minor modifications to the details of some scenes, and the introduction of some dream sequences. These are effective for a few jumps, but are all-too-brief to really build to anything more than some MTV-style editing. The film is quite stylishly produced, and some imagery is memorable: in particular the starkness of the snow-bound trip across Italy undertaken by Robert Thorn and Jennings in pursuit of some answers, and the recurrent use of blood red imagery on white backgrounds that subtly anticipates the impending trauma of the film’s climactic battle. But these are the only subtle touches in a film that is elsewhere heavy-handed and obvious in its execution.
Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man is a different beast altogether, a re-imagining that just about retains enough of the outline of its original text to justify its claim to the title. The original Wicker Man was a low-budget British chiller, a cult classic with much in common with the independent ideals of 1970s American horror filmmakers such as George A. Romero and Tobe Hooper. Its reputation has primarily rested on that ending, as it explodes into horror after a slow-burning eighty minutes or so (depending on the cut) when Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie fulfils his appointment with the wicker man. Hardy’s film revolved around the clash between Howie’s repression and the sexual liberation of the inhabitants of Summerisle, and climaxed with the ultimate clash between Christian and pagan virtues, with the virginal Christian police officer burnt as a May Day sacrifice by the pagan islanders so that their apple crops might recover from the previous year’s disastrous harvest. The film’s power rests in the manner in which Howie’s ideals are ultimately used against him to valorise the ideals of his pagan adversaries, and his sacrifice makes for a shocking closing reel. However, there is no such power on display in LaBute’s updating and relocation of The Wicker Man to the present day in the Pacific Northwest.
LaBute’s film notoriously rejects the original’s clash between Christian and pagan ideals, a rejection that is made clear from the very first scene, in which Nicolas Cage’s traffic cop peruses the self-help section of a bookstall. Instead, LaBute invokes his favoured topic of the battle of the sexes, but his outmoded gender clashes manage to make the film feel more dated even that Hardy’s folky 1970s version: even the sight of Britt Ekland’s naked body-double slapping herself while crooning a creepy folk tune was preferable to the offensive and misogynistic gender politics which abound in LaBute’s film. His Wicker Man is entirely predicated on a dystopian vision of the oppression of men (‘drones’) by empowered, witch-like women (led by queen bee Sister
The problem with The Wicker Man is not just that it’s a bad remake of a classic chiller with bludgeoned nods to its original (Cage’s character is called Edward, and Willow’s surname is Woodward), which elicits giggles where the original unsettled. It’s also a film that quarries other classic horror sources, so it looks like a hodgepodge of any number of better films: in Rowan’s red cardigan and Malus’ watery pursuit of nightmarish visions of her, as well as the blind twin sisters who prophesy the coming of the wicker man, it visually references Don’t Look Now (the upper half of the double bill with which the original Wicker Man was released); and in his frenzied search of Sister Summersisle’s house, the film borrows heavily from The Shining. But it’s also reminiscent of less memorable films: in particular, its reclusive female colony smacks of M. Night Shyamalan’s tiresome post-9/11 allegory The Village. But even taken on its own terms, LaBute’s film is a convoluted mess, with badly-written dialogue and ludicrous plotting to get Malus to the island, and a central turn by Cage that is all teeth and wild hair, one of the worst cases of over-acting in an actor who is terminally prone to do so. But read in relation to its obvious influences, The Wicker Man almost feels like four bad remakes: they add up to one farcical folly.
Ultimately, both The Omen 666 and The Wicker Man are mainstream horror films that sit at either end of the remake spectrum, but whereas The Wicker Man has been categorically and soundly denounced by fans and critics alike, The Omen 666 has received mixed reviews overall.
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies:
FILM REVIEWS
The Proposition (Dir: John Hillcoat)
Tartan Video (18) Out now
parted company with the gang, taking his younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson) with him, but he is now faced with the titular proposition: locate and kill the gang’s leader, his elder brother Arthur (Danny Huston), or condemn his younger brother to the gallows. What follows is a dark study of fraternal loyalty and morality; an examination of man’s inhumanity to man; and a meditation on the brutality of the class, national and racial conflicts that laid the foundations of the Australian nation.
The film has most widely been described as an Australian Western, with its outback setting in the 1880s and its double-stranded story that pits the law-enforcer Stanley against the lawless Burns brothers and the indigenous Aboriginal population. Director John Hillcoat has written and spoken widely on his long-held desire to adapt the genre within an Australian context, and the film is commendable for its complex depiction of the relationships between these population groups and of divisions within them in the years leading up to the emergence of Australia as a commonwealth. However, with its brooding and oppressive atmosphere, distinctive brand of Old Testament imagery and judgement, and depiction of a harsh and alien landscape, it also has affinities with the gothic tradition that has manifested itself most famously in the American South (for example, in the writings of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor). Traces of this tradition are littered throughout Cave’s back catalogue (in particular on Henry’s Dream and The Murder Ballads), as well as in his only novel to date (And the Ass Saw the Angel, first published in 1989): equally, it informs The Proposition’s twisted morality tale, in which a tale of bloody retribution is played out in a harsh and oppressive setting.
The desert has proven a rich gothic landscape in Australian literature and film throughout the last century: even in such crowd-pleasing comedies as Crocodile Dundee and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert it has featured as a potentially disturbing and unwelcoming space, and in Australian horror movies such as Wolf Creek the outback has been utilised as the site of unbearable human suffering. Similarly, it dominates The Proposition, and is captured memorably by director of photography Benoît Delhomme. The film is beautifully shot: the harsh browns and yellows of the exterior shots contrast starkly with the washed-out blues and greens of the interiors of the Stanley homestead: this location provides some of the most striking shots, in particular of their cultivated garden, lost in the vast, inscrutable landscape which engulfs it. Throughout the film, the desert functions as an unknowable space at the heart of a continent, mirroring the hearts of darkness that both Stanley and Charlie Burns are forced to confront in the course of the film.
scenes of violence that punctuate the narrative. This is most evident in the pivotal scene in which Mikey is whipped: there is just one brief glimpse of his shredded back after less than half of the proposed one hundred lashes, while the rest of the scene focuses on the blood-spattered faces of the increasingly silent and repulsed spectators, on the sodden whip itself, and on the puddle of blood which collects on the ground. Elsewhere, the violence remains bubbling under the surface (as in Charlie’s early scene with bounty-hunter Jellon Lamb, played by John Hurt in a startling cameo), or is depicted off-screen. The bloodiest moments are implied through reaction shots and sound effects, and crucially, the event that provides the immediate context for the film – the attack on the Hopkins homestead – is never shown. As the film hurtles towards its devastating final reel, it erupts into action in the climactic scenes at the Stanley homestead, and the full ramifications of Stanley’s proposition are revealed.
All in all, Hillcoat and Cave have delivered a complex and unsettling film that lingers in the memory long after the credits roll. With excellent performances from Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone and Danny Huston in particular, a haunting and affecting score by Cave and Warren Ellis, and an impressive two-disc set, this proposition is one worth considering.
DVD extras: Two documentaries (‘Making Of The Proposition’ and ‘Meet the Cast and Crew’); Exclusive interviews with Guy Pearce and Danny Huston; Theatrical trailer; Feature-length commentary with John Hillcoat and Nick Cave
The film’s strength lies in its fundamental moral ambiguity. It is viewed through the eyes of two anti-heroes, Captain Stanley and Charlie Burns, both of whom are faced with the prospect of doing the ‘wrong’ thing for their own interpretation of the ‘right’ reasons, and by the end of the film both men will have confronted the devastating repercussions of their respective attempts to do right. The film manages to blur such binaries as ‘right and wrong’ and ‘civilised and barbaric’ throughout: for example, it is the most refined characters (the local landowner Eden Fletcher, played by David Wenham) and Martha Stanley who are responsible for the film’s most violent sequence when they ill-advisedly order that Mikey be whipped (thus setting things up for the film’s disturbing final act). Equally, Danny Huston’s Arthur is first established as an eloquent and almost enlightened soul long before we see him in action as the bloodthirsty killer that Stanley has described him to be.
Considering the bloodthirstiness and brutality that pervades The
Proposition, the film demonstrates considerable restraint in the
Nick Cave’s strength as a storyteller has long been evident in his musical output, and it is a skill that he again puts to good use in The Proposition, his second script for director John Hillcoat. Their first collaboration was Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988), a low-budget futuristic horror set in the confines of a prison, populated by brutal criminals. The Proposition is a more restrained, sophisticated and subtle film in almost every respect. The premise is simple: recently relocated from England to a post in the outback, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) has been entrusted with the task of civilising the land and suppressing rebellious factions of the population (both settler and Aboriginal). The film opens with his capture of two of the notorious Burns brothers, members of a gang of outlaws who are responsible for the vicious murder of the Hopkins family. In the wake of this attack, the middle brother Charlie (Guy Pearce) has actually
In truth, part of the problem lies in the iconic status of The Omen itself, which is such a pervasive presence in the history of horror’s move towards box-office credibility and acceptance at the end of the 1970s that is all-but impossible to re-view it with anything close to fresh eyes. There’s a hazy, nostalgic glow around The Omen, and in a sense, it has become too iconic, elevated to greatness when compared to its own inferior sequels and the numerous devil-child films that emerged in its wake (for example, Children of the Corn, Godsend). In hindsight, it actually adds up to less than the sum of its parts (Gregory Peck, Jerry Goldsmith’s score, those death-scenes), and the main problem with the remake is that it has attempted to replicate those parts exactly without really trying to make them add up to something more.
When it comes to recent horror movie remakes in particular, the films produced have tended to be inept or glossy rehashes of older films (The Fog, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Moreover, they have further contributed to the perception of horror as a genre that is often derivative, formulaic and sequel-driven (of which the recent direct-to-DVD appearance of I’llAlways Know What You Did Last Summer is a timely reminder). 2006 has also brought its fair share of sequels in this vein: Underworld: Evolution, Final Destination 3, Scary Movie 4, and Adrift (a film that was not an official sequel to Open Water, but which has been sold in many territories as Open Water 2 because of its obvious similarities); still to come this year are the forthcoming Saw III, The Grudge 2 (the sequel to the remake of the Japanese original, which itself spawned an inferior sequel), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (a prequel to the remake of the original). Horror sequels have rarely surpassed their originals but have often attempted to replicate their successes by sticking closely to the blueprint of a tried-and-tested-formula (witness, for example, the law of diminishing returns in the Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series); horror movie remakes are now emerging as a natural offshoot of this process. More than any other genre horror has not lent itself to the remake treatment with any real success: fundamentally, it’s hard to scare the living daylights out of people with a film that they’ve already seen in another incarnation. Yet the trend continues unabated, and next year audiences can look forward
to remakes and re-imaginings of the likes of Halloween (by Rob Zombie) Day of the Dead, The Hitcher and The Omega Man (as I Am Legend, the title of the Richard Matheson novel on which it is based), and there’s also the persistent rumour about an imminent remake of The Birds.
It’s in the death scenes that the film seems to feel it must push some boundaries, and it ups the ante for the demise of David Thewlis’s Jennings (a more elaborate decapitation than David Warner’s) and Pete Postlethwaite’s Father Brennan who is skewered by a church steeple in the same way, but ends up resembling Darth Maul in his long black robes and with shards of glass sticking out of his head. These beefed-up sequences probably do play well to a contemporary audience reared on the imaginative demises of the Final Destination series, but the decision to tamper with the death of Katherine Thorn is indicative of the overwhelming lack of subtlety on display throughout the film. The original worked on the power of suggestion, and Lee Remick’s tumble from her hospital window was motivated as much by her own growing paranoia as any palpable threat from Mrs Baylock. In contrast, Julia Stiles’ character is disposed of in her
hospital bed – this time by Mrs Baylock, who proves very handy with a syringe. There is no room for ambiguity in this Omen: from the opening montage of recent events that suggest the eve of Armageddon (9/11, the Asian Tsunami, the Columbia space shuttle disaster) to the closing shot of a George W. Bush look-alike clutching the orphaned Damian’s hand, the film displays a singular lack of subtlety in justifying its own existence and asserting its contemporary relevance. It displays a corresponding lack of originality, and it remains difficult to appraise the film on its own terms: quite simply, it has been seen before, one too many times.
Summersisle, played by Ellen Burstyn). The suggestively named Edward Malus (combining the male and phallus that Molly Parker’s schoolmistress educates her charges to mistrust) is a doomed man before he even sets foot on Summersisle. Malus is a ‘troubled’ man, having failed to rescue a mother and child from a burning car in the film’s opening sequence, and is lured to Summersisle by his former fiancée, Willow, to seek her missing child, Rowan (later revealed to be his own daughter). But whereas Hardy’s islanders were merely eccentric to begin with (and really remain so up until the point at which they burn Howie as a sacrifice), LaBute’s islanders are obvious weirdos from the first moment Malus encounters a group
of silent men carrying a suspiciously dripping bag and strange women who speak in stilted constructions and refer to one another as ‘Sisters’. Every woman in this film seems to be part of a convoluted plot to lead Malus to his appointment with the wicker man, and the film grows to a crescendo of distasteful violence against women, as Malus punches and karate-kicks his way through a selection of these ‘Sisters’ (to a cinematic swell in Angelo Badalamenti’s score) and tries to save his recently-acquired daughter. After some ludicrous, and hilarious, off-screen torture, punctuated by ridiculous expository dialogue, finally he’s strung up in the wicker man, eloquent to the last (‘You bitches! Killing me won’t bring your goddamned honey back!’), his young daughter lights the flame that will kill him, and the wicker man burns. As the screen fades to black, and the giggles subside, the unthinkable happens: a caption appears onscreen, reading ‘Six Months Later’, and the incredulous audience is treated to a coda in which another hapless police officer is seduced by an islander. We can only hope to be spared the inevitable sequel if LaBute’s film turns out to be the resounding critical and commercial failure it looks set to become.
The most obvious reason for such different receptions is that, even taken on its own terms, The Wicker Man is an absolute mess, whereas The Omen 666 sticks very close to the blueprint of a solid film (and manages the occasional jump of its own), with the result that it too delivers an average, if unimaginative, film. But there’s another reason for the overall indifference to a remake of The Omen and the overall indignation at a remake of The Wicker Man, and this lies in the nature of the original texts themselves. The 1976 version of The Omen was a slick Hollywood production that built on the success of The Exorcist and continued to pave the way for horror's emergence as a respectable genre with Oscar potential (finally endorsed in 1992 when Silence of the Lambs scored victories in the five major
Oscar categories); The Omen 666 replicates these credentials, with a bigger budget and an appropriately commercial director in John Moore (whose previous film was the 2004 remake of Flight of the Phoenix). On the other hand, The Wicker Man has come to be seen as a counter-cultural classic produced outside the studio system, and a key example of horror at its subversive best. The remake apparently comes equipped with independent credibility of its own in the shape of Neil LaBute, but this independent spirit has delivered a film that is staggeringly ham-fisted and derivative. The issue, then, is not that The Wicker Man dares to re-imagine its source material for a new generation, but that it delivers an end product that counteracts the subversive and counter-cultural ideals for which its original has come to stand. In the end, it is a disheartening prospect, but The Omen 666 – a safe remake of a solid film – is the lesser of two evils.
How did it all begin? Believe it or not, it all began in my house back in 1994. As a child growing up I adored the horror film. It was such a rush to be thrilled and put oneself in the skin of the victim for ninety minutes. It was such a rush that I knew one day I’d end up working within the horror genre and making horror films. Myself, my cousins and my friends would get together on numerous weekends watching ten to fifteen horror films starting on a Friday night right through to Sunday. It was so much fun that I decided I wanted to take it to the next level. My friend Derek O’Connor suggested that I should talk to Pete Walsh in the Irish Film Institute and create Ireland’s first and only horror film festival. So, with the help of my friend and festival co-director Michael Griffin, we got the wheels turning.
Ironically, Pete in the IFI was considering bringing over a festival in the U.K. called Phantasm (named after the film, I gather) but after speaking to him I convinced him that we didn’t need to do this: I could programme what started as a one-day event, and is now a four-day festival. My goal was to give an entire younger generation a chance to see a film that hadn’t been allowed on
something it’s like watching a child grow up and seeing how different it is with each passing year. It’s always a great pleasure to be greeted and thanked by festival-goers for doing it: that means more than anything and out of this I have made plenty of new friends personally and professionally. To say what the best year was, hmm? My own personal favourite was 2001. For the first time I had a great guest over, Brian Yuzna of Re-Animator and Society fame. It was such a hit with the audience and I was showing his new movie Faust: Love of the Damned. I also had what I felt was the best year in terms of programming. When would you get a year where every major horror director had a new film out? 2001 had John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, George A. Romero’s Bruiser, Dario Argento’s Sleepless, Jack Sholder’s Arachnid and the surprise film was The Others. It also had some great retrospectives: Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and a 70mm screening of John Carpenter’s The Thing. God, that was some year! Premiering my own produced feature film Dead Meat in 2003 was also a great buzz. In fact, I owe a lot to Brian Yuzna who I considered my mentor when producing my first film. He gave me a lot of great tips and advice that was all invaluable
the end of the screening when all hell breaks loose in the final reel, Ruggero turned to me, held his hand up and, referring to the violence, said: “It’s terrible!” Michael and I have said it before and will say it again – “It could only happen in Horrorthon”. True, but without those who attend every year it wouldn’t happen at all, and I thank you deeply for that!
HORRORTHON: TERROR IN THE AISLES (1998 to Present)
Blood For Dracula (Dir. Paul Morrissey)
Tartan Video (18) Out Now
Over thirty years after its original release, Blood For Dracula has been repackaged and is now available on DVD for the first time. The film is now visually clean and crisp, and we may appreciate the particular colour effects and set design. Paul Morrissey’s Blood For Dracula is the second instalment of his ‘Costume Trilogy’, comprising Flesh For Frankenstein (1973) and Beethoven’s Nephew (1985). However, there are some questions over directorial credits to Flesh for Frankenstein, and there is substantial evidence to suggest that Italian director, Antonio Margheriti, may have co-directed the film. While Flesh For Frankenstein (also starring Udo Kier and Joe Dalessandro) is deliberately melodramatic and grandiose, Blood For Dracula is intended to be a more subtle production: nevertheless, it spirals into a ludicrous spectacle. It is because of this comic and ghastly representation that the film is still held in high cult status, making its Dracula, Udo Kier, a star in underground horror cinema. The delight in viewing this new edition DVD is the inclusion of a commentary track by Udo Kier, Paul Morrissey and renowned academic Maurice Yacowar, whose expertise on Morrissey is included at critical moments. If I may make a suggestion, leave this commentary on if you have experienced the film before. It is more rewarding in retrospect, and Yacowar’s contribution in particular proves to be an invaluable source of both critical film theory and interesting anecdotes for any fan of the underground horror genre or of the ‘Warhol Factory’.
Morrissey’s film must be commended for its originality in plot; while the original narrative of Dracula (and a number of film adaptations) includes the story of the Count travelling from his homeland to seek new victims, Blood For Dracula humorously makes this necessity hinge on the Count’s need for virgin blood. With no virgins left in Transylvania, the Count decides to relocate to Italy, a good Catholic country, where he assumes he will have his pick. Facing potential starvation in his homeland, where this lack of available virgin blood has already condemned his sister to a certain death; it is at the suggestion of his wily servant Anton (Arno Juerging, who also plays Kier’s assistant in Morrissey’s Frankenstein), that Dracula heads to Italy in search
we realise the consequences of Dracula’s deviance from his ‘pure’ blood diet. While the aristocratic parents of these doomed young maidens seem oblivious to the vampire residing in their guestroom, Mario investigates the Count’s strange habits and his interest in the girls’ virginity. Upon discovering that Dracula is a vampire, Mario plans to eradicate him, as he is undoubtedly a competitor. In a Grand Guignol spectacle, Mario rapes the youngest daughter to ‘protect’ her from Dracula’s thirst and finally dismembers the Count limb from limb. This climactic ending highlights the overthrown power of the bourgeois past and the frailty of our Old World monsters in postmodern times and as the final shot closes, we discover what we had (nervously) suspected all along: Dracula is left to be a victim and it is Mario, the film’s Van Helsing figure, who has always been the true monster.
One must not expect this Dracula film to be a remake of the Hammer Horror template. The film lacks the stylisations of Hammer classics while it overtly (and ridiculously) sexualises every possible scene with Dallesandro and the women. While I <
