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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Christopher Speeth

FEATURING: Janine Carazo, Jerome Dempsey, Daniel Dietrich, Lenny Baker, Hervé Villechaize

PLOT: Vena and her family come to work at a strange amusement park marked by an ever-growing number of disappearances, deaths, and unusual goings-on.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A collection of unsettling scenarios that make their low-budget DIY components into advantages, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood cares not for your fancy storytelling and logical progression of events. A consistent mood of unease and an off-kilter sensibility make this an underappreciated companion to other amateur horrors, both good and bad.

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973)

 

COMMENTS:  Biz Markie’s ode to loss and frustration, “Just a Friend,” was one of the biggest hits of 1989. Seemingly recorded with a mic and a Casio preset, Biz howled out his pain over the cheapest, tinniest piano loop. It was awful, but by gum everybody knew the damn song, and you couldn’t help but laugh and join in with the crowds screaming out “OH BABY YOU!!!” mid-chorus as Biz shredded his vocal cords in existential pain. It’s a legendary song despite its amateurishness, and possibly because of it.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. We have spoken before about the glories of the 1970s indie horror scene, a genre unto itself populated by low budgets, first-time directors and screenwriters who tend to become only-time directors and screenwriters, and a fervent hope that blood and bodies will do all the work. Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is a masterful example of the form, with major shortcomings in storytelling that perversely enhance the atmosphere of discomfort and dread, homemade effects that betray their homemade origins yet occasionally become transcendently original, and an incompetence that’s downright charming.

Speeth and screenwriter Werner Liepolt have a couple things working for them that lift Malatesta above the other amateur one-offs. One is its location, a working amusement park, which grounds the action in a tangible, believable milieu. The filmmakers had access to Philadelphia’s beloved old Willow Grove Park, at the time d/b/a “Six Gun Territory” and only a couple years away from being leveled and replaced with a mall. The picture also benefits from some unexpectedly decent acting. The performers are by no means brilliant, but they display a professionalism that is rare in this sort of film, managing to sell scenes that would otherwise be laughable. We only have the vaguest idea why the Norris family joins up with these carnies (revenge seems to be the primary goal), but Betsy Henn and Paul Hostetler are quite charming as the nervous Nellie and her heat-packin’ husband. Villechaize brings his particular brand of oddness, only a year before The Man With the Golden Gun. My favorite of these is Dempsey as the amoral impresario Mr. Blood, who is tasked with most of the exposition and delivers his lines with the sinister gentility of playing a maître d’. He remains confident even as he demonstrates a complete inability to operate a fire extinguisher. In his most delightful scene, he interrupts our heroine and the ratty tunnel-of-love operator by sliding up in a bumper car. Where did he come from? When he departs, where’s he gonna go in a bumper car? No matter how ridiculous things get, this kind of commitment helps sell it.

Sometimes the film hardly bothers with basics of storytelling, dispensing with voice or foley during tense scenes in favor of dramatically mismatched music. It’s actually an effective method; applying an eerie synthesized sting to a chase scene is as unsettling as any number of screams and crashes. Speeth has great confidence in his ability to let the images do the heavy lifting, and every now and then, he’s absolutely right. He attaches his camera to the walls of a rotating tunnel, adding a level of disorientation to an already head-scratching attraction. He places his heroine in the center of a giant tarp that actually takes on a sinister quality as she tries to escape. Perhaps his most effective visual is the room full of ghouls who have assembled to watch Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, equally as delighted to be at the movies as they are hungry for blood. Speeth must have recognized a good thing when he saw it, because he replicates the shot with an unconscious Vena in the foreground and the leering Mr. Blood sneaking up on her like Chaney on the projection screen. The director is unquestionably an amateur, but every now and then, a unique vision comes through.

I feel like the film’s ending speaks for the filmmakers, as the evil mastermind Malatesta celebrates another successful night of carnage by taking a spin on the park’s chair swing. As he blissfully takes in the ramshackle setting, cavalierly disregarding the likelihood that a haunted amusement park that kills its guests, employees, and investors is a park that’s going to have a hard time luring in more of them, he leans his head back in gentle bliss. A job well done, Malatesta. A job well done, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. You’ve got what we need.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In a world where everything looks, feels and sounds interchangeable, it’s a thrill to see something so completely removed from normality… as if Speeth was simply cherry-picking bits from popular horror and mixing them all together in a weird, psychedelic brew.” – David Flint, Desperate Living

(This movie was nominated for review by Parker. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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Malatesta's Carnival of Blood [Blu-Ray]

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEMROC (1973)

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    DIRECTED BY: Claude Faraldo

    FEATURING: , Béatrice Romand, Marilù Tolo

    PLOT: An unnamed worker rebels against social norms.

    Still from "Themroc" (1973)

    COMMENTS: The anarchic, sexually liberated atmosphere of the late 1960s and 1970s left a rich cinematic legacy. Many auteurs inspired by the era’s revolutionary ideologies produced subversive masterpieces, bold in every sense of the word, both formally and thematically. Themroc is a product of this environment, even if it is a bit dated and tame in comparison with wilder contemporaries like Sweet Movie (1974) or 120 Days in Sodom (1975).  But it is a decent attempt at 1970s-style taboo-breaking.

    The story follows a lonely, horny worker living with his sister and mother. He is alienated and repressed, a dormant beast. The film avoids actual dialogue: the few words spoken are unintelligible gibberish. The characters communicate non-linguistically or just physically, highlighting their animalistic nature.

    Our hero constantly coughs, with his coughing sometimes transforming into a roar. He is truly a lion in a cage. His mother shows similar bodily responses, hiccuping when stressed. A female neighbor obsessively sucks her thumb. Later on, touching and moaning will take the lead as the ultimate forms of non-verbal communication.

    As the plot develops, a trivial incident at work becomes the catalyst for the protagonist to decide to break free from social and moral conventions. Breaking his room’s outside walls, he transforms it into an alternative public-private space of free love, incest, cannibalism, and so on. It sounds extreme, but it develops like a schematic anti-capitalistic and anti-authoritarian parable, and the most shocking imagery is only implied. Any pretense of realism and in-depth political discourse gives way to naïve escapist fantasy, especially when our hero overcomes problems with law enforcement by employing an orangutan-like power and attitude.

    This isn’t an idolization of brute force, nor a revolution of the individual. The whole neighborhood is inspired by this man’s acts, and they establish a collective effort. The tale becomes a touching call for revolution and an ode to the communal spirit, even if it remains simplistic and without clear propositions.

    Themroc may be meaningful as an elliptical parable, but it isn’t always the transgressive radical statement it claims to be. A few edgy fun moments prove themselves pretty unmemorable in the long term.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “It’s an oddity to be sure, but it’s one that rewards curiosity through a rich narrative and complex ideas.”–Douglas Davidson, Elements of Madness (Blu-ray)

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    Themroc [Blu-ray]

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      APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SENSUELA (1973)

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      DIRECTED BY: Teuvo Tulio

      FEATURING: Marianne Mardi, Ossi Elstelä, Mauritz Åkerman, Ismo Saario

      PLOT: A young Sámi woman abandons her life of reindeer herding for the big city when she falls in love with a Nazi pilot/photographer.

      Still from Sensuela (1973)

      WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sensuela is a difficult film to describe. A remake of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio’s own melodrama Cross of Love (1946), which itself was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 short story “The Stationmaster,”  though neither film closely follows the text. In his updated version of a prodigal daughter’s journey, Tulio mashes together the modes of ethnographic documentary, commercial advertising, and softcore porn. All incongruously set to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the result is ultimately unclassifiable.

      COMMENTS: Did you know the Sámi geld reindeer by biting off their testicles? Neither did I, until I watched this movie. I don’t know if this is actually true in the real world, but in the world of Tulio it’s a fact, and one which proves shockingly relevant to Sensuela‘s loosely plotted narrative. Like and other low-budget outsider auteurs, Tulio clearly pursued his own cinematic vision, with relentless disregard for prevailing taste or convention.

      Sensuela opens during WWII with three fighter pilots in the midst of battle, but this isn’t war as seen in any other movie. Painted backdrops of snowy mountains provide the landscape and cartoonishly simple sets, barely recognizable, represent the plane cockpits. To the sound of gunfire, two of the pilots collapse on their instrument panels, but the third survives.

      Hans parachutes out of his damaged plane into the Arctic landscape below. Laila, a Sámi girl, crossing the tundra in her reindeer sled, discovers him and brings him back to her father’s yurt. While she nurses him back to health, they fall in love, but the war forces Hans to flee Finland once he recovers.

      In the first of many confusing transitions, the characters reunite after what must be about twenty years (though neither one has visibly aged). Hans whisks Laila away to Helsinki where he works as a photographer and she becomes his hottest model. The novelty of the relationship wears off when Laila refuses to swing with the ’60s. They break up, but she continues telling her father she and Hans intend to get married.

      What seems like a harmless white lie proves to be Laila’s undoing. After many trials and tribulations, she takes a job in a warehouse, falls in love again, and becomes engaged to one of her co-workers. Meanwhile, Laila’s father happens across her nude photographs and sets off for the city in a rage. After roughing up her roommate, he decides to go after Hans. The roommate warns Laila, who manages to reach Hans just before her father’s arrival.

      Happy to see Laila again, Hans, surprisingly, agrees to go along with the deception. They’ll tell her father they’re still planning to marry, thinking he’ll leave once they calm his indignation. Instead, dad insists on remaining in the city for the wedding.

      Laila and Hans decide to hold a fake marriage ceremony. They almost pull it off—until Laila’s actual fiancé crashes the “wedding” party and all hell breaks loose. In a classic over-the-top Tulio climax, emotions run hard and fast, and love turns to hate in the blink of an eye. Her fiancé renounces Laila, but Hans suffers the brunt of her father’s anger.

      Unfortunately, it’s not all sex, drugs, and castration. Sensuela is honestly a train wreck, but it’s difficult to look away, as one can’t help but wonder what randomness will happen next. Stock footage pads the already overlong 104 minute runtime with gratuitous scenes of carnival lights, saunas, and loudly chirping birds. Even more -esque moments appear, with conversations taking place over static close-ups of a coffee table.

      Tulio frames sex scenes from such awkward angles they detract from the sensuality implied by the title. Other scenes have such a contrived, stagey feel they can hardly be taken seriously. In a scene of Sámi watching a reindeer race, the crowd jumps and applauds in unison (especially unsettling because they also dress identically). The editing of the fight choreography has a strange, staccato rhythm, like the skips between comic book panels. This would work in an actual comic book adaptation, but in the context of Sensuela, it just adds to the film’s erratic quality.

      Some film scholars categorize Sensuela as camp, citing Tulio as a forerunner of , Pedro Almodovar, and even . Others stress the director’s distinct lack of humor and jouissance, which work against his camp aesthetics. Sensuela echoes the grim morality of Tulio’s earlier melodramas, despite the hippy orgies. Laila’s look always retains an out-of-place 1940s glamour. With her buttoned up trench coat, high-heels and red lips, she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set from a film noir. This speaks to the film’s deep weirdness: Sensuela exists in its own world, without any concern for linear time or standard genres.

      It’s interesting to note that Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a film that would help make “Swedish” a byword for sexploitation, was released in the same year. No such trend occurred in Finland. Sensuela would be Tulio’s last movie; after it bombed, the director retired into seclusion, rarely granting interviews about his life or forty-year career. Finnish cineastes continued to value realism and restraint, and Tulio’s films were always, very consciously, the exact opposite.

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “…best described as a psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland-like journey that has ample amounts of Brechtian melodrama. – Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets [Blu-ry]

      3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross

      3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross Of Love + Restless Blood

      • A trio of surreal melodramas from Finnish director Teuvo Tulio including CROSS OF LOVE, RESTLESS BLOOD and the notorious SENSUELA

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      Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? (1973)

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      La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?

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      DIRECTED BY: René Viénet

      FEATURING: Hung- Liu Chan, Ingrid Yin-Yin Hu, Jason Piao Pai

      PLOT: Alienated proletarians, trained in kung fu, fight against their bureaucratic oppressors.

      Poster for "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" (1973)

      COMMENTS: What if a typical kung fu flick was transformed through voiceover into a subversive and radical wanna-be manifesto? Such an anarchic romp could only come from France. But let’s take things from the beginning.

      Some definitions should be clarified. Dialectics is a product of the Situationist movement, a group of anti-capitalist artists and thinkers, known cinematically mostly through Guy Debord’s documentaries. Like a lot of spoofs—What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) and In Search of the Ultra-Sex (2016) come to mind—this movie takes preexisting material and subverts its meaning through clever use of voiceovers.  The Situationists call the exact technique used here “détournement”, and it could be better defined as a reappropriation in a new and ideologically subversive setting. It is a recontextualization of images so that new meanings, radically different than previous, are produced: a practice commonly used in  postmodernist art of the later half of the twentieth century until our own time.

      With the theoretical background of this movie specified, what is it really about? The plot revolves around a commune of proletarian martial artists defending themselves against alienation and their evil overlords. These overlords are not simply your typical evil Western capitalists, but we can trace references to the Soviet Union’s nomenklatura as well. They in fact represent of every possible state, even of those that hypocritically claim to defend the rights of the proletariat.

      A main character emerges from the crowd, a typical hero who becomes the focus of the narrative, a man who sets his noble ideals against the bad guys. What is atypical of the genre , though, is that while the choreography of fighting plays out, our characters indulge in deep conversations about class struggle, the abolition of masters, and Wilhem Reich‘s writing, among other subjects. Through voice-over an “essential”  bibliography is mentioned, too, which one of the most unexpected and weirdest elements of the movie.

      Don’t worry, though. This is not a heavy movie. Sexual jokes and self-aware irony prove its unwillingness to take itself too seriously. In fact, Dialectics isn’t much more than a funny gimmick. It surely has an appeal for fans of cult cinema, but it is not essential viewing for anyone interested in the Situationist movement. On the other hand, if you enjoy this kind of absurd humor—and the eccentric idea of a martial arts show about the class struggle—and would like to view something similar, albeit in a contemporary setting, try to find the French TV show “Machine” (2024) created by Thomas Bidegain and Fred Grivois.

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “An obnoxious and hilarious stunt from 1973…”–Eve Tushnet, Patheos (streaming)

      (This movie was suggested for review by Comrade Faustroll, who said “The filmmakers strike the right balance of meaning what they’re saying enough to be really weird, but joking enough to keep it interesting.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

      It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973)

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      AKA They Call Her One Eye; Hooker’s Revenge; The Swedish Vice-Girl

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      DIRECTED BY: Bo Arne Vibenius (as Alex Fridolinski)

      FEATURING: Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf, Solveig Andersson

      PLOT: A young woman rendered mute as the result of a traumatic sexual assault as a child is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and made into a prostitute; after further assaults and indignities, she sets about getting revenge.

      COMMENTS: We’re 40 minutes in to Thriller – A Cruel Picture before we finally see our heroine claim some power of her own. Up to this point, it has been a deeply disturbing watch, a rendering of  an accumulated and escalating litany of abuses endured by Frigga (sometimes called Madeleine, and always played by Christina Lindberg with the coolest, most emotionally detached demeanor imaginable). We’ve seen Frigga violated as a child, and deprived of her voice as a result of the trauma. We’ve listened to busybody locals talking trash about her. We’ve watched her get kidnapped, beaten, injected with drugs, and chased through the countryside. We’ve seen a parade of monsters treat her as their mindless personal toys. We’ve learned of her parents’ suicides. And we’ve seen the blood-soaked remnants of the closest thing Frigga might have to a friend. It’s a bleak existence, but we take some comfort in knowing that she’s going to be dishing out some serious payback. It feels like classic exploitation territory, a trailblazer for later tales of rape and revenge like Last House on the Left and Ms. 45. So when she steps off the bus and reveals herself in a kicky little red dress with matching leather eyepatch, it’s the first moment that affords some level of hope. She looks ready to deal out some vengeance. Here we go.

      But Thriller doesn’t really work that way. The story beats are there, but the rhythm is all off. In the hands of director and co-writer Vibenius (who previously worked as an AD for Ingmar Bergman), everything is very slow, very deliberate, very thorough. We’re trained to expect a certain cake-and-eat-it-too element to these movies; the female lead endures horrific abuse for our entertainment, but with the reassurance that she’ll turn the tables in a big way, providing a cathartic release and making us feel better about all that pain and misery. Thriller never lets go of that early discomfort. That moment with the red dress is actually the start of an act-long training sequence that will run for roughly 25 minutes. Yes, she learns karate and marksmanship, acquires guns and a car, picks up all the tools and she will need to take down those who have wronged her, but this is not a song-driven montage; we get it in toto. We see every moment of the karate lesson, with the instructor demonstrating falls and then Frigga repeating them. We see how she squirrels money away for her eventual escape, but we’re not spared any of the humiliation and degradation heaped upon her by her johns in order to get that precious cash. And when it comes time to saw off the end of a shotgun, we witness every single stroke of the hacksaw. There comes a point when it stops being a story, passes documentary, and becomes Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) →