Tag Archives: Horror

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CAPSULE: THE BLOODY LADY (1980)

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DIRECTED BY: Viktor Kubal

FEATURING: Voice of Jela Lukesová

PLOT: A young maiden transforms into a sadistic lady after a short affair leaves her heartbroken, and the myth of Erzsébet Báthory, the Blood Countess, is born.

Still from The Bloody Lady (1980)

COMMENTS: It starts innocently, with vivid and warm color palettes, visual gags, and a young princess dancing and playing with the forest animals, like something out of a Disney movie. But do not be fooled; this lady is Elizabeth Bathory, and things will suddenly take a turn for the grim, the weird, and the macabre.

When the young girl falls sick while in the forest, a peasant takes her under his protection and care. Something akin to love blossoms. But this love is doomed to remain unrequited, as the princess will have to return to the palace eventually, leaving behind as a memento… her heart.

This slightly grotesque gesture is not  only a symbol of her love and devotion towards the peasant, it underlines the grief their separation brings. With the gift she becomes figuratively and literally heartless. She stops caring about others—people or animals—and her hardened feelings transform her gradually into a cruel beast, finding comfort and joy only in tormenting others.

The drawings, till this point vibrantly recalling 60s and 70s psychedelia, grow darker with and an ominous night color palette emerges.  Like the mythical Snow Queen, our heroine develops cruel instincts as a way to cope with her frustrations. She turns into what we would call “evil”, although she is never just a caricature, retaining her humanity even in the movie’s most WTF moments.

She turns a servant into a pawn for her evil doings. His job will be to seduce young virgins and lure them inside the castle, where the countess awaits ready to turn them into a bloodbath for her own pleasure and self-care. More murders and mayhem follow, climaxing in a suggestive scene combining nudity, seduction, and sharp nipples.

Although dialogue is mostly absent, the soundscape is a major part of the world-building. Orchestral music, often melancholic and with a slow tempo,  introduces us to the darkest moments of our tale. Psalms, resembling satanic calls, accompany the grotesqueries. And everything culminates in a deeply lyrical ending.

This is not a sensationalist portrait of the legend of Bathory, but one that strives to find her humanity. Humans are revealed as deeply flawed creatures, but with a prospect of salvation sometimes—but not always. The story can be considered as a parable, an allegorical commentary on the perpetual fight of good vs evil inside our psyche. The Countess’ young servant, a dirty-looking dark-haired man, is a symbol of impure evil. The blond, angelic peasant Elizabeth fell in love with at the first place is a vessel of light, a messenger of bliss and pure good—even when he fails to make a difference.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Kubal’s] trademark style involving very simple lines, shapes, and colors was first put to use in commercials and child-friendly short subjects, but here he lends it to something much stranger and darker that feels like a Saturday morning cartoon splashed with nudity and blood.”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

The Bloody Lady [Blu-ray]

The Bloody Lady [Blu-ray]

  • A collection of feature and short films by the influential Slovak animator, Viktor Kubal.

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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE THING WITH FEATHERS (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Dylan Southern

FEATURING: , Sam Sprueli,

PLOT: After the loss of his wife, a widowed man comes in contact with a mysterious human-sized crow.

Still from The Thing with Feathers (2025)

COMMENTS: Dimly-lit interiors and catatonic acting clarify from the beginning that this will be a grim watch. And it is, as we follow an unnamed man, dealing with complex emotions after the passing of his wife, struggling with denial while trying to care for his two sons and to find comfort in his work as a comic artist. This is not a realistic tale, but an allegorical and elliptical one, with gothic flourishes as a human-sized crow gradually makes his appearance.

The narrative, based on Max Porter’s novel “Grief is the Thing with Feathers,” is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a different perspective. The first, focusing on Dad, remains close to typical horror conventions, with its slow-burning atmosphere culminating in a series of violent confrontations with the aforementioned crow. The intensity of one of those encounters is underlined by an excellent 360°  shot. The aggressive, grotesque bird mocks our hero for his self-pity, and evens becomes physically violent, while calling him generic names like Sad Dad and English Widower. At the same time jump cuts bring us back into reality to create an ambiguity regarding the nature of the crow, which could just as well be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination.

The next chapters focus on the bird, the kids’ perception of the events, and a new demon plaguing the family’s home, seemingly an enemy of the crow. Events are open to interpretation as different monsters come to symbolize different aspects of the mourning process, drawing, through allegory, a distinction  between grief, as a healthy way of dealing with loss, and total nihilistic despair.

We don’t have the most original and unique premise here. The central metaphor isn’t exactly something we haven’t seen before. However, thanks to a competent main performance by Benedict Cumberbach and an emphasis on dimly-lit interiors, the execution doesn’t completely disappoint. For fans of art-house psychological horror, in the vein of The Babadook  and similar movies distributed by A24, this is an okay recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the perfectly cast Cumberbatch effortlessly moves between fever dream, painful reality and apparent hallucination with every cell in his body present in the character… It’s a strangely beautiful, well paced and moving film…”–Annete Basile, Film Inc (contemporaneous)

The Thing With Feathers

The Thing With Feathers

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Capsules

CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

_________________________________________________

Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

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AKA My Crepitus

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

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(This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEEP DARK (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Medaglia

FEATURING: Sean McGrath, Anne Sorce, Denise Poirier

PLOT: An failed artist’s last stab at success is given an unexpected boost by a mysterious creature living inside a hole in his shabby studio apartment, but the hole’s motives are not entirely charitable, and the arrangement may come at an unexpectedly high cost.

Still from Deep Dark (2015)

COMMENTS: Among the unsung heroes of modern cinema are the home-video closed-caption writers. They must not only transcribe the dialogue but provide detailed descriptions of sound effects that offer meaningful context for the mood and the stakes of a scene. Surely some sort of award is owed to the unknown captioner for Deep Dark, who was tasked with delivering a full accounting of the first appearance of the hole in the wall who will change the life of our protagonist, and came through with this masterpiece: “[eerie sounds, vaguely wet, vaguely female]”.

It’s an auspicious introduction. We’re told that the Hole has inspired Pollock, Warhol, and Patrick Nagel, and she sparks a sea change in the artistic output of tiresome whiner Hermann by expelling pearlescent orbs that drive art patrons to ecstatic distraction. Her sultry, needy entreaties (delivered by Poirier, best known for voicing the title character in the “Æon Flux” animated series) leave him completely in her thrall, so much so that it is far from surprising that she eventually demands more of him, culminating in an encounter that reveals the Hole to be, shall we say, glorious. One of writer/director Medaglia’s craftier decisions (in his only feature to date) is to leave details about her true nature or origin completely unaddressed. The mystery only enhances her power over everyone who encounters her.

What we have here is a Little Shop of Horrors scenario, in which a monster provides a loser with the key to success, only to demand more and more in return—up to and including blood. Deep Dark is clean and efficient at delivering its story in a tight 80 minutes and taking advantage of a small cast and limited locations to convey its thrills. The film looks good, too, with a crisp editorial sensibility and evocative use of locations both publicly bright and privately grimy. Outside of Poirier’s very good voicework, the actors are definitively fine, turning in perfectly workmanlike performances that deliver the material without enhancing or undercutting it. Like Hermann’s art, though, Deep Dark is missing something. All the pieces are in place, professionally delivered, but it just doesn’t feel like there are any stakes. Events unfold almost entirely as expected, and even the movie’s most graphic moments are evocative, but not shocking or surprising.

Where the film falls the furthest from the goal line is in developing a voice or message uniquely its own. There’s the hint of satiric intent—Medaglia subtitles Hermann’s art and life with ironic descriptions, a tool that will be echoed a few years down the line in The Menu—but the targets are lame and the delivery is weak, especially since there’s a strong argument that we don’t see a single piece of good art in the film. Characters who could provide depth or further complications are assigned subplots that never fully take shape; a curious landlady is the most notable, but Sorce’s influential gallery owner is frustratingly inconsistent, by turns mercenary, snobbish, and weak-minded as needed. Medaglia has his straightforward horror tale, complete with a notably interesting monster. He just doesn’t have much more than that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Both deeply disturbing yet strangely alluring, the film offers audiences something inherently crazy and incredibly macabre… if like me you have a fondness of the strange and bizarre then Deep Dark is a film worth seeking out.” – Jon Dickinson, “Scream” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Patricia, who called it “hilariously disturbing” and added “gotta love the weirdness of it…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Deep Dark

Deep Dark

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