Tag Archives: horror

Black Sunday (1960) Review

by in 60s, Black Sunday, italy, Mario Bava and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s the 1st of June and the second day of my celebration for Italy’s Festa Della Repubblica, and so the second color on the Italian flag, and what better way to celebrate than with a black and WHITE film, Black Sunday!
So here is one from the re watch pile…

Black Sunday aka La Maschera Del Demonio (1960)


Film: One can’t celebrate Italian cinema without the name Mario Bava coming up. The son of special effects artist, Eugenio, Bava was born to make movies. His seemingly natural eye for misé en shot and his ability to be trans-genre made him a formidable director, and more importantly cameraman (It is out of respect I say ‘cameraman’ rather than cinematographer as he himself preferred that term). His eye for setting a scene is unrivalled and every new act in a film is a visual revelation.

Truly, Bava was a cinematic artist.

This review was done on the Arrow bluray release from the U.K. and upon watching, the first thing you will notice is the opportunity to watch either Black Sunday or The Mask of Satan. Black Sunday is the American International Pictures version of the film, whereas The Mask of Satan is the Galatea Jolly Film version of the film. I watched The Mask of Satan several times on this collection, but never bothered with Black Sunday as I knew it was an edited version. For this review I did watch both.


 In Moldavia in 1630, a vampiric witch Asa (Barbara Steele) and her consort Javuto (Arturo Dominici)are in league with Satan and are put to death by the the chief inquisitor, who happens to be her brother, and the townspeople by hammering the mask of Satan, a spiked iron mask onto her head. Of course before she is put to death she vows external vengeance in her brother’s descendants… Like we ALL do when being put to death by a sibling. They attempt to burn her body but the elements stopp it, so instead she is interred in a windowed coffin, which constantly casts the shadow of a cross onto her face to keep her there.

200 years later in the 1800s, a young doctor, Andre Gorobec (John Richardson) and his learned elder, Professor Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) are on their way to a medical conference in Moscow when their horse and cart loses a wheel in the forest they are travelling through. The horseman fixes the wheel, but the two go exploring in a tomb close by.: the very tomb the witch was buried in!!

The horseman requires assistance is resetting the wheel, and so Gorobec goes to help, leaving the Professoralone, but he is attacked by a bat and accidentally smashes the godly protections placed around the tomb to keep the witch in her stead. As they leave the tomb they are greeted by a young woman, Katia (also played by Steele) a descendant who looks like the original witch, and her good looks enchant Gorobec and they are soon on their way, accidentally taking with them one of the contents of the tomb.


What they don’t realise is they have revitalised the witch, and very soon she will returned reap her revenge upon the ancestors of those who killed and entombed her, but can she be stopped?

The two versions of this film on this disc have slight variations. Just by looking at the time codes you will realise the American version has had 3 minutes of ‘questionable’ material removed from it for American audiences, including a shorter ‘mask impalement’ and branding, and changed elements such as Asa’s brother Javuto now being her servant. The dialogue has also been altered slightly when it was entirely redone in the states as AIP bosses Samual Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson decided the Italian translations to English were stilted. The American version also has a title card with a small explanation as to what was happening in Eastern Europe during these times.

The first thing one must notice is just how damned grisly this film is for 1960. I remember when I first watched this film I checked and rechecked the date it was made as the special effects are stunning, and quite brutal. I completely understand why the American’s excised so much from it as in the 60s, even cut, it still must have created quite an impact.

Bava’s affection for special effects obviously comes from his father, but his skill as a cameraman and his understanding of lighting a scene is definitely on show here. His obvious and possibly natural comprehension of artists using chiaroscuro, the use of contrasting dark and light for effect, is used here in such an effect that the depth of each scene makes it almost three dimensional, and the way a closing door or a slight shift of light can change the mood of a scene is amazing.

I especially like the touch of having the emblem of the vampires being that of a dragon, which lends itself nicely and was possibly a tribute to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the character, and the actual real Vlad the Impaler, being of the ‘Order of the Dragon’, a chivalric order formed during the crusades in 1408. I also wonder if Amando De Ossorio borrowed his silent, slow motion horses from this film for his Blind Dead series, which was used here to great effect.

So is this my favourite Bava film? Definitely not, but there is so much to like here: the atmosphere is a tangible and the performances melodramatic and a joy to behold.

Score: ***1/2

Format: This viewing was done on the UK’s Arrow film’s bluray release which has been masterfully restored. Depending on which version you watch, the film The Mask of Satan runs for approximately 86 minutes whereas Black Sunday runs for 83 minutes, due to the aforementioned slicing and dicing by AIP. The film is present in 1.66:1 with a Mono 2.0 audio, both of which look and sound just fine.

Score: *****

Extras: You want extras? Oh boy, do we have extras in this package!


Disc 1 features a commentary by Tim Lucas, an Introduction with Alan Jones (the English Italian horror expert one, not the Australian one), and Interview with Barbara Steele, a deleted scene, the international, US and Italian Trailer, a TV spot and Bava’a ‘first’ film I, Vampiri, which when click upon take you to a sub menu that also features it’s trailer and trailers for other films from Bava including The Mask of Satan, Hercules in the Haunted World, Erik the Conquerer, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Black Sabbath, The Whip and the Body, Blood and Black Lace, The Road to Fort Alamo, Planet of the Vampires, Knives of the Avenger, Kill, Baby…Kill, Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, Danger: Diabolik, Hatchet for The Honeymoon, Five Dolls for an August Moon, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack, Carnage (Bay of Blood), Baron Blood, Four Times That Night, Lisa and the Devil, Rabid Dogs and Shock.

I have to quickly insert a mini review of I Vampiri here as well. This is a beautifully shot film that tells a modern (well, modern for the late 50s) version of the legend of Lady Bathory. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad it came as an extra on this disc… Honestly, I would say I enjoyed this film MORE than Black Sunday!

Disc 2 is a DVD featuring every thing above, except for the film I Vampiri, and the trailers.

Disc 3 is a DVD featuring the film I Vampiri and the other extras listed under the sub menu for I Vampiri on disc 1.

So that’s just the discs, also in the package we have a booklet with articles relating to the films on this disc: Black Sunday by Matt Bailey, a Barbara Steele interview, I Vampiri by Alan Jones and Riccardo Freda on I Vampiri and Mario Bava. It’s a cool booklet that is quite informative.

Honestly I think the only thing this package is missing is another run of Black Sunday, but instead with the U.K.’s less distressing title of the 60s, Revenge of the Vampire!

Score: *****

WISIA: It’s a Bava film so at the forbidden Castle of J.R. it gets a regular re-spin, as does a lot of his films, especially Baron Blood… But not so much Lisa and the Devil. It’ll be pulled off the shelf a lot more now though that I’ve experienced I Vampiri!

Celebrate Friday the 13th with this Top 5

by in Friday the 13th, Slasher and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

FRIDAY THE 13TH TOP FIVE
Friday the 13th is like Christmas for horror fans… Actually that’s probably more likely to be Halloween, and calling it Easter for horror fans seems inappropriate, especially seeing as how technically Easter has a disturbing tale of a revenant in it…

…

OK, I’ve got it. Friday the 13th is like Mother’s or Father’s Day for horror fans, and if card companies were clever, there would be a series of Friday the 13th cards available for the spooky end of the human spectrum to give each other whenever that day turns up. The cards could say things like ‘To my spooky love on Friday the 13th’ or ‘Wishing you the best of luck on Black Friday’, and we could give each other lollie ladders to walk under and black cat cakes.


Anyway, I digress: there is no doubt that most horror fans will watch one of the Friday the 13th series of films on Friday the 13th and I thought to myself ‘rather than just watch a F13 film, why not share with the readers of the To Watch Pile what my Top 5 favourite Friday the 13th films are’, because no one EVER does top fives on the Internet.

Gosh, my capacity for originality is astounding… Almost of as high a standard as my sarcasm.

Now I’m not going to attempt to re-educate those who SHOULD have watched the entire Friday series of films with a giant series of plot synopses though I will quickly say this ‘Crystal Lake has a whole lot of horrible murders happen there, and they all revolve around the Voorhees family and the legend surrounding them and the murders they committed’: so here we go, the top five Friday the 13th films as told by J.R. of the To Watch Pile.

5. Friday the 13th The Final Chapter. Define the 80s in two people; l can: Crispin ‘George Mcfly’ Glover and Corey ‘Not Haim’ Feldman. The two of them are the Godfathers of 80s films, along with Anthony Michael Hall, and their presence here powers this film to the top five. Add hot skinny-dipping twins and one of the greatest dance sequences ever committed to film and you’ve got a winner.


Oh, I suppose I should mention the fact that Jason Voorhees is in this one too and he has some pretty sweet kills. It remained quite serious for most of the time, but the humour is incidental and feels like the sort of amusing stuff friends would do and say to each other.

4. Friday the 13th Part 3. Jason gets his signature hockey mask. I still well up when he first places it on his face. It’s akin to watching an angel get his wings. 

Some of the 3D stuff is silly when you watch it in 2D… That bloody yo-yo, for example… But any other crime committed can be ignored for that one simple thing.

3. Friday the 13th Part VI Jason Lives. I would have to say that this is one of the F13s I have watched the most because as a teen I had my own copy on VHS which was given to me by a closing video shop as a gift for being a faithful staff member and a solid customer. There is a lot of levity in this one and the smart-arsey-ness of 80s Brat Pack films, not to mention another Return of the Living Dead actor (more on that later). As an adult I probably can’t really name what it is that I like about this film other than nostalgia, but sometimes that’s enough, I suppose.


2. Friday the 13th (1980). There is a reason why these films have the longevity they do, and it all comes from this foundation. This movie is one of those perfect horror films, like Halloween or Psycho: there is always something happening and there is a bunch of nice victims who you care about when they are dispatched. All of the other Fridays had characters who may as well have had ‘stereotypical victim: please kill’ tattooed to their forehead, but this had well rounded people filling up the cast. The surprise reveal of the killer really makes the film. Any horror fan who doesn’t have this in his collection, doesn’t have a well curated horror film collection at all.

1. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Since the first time I saw this entry in the series it’s been my favourite, and this is for many reasons. I like how for the first time since the original there was a air of deceit about the identity of the killer (it wasn’t Jason remember, he ‘died’ in the last one) and my future affection for gialli possibly started here, except for the fact that the identity is hilariously telegraphed almost from the first time he is spotted. Also this film has two actors from my much loved Return of the Living Dead, has a hilarious hillbilly mother and son duo that crack me up every time I see them, a girl who does ‘the robot’ to Pseudo Echo (how very 80s) and easily the best boobs in the entire series attached to front of an actress whose surname is Voorhees! How can you best that? Add to that a general air of sleaziness and most funny, a pair of 50s styled greasers (?) who are so out of place that one thinks for a tiny minute that it’s some kind of obscure flashback. 


… And I guess I should label which one I think is the worst…

For me, the worst Friday the 13th is Jason Goes to Hell. I think when you have to change the entire M.O. of an antagonist, you are not just diminishing him, but taking away his power all together. This film, whilst innovating in its attempt to explain Jason’s regenerative powers, makes him a lesser bad guy. Yes, it does have Buck Rogers’ Erin Grey in it, and it really does attempt to do something different, but it gets a fail from me. At least it set up the premise for Freddy vs Jason.


So that’s it, my list. I hope you all have a great Friday the 13th. If you like, leave a comment about which is your favourite Friday and why!

Cabin Fever (2016)

by in 10s, Cabin Fever, Eli Roth, Travis Zariwny and tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

One from the to watch pile…
Cabin Fever (2016)


Film: OK, so I just want to start this review by pointing out what my opinion of remakes is: I have no problem with them at all. I don’t necessarily get angry or upset when a remake is announced, and I don’t think the remake diminishes the original in the slightest, if anything, it’s sequels that commit that crime more than remakes. Sure a lot have been terrible, but that reflects a remakes misinterpretation of the original’s intent more than anything else, and somethings they can even be entertaining.

My final word on remakes is without them, we wouldn’t have John Carpenter’s The Thing, Chuck Russell’s The Blob, De Toth’s House of Wax, Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors or Croenenberg’s The Fly!

Sure, I get 2005’s House of Wax and 2004’s Flight of the Phoenix are good example against remakes, but again, they don’t actually diminish the originals.

For some reason though, the space between an original film and its remake seems to be getting shorter, and I’m not talking about the j-horror to English versions either. In 2002, Eli Roth released his first film called Cabin Fever, and it was a gem. For some reason though, 13 years later, Roth decided that he would produce a remake of it… Why?

I imagine money, but that would be cynical, so I honestly don’t know. Seriously, why would someone who is one of us (a horror fan) who made it to Hollywood, managed to squeezed tributes to his favourite films in a film he made, based on a personal experience want to allow something he created to be remade when it was good the way it was?


This remake is directed by Travis Zariwny from a script by Randy Pearlstein, who realistically just dropped the original script by Eli Roth into a mixmaster and regurgitated it into what must have been thought of as a hard-hitting remake. Fede Alvarez did the same thing with his Evil Dead remake, but for me, that was a successful attempt at ‘nasty-ing’ up something that had a sense of humour, whereas this fails.

Anyway, Cabin Fever tells of five friends, Karen (Gage Golightly), Jeff (Matthew Daddario), Paul (Samuel Davis), Marcy (Nadine Crocker) and Bert (Dustin Ingram) who decide to go on a trip into the woods to stay in a beautiful lakeside cabin. One night, their fun is interrupted by a woodsman who is seemingly infected with a disease that, of course, quickly spreads to the group… But can they survive?

The answer in this case is, who cares?


The original had a sense of humour to it that it gone from this version and even though Roth’s comedy may be, somewhat sophomoric at time, it did at least give this film an identity that is absent from this. Speaking of losing identity, the three male leads are horrible photocopies of a type and don’t have any real characterisation of their own. At a push I’d suggest the two women in the film were the same, but at least they could be identified by ‘the brunette one’ or ‘the blond one’, which is really their only difference and makes them Easy to tell apart, well, until the blonde cop turns up, who thankfully has a scar which means she looks different from the other one.

Which brings me to another weird point: the cop has been changed from the goofy guy, to a really attractive blonde, but have given her the same dialogue, which is delivered slowly and with menacing music, so her intentions are cloudy. Does she just want to party with the kids, or is she suggesting that she has other intentions? 


There’s some terrible flaws in this film too, that the editors should have picked up on. The first sex scene, which is surprising hot initially, is reduced to being crappy once you notice that the guy has shorts on, which can be seen not once, but twice. Terrible, that sort of stuff takes me out of a film.

So why remake this film when it is so close to the original release? Who knows… But everyone: EVERYONE…. Crew, cast, viewer, we all wasted our time. If I am to shine any light onto it, it did have some nice gore, and the nipple-pierced nudity was a high point.

Score: **

Format: This Australian Bluray release of Cabin Fever runs at 1 hour and 38 minutes and is presented is a crystal clear 2.40:1 image with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack which also kicks arse. 

Score: *****

Extras: Not a damned thing… Not even scene selection. Nasty, lazy release. The angry-at-unnecessary-remakes-film-fan in me thinks that when you remake something, at the very least, you should have a small doco justifying or explaining why you think the film NEEDED a remake.


Score: 0

WISIA: I’ll probably just watch the original again.