The Cameraman's Revenge

I’ve finished with the ICM Top 500 Horror list for now, and am going to spend the next few days ticking off some titles from the Jonathan Rosenbaum list. To ease us from one to the other, let’s begin with this fascinating bit of work… The Museum of Modern Art calls it “a delirious reflection on the codes and conventions of the horror film through the language of structural materialist cinema”, but I daresay they would call it that. In plainer terms, it’s a film shot during the making of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, which the opening credits oddly ascribe to Hammer, who would surely never have let Franco near them; and yet it’s not really a “making of”, or if it is, it’s one of the strangest examples of the form ever made. Directed by Pere Portabella, we do get some views of the behind-the-scenes stuff (I particularly liked the fan device that blows cobwebs onto things), but other scenes are of a less obvious nature. What’s actually going on in some of them? We see Franco’s camera crew filming certain scenes, but if that’s what they’re really doing then wouldn’t they have also got Portabella and his crew in the picture they were shooting? Are we looking at re-enactments of the scenes acted for Franco, rehearsal footage, even bits of Franco’s own film? The absence of speech (except at the very end) only makes things more ambiguous… But if you’re broadly familiar with the story of Dracula, it’s not hard to follow, and it never looks anything less than astounding thanks to Portabella’s decision to shoot in very high-contrast monochrome. It’s a decidedly abstract retelling of Dracula, and of Franco’s film, but a fascinating one. Alas, Portabella’s never let it be released on video or DVD (I scammed my copy from Youtube, no idea of its provenance but it’s remarkably good quality), but a restored print’s been doing the repertory rounds for a while, so maybe one day…

Needless to say, finding THIS recently was a surprise, to say the least; I was under the impression the UK DVD of the film released by Cornerstone was exclusive to HMV there, so it was interesting to find it on import here (not too unreasonably priced)… even more so cos the film remains locked in posthumous legal limbo (in this case it seems to be mostly on the late Harry Saltzman’s side), so technically it probably shouldn’t be available at all. From what I read, apart from the long-vanished Spanish DVD, French and Italian issues have also come and hastily gone, so maybe I did well to at least get my hands on this one in case it eventually does the same… Anyway, I bought it without, admittedly, having done any research into the quality (I mean, it’s not like I was expecting to actually own the bloody thing), and, well, that post facto research was not heartening, and yeah, aurally I didn’t find it as problematic as most reviews of the film claim it is (maybe I just don’t notice sync problems like others do?) but visually, eh. Non-anamorphic and interlaced dreadfully thanks to a clearly ho-hum NTSC>PAL conversion, too bright as well… how sad that seemingly no one can pull theirs heads out of their arses to give this the release it deserves. Cos the film itself is terrific; I know you read all the time that it’s one of Welles’ best films, one of the best Shakespeare adaptations ever, all that, and it’s true, this really is an amazing piece of filmmaking. Welles finds an emotional devastation in the new King Henry V’s rejection of his old carousing partner that I don’t think I ever got from actually reading the end of 2 Henry IV, and the whole Battle of Shrewsbury business (shot by none other than JESS FRANCO of all people) really is astounding. In short, a film that should never have been allowed to slip into the abyss it seems to be stuck in unless you can access the grey market…

I said after I saw the original [REC] last year that I was interested in seeing the sequel. How often do people say that? I know these days that sequels are par for the course in genre cinema, and I think we’ve come to accept their inevitability even if we piss and moan about them usually being needless. So it’s rare indeed to kind of welcome a sequel, to actually want to see the story continue… and how do Balaguero & Plaza do so? Well, frankly, by updating The Exorcist… This is a direct follow-on from the first film, set in and around the quarantined apartment block and shot in the same sort of Blair Witch shakycam fashion, albeit with a couple of twists; this time there are two groups wielding cameras, one a trio of kids who break into the building and the other a SWAT team assigned to escort a government man (who is not exactly what he seems) into the place. The latter have helmet-mounted cameras, all feeding to one man recording the debacle who can switch between his own camera and any of his comrades; so the action is still confined but the perspectives of it are somewhat wider. The film doesn’t really do anything the first one doesn’t do, but that’s OK cos it does what the first one did about as well as it did… however, the issue I have with the film is that, frankly, it felt like a film in a way I don’t think the first one did; it felt “performed”. And maybe the multiple camera thing helped add to that impression; it’s obviously a different feel to something being seen through a single camera. So maybe not quite as successful as the first film, and the prospect of another continuation of the story (yes, [REC] 3 is in the works) doesn’t grab me so much this time, though certainly it’s still fun, and it does kind of complete the action of the first film. Be interesting to see how number three carries it on…

If nothing else the title is both descriptive and entirely accurate: a man afflicted by lycanthropy needs a certain religious artifact to end his existence, but said artifact is currently holding down a centuries-old vampire. No prizes for guessing the hijinks that ensue… This wasn’t the first of Paul Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky movies, though apparently it was the most popular one out of that remarkably enduring series, but it was the first one I’ve seen… got a loan of it from a friend who advised me she’d got it for $2, so needless to say it wasn’t the apparently quite nice Anchor Bay edition we were dealing with; this was more like someone had taken a ho-hum 16mm print and transferred it to VHS at the dawn of that technology, which was then ripped by someone else to a computer file featuring weird compression and other artifacts (if this had been a 1970s Doctor Who episode you’d swear some of them were bad CSO; I don’t know how you explain them on film), and somehow this mess became a DVD master. Let’s not even talk about the sound…

This is a damn shame, cos buried somewhere beneath this technical fiasco is an actually interesting idea; wonder if Len Wiseman took any cues for Underworld from the werewolf/vampire thing going on here? And I just like the casualness of the whole thing, for want of a better word; Elvira goes into an old church (or something) and gets set upon by what looks like a leftover from Tombs of the Blind Dead (speaking of which, cf. the use of slow motion in the two films). It has nothing to do with the rest of the film, it’s just there. Marvellous. I gather most of Naschy’s films were made on budgets that Hammer would’ve found unfeasible and so the execution perhaps didn’t live up to the vision; that said, as murky as this was it’s given me an interest in checking out more of his oeuvre (not to mention finding a much better copy of this one).

Finally caught up with this acclaimed Hispanic horror on TV. Pleasingly, it did seem to survive most of the hype, though I’d hesitate to use the adjective “masterpiece”. I don’t think it does much that’s original apart from the idea of the biological cause for demonic possession (at least I don’t think I’ve seen that before), but what it does, it does effectively enough. The limited locations are used well, the shakycam allows for a few decent shocks, and, best of all, it’s over and done with in just 75 minutes; a lot of filmmakers could learn from that of efficiency. Barring a fairly gaping plot hole whereby how the tape of the events gets recovered goes unexplained, this is more like what I wish George Romero’s hugely disappointing Diary of the Dead had been like. Sequel’s out already, and I don’t often say this, but I’m interested in seeing it now.