Bring Out the Perverts: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

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Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much is generally considered the first Giallo ever made. While it does contain many of the hallmarks of that genre, it is missing one important ingredient: color. It was filmed totally in black and white.

As if correcting his own mistake Bava’s next turn into the genre would be absolutely exploding with color. Blood and Black Lace is one of the most colorful films I’ve ever seen. The genre forevermore would make great use of bold color schemes.

Bava was an artist and cinematographer before he became a director and it certainly shows with this film. Every scene is a painting. Every shot is beautiful. Even the violent ones.

He constantly uses different colored spotlights (red, blue, green, etc.) and will shine them on a specific object in his scene so that in any given shot, multiple things will shine bright in specific colors. One set is filled with mannequins, all of which have their own colored lights, and billowing curtains, again with different colored lights shining on them. It gives the entire thing this beautiful, yet eerie look.

His use of shadow and light is entrancing. Everything truly is astonishing-looking.

It is the story that lets me down. A black-gloved, masked killer is murdering beautiful women at a modeling agency. A police detective tries to solve the case. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone has an opinion on who the real killer is. A secret diary, red herrings galore, and all sorts of backstabbings and skeletons are in the closet. That sounds good, but something about its execution just doesn’t do it for me.

I think the lack of a real protagonist, or at least someone to root for causes my interest to lag. We wander from character to character, learning their dark secrets and thus their potential to be the murderer without ever really caring for them.

But Giallo has never been a genre that was all that concerned with telling a good story. It is about style, and Blood and Black Lace has that in spades.

What’s amazing is how this film, the second-ever Giallo, has pretty much every hallmark of the genre. This is the gold standard by which every other Gialli came into existence.

The killer has a black trenchcoat, a black hat, and black gloves. Here he wears a faceless mask that obscures everything about him, even his gender. He prefers blades over guns. The motives are psychosexual (presumably), and the victims are beautiful women. The camera is all gaze, objectifying the women as they become victims. Implicating us as it thrills us. And as I say it has style for days.

If you are interested in Giallo this is where you begin.

I previously wrote a review of Blood and Black Lace for Cinema Sentries, you can read it here.

Bela Fleck: Shows by Date

xxxx.xx.xx – Ultimate Bruce Hornsby Torrent
xxxx.xx.xx – Jerry Garcia Comp, Vol. 5
xxxx.xx.xx – Mangochill’s Jerry Garcia Comp, Vol. 10
1985.06.22 – Telluride, CO – w/Doc Watson
1989.06.23 – Telluride, CO – w/Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
1989.06.24 – Telluride, CO – w/Bruce Hornsby
1990.08.05 – Berkeley, CA – w/Jerry Garcia Band
1991.08.25 – Squaw Valley, CA – w/Jerry Garcia & David Grisman
1992.04.24-26 – Wilkesboro, NC – Merlfest w/lots of other artists
1993.08.21 – Salt Lake City, UT – w/Phish
1996.04.24 – Kalamazoo, MI – w/Bruce Hornsby
1998.01.05 – Nashville, TN – w/Bruce Hornsby & Vince Gill
1998.05.10 – San Luis Obispo, CA
1999.04.11 – Seattle, WA – w/David Grisman
1999.05.01 – Wilkesboro, NC – w/Doc Watson
1999.05.12 – Hickory, NC – w/Tony Trishcka
1999.08.21 – Danbury, CT – w/Bruce Hornsby
1999.09.09 – Camp Mather, CA
2000.11.16 – Somerville, MA
2001.04.10 – San Luis Obispo, CA
2002.06.06 – Nashville, TN
2003.11.28 – San Francisco, CA
2005.06.18 – Telluride, CO
2010.06.18 – Telluride, CO – w/Lyle Lovett
2011.05.29 – Chillicoth, IL
2011.06.03 – Hunter, NY
2011.07.08 – Lowell, MA
2011.07.24 – Littleton, CO – w/Bruce Hornsby
2011.07.30 – Woodinville, IL – w/Bruce Hornsby
2011.08.03 – Apple VA, MN
2011.08.11 – Asheville, NC – w/Bruce Hornsby
2011.08.14 – Wilmington, NC
2011.09.02 – Binghampton, NY
2024.02.03 – Dublin, Ireland

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVIII

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Kino Lorber has been putting out these film noir sets for a few years now. I love them. I’ve watched most of them and reviewed more than a few. The thing with them is that they are collecting the b-sides of film noir. The best films in the genre get their own single releases. They get special editions. These films get packaged together in a set of three.

Naturally, not all of them are going to be good. In fact, I only liked one film in this entire set – Crashout (1955). But the other thing about these sets is that I love that they keep putting them out. I love that these mostly forgotten films are getting nice little Blu-ray releases even if they don’t get a lot of special features and come in sets of three.

You can read my full review of this set here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Longlegs (2024)

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A young F.B.I. agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and her partner go house-to-house door knocking. They are looking for someone. Someone dangerous. As soon as she gets out of the car she stares at one particular house. She knows it is the one. The killer is there.

She tells her partner. She suggests calling for backup. He scoffs. How could she know? She’s right. The killer is there. She has some light clairvoyance.

Right from the start Osgood Perkins lets us know this film is going to be a police procedural, and one that believes in the supernatural. It also lets us in on the fact that Nicolas Cage is gonna give one of his strongest performances.

In a brief flashback, the film opens with a little girl hearing a noise out on her isolated farmhouse. A man (Cage is some wild prosthetics and makeup) appears seemingly out of nowhere. Cage affects a high-pitched voice and behaves erratically. It is a bizarre, yet effective performance. More on that in a minute.

Harker is recruited by Agent William Carter (Blaire Underwood) to join his task force investigating a series of murder-suicides. In each case, the father kills his wife and children before offing himself. Each time a note is left behind with some strange symbols, written in an unknown person’s handwriting, and it is signed “Longlegs.”

Harker has an innate ability to decipher the symbols and follow clues that will lead her and Carter to Longlegs. But he seems to have a connection to her, too. He visits her house and leaves her a note.

I won’t spoil what happens next except to say I wasn’t always with it in terms of story and plot. I found the last twenty minutes to be a bit much. But the film creates a vibe that I really dug. It is full of dread and menace.

It is a film that makes you look in the background just to see what might be sneaking up on you. There is one scene where something happens in the back of the screen that I had to rewind just to see how they did it.

And that Cage performance is one for the books. He’s an actor that can often go way over the top and this is crazy even for him. I’m not sure I actually loved it but I admire it just the same.

Actually, the entire film is a bit like that. I did not love it, but I dig that this type of film is still being made. Filmmakers are willing to take risks and do something a little different.

Bring Out the Perverts: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

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Dario Argento’s debut film was not the first Giallo ever made (Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much usually gets that honor, followed by another Bava film Blood and Black Lace from 1964 – both of which I’ll be writing about later). Nor did it create any of the hallmarks usually associated with the genre (black-gloved killers, bold use of color and camera angles, psycho-sexual motives, etc). I wouldn’t even say he perfected it (at least not with this film). Still, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage was exceedingly successful, helping to popularize the genre and influencing a decade’s worth of Italian horror films.

It is a bit like how John Carpenter’s Halloween didn’t invent the slasher (a genre greatly influenced by the Giallo) but it popularized it to the degree that without it 1980s horror would look extraordinarily different.

The thing to remember about Giallo is that they are all essentially murder mysteries. Someone is killed (usually female, usually graphically), and someone else (usually not a cop) tries to solve the crime. They fall into the horror category because the violence is often stylized, brutal, and blood-soaked, and the killer often pops out of nowhere leading to jump scares. But at their heart, they are no different from other crime stories.

The genre in general, and Argento in specific never seem to care that much about the details of the crime or its solution. If, upon examination, some part of the story doesn’t make logical sense, that’s okay. What matters is the style and the execution (of the story, not the victims, although the kills are an important part of the genre.)

So it is with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some of the plot points are a little goofy and the final solution is a bit ham-fisted, but I never care no matter how many times I watch it.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer vacationing in Rome. While walking home one evening he sees what appears to be a woman attacked by a man wearing a black trench coat, black gloves, and a black fedora. The woman is stabbed and the man runs away through a back door.

Sam tries to help but finds himself stuck between two sliding doors. He stands there helpless, watching this woman bleed out. Eventually, he manages to flag down a passerby who calls the police. The woman lives.

The police think the assailant has also killed three other women in the city within the last few weeks. Sam is haunted by what he saw. He thinks about that scene over and over again. He can’t even make love to his girlfriend without thinking about it. He’s convinced he missed some vital detail. Perhaps he saw the man’s face and can’t remember it. Or maybe there is some other clue he’s not seeing.

The film keeps flashing back to that moment as well. We see the attack from slightly different angles. In slow motion. It zooms in. As an audience, we examine the scene, looking for some vital clue. All cinema is voyeurism, but Argento makes it explicit. We are a part of this movie.

In another scene, the killer will look at his potential victim. He’ll snap photographs of her. The movie camera will look through the photographer’s lens. Voyeurism upon voyeurism.

The film opens with the killer in his black coat, donning his black gloves typing at a typewriter. Anecdotally I know that it was Dario Argento himself wearing those gloves, being seen creating words on a typewriter. In this moment the creator of the film portrays the killer creating something. Creation is art and art is violence.

Sam begins his own investigation into the crime. He visits an antique shop where one of the victims worked. The last thing she sold was a strange painting of a girl getting stabbed in the snow. More art. More violence. He visits the artist and finds that his painting is based on a real incident that happened several years before.

Meanwhile, the killer makes a few attempts on Sam’s life. In one stunning scene, he’ll attack his girlfriend in her apartment. The killer makes threatening phone calls. All the while Sam and the police get closer to him.

The ending is a bit of a letdown. It reminded me a little of Pscyho which is also a fantastic film right up until the end.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage isn’t my favorite Giallo, it isn’t even my favorite Argento film but it is a stunning debut and helped crystalize what the genre was about, and certainly influenced nearly every Giallo that came after.

I previously reviewed this film for Cinema Sentries.

Bring Out The Perverts: Giallo On The Criterion Channel

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Criterion was one of the first boutique physical media companies. They started making Laserdiscs as far back as 1984 and then eventually moved to DVDs, Blu-rays, and most recently 4K UHD. They specialize in arthouse, foreign, and independent movies. Basically, they are the film snobs’ religion.

But that isn’t really fair. While they do release films by non-American, art-house directors like Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Federico Fellini and independent film darlings like Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson, they also have boxed sets starring Bruce Lee and Godzilla.

The Criterion Channel does an even better job at this. Sure, you can watch the entire filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but they also regularly add in all sorts of obscure, goofy, and cult films like The Atomic Submarine, Atragon (about a giant sea snake that decides humans have become technologically advanced and attacks), Baba Yaga (based on a series of S&M friendly comics), and The Canyons (starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen).

Right now they are featuring thirteen Giallos. Fans of this site know I’m a huge fan of that stylish Italian horror genre so this is like catnip to me.

Even though I’ve previously watched all of the films, own most of them on DVD, and have even reviewed quite a few of them before, I thought it would be fun to watch them on the Criterion Channel and do a little write-up on each one.

Now that the music has moved to a separate site, I keep wanting to find ways to add value to this site. Something like this seems exactly perfect.

The name of this series, by the way, comes from Dario Argento’s debut film The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. A cop in that film has put together a lineup of crooks who might be the murderers of several beautiful women. He yells this when bringing them out. I thought it was a fun title for this series.

The films are as follows:

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Death Walks at Midnight (1972)
Deep Red (1975)
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Tenebrae (1982)
In the Folds of the Flesh (1970)
Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Torso (1973)
What Have They Done To Your Daughters (1974)
Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)
All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
The Evil Eye (1963)

Usually, Criterion presents their collections in chronological order, but lately, they’ve used some other criteria. I presume someone has ordered them in a way that makes for interesting viewing. I’ve decided to follow their order.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

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Apocalypse Now is one of, if not the greatest war movies ever made. I can’t remember when I first watched it. I was probably in high school or maybe college. I do remember watching it again off an old VHS tape. I had taped it off TCM or HBO or some such cable channel.

It is weird to think about that now when streaming video is so prevalent. When you can watch nearly anything you want at any time you want. But back then you watched whatever TV wanted you to watch when they wanted you to watch it. You could record live TV and watch the program later, but that wasn’t the norm. People like me used to collect VHS tapes and record movies. I developed a pretty good library that way.

Whenever there wasn’t anything interesting on television I’d pull out a VHS tape and watch a movie. It took a long time to build a collection back then. I think I started collecting tapes in high school but didn’t get serious about it until college. With a small collection, I found myself watching a lot of the same movies over and over again. My favorite movies I’d watch three or four times a year. As my collection grew those viewings became a little more spaced out.

I have this vague memory of putting on Apocalypse Now one Saturday afternoon. It was an old tape and not that great of quality. I always thought it was a great film, but I seldom watched it. I’d say I’d only seen it two, maybe three times before this weekend. It is long, and meditative so I probably never felt in the mood.

In 2001 Coppola re-edited the film, adding some 49 minutes to its already long run-time. He called this version Redux. That’s what I watched this weekend.

What I found striking is how easily I was able to instinctively know what new scenes were added in. It wasn’t that the quality of those scenes was bad. There aren’t any visual clues that those moments were new. Sometimes when an old scene is added to a movie you can tell because the quality of the image is bad. But not here. It all looks amazing.

I just knew. Intuitively. Even though I hadn’t seen the film in two decades I somehow understood I hadn’t seen those moments before. This film is just part of my cinematic knowledge. It helps that nearly every scene in the movie is utterly iconic. Even if you’ve never watched the film, you probably know about large chunks of it.

There are two major scenes added in – an additional one with the Playboy Bunnies and another long one on a French plantation. In my opinion neither really adds that much to the movie. Both of them slow things down, disturbing the flow of the film. The French plantation scene is interesting, the things they discuss are worth watching, but again it slows things down just as things are heating up.

The scene with the Playmates is not particularly interesting at all. Apparently, Coppola wasn’t originally able to shoot all of that scene that he wanted due to bad weather, but he was able to edit enough of it together to put it in this recut.

I’m sure there are small moments added to already existing scenes that I didn’t notice were new, but I find it fascinating that I automatically knew those long scenes were new to me.

Coppola had originally wanted to adapt Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, into a Vietnam parable as far back as 1967. He hired John Milius to write a script and wanted George Lucas of all people to direct. But no studio was willing to fund a Vietnam movie while the war was still raging and the movie was scrapped.

Coppola then made The Godfather and The Godfather II both of which were huge critical and financial successes. This offered him the clout and money to make his Vietnam movie.

It was a famously troubled shoot. Coppola wound up putting most of his own money into the film. The filming shooting schedule ballooned from several weeks to well over 200 days. Actor Harvey Keitel, who was set to play the lead role, Captain Willard, was fired after the first week of shooting. The man who replaced him, Martin Sheen, had a heart attack in the middle of making the film and nearly died. Storms destroyed sets. The Philippines government, with whom Coppola had made a deal with the overuse of some helicopters were constantly interfering. And Marlon Brando, who was paid 3 Million dollars for three weeks worth of work showed up overweight and unprepared.

Eleanor Coppola shot documentary footage through the entire process which was later turned into the film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. I watched that this weekend as well. It isn’t as great as I was hoping. The main problem is that I’ve heard most of the stories before so it doesn’t present anything new. It is fascinating to see all of the behind-the-scenes footage.

Despite all those troubles Apocalypse Now still stands as a towering achievement. I’ve never been a soldier. I’ve never gone to war. But if anything is capable of showing us the truth behind the line “War is Hell” Apocalypse Now is it.

I realize I’ve just written some 900 words on a movie and said nary a word about the actual plot.

The plot involves Captain Captain Williard who is tasked with sneaking into Cambodia to find Colonel Kurtz (Brando) a well-respected and decorated officer who has gone completely insane, and terminate him with “extreme prejudice.”

He takes several other soldiers on a small boat up the Nùng River through Vietnam into Cambodia and the heart of darkness. Along the way, he runs into a wild variety of people. This includes a helicopter assault unit led by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who blasts “Ride of the Valkyries” through loudspeakers when he assaults a village, goes surfing even when the enemy is still attacking, and just loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

There are a couple of outposts with no commanding officer. The remaining soldiers keep on fighting, though haphazardly. One group continues to rebuild a bridge even though it is destroyed every other day. Playmates entertain a group of soldiers and are almost immediately overrun and mawed by the men, causing them to flee by helicopter. They are attacked by a tiger, children carrying hand grenades, and natives armed with nothing but spears and arrows.

And then they arrive at Kurtz compound. It is literally littered with the bodies of his enemies. He has created an army out of local soldiers, natives, and his own company, all of whom consider him to be a god. Dennis Hopper plays a spaced-out photojournalist who decides Willard should be the man to explain the majesty of who Kurtz has become.

Willard’s missing is to kill Kurtz because he’s become insane, but what he comes to realize, is that this war has made everyone stark raving mad.

All of this is put together by an amazing cast, top-tier directing by Coppola, and award-winning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. Though the film is full of incredible action it is meditative, philosophical and one of the most beautiful films of all time.