THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) - a giant among disaster movies

THE TOWERING INFERNO
(1974, USA)

During my Earthquake review, I hinted that The Towering Inferno was the mother of all disaster movies, certainly in the seventies cycle. It was exciting to see this in the cinema in 1975 (the UK got most films about six months later than the US), and it still stands up very well today - not something you can say of all Irwin Allen's movie productions. The non-CGI stuntwork and big-name cast is hard to beat. I’d finally got it on anamorphic widescreen DVD earlier this year, and Paul Newman's recent passing prompted me to finally watch it.

Most disaster movies can only be enjoyed with more suspension of disbelief than usual – how often do ocean liners capsize, how often do bees attack? But skyscraper fires are all too plausible – though I admit that at the time, I thought it was another over-the-top impossible Hollywood fantasy. Watching it now, it’s hard not to think of 9/11. When the World Trade Center was on fire, I was naively expecting all the rescue attempts that I’d seen in The Towering Inferno to be rolled out. I wondered why the nearby helicopter rides weren’t airlifting people off the roof. It’s beyond ironic that the filmmakers had the newly-built Twin Towers in mind when making The Towering Inferno. The film was intended as entertainment, but also acted as a vivid reminder of the dangers on the inadequacy of tall building fire regulations and building standards.


Although it now reminds me of the tragic end of the Twin Towers, the film rises to this retrospective challenge and still holds up today, showing the realities of big fires, and depicting the fire department’s heroism. Admittedly, there are a few too many explosions to pump up the visual excitement, but for Irwin Allen this is restrained. From the promotional films (available on the second disc of the special edition) and the garish gory pre-production art of various overly inventive death scenes, one can only presume that other producers and saner heads managed to tone down the bodycount in favour of good taste.

When starting work on the movie, one of those periodic Hollywood coincidences cropped up - two film studios had the same idea at the same time. In fact, two studios had bought books about skyscraper fires, The Glass Inferno and The Tower. With the WTC newly up, this was not an uncommon worry in America, or even worldwide at the time. The studios, for once, combined efforts and scripts to make one huge movie. One wonders why they haven’t done it since - with the various Robin Hood, Christopher Columbus, meteor’s hitting Earth, head-to-head box office clashes.

Inferno is the best of the disaster movies, with the great cast, grand scale, and a tight story delivering continuing logical peril, and a quite terrifying situation. Faulty wiring sabotages the opening ceremony of the tallest skyscraper in the world. As the guests celebrate in a party at the top of the tower, little do they realise that a fire halfway up the building is closing in on them. As the fire department works slowly up the building, various risky rescue methods are needed to try and get everyone out – including the architect, the Mayor. With so many characters, the story takes a while to tell, but the time flies by. In the cinema, this even had a half-time intermission.


It’s a very special cast, with the late Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden all expecting top billing. Faye Dunaway (The Eyes of Laura Mars, Network, Bonnie and Clyde) adds frosty sex appeal and additional suspense as she tries not to pop out of her evening dress. Wrinkly but still perky, dancer Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones (A Portrait of Jennie) are the token oldies. Richard Chamberlain (Dr Kildare, The Three Musketeers), Robert Wagner (The Pink Panther) and Robert Vaughn (The Man From UNCLE) are the younger things. O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One) plays the head of security.

McQueen chose the fire chief role thinking it was the best part, but he spends all his time dashing around, ridiculously doing all the toughest rescues himself, reminiscent of T.J. Hooker ignoring all his younger staff. I remember his (very brief) swearing in the film was new to family certificated films back then. Paul Newman gets far more acting time and comes off as a more real and likeable character.


The fire-fighting scenes look genuinely dangerous, setting a high standard of spectacle and stuntwork unequalled until Backdraft came along in 1991. The superb 100-foot high model looks all the more spectacular for largely being shot at night, as does the back-projection and compositing work. Even the model helicopters smoothly intercut with the real thing. The gigantic and fully-functional sets put the money up on the screen. The streets of San Francisco take a pounding from having dozens of fire tenders speeding to the rescue.

British director John Guillerman directed the non-action sequences – getting sobering and dramatic performances out of a great cast. This is one disaster movie that doesn't feel padded out with melodrama. The film's success must have lead to Guillerman being invited to make another event movie - the remake of King Kong (1976).


There's an early pre-Jaws score from John Williams, illustrating how much of his early career was with Irwin Allen - from the theme tunes for TV shows like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants, and into the big time movies with this and The Poseidon Adventure, all produced by Allen. The album was my first of many Williams soundtracks, though naturally it was on vinyl. The score was expanded and released on CD back in 2001, but is out of print now.

Last year, we took time to visit the Bank of America building in San Francisco, used as the main shooting location in the film, as the entrance plaza to 'The Glass Tower'. Unfortunately, nowadays the public aren't allowed inside. However, the suspenseful glass elevator scene was inspired by the wall-hugging elevators at the nearby Hyatt Regency. The spectacular hotel lobby, and its elevators, briefly appear in the film and are well worth a visit. It also served as a pivotal location in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.

I watched The Towering Inferno on the region 1 DVD special edition (pictured at the top), which includes a second disc full of original promotional featurettes and a very interesting gossipy TV special about the making of the film and the on set clash of personalities of the mega-cast.


I'll also mention the DVD of The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen as an excellent documentary career overview of all his iconic films and TV shows, full of rare footage and insightful interviews. But "Danger, danger", it might make you buy a lot of DVD boxsets...

There's more about Irwin Allen here, and a huge marvellous site dedicated to The Towering Inferno here.

KING KONG (1976) - monstrous disaster movie

KING KONG
(1976, USA)

Sitting on a shelf of DVDs, or lost in a list of downloads, movie's are completely stripped of the advertising campaigns that launched them, no matter how massive the original hoopla. This King Kong was one of the biggest films of the year, with pages of newspaper and magazine coverage heralding its arrival. An early 'event movie', hoping to follow up on the Jaws phenomenon of the previous year, combining an animal-on-the-rampage with a disaster movie.

This 1976 retelling is widely regarded as inferior to the 1933 original, and its special effects and lack of ambition pale against Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. But, as noted here on the Classic Horror Forum, it was nevertheless an influence on Jackson's version. I have a soft spot for this very seventies blockbuster, not that I don't regard Kongs 1933 and 2005 more highly, but I’ll also watch this one just as often.

Flashing back to the 1970's, I had yet to see the original 1930s King Kong. In magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland it looked like the best monster movie ever, full of dinosaurs and city-stomping. I was fascinated by dinosaurs and stop-motion animation, watching every Ray Harryhausen movie that I could. Ray had trained with King Kong’s special effects creator Willis O’Brien, and his movies forwarded the spirit of Kong’s adventure.

But I must have missed it on TV in the UK (until the early 1980s), and home video didn't exist yet. So the closest I could get was a comic book version of the story, a novelisation, and reading through the well-illustrated book, 'The Making of King Kong' by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner.

That's why the first Kong I got to see was the Dino De Laurentiis’ remake in 1977, when it reached the UK. The publicity was huge, concentrating on the full-scale Kong 'robot' that had been built, designed by Carlo Rambaldi (halfway between doing gory effects on Italian horror movies, and building E.T. for Spielberg). The wall-to-wall robot stories even made critics and audiences believe that the it performed the whole film! The publicity toned down the involvement of young FX make-up specialist Rick Baker, who worked with Rambaldi on the cable-controlled (an early version of animatronics) mask for the ape suit that Baker wore. He performed the bulk of Kong's shots throughout the film. In later films, he went on to perfect his 'ape suits' to uncanny effect, like in Gorillas in the Mist, as well as designing the shocking transformation FX in American Werewolf in London, The Thing and more recently Hellboy, among many other classic creations.

Storywise, King Kong '76 improves on rival versions with a story that launches straight away with the ship heading off for Skull Island, this time in search of oil, a rare and expensive commodity in that inflation-ridden decade. Hippyish animal-lover Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges looking like a younger version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski) stows away onboard, forewarned that a big ape may also be on the island. Along the way, they rescue shipwrecked, scantily-clad Dwan, (Jessica Lange in her first screen role).



All the action is handsomely mounted, using real oil tankers and ships, and a bewilderingly large full-scale fogbank that hangs around the island. A spectacular Hawaiian location is used for the beach landing, and then the explorers encounter the immense wall that divides the island. That's in fact a gigantic full-scale outdoor ‘set’ - there’s no doubting there’s a lot of money on the screen and it’s looking good, until Kong turns up.

Compare and contrast - Rick Baker behind the mask...

As Dwan gets kidnapped and given to Kong. I realised that Kong wasn’t a giant robot at all, but a man in a suit composited into the live-action using the variable blue-screen optical process, which rarely blends all the elements together. All was not lost, but such an uncomplicated effect wasn't convincing. What saves this depiction of Kong are the close-ups of his face. Seeing Baker's real eyes behind the mask brings this Kong very much to life. And the amount of expressiveness in the mask is still very impressive.

The actual robot is only glimpsed head to foot in a couple of scenes, where it is almost completely static. But closer scenes successfully use the full-scale foot and hand, much like Jurassic Park, and it’s full-scale T Rex hydraulics. A huge gorilla arm and hand swinging through a set are perfectly convincing. No CGI, no dodgy compositing, just large-scale engineering and stuntwork.

... and the face of the full-size robot

Hollywood’s last resort in special effects is to use a man in a suit, and they haven’t put the years of expertise that the Japanese had built up. There’s simply not enough detail in the modelwork in the Kong suit scenes. While contemporary critics would scoff at the Godzilla films, the producers could have learned a lot from the expert use of slow-motion to increase the scale, low-angle camerawork could also have helped sell the idea of suited Kong. The central action scenes, such as the log bridge and Kong’s lair are both disappointingly fakey-looking sets. Compared to the expense of building the gigantic wall, why did they skimp on the ape scenes?

To the credit of the cast, they try and play it straight, Jeff Bridges certainly doing his best. Jessica Lange seemed a little phased thoughout, or was that her character? Back then, she convinced me that she was a bubble-headed blonde and I’d never see her act in anything ever again. Of course, she went on to garner far better parts, wide acclaim and two Oscars! Charles Grodin (Midnight Run) is believable as the nasty expedition leader, with the always watchable Rene Auberjonois (Deep Space Nine, Boston Legal) as his assistant.

There’s a chance to hear Jack O'Halloran’s rich voice – for Superman 2 he played Non, the mute super-criminal sidekick to General Zod. Rather riskily, John Agar appears in a bit part as the Mayor - casting the star of so many low-budget, frankly terrible monster movies surely begs us to draw comparisons, though here the budget is clearly higher than The Brain of Planet Arous.

The climax is both sad and surreal. The twin towers of the then recently erected World Trade Centre remind Kong of his mountain lair. As he climbs up it, and the Army congregates in the plaza. It’s hard to concentrate on the action without reflecting how dramatically the location has changed. Manhattan was used extensively for many movies during the 1970s, and the WTC was one of the city’s most identifiable and spectacular settings. By the time Peter Jackson's film was released, the Empire State Building was once again the tallest building in the city.



Throughout the film, some special effects work, some don’t. But it tells the story, and the large scale of the film still entertains. It’s sort of dated, seventies wise, but this adds to the fun. Though I’m now very aware that this version lacks a huge dollop of what the 1933 and 2005 movies have - style. Thirties fashion, architecture and design make the setting classy and atmospheric.

It’s largely a retelling of the original story, but the filmmakers have trouble keeping a straight face in making a monster movie, particularly when it comes to the dialogue. Scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr, midway between the tongue-in-cheek 1966 TV Batman, and the 1980 comedy Flash Gordon, adds too many in-jokes, defusing the drama.



John Barry’s soundtrack, one of my favourites of his, takes the entire film up several notches, in atmosphere and anticipation. If only the visuals matched the grandeur of his music. Listening to the score, which has a few choice sound effects mixed in, always encourages me to imagine a better film.

King Kong '76 isn't perfect. I've pointed out most of the huge shaggy flaws. It's not the epic it aspired to be, but is still enjoyable for the cast, the scale and the locations. And compared to the 1986 sequel, King Kong Lives, also directed by John Guillerman (The Towering Inferno), it looks like a classic.

Oodles more Kong here, on KongisKing.net!

Still not on DVD - THE HAND OF NIGHT (1966) - our Beast in Morocco

(Updated 1st August 2013...)

Trawling through old VHS tapes, I'm reminded of good films that still aren't on DVD. I can only guess why this has dropped out of circulation. There may be confusion over copyright or the cost of restoration may be too great for the perceived demand.

But it's a movie I'd love to see get a new lease of life...

THE HAND OF NIGHT

(1966, UK, aka THE BEAST OF MOROCCO)

I first saw this at the cinema on what was presumably a re-release, around 1968. It made quite an impression on me as a pre-teen, because of the upfront use of skulls and bloodied bats in the bizarrely literal title sequence, and for the disintegration scene in the climax, realised in a series of close-up, special FX make-ups. I always caught it when it showed again on TV, and wasn't disappointed by repeated viewings. The opening nightmare scene, the death-obsessed characters and the beautiful soundtrack by Joan Shakespeare, all continue to fascinate.

Architect Paul Carver (William Sylvester) believes he is a 'harbinger of death', as bad luck dogs his every move. After the deaths of his wife and children, he takes a business trip to Morocco where he meets an archaeologist (Edward Underdown) excavating an ancient tomb. Inside, a newly unearthed Princess of Darkness takes advantage of Carver's fatalistic mood to try and lure him into the land of night.

Not even the pretty young Chantel (Diane Clare) can cheer him out of depression, not that she feels sorry for him. When she hears that Carver is newly bereaved, there are no quiet sympathetic words. Instead, she immediately lays into him for being morbid! I was shocked by her reaction, but don't think that it's an unrealistic approach. She's passionate and, well, French. Even though we, or Chantel, haven't established just how recently the fatal accident was that wiped out his family, she's very angry at him for giving up on life.

He's dwelling on the past, blaming himself and looking forward to drinking himself into oblivion. She continues to challenge his defeatism and continuing fascination with 'the dark'. Although it's not explicit, his fascination for the shadowy, reincarnated Marisa infers he is ready to give up on life. She's a very different breed of vampire, feeding on hope...

Shot mostly on location in Morocco, the film has an unusual look and 'feel'. Considering that Hammer's style of Dracula films was all the rage, this is quite a departure from the gothic castles and vampire mythos of the time. As well as a very different variation of their Egyptian mummy films.

William Sylvester stars, seen here between leading roles in Gorgo and 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Alizia Gur plays the 'vampire' after making a striking debut in the sweaty gypsy camp catfight in From Russia With Love. Diane Clare represents 'the light' and the love interest, in the same year she starred in Hammer's Plague of the Zombies. A special mention also for Terence De Marney as the maniacal Omar, the henchman doing the dirty work of the dark side. He'd just appeared in Die Monster Die, one of Boris Karloff's last films.

On balance, there are a few low-budget faults which I must warn you of that might be distracting. Many of the exteriors were shot day-for-night - quite a task considering Morocco's blistering sunlight. The TV print I watched seems to have completely lost track of which scenes are day or night, and some of the night-time scenes are as warm and light as daytime! Even if there was a 1.85 widescreen crop over the 4:3 image, it wouldn’t remove the bright blue sky from many of these scenes. The climax seems to have been partly shot at dawn, which makes it the most convincing of the night-time scenes, even though it takes place in open desert.

William Dexter and Edward Underdown

This is also a very accent-heavy film. All the secondary characters have thick French accents (Morocco's second language) and the two main vampires, De Marney and Gur both seem to have been 'looped' by different actors. Some viewers may be distracted by these technicalities, especially when modern sound-mixing is so much more careful.

Fans of mechanical bats will also delight in the fakery of the title sequence and those that appear throughout the film. One fairly convincing upward shot of the night sky, with a bat shadowing the architect, is spoilt by intercutting with the actor in daylight surroundings, a reverse situation from the jarring dove shot in Blade Runner.

Like many films of the time, the characters are vague about geographical details further than anything familiar to a general audience. They refer to Morocco, but not the cities or areas they are in. I also found this with heist caper Maroc 7 (1967), where the characters travel around Morocco without mentioning where in the country they are. On a recent visit to Marakesh, I was hoping to establish that The Hand of Night had been filmed there, but couldn't find anything at all familiar, apart from the walled city. The desert scenes also look very different to the landscapes in the recent The Hills Have Eyes remake, which was shot around nearby Ouarzazate, doubling for New Mexico. There are beach scenes in The Hand of Night that make me presume this could be Casablanca, somewhere closer to the coast.

I'd recommend The Hand of Night to fans of 1960's British horror. It has solid, dramatic performances, gloomy supernatural drama, and is thick on atmosphere. But it’s not on DVD and I've not seen it on British TV for over 15 years. There are tatty bootlegs out there, but the film deserves much better. I’m baffled that William Sylvester's other sixties horrors Devils of Darkness (1965) and The Devil Doll (1964) have beaten this to DVD.

On YouTube, here are the opening moments of the UK version, including Joan Shakespeare's haunting music, the unusual title sequence and the introductory nightmare that sets up the story...

Here's a look at the other horror films of the late Diane Clare.

TOKYO ZOMBIE (2005) - Tadanobu Asano in a funny wig

TOKYO ZOMBIE
(2005, Japan)

Finally got to see this, now that it’s been released in the UK on region 2 DVD. It’s a shock to see Tadanobu Asano in an afro wig in a zombie comedy - his latest appearance is as the young Genghis Khan in the first instalment of the epic Russian trilogy, Mongol!

I always think of Tadanobu Asano as appearing in slightly quirky, quality drama (Zatoichi), with some offbeat arthouse (Invisible Waves, The Last Life in the Universe) and the occasional offbeat horror (Gemini). But I guess Ichi The Killer should have clued me in that the actor is up for anything.

Tokyo Zombie starts off well enough, with Asano and Sho Aikawa as two amoral slackers on the frontline of a new zombie outbreak. This is caused by dumping too many corpses in with too much toxic rubbish on the outskirts of Tokyo, and named Black Fuji because it’s such a big pile. In reality this could have been filmed anywhere in Japan – for instance the early action takes place in a grotty factory and at a rubbish tip. This disappointed me because I was expecting Tokyo to feature in Tokyo Zombie.

The accent is on the stupidity of the two friends who are more interested in practising jiu-jitsu than working, or fighting zombies. I first thought that the wrestling was a long set-up for a later gag, but it’s more like the core of the story! The early scenes of people dumping bodies are unusual, irreverent, and edgy. Though a sub-plot about a lecherous teacher is more mercilessly aggressive than funny, and ties in with an insecurity about the duo's preoccupation with denying they are gay, despite their close and physical friendship. This dated much of the humour and pitched it about the level of schoolboy comedy.


Taking to the road to escape the growing zombie horde, the two literally pick up a young woman, but then around halfway in, the story comes to a dead halt, and goes in a completely new direction. Nowhere. Stalling for too long in an obviously small set and a not very elegant story contrivance. This is where the film lost me, by throwing away all the gathered momentum and never recovered.

I'm probably missing a lot of the humour, but the story also chooses to explore the sketchy characters like they could actually exist, and also introduces other eccentrics with even thinner motivations.


The zombie action is fun when it's allowed to interrupt, and there are a few well-staged and elaborate visual gags. Adana seems to be enjoying himself, though his acting isn't even stretched as much as Aikawa. It’s all bizarre and quirky, rather than funny. So if you want something different, it's certainly a very different scenario. But the story looks to me like the first and last chapter of a manga, with the middle torn out.

It’s in the same tournament, but not in the same league, as Shaun of the Dead.


UPDATE 13th April 2009
Tokyo Zombie is also out now on DVD in the USA...

KAIDAN (2007) - old ghost story from Hideo Nakata

KAIDAN
(2007, Japan)

Hideo Nakata is internationally famous for directing Ring (1998). But its huge success has been a tough act to follow. I’ve been entertained but not impressed by his other films. His early ghost stories were interesting for Ring fans (like Ghost Actress/Don't Look Up), but after his Japanese sequel, Ring 2 (1999), he avoided horror for a few years until Dark Water (2002). He’s been to America to direct the US sequel The Ring Two (2005) and IMDB reports he’s in place for The Ring Three in the future. Meanwhile Chaos, Sleeping Bride, and the recent sequel to Death Note, L: Change the World, maintain his success in Japan.

With last year’s Kaidan, Nakata sets himself up for a huge fall by telling a period ghost story. Not only is the mixture of samurai and vengeance demons a genre that was perfected in 1960s Japan, their last great international horror boom, but he's also used a similar name to the best of that genre. Kwaidan (1964), also known as Kaidan, one of the most famous of all Japanese films.

As always, I read very little about this film in advance, and wasn’t even sure whether Nakata had remade any of the stories from the original. I was then thrown by the posters and the DVD cover art, which made this new Kaidan look more like a comedy.

It starts with a storyteller talking to camera - I assumed the character would reappear to link several stories together. But no, this turned out to be one long story. There’s a hurried prologue which flashes back to the origins of a family curse - a sadistic landowner wipes clean his slate by killing a moneylender. These scenes rush through years of events very quickly, before the movie slows to a snail's pace. The long set-up doesn't start paying back until halfway through, when it starts actually being a horror story.


The crux of the curse was reused to death in the earliest Japanese horrors, a disfigured woman taking revenge on a man by possessing his wife. Nakata adds sex and fresh new scares, but they are scarce and not always logical. As the curse continues, many other victims get drawn in, but over the years (it’s a very slow curse) the story starts to drag and even gets repetitive.


There’s as much melodrama as horror, and even a scene more suitable for Seven Samurai. All this effort might have been worthwhile if it looked gorgeous, like the 1964 Kwaidan. The make-up, dresses and scenery all look suitably accurate, but not particularly interesting or eye-catching. Attempts to expand the scale of the visuals with digital FX of townscapes are unconvincing.

Elongating a simple, oft-told ghost story to feature-length, has left me pining for Nakata to only return to horror if he doesn’t combine so many genres in future.

Kaidan is currently available with English subtitles on a Hong Kong DVD release from CN Entertainment (pictured at top).

You're recommended instead to try Kwaidan (1964), currently available in the UK and US.

Update April 2009
Video Watchdog issue 148 has a huge article comparing Nakata's Kaidan to an earlier black and white version of the story.

BOMBER & PAGANINI (1976) - uniquely black comedy

BOMBER & PAGANINI
(1976, West Germany)

Why do films become obscure?
Britain's BBC2 used to run interesting European films in late night slots in the 1970's and 1980's, some of which I'd like to see again. This one in particular caught my eye because of its bleak, black humour and huge dollops of irony. While I'm trying to limit Black Hole reviews to recommendations of must-see films, this is more of a simple acknowledgment of a good film that's become obscure (outside it's own country). Maybe this will help someone out there troubled by their own vague memories of thirty years ago.


It also makes me wonder where these films go, why do they become obscure, or even completely disappear? Black & white films and silent movies are rarer on TV than they used to be. These now have to be actively hunted down rather than discovered by channel-hopping. I've learnt that films can suddenly become hard to see. 'Obscure film heaven' is a dusty shelf somewhere...


Anyhow, wanting to see this particular vague memory again wasn't so easy - I couldn't remember it's name or even the country where it was made. For years, I've been searching for a Polish film about a guy in a wheelchair and a blind guy playing football - only recently I found out it was German, out on DVD, and had nothing to do with football! I saw it on a black-and-white TV, so I was surprised that it was actuall shot in colour. The DVD has no English translation, but I couldn't wait any longer.


The set-up is simple: Bomber and Paganini are two inept crooks who attempt a jewel heist by cracking a safe. But stupidity and acetylene torches don't mix - Bomber winds up blinded, and Paganini loses the use of his legs. After a lengthy stay in the prison hospital, they reluctantly team up again, out of necessity. Paganini can see for both of them and needs Bomber to push his wheelchair. But while inside, they've been usurped from their sleazy nightclub headquarters, their only remaining allies are a few prostitutes they used to pimp, and Bomber's mother. This all may sound a bit Farrelly Brothers, but while the characters are slightly stylised, it still feels grubbily real.


The hapless duo initially struggle to make any sort of money, resorting to ridiculous penny-pinching schemes. The film meanders through several random escapades before eventually focussing again on a grand scheme for them to regain all that they've lost, and revenge themselves.


While it's full of wry observational humour, it doesn't get tempted by any slapstick humour for easy laughs. There's some great moments of physical comedy, but their disabilities are believably portrayed, particularly Paganini struggling along without the use of both legs and one arm, shrunken dejectedly into his wheelchair, partly lost inside a huge coat. He somewhat resembles a weaselly version of Robert Carlyle. Bomber reminded me more of an oafish Jean Reno (perhaps it was his Leon glasses).


The two actors also appear to perform most of their own stunts, which involve a variety of high-speed wheelchair crashes. Both actors are still working today - you may even have seen Bomber (Mario Adorf) as 'Consalvi' in Dario Argento's, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), and glimpsed Paganini (Tilo Prückner) as 'Night Hob' in The Neverending Story (1984), also shot in Germany. They're supported by an wide cast of character actors as the other slightly surreal low lifes.


Much of the film appears grittily real because of the large amount of outdoor and location filming, though it's all impeccably photographed and subtly well lit. The DVD certainly doesn't make the film look its age.


Bizarrely this German DVD (available here) includes a rambling trailer that's dubbed into English, though there are no subtitles or dub on the main feature. While this indicates it must have had an English release (somewhere), the only non-Germans with love for this seem to be those who also saw it TV in the UK.


There are a few more black and white photos from the film on the Crazy Media site - click on the small thumbnail at top right, labelled 'Screenshots'.

MANIAC COP - 1 2 3 ...and maybe 4

Good movie sequels are pretty rare. Maniac Cop 2 is a great example of a memorable follow-up that delivers even more than the first. I've rewatched all three Maniac Cop films to double-check my favouritism, and also learned that work has started on a possible Maniac Cop 4! Let's rewind and look at the whole maniacal saga...

In 1980, director William Lustig struck video nasty gold with his low-budget horror Maniac - the tale of a deranged serial killer (actor Joe Spinell certainly looked the part) who assaults, kills and scalps his female victims. This was the kind of slasher that got everyone upset, because women were victims, stalked at length and then realistically scalped (courtesy of Tom Savini's bloody make-up FX). Graphic, controversial, usually censored and therefore a hit on dodgy VHS.

MANIAC COP
(1988, USA)

After shooting the bloody cop thriller Vigilante (1983), Lustig combined his police and horror genres. Maniac Cop introduced a street cop turned random serial killer, with a short sword hidden in his night stick. As the murders continue, the public get spooked by anyone with a badge. 

The resulting subversive scenario - society losing faith in the police force - is typical of producer Larry Cohen's work (the It's Alive trilogy, The Stuff). Another twist is that the couple investigating the case (played by The Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon) get implicated as the killers, because the main suspect is dead! Or is he... Tom Atkins (The Fog, Night of the Creeps) is the unlucky detective trying to unravel the mess.


While the killer is being tracked down in a city in panic, we also get his backstory and meet everyone involved - it's all very plot heavy. Also Bruce Campbell's trademark humour is forcibly subdued here. Lustig cashes in on his Maniac reputation, but pulls back on the violence, trading in for pumped up action scenes. There's a nighttime car chase where one of the vehicles is on fire, and a superb and highly dangerous-looking crash. It's all fun enough, but the sequel would take everything up a notch.

Maniac Cop has been released twice on DVD in the US, first remastered widescreen (above) and also recently in a Synapse Special Edition.

MANIAC COP 2
(1990, USA)

The sequel generously kicks off with a repeat of the dynamite climax of Maniac Cop. As the cop continues to kill, the police discover they've been after the wrong man. Maniac Cop ups his game by teaming up with another serial killer in a diabolical plan to avenge himself, (and conclude some unfinished business left hanging in the first). Bruce Campbell is back, but Robert Davi (the Bond baddie in License To Kill) and Claudia Christian (sensational as stripper turned alien killing machine in The Hidden) are new on the case - Davi plays a disillusioned hard-boiled detective, Christian a street-smart lawyer.

There follows a series of astonishing action scenes, all expanding on the stunts in the first film. They all benefit from being shot at night. A car chase where one vehicle has its tyres ripped off, causes sparks to fly off the bare wheel rims - the entire car chase is spectacularly lit by the sparks alone. There's a gob-smacking runaway car stunt, with a stuntwoman handcuffed to the steering wheel, from the outside! Then there's a huge slow-motion brawl, while Maniac Cop is on fire, but just carries on fighting, letting his victims catch fire as they try to defend themselves - a prolonged series of astonishing stunts...

It's action-horror! Way before Jeepers Creepers, there was a unique sub-genre of car chase action, starting in 1970s horror movies. Death Race 2000 mixed elements of gory horror into a futuristic road race. Race With The Devil piled on the atmosphere, with satanists racing and chasing their victims along America's backroads. The Car was possessed by the Devil, bringing sacrifice to the highways. Later The Hitcher (1986) put the 'stalk and slash' into a road movie. Not to mention the Phantasm films adding high speed hearse action, including the incredible barrel roll stunt in Phantasm III.

Anyway, the 'serial killer team-up' sub-plot gets a little annoying, but the story regains a sense of purpose towards the climax, which brings a spectacular and logical closure that the first film lacked. I rate Maniac Cop 2 over most Friday the 13th and Halloween sequels in the category of most entertaining 'undead killer'.

I've given up waiting for a Special Edition of Maniac Cop 2 - it isn't even on DVD in the US, and no sign of happening in the near future. Instead, I bought the UK region 2 DVD (above) - the 1.33 aspect ratio is a little tight, but it's a clear good-looking transfer. Two original trailers are included - the one made specifically for home video has snappier music and a sharper choice of money-shots. The classic movie trailer tagline is "You have the right to remain silent... Forever... Again". But as you can see above, the DVD cover misquotes this, repeating the tagline from the first film.

MANIAC COP 3: BADGE OF SILENCE
(1993, USA)

My hopes were way too high for this sequel, and it was apparently a troubled production - the trailer credits another director as well as Lustig. (There's a couple more clues in this interview on Slasherama). It's still very watchable, but the story is more of a cop thriller, with Maniac Cop only really appearing in a feeble retread of scenes from Halloween II, stalking around a hospital. It's not until the final action sequences when it begins to look anything like a Maniac Cop film.

The film really belongs to Robert Davi who holds everything together. He also has a great supporting cast, including Julius Harris (another Bond baddie, from Live and Let Die), Robert Forster (Vigilante, Alligator, The Black Hole, Dragon Wars) in an amusing cameo, Doug Savant (now a regular in Desperate Housewives), Bobby Di Cicco (no longer the fresh-faced star of Spielberg's 1941) and Jackie Earle Haley (The Bad News Bears, Damnation Alley - just before he took a long break from acting).

Maniac Cop 3 is available on DVD, once again only fullframe in the UK, and the cover art is uninspiring (the grittier VHS artwork is displayed above).

While Googling the trilogy, I hit the news that Maniac Cop 4 is now on the boards, as William Lustig and Larry Cohen have now regained the sequel rights. Check here for any more news and lots more Maniac Cop stuff. It's time for me to start getting my hopes up again...

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973) - go in, or don't!

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE(1973, USA)

In the 1970s, writer Richard Matheson set upon the foundations of gothic horror, with a mission to bring them up to date – placing a vampire on modern American streets in the influential The Night Stalker TV movie, and every other classic monster in the series that followed. In Matheson’s earlier novel, I Am Legend, he had vampires who could be explained scientifically rather than supernaturally. In his novel Hell House, he tackled a haunting from two directions, with psychics and scientists…


Four investigators come to “the Mount Everest of haunted houses” in order to solve its mysteries, even though the last attempt meant death for almost all of them. This is a similar plot to The Haunting (1963), which is far more critically acclaimed, but I much prefer Hell House, perhaps because I saw it in the cinema. The two titles are easily confused - Shirley Jackson’s book, The Haunting of Hill House, was shortened to the movie title The Haunting, while Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House had its title lengthened to The Legend of Hell House for the movie adaption. Are we clear?

The Legend of Hell House also beat The Exorcist into the cinema by six months in the US, they both have possessions, bad language and demons with sexual motivations. Hell House is far tamer, however and it’s structure is closer to Spielberg’s Poltergeist, while being far more serious in tone. There’s no comic relief in this old dark house…

One of the team is temporarily possessed, and having a good experienced actress in the role makes Pamela Franklin’s performance an interesting comparison to Linda Blair, who was obviously a newcomer to the movies when she appeared in The Exorcist. Unlike the period costume horror films of the Hammer Studios, here was a British-made film in a modern setting. The devilish plot meant that here was one horror that kept on being re-released as long as movie double-bills survived in the seventies, which is how I got to first see it - in 1976 on a double-bill with The Antichrist an Italian Exorcist riff.

Hell House hits the ground running – there’s a brief set-up, then the team arrive at the house and they’re inside before the titles are over. The building is shrouded in fog (for days on end!). The movie is thick with atmosphere, created by the intense but largely restrained performances, aided by the distorting lens of wide-angle cinematography, and backed by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson’s electronic soundtrack. This superior accompaniment is more like vibrations than music. The two composers were from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and in 1963 it was Derbyshire who engineered the first extraordinary Doctor Who theme there, based on Ron Grainer's composition.

Though the reputation of the house is regularly refered to as a being a haven for murder and debauchery (loosely based on the stories about satanist Aleister Crowley), the film suffers by having no physical evidence lying around. Presumably to avoid censorship hassle, the resulting film is almost too tame, but still garnered an 'X' certificate in the UK. It’s creepy, violent, sexually violent, but tastefully pulls its punches. I think it’s still strong enough to please a modern audience. For a stronger version of the story, you'll have to seek out a copy of Matheson's book.

The small cast are marvellous, though Roddy McDowall’s American acting style is far broader than the rest of the cast, who successfully underplay. McDowall was just at the end of his many Planet of the Apes roles. Here he plays the only survivor of the previous incursion into Hell House, twenty years earlier. Another former child actor (her first role was in The Innocents) was the criminally underused Pamela Franklin, who made several cult horror films, like And Soon The Darkness, and then briefly returned to TV roles after the ridiculous The Food of the Gods. Pamela has the toughest part as an over-sensitive medium.


Clive Revill was better known as a comedy actor, as Dirk Bogarde’s sidekick in Modesty Blaise, and as a Russian aristocrat in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Here he excels as the project leader, designer of a machine that he hopes to cure the haunting with. Revill is still working, mainly in voiceovers – one of his famous early offscreen roles being the original Emperor Palpatine’s voice in The Empire Strikes Back. The lovely Gayle Hunnicut plays his wife – her other great horror role was Eye of the Cat.

I think this is easily director John Hough’s best film, over The Watcher in the Woods, and Twins of Evil, though more recently American Gothic (aka Hide and Seek) showed he’d still got it. The mostly ingenious special effects are all in-camera, apart from some eerie optical work for the manifestation of ectoplasm.

20th Century Fox’s DVD widecreen transfer restores the vibrant colour of some of the sets, particularly the sinful deep reds of the bedrooms. It’s never looked better, and there’s a 4.0 audio track too. It's available in the UK and US.

Recently, some of the striking camera compositions were recently plundered and copied for Edgar Wright’s superb pastiche trailer for the Tarantino and Rodriguez’ Grindhouse intermission, for the made-up film Don’t!. A keenly-observed and funny homage.

In 2013 - we visited the house used for the exteriors of Hell House - more photos here...