THE MASK (1961) - vintage 3D horror finally on DVD

THE MASK
also called EYES FROM HELL
(1961, Canada)

Definitely a cult movie, early Canadian horror The Mask is finally out on DVD. In 3D!

I was going to include this in the Not On DVD movies. But after another viewing, I couldn't recommend it as a must-see. It's a cheap, dull story for the most part, only the 3D 'dream sequences' are really worth seeing.


Really very good 3D effects and wild, horrific imagery, presumably shot by a different director. The 3D benefits from long tracking shots. I still think that the best 3D effects allow the viewer to 'get their bearings', like a camera moving through a deep hallway of cobwebs. The set designs and make-up effects are uniquely nightmarish and the shocks are carefully designed for 3D. A giant Aztec skull floating over a sacrificial ritual, a phantom firing fireballs from its palms, druids with razor-gloves... The stills you see from The Mask are always from these scenes, which tell their own dream-logic story. Joined together, they would make a far more famous 3D short film.


The Mask is OK to watch if you're used to low-budget fifties sci-fi. Most of the talky action takes place in small, functional three-wall sets. Where an archaeologist starts hearing voices coming from one of his artefacts, demanding that he wears it. When he does, he has nightmares about an ancient ritual... If you want a chance to see what a great 3D horror, or even LSD horror could look like, try out the dream sequences of The Mask...

The DVD is from Cheezy Flicks. It's a black and white fullscreen movie (this lobby card was hand-coloured). It's misleadingly listed as colour, because it's presented in the red/green 3D process. From the reviews, it doesn't appear to have been digitally remastered.

"Put the mask on, now..."

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (1976) - early Jodie Foster thriller

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE
(1976, Canada/USA/France)

Martin Sheen as a very nasty man...

1976 was the year when Jodie Foster became a star! At the time, I hadn't seen Taxi Driver, but there was plenty of publicity about her controversial role. Amazingly she was still appearing in Disney films!

Bugsy Malone was a big hit in the UK. With goodtime girl Tallulah's slicked-down hair, she nearly wasn't recognisable. But her raunchy and mature attitude was fun - it certainly seemed to scare Scott Baio! Director Alan Parker's success with this children-playing-adults gangster musical led to his next project, the very different Midnight Express!

Foster had appeared in Disney productions as early as 1970, continuing after Little Girl with Freaky Friday and later Candleshoe. The original Freaky Friday was another popular hit for her in the UK, Foster being one of the few youngsters who was intelligent and rebellious enough to be 'cool', acceptable to teenagers who normally wouldn't be seen dead watching a Disney double-bill. In it she plays a tomboy with a skateboard who swaps bodies with her Mom.


The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane was another very different film for her repertoire, and seemed to represent what I imagined her own personality might have been. Independent, private, wanting to be treated like an adult. Interested in learning more about everything. There's a great interview that was shot on the set, maybe it was a publicity film, where she says that eventually she wants to direct. She was deadly serious, at a time when there were even fewer women directors, ridiculously young. But if anyone was going to do it, she sounded like she could, and also knew where she was going.

Her character, Rynn, is supposed to be from England - the creepy Frank (Sheen) has to explain some of the customs of Halloween 'because the English don't celebrate it'. Proof that before the movie Halloween was a hit the UK, we Brits didn't even consider it as an opportunity for fancy dress, let alone trick or treating.

Little Girl feels like quite a small film, but has a uniquely odd atmosphere. So much action is centred on Rynn's home, it could very easily be adapted as a play. There are even several key moments that are described rather than shown, robbing the film of some potential shock moments. More damagingly, it's quite hard to follow everything unless you listen to every line of dialogue. I always forget the storyline because I haven't witnessed everything. This also keeps the film in the mystery/thriller genre. While it verges on horror, it needs a few more explicit moments.


A small cast of characters adds to the claustrophobia, especially with the early arrival of the sleazeball played by a young Martin Sheen, when he usually played sleazeballs. He was on the wrong side of the law in Badlands, a hustler in The Cassandra Crossing, and here a dangerous paedophile.

Foster's character is aged 13, but Frank is still very interested in her. The problem is that his mother is also her landlady, one of the most powerful landowneds in the area, with maybe even the police in her pocket. Everyone locally knows what Frank is capable of, but are reluctant to intervene. From his first appearance, we know he's threatening to probe the secrets of her mysterious family. She gains an ally in likeable local boy Mario (Scott Jacoby), but an accident threatens her precarious hope that everyone will leave them alone.


Once again, the film-makers were keen to exploit Foster's image sexually at such an early age. While she'd been a prostitute in Taxi Driver, and a vamp in Bugsy Malone, the actress understandably baulked at a nude scene. Doubtless wanting a little more respect despite her junior status. To be treated with more respect - not to mention gender equality - her star status failed to remove the scene from the script.

So there's this huge (very seventies) paradox. The villain is a paedophile, but the film-makers still want a gratuitous nude scene of a character who's only 13! This was actually performed by Foster's 21 year-old sister, flashing breasts and butt. But the brief scene fooled us all at the time into thinking we were seeing Foster nude, which again she was far from happy about.


It's a sufficiently intriguing film with some unnerving moments, good twists and engaging characters. Besides Foster's age, the film is dated by the music score - some nasty keyboards and wakka-wakka guitar detract rather than complement the atmosphere early on in the film, but thankfully this disappears as the plot thickens.

It's fascinating to see Jodie Foster as a child star, years before she found success as an adult, and Martin Sheen's career off-course before he starred in the awesome Apocalypse Now.


For a long while Little Girl was absent from DVD but eventually appeared in both the UK and US (with subtly different cover art) and apparently uncut. It's more generously framed than the VHS release (above), to which I can now finally say goodbye...

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981) - 28 years later...

MY BLOODY VALENTINE
(Canada, 1981)

This beats Friday the 13th, any day of the week!

I'm pretty sure I saw this supporting Friday the 13th - Part 2 in a Bournemouth cinema while Lady Diana and Prince Charles were getting married (July 29th, 1981). The Royal Wedding was on every TV in the country and I wanted to escape somewhere until it was all over...

The original My Bloody Valentine has always been a solid horror movie, but the many shock moments were severely castrated by censor cuts. Practically every kill is cut down so much that you barely know what has actually happened. What was worse is that there were some great colour photos of the make-up effects in Fangoria magazine showing us what we'd missed.

Through the years, each release on home video - VHS, laserdisc, all the way upto the first Paramount DVD release - I was hoping for some cut footage to reappear. But even the DVD was the same censored version.

Then in 2006 came the entertaining and fact-packed documentary about the 80's slasher movie genre, Going to Pieces. In the DVD extras was the tantalising news that the director of My Bloody Valentine, George Mihalka, had held onto the uncut version. Thankfully this has lead to a full restoration.

Now, I've finally watched the Special Edition, released on DVD earlier this year, ending a 28 year wait to see the version that I'd always wanted, with all the scenes promised in those early issues of Fangoria. This new version is a slasher that surpasses the early Friday the 13th movies on almost every level.

In Valentine Bluffs, a Canadian mining town, preparations for a Valentine's Day party are underway. But the Sheriff and the Mayor are getting nervous because the last time they had such a celebration, a lot of folks got killed by an insane miner brandishing a pick-axe. They haven't celebrated the occasion for nearly twenty years, until now. As February 14th gets closer, it looks like the date is indeed cursed. Also, the biggest Valentine's party picked the worst location possible, near the entrance to the town's coal mine...

Near the start of the story, someone gets a rhyming Valentine card and a gory present that feels exactly like the end of the 'Poetic Justice' segment if Tales From The Crypt (1972), in turn based on the EC horror comic story. But after that it's a familiar blend of sexed-up youngsters (miners, not minors) and gory mayhem, right down to the barman who could be a close relation of Friday the 13th's Crazy Ralph. "It could be you!" is his way of saying "You're next" to die horribly, rather than a prophecy of a lottery win.

Like Friday the 13th, I didn't recognise any of the actors, and the atmosphere is helped enormously by extensive location filming, that keeps everything looking real, even though some of the acting isn't. The leads are all very strong, with stern silent hero-type T.J. (Paul Kelman) looking a lot like a young Rufus Sewell. My least favourite is the goof-off character who manages to make all his friends laugh by making the worst jokes possible.

But My Bloody Valentine is very different from Friday the 13th in many ways. The drama actually works, with the older townsfolk looking very nervous about the town's nasty secrets, and two of the miners caught in a painful smalltown love triangle.


While Tom Savini's effects for the first Friday were convincing, they were barely glimpsed. The murders in My Bloody Valentine are more complex and sustained, often with a 'double-whammy'. They take the more realistic take that murder is often prolonged and painful. At the same time they dreamt up some unique kills for the slasher genre. Even the photos of the body being dragged along the ground, a pick-axe skewering the jaw of the victim, look remarkably convincing.

The scene in the showers is famous for its pay-off, but I found the build-up particularly unsettling, with prolonged takes of the victim being carried along, held by her head, shown from the point-of-view of the murderer, shining his helmet-lamp into her terrified face. Yes, it's intense and horrifying - in Friday the 13th it's almost over before it begins.

The FX are remarkably convincing for the most part, at a time when everyone was trying to perfect prosthetic gory effects to top the last. For the first time I noticed a hand 'wobble', in the game where two macho miners play the 'stabbing the table between the fingers' game (also used in Aliens). Looks like they were using a very convincing prosthetic hand - I thought they found a couple of experts to do it for real!

While the many of the characters are 'up for it', and this is an unofficial entry in the get drunk, 'have-sex-then-die' genre, sex is treated far differently than the usual half-naked girl wandering around with a knife. The opening scene cleverly confuses expectations in an underground triste, the best pool player in town is a flouncy-looking blonde, when the hero is in a fight the women don't just stand around and cower - they join in, and my particular favourite, a guy actually gets a condom out before sex. This is so very rare in movies nowadays, let alone 1981! It's a more adult attitude, and a bucking of the cliches. After watching a lot of horror films, I've gotten very tired of the cliches.


Lastly, while Friday the 13th took three films to sort out the iconic look of Jason, My Bloody Valentine hits the ground running with the awesome image of the miner dressed in black, with a gas mask covering the face. The pick-axe completes a really scary look. But with most of the blood diluted by censorship (Friday the 13th had cuts as well), the film disappeared without a sequel, maybe because it didn't have a catchy ad campaign, and the killer doesn't have a nick-name. I don't know why, but it didn't catch on - but now it's one of my favourites of the slasher genre.


The new Special Edition Lionsgate DVD has the option to watch both the original cinema release or the new restored version - both work seamlessly. There's also an interesting interview with the director and a couple of the cast, (why build sets when everything you need is 2000 feet underground?) and Ken Diaz (The Thing, Pirates of the Caribbean) and Tom Burman (The Manitou, The Exterminator, Grey's Anatomy) talk about how their impressive special effects were done.

The restored, original trailer of the 1981 My Bloody Valentine is here on YouTube...

RUSSIAN ROULETTE (1975) - not on DVD

RUSSIAN ROULETTE
(1975, Canada/UK)

George Segal plays a disgraced policeman caught between the KGB and CIA during a Canadian visit by the Russian premiere. What starts off as a simple undercover operation grows into a very messy assassination plot. Being a mid-budget mid-seventies thriller, there's naturally helicopter action, a car chase and stunts galore. In fact, so much is going on in the finale that it starts getting ridiculous.

Russian Roulette isn't a must-see, but there's plenty to recommend. It played well on TV for a while and I've yet to tire of it. Having first seen it in the cinema on a double-bill with Diamonds in early 1976, I've tracked the whereabouts of both films ever since. Diamonds, starring Robert Shaw and Richard Roundtree, has earned a DVD release as well as a CD of Roy Budd's soundtrack.

George Segal is now better known for comedy, particularly the TV show Just Shoot Me. But in the 1970s he mixed humorous roles (The Hot Rock, the original Fun With Dick and Jane) and tough guy leads (The Terminal Man, Rollercoaster). In Russian Roulette, it's a happy medium.

Co-star Cristina Raines is the token female sidekick, though she has a standout moment in her fight scene... Her movie work peaked in the seventies when she was going out with Keith Carradine. Which I'm assuming had something to do with her roles in Robert Altman's Nashville and Ridley Scott's first feature The Duellists. In 1977, she starred in the poor taste Michael Winner horror The Sentinel.

In contrast, Louise Fletcher (Brainstorm, Exorcist II, Invaders From Mars) has little more than a bit part, as a switchboard operator for the mounties! This was the same year as her Academy Award-winning Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest!


Being a UK/Canadian co-production, the rest of the cast is unconvincingly swarming with British actors. Nigel Stock (a convincing Dr Watson to Peter Cushing's TV incarnation of Sherlock Holmes) sports a very poor American accent. Gordon Jackson plays a senior policeman, pre-dating his famous role in cult TV series The Professionals (1977-1983), Brian Clemens' popular follow-up to The New Avengers.

Best of all, Denholm Elliott (Vault of Horror, The House That Dripped Blood, To The Devil... A Daughter) plays a consistently seedy CIA operative. When he's not nicking cigarettes and blagging drinks, he's lying through his teeth with the two-faced smile he does so well.

Director Lou Lombardo indulges the cast to throw in improvised dialogue to add to the realistic feel. The best example is a scene where Segal tries to get an old lady to remember a really important message. The worst is his throwaway line to a traumatised Raines in the middle of a car chase, "How do you feel, killing a man?". Sometimes his comedy touch makes the film a little lighter than the subject deserves.


It looks mostly, if not entirely, shot on location in Vancouver. The grand Hotel Vancouver takes the centre stage for the climax, with some excitingly shot low-flying helicopter action. Ah, the seventies...The music sounds a little like Roy Budd (Get Carter, Fear Is The Key) but it's Michael J Lewis (Theatre of Blood, 11 Harrowhouse, The Legacy). Instead of Budd's trademark sax, Lewis favours electric 'wacca wacca' guitar to ramp up the car chase excitement. Extensive reworkings of the Soviet national anthem form the majority of the score, but it's still a soundtrack I'd happily buy.


While other, less exciting Canadian thrillers of this period get DVD releases (yes you, The Kidnapping of the President), Russian Roulette is still trapped on VHS. Germany has a full-frame DVD (with rather generic cover art) but no English subtitles or soundtrack - that's dubbed German audio only. Not good enough to keep it off my not-on-DVD list!

There's another positive review on the Permission To Kill spy movie site. Hopefully proof that it's not just my nostalgia talking.

Oh, and no-one actually plays russian roulette in the story, in case you were expecting it...

THE CRAZIES, SHIVERS, RABID - nasty seventies virals

Three North American horror movies from the mid 1970's where people turn into mindless, predatory animals, decades before the fast-moving 'zombies' of 28 Days Later and I Am Legend.

THE CRAZIES

(1973, USA)

George Romero had already laid down the rules for the modern zombie genre in Night of the Living Dead (1968). But before he started with the sequels, he made The Crazies, in which society breaks down in a remote town when a military nerve gas turns everyone into psycho-killers.

While the premise had horror potential - with innocent-looking children and grannies turning homicidal – the amateurish acting has always made this a tough one for me to sit through, even when it came out. Besides the budget being too low to do ‘a city in chaos’ properly, the gore effects severely lack Tom Savini, with fake-looking limbs and even unconvincing blood.

But the ideas were ripe for recycling, and the image of the military dressed head-to-foot in white gas masks, suits and hoods proved enduring, soon appearing again in The Cassandra Crossing (1976).

SHIVERS
(1975, Canada)

David Cronenberg was obviously inspired by Romero’s film (he even cast Lynn Lowry from The Crazies), but added more inventive angles, like making people homicidal and sexual maniacs. Shivers was his first feature film, and he ladled out enough controversy to launch his career.

In it, a medical experiment to mutate parasites into missing organs comes to a tragic end when the doctor kills, disembowels and pours acid into the stomach of a naked schoolgirl. Little does he know, she's been sleeping around, fuelled by the parasites' sexual appetite. Now several men in her apartment block are breeding parasitic slugs of their own... internally.

While this is far more interesting than The Crazies, the amateur quality of acting is still pretty distracting, though queen of Italian horror, Barbara Steele (Mask of the Demon) is a welcome exception. Her bathtub scene is still squirmingly effective, and was the basis of many poster campaigns.

By his own admission, Cronenberg was still learning to direct during the production, but the film was still an international hit. He pushes the concept way out, and it's unusual to see sexual horror outside of the realm of vampires for once.

RABID
(1976, Canada)

Cronenberg tweaked and expanded the same concept of infectious psychosis for his next, far more assured film. This is the easiest of the three to recommend, with a more able cast, and a bigger budget.

Another medical experiment misfires, this time using skin-grafts. After a bike accident, Rose (Marilyn Chambers) finds herself with a vampiric spike in her armpit and a lust for human blood, not realising that she's infects her victims with rabies.

The stage is set for random violence, with Cronenberg dreaming up kills more creative than the story or the characters. Not many horror films feature a pneumatic drill as a murder weapon, or Santa Claus gunned down by a hail of machine-gun fire.

This is efficient, unusual, indie horror mayhem, from the heyday of Canadian horror, with buckets of subtext only if you want it. Watching this again, I noticed that there's no original soundtrack music, just a few library tracks repeated to exhaustion! It certainly worked at the time. Shivers and Rabid then made perfect partners on a double-bill re-release in cinemas. Check out any trailers you can find - the voice-over is a classic.

(Cronenberg then continued with a run of interesting horror films - The Brood, Scanners, and the marvellous Videodrome, before hitting the big time with his 1986 remake of The Fly).

These three quasi-zombie films were labelled as 'body horror' in the eighties, and lumped in with the remakes of The Blob and The Thing - today they're the fore-runners of today's 'fast and furious' genre of the undead.

Incidentally, the US DVD of Shivers (from Image Entertainment) looks good in 1.33 aspect ratio, but my UK edition of Rabid (from Metrodome) is severely cropped on all sides of the 16:9 frame, cramping the action and even clipping off parts of the opening titles - a case of 'widescreen edition' meaning less rather than more... but there's an interesting introductory talk from Cronenberg on both discs.

FIDO (2006) another marvellous rom-zom-com

FIDO

(2006, USA/Canada)

After seeing the poster with a little boy leading a pet zombie on a leash, I hoped I was going to love this one. I do!

I wasn’t expecting it to be set in square-jawed suburban fifties America, where picket fence neighbourhood communities are protected by a ring of steel and omnipresent firepower. The riff is that radiation has caused the dead to rise again, but instead of treating it like something new, the story picks up as if the entire George Romero trilogy timeline has already taken place – zombies have almost over-run society but been beaten back in the zombie wars (that Romero wanted to depict in the original Day of the Dead).

Also following on from that film, the zombies have started to regain their original memories and skills. In Fido, this means that they are now ripe for domestication, as long as they wear electronic collars to curb their craving for human flesh.

To me, this is a natural progression on from Day of the Dead (1985). It could be a sequel that Romero never made. Zombie competition is hot at the moment, mostly trying to rekindle the thrills of the gory seventies, but Fido attempts something new with the mythos and gives us a sort of comedy version of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes!

Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix trilogy) is superb as an uptight housewife who gets a zombie just to keep up with the neighbours. Her husband, played by Dylan Baker (Happiness, The Cell), is more interested in golf than raising his son. While Timmy is struggling to understand the principles of zombie slavery at school, but keeps ignoring the rules to see what happens. Well, if you’re not careful with your pet zombie, it’s likely that there’ll be a local scandal, disapproving looks, flesh-eating, and creeping outbreak of serial zombification…


While the story is inventive and rewarding, with a host of enjoyable character actors really enjoying the fifties surroundings. The movie pulls its punches on gore, shocks, belly-laughs and even zombie sex, resulting almost in a kids movie largely centred around the neighbourhood children. But with regular scenes of flesh-eating and some splattery head wounds, it’s hard to recommend to the early teens.

Several dramatic themes are built up but left open-ended, and at times the story seems to rush past plot points between scenes, making it look like a shortened version of the intended story.

But it’s good-natured, with everyone playing it straight and ignoring the bizarreness of the premise. It’s blackly humourless without being grim and makes few political points with such a heavily loaded scenario.

The beautiful metallic cars and primary colours contrast with the miserable zombies’ grey pallour, yet there’s still could be a place for them in middle America, if there can be zombie integration.


K’Sun Ray as Timmy, holds the film on track whenever Carrie-Anne Moss isn’t around. Tim Blake Nelson (spectacularly stupid in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has a great part as an eccentric neighbour with a zombie playmate. Fido himself is played by an unrecognisable Billy Connolly, who builds on the classic portrayal of zombie Bub (Sherman Howard) also from the first Day of the Dead. Well, there aren’t many other performances of zombies with dawning self-awareness around to study.

The usually bearded actor/comedian is hugely popular in the UK, where this still hasn’t been released. It’s a cult movie - come on, you’ll make money!


Fido can be tracked down on DVD in the US (from Lionsgate) and around Europe (but not the UK).

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Not on DVD: DEATH WEEKEND (1976) your typical rape/revenge movie

DEATH WEEKEND

(1976, Canada)

Wanting to review Death Weekend, one of the first X films I ever saw in a cinema, set me to thinking about similar films with the same plotline, and whether to cover the movie at all. Am I a little out of my depth to be recommending a movie about rape?

The film belongs to the ‘rape/revenge’ sub-genre of horror films and psycho-thrillers, where a woman takes revenge on those who assaulted her. These films are not about the effect on her life (like TV movies or soaps do), but driven by more exploitable action – scenes of sex and violence. Obviously there are many other films about rape and revenge, but it's usually the men who dish out the rough justice.


'Rapesploitation' in the seventies

A decade of rape-themed films began with Hannie Caulder (1971). It’s a western, but subverts the genre by having a woman take her own revenge. It’s very seventies, showing a prolonged sexual assault and having several men involved. This also means a prolonged, action-packed revenge, because she then has to track them all down, one by one. Raquel Welch plays the title character, and Christopher Lee (trying to break out of horror film typecasting) plays the gunsmith who teaches her how to use firearms.

Movie vengeance was then returned to the guys, with a string of films that showed graphic rape scenes. Some of these rapesploitation films are of course not without merit, but have obviously had censorship issues and even periods of being completely banned, both in cinemas and on video. They are all on DVD now, unlike Death Weekend.

Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), took the premise of a western, but placed it in modern day rural Britain. It’s a brilliant portrayal of mob mentality and violence in a small town. Susan George plays the beautiful young wife, coveted by the local lads, with weedy husband Dustin Hoffman forced to revenge her.

Also in 1971 (what was going on that year?), A Clockwork Orange hit the screens, and in the UK also left the screens until after the director’s death. Several rape scenes set up Alex (Malcolm McDowell) as a violent problem for the government to try and cure.

Equally controversial, The Last House On the Left appeared in 1972. Two women are graphically violently assaulted, but don’t get to take their revenge. Producer Sean Cunningham (Friday the 13th) and director Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) both toned down the realism of violence in their films in order to start a long career in horror films.

Even Alfred Hitchcock made an astonishingly seedy thriller in 1972. Though Frenzy focuses more on a man who is wrongly accused of being a serial rapist. Jon Finch's character is more interested in clearing his name than avenging the victims. The villain (Barry Foster) plays a memorably nasty murderer, appearing in scenes which gave censors headaches for decades, (maybe 'I can’t cut that, it’s a Hitchcock film...').

Death Wish (1974) took the premise into crime-drenched Manhattan, and here again it's a man taking revenge. It was a huge hit and far more widely seen than Last House on the Left. Director Michael Winner pulled all the stops out for the multiple gang rape that motivates Charles Bronson's character through five Death Wish films. It’s a prolonged and nasty scene, crassly peppered with nudity (still cut when shown on TV in the UK). The film then unrelentingly justifies the anti-hero, and anyone in the audience living in a big city, to arm themselves and dish out murderous vengeance on muggers and even thieves. I shudder to think what real damage this film has done.

Rape/revenge movies - women fight back

I find the rape/revenge genre to be more balanced, because women get their own revenge. It’s a theme that’s proved popular in the slasher genre too, when the last prospective victim standing is usually a woman.

The first that I can remember in a modern setting, are two films made in 1976, Death Weekend and Lipstick. Perhaps they were inspired by the success of Death Wish, but wanting to revert revenge to the women.

Lipstick even dealt with the legal problems facing women who had been raped. The seriousness of the issue is somewhat undermined by the victim here being a fashion model, played by real-life model Margaux Hemingway. This makes the film almost surreal, especially when she starts running around in high heels, high fashion, wielding a shotgun! Chris Sarandon resigned the rest of his acting career to playing baddies, by playing the serial rapist.

The most famous movie in the genre is also the worst, I Spit on Your Grave (1978). I falsely remembered this as the one that it started rape/revenge as a cycle. After all the films had had limited runs in theatres, even under-achieving titles were suddenly hot property when released on home video in the early eighties, uncut! I Spit On Your Grave had the sleaziest video cover, the rudest name, the lowest budget. The plot is no more than rape and revenge, literally. The rape ordeal takes up the entire first half of the movie, then the second half is a serial revenge. It’s the only title in this article that I wouldn’t recommend at all.

Incidentally, the movie title, the posters and the video covers are often potent in the arguments for and against controversial movies. More people see the videos and poster art than see the movies themselves. The blue UK poster for Death Weekend certainly makes it look more lurid. Taglines like "It began with a rape. It ended with a massacre." further distort perceptions of the film.

Abel Ferrara later made an intriguing and intelligent low-budget riff on Death Wish with the actress Zoe Tamerlis as an Angel of Vengeance in Ms 45 (1981). But now we’ve strayed into the eighties, which had it’s own more responsible take on the genre, with the likes of the stodgy and overlong The Accused and the far more interesting Australian movie Shame…


 

Death Weekend

But here I’m trying to focus on the seventies, when the rape/revenge genre seemed to go into overdrive, and one of the earliest and cleverest films in the genre…

Death Weekend was made in Canada (note that Ivan Reitman was the producer, in between early David Cronenberg films Shivers and Rabid) and sold as a horror film in the UK, and as The House by the Lake in the US. Watching it again, it’s more intelligent and thought-provoking than I remembered.



Brenda Vaccaro plays Diane, a fashion model from the big city. She’s being taken for a ride by rich young Harry (Chuck Shamata) to his remote house in the country. But she’s not stupid and certainly no pushover. The character and situations are carefully written – she’s sexy but not sexily dressed, unless you like flared jeans and baggy rollneck sweaters (contrasted with Margeaux Hemingway’s outfits, also as a model in Lipstick). When Chuck gets amorous, she says no and fully expects it to work. She handles difficult situations confidently and firmly and Harry, though extremely angry, gives up.



Besides being a model, she’s an accomplished car mechanic, and can handle Harry’s car at high speed. Unfortunately, they run into a local gang of joy-riders, lead by Don Stroud, who takes personal exception to being outrun by a woman driver. This simple prejudice triggers the whole story off, as the gang track down Harry’s country house, and terrorizes the two of them for kicks.

But we’re not sure where trouble will first occur. Diane is in trouble from all sides, not realising that she’s not going to a party, but being set up on a romantic weekend for just two. Worse still, Harry’s got some hidden two-way mirrors in her guest bedroom and always takes a different girl to his house every weekend.

Like Straw Dogs and Corruption, there is an extended ‘home invasion’ where the freaky gang terrorize them both, and slowly destroy Harry’s material possessions, even his speedboat! (In a scene that seems to have inspired one of the killings in I Spit on your Grave).

The scenes of sexual assault are at least plot-driven, unlike Death Wish, which needn’t have been shown at all. Although there is brief nudity, it certainly doesn’t go as far as many others in this list, but it does introduce the use of a cut-throat razor for foreplay. As I remember it on its UK release, only the gore and the swearing was removed from the film. I was shocked at this early example of the c-word being used in a movie. The two utterances of the word are still intact on the pre-cert UK release VHS, and the US release (though some violence has been removed).



For a film in this genre, Death Weekend is far more consistent than Last House On the Left (that leavens extremely realistic and prolonged sexual assault with scenes of comic relief cops). Her ordeal is violent, but she doesn’t lose her cool, unlike the characters who ‘crack’ in the old The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where people descend to almost animal behaviour to defend themselves.

The film seems so confident that it has handled the issue even-handedly, that it dares to suggest that she might have been attracted to one her attackers. This is indicated by the ambiguous ending scene, sending out a dubious ‘mixed message’. To complicate matters further, actress Brenda Vaccaro went on to date the movie's gangleader Don Stroud in real life!

Brenda quickly rose to bigger films, with parts in Airport 77 and Capricorn One (1978). Don Stroud was forever playing heavies on TV cop shows, but tried to break the mould in The Amityville Horror, by playing a priest! That’s stretching it a bit, Don.


Like many 'survival plots', the action is carefully set up so that the only course of action is murder. Nowadays I'm thankful that more films, like Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy, show up murderous vengeance as a messy business of escalation and further tragedy.

But as an exercise in revenge fantasy, I’d still posit Death Weekend as a more responsible film in an irresponsible genre. I’m guessing it’s the ambiguity of the ending is the main reason for this film not being updated to an appearance on DVD as yet. All the male revenge films are out, why not the female?

Unless you track down a VHS, you'll have to settle for these clips on YouTube...