SUMMER OF SATAN: post-retrospective analysis

Friends, readers and fellow countrymen of the blogosphere, the Summer of Satan has reached its end. Now comes the autumn of all things pumpkin-shaped and ghoulish, as a large swathe of next month is given over to 13 for Halloween, and after that it won’t be long till the second annual Winter of Discontent.In other words, no need to mourn the passing of our Satanic summer: plenty more reels of cinematic depravity will be flickering through the projection...

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SUMMER OF SATAN: The Day of the Beast

Alex de la Iglesia made an inventive if somewhat frenzied debut with the sci-fi satire ‘Accion Mutante’. Rough and ready and with its set-pieces belying its budget, nonetheless the talent behind the film was evident.His follow-up, again a genre film and again satirical in tone (at least in its early stages), proved that de la Iglesia was a filmmaker with full confidence in the medium and a wicked sense of the irreverent. The genre this time was horror....

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Drive Angry

In which John Milton (1608 – 1674) loses his sight, wrestles with the big questions of humanity’s relationship to the divine and writes an epic poem that begins with man’s first disobedience and –No, wait. Let me start over. ‘Drive Angry’. In which John Milton (Nicolas Cage) breaks out of hell in shriek of burning rubber and a cloud of petrol fumes, busts back through into the world of the living, and goes in vengeful pursuit of the Satanists who...

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Alucarda

Juan Lopez Monctezuma’s hallucinatory exploitationer is a heady and unsubtle mix of nunsploitation, sexual hysteria, Satanism, vampirism, pyrotelekinesis and lipstick lesbianism.To those of you who have already abandoned this review and logged on to Amazon, Lovefilm or Netflix, happy viewing – see you next time here at The Agitation of the Mind.To those of you still with me, let’s see if we can’t unravel a critically valid and intellectually rigorous...

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Back in the summer of 666 …

Brothers, sisters and neophytes … the temperature begins to plummet, the darker nights draw in, the leaves turn to gold and russet and fall from the trees like a crucifix falls from the hands of a nun who has just witnessed her first Walerian Borowczyk film … Summer ebbs, my delightful children of the night. Our ramblings through the darkly enchanted forests of this blog must come to an end. Likewise our cavortings beneath the moonlight (this specificially...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Giallo

Nottingham Forest were, at best, an average football club when Brian Clough became their manager in 1975. What he accomplished with Forest was nothing less than alchemy. The 1976-77 season saw them promoted to the first division. They won the First Division English Championship the following season. They won the League Cup two years running (1978 and 1979), ditto the European Cup (1979 and 1980), prompting Cloughie’s immortal comment about Manchester...

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Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney - the man with the most infectious grin in the movies - is 91 today. IMDb lists his first credit as 1926. With two films in pre- and two in post-production, I'm counting that as ten decades in the movies.Plus, the dude was once married to Ava Gardner.God love you, sir! A full-bodied pint of real ale is being raised to you this eveni...

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Christine

Dedicated to Stephen King on his 64th birthday. Thanks for all the scares.Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m in the habit of posting birthday greetings to my favourite actresses in the form of triptychs of unapologetic cheesecake shots. These posts are normally cobbled together at a moment’s notice. They stem from a nightly ritual myself and Mrs F engage in. Based on IMDb’s “born today” section, we raised a glass to our favourite actors,...

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Antichrist

Perhaps the least explicitly Luciferean entry in the Summer of Satan retrospective, ‘Antichrist’ is a Lars von Trier film through and through: wilfully pretentious and undeniably powerful in roughly equal measures and studded with examples of that certain x-factor von Trier shares with Michael Haneke – to whit, a tendency to take things just that little bit further than he needs to in order to make his point.I’ve always approached the work of von...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: The Wax Mask

Wikipedia cites the Dario Argento produced ‘Wax Mask’ in its list of notable giallo titles, which was pretty much the only reason I approached it yesterday. I’d dispute its classification as a giallo, but not having watched any other giallo-rific titles in the last week, it’ll have to do for today’s post.The story behind the film is possibly more notable than the film itself, so let’s start there. When the project got off the ground in 1996 it was...

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SUMMER OF SATAN: To the Devil – a Daughter

If Hammer’s ‘The Devil Rides Out’ gave Dennis Wheatley his finest cinematic outing (although the ratio of his prolific and entertaining output to film adaptations is still woefully out of kilter), then the Hammer production of ‘To the Devil – a Daughter’ presents a thornier prospect for the reviewer.It’s a film of two halves, that’s for sure.The first half shapes up quite nicely. The opening sequence has Father Michael (Christopher Lee) excommunicated;...

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Martina Gedeck

Happy 50th birthday to Martina Gedeck, one of the leading lights of German cinema. A Riesling of appropriate quality is being raised in toast at chez Agitati...

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Damned in Venice

In which an ageing composer played by Dirk Bogarde travels to – … no, wait, wrong film.‘Damned in Venice’ – the original Italian title ‘Nero Veneziano’ suggests ‘Darkness in Venice’ as a better rendering – is an atmospheric riff on ‘The Omen’ (it was made two years after little Damien and his nefarious nanny cleaned up at the box office) which, in my humble opinion, uses the material to much better and infinitely creepier effect than Richard Donner’s...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Death Carries a Cane

There is tradition in gialli of wonderful Italian titles being dumped for the English market and replaced with altogether more generic handles. Hence, ‘Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?’ (‘What Are These Strange Drops of Blood Doing on the Body of Jennifer?’) is retitled ‘The Case of the Bloody Iris’, while ‘I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale’ (‘The Bodies Displayed Traces of Carnal Violence’) becomes ‘Torso’....

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