Son of Danse Macabre by Bryce Wilson

Bryce Wilson’s ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ was one of the most interesting blogging projects of the last couple of years. Especially for fans of the horror genre.

Taking as his Bible and starting point Stephen King’s seminal non-fiction overview of horror ‘Danse Macabre’ – and attuned to the fact that the book, originally published in 1981, concludes its consideration of all things dark and scary at the dawn of that decade – Bryce’s remit for ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ was to consider the American horror movie post-‘Danse Macabre’.

The title may have been an homage; the content emerged as anything but mere copyism. Bryce originally blogged ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ as a book-in-progress, a brave and confident approach for any writer as one’s first draft is essentially being launched into the public realm chapter by chapter. Also a daunting commitment to a writing discipline, particularly since real life has a tendency of up-ending the best laid of plans and the purest of good intentions.

It was while real life was doing just this and new material on the project was at a low ebb that I offered Bryce an essay called ‘Foreignness and Home Soil: The American Horror Movie Post 9-11’, which he duly published online. I was quietly proud of the article and heartened that he was able to use it.

When the project concluded and the final essays were posted, Bryce lost no time in kicking up ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ up a notch: drawing the material together, polishing and expanding it into the full-length book it had been envisioned as; and which can now be yours for the ridiculously low price of $2.99 (or £1.85 if, like me, you’re in the UK).

Before it went on sale, Bryce asked me if I wanted ‘Foreignness and Home Soil’ back to post on Agitation, with the alternative that he could include it as an appendix. I felt the essay needed the context of ‘Son of Danse Macabre’.

Thus I find myself at the crossroads marked “conflict of interest”. I’d love to write a straight-up review singing the praises of ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ – because it’s a hell of a good piece of writing, shot through with passionate, knowledge and insight. But I’m featured in it.

So what I’m saying is: it’s an accomplished piece of film criticism, it’s completely affordable and if you’re a fan of Bryce’s indispensable blog Things That Don’t Suck – or a fan of horror movies in general – there’s no reason it shouldn’t be on your reading list.

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And never brought to mind ...

This year’s Winter of Discontent has been a blast. We’ve had sex, violence and bad language; hard-nosed crims, seductive women, and a hobo with a shotgun. We’ve had vampires, cannibals and zombies. We’ve had “based on a true story” and “you couldn’t make this shit up”.

But now this third annual festival of filmic feculence is over and I find myself at a crossroads. Although I’m posting this at year’s end, I’m writing it on a spectacularly rainy evening in late November. I’ve spent October and November stockpiling material for the Winter of Discontent. The idea is that, throughout December, the blog will run itself and I’ll be able to concentration on other writing projects.

As regards The Agitation of the Mind in 2013 … well …

There seems to have been a diminution of interest in Agitation during the last year, with demonstrably fewer comments and page views. I’ve been tempted, on more than one occasion, to lock up the store, pull down the shutters and scrawl “CLOSED” in spray-can lettering over the home page. But then I get stuck into something like 13 For Halloween or the Winter of Discontent and I find myself having a good time with it, to the point where it wouldn’t matter if the blog only had one reader and that was my mum – although she’d probably bollock me for the language.

So, stats and comments notwithstanding, I’ll keep Agitation going while I still enjoy writing about film. And right now, I feel the best thing I can do is take a break for a couple of months until I’m suitably enthusiastic about it again.

In the meantime, I’d be happy to open Agitation to contributors. Any form, any style, any length. A list of your favourite movies and why you love them. The first film star you feel rapturously in love with and why they still beguile you. Your memories of movie-going: the picture palaces of your youth, be they arthouse or grindhouse. Or, y’know, just a straightforward review. Emails to slainte[at]inbox[dot]com.

The stage, my friends, is yours.

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hobo with a Shotgun

Come listen to the story of a hobo who turned sour,
Dude got no name but he’s played by Rutger Hauer,
Rode into town on a freight train belchin’ steam*
But life on the streets is where it’s really unclean.

In a town called Hope, where actually there’s none
And the sign’s been repainted so the name’s now Scum,
Our hobo hero dude who ain’t go no name
Goes beggin’ on the sidewalk for a handful of change.

Ragged and dirty, ignored and overlooked,
All our guy wants to do is scrape up fifty bucks
To a buy a lawnmower from a pawn shop downtown,
Do yard work for cash, try to turn his life around.

But the seedy town of Scum (used to be called Hope)
Is ruled with fear by this crazy psycho bloke
Who wears a white suit though his deeds are deadly dark
And his psycho sons who are chips off the block.**

Then our hero meets a girl – a blameless innocent
(Or so he believes; she turns tricks to pay the rent).
When white suit psycho’s son starts jonesing for her bad
Cue hobo as a shotgun-wielding surrogate dad.

In a town that’s lawless, that’s morally destitute,
Where a paedophile cruises dressed in Santa suit,
Where the cops are corrupt and robberies are rife,
Death is dirt cheap but the cheapest thing is life.

In a place where the only career choice is crime,
Our hero cleans up the town, one deadbeat at a time,
Each pitiful pederast, each misogynistic male,
A join-the-dots corpse-strewn spent cartridge trail.

It’s a crusade that puts white suit and sonny-boy on edge;
Their empire crumbling, they call in The Pledge.
At this point a movie that’s already kind of mental
Buys a first class ticket to What The Fuck Central.

The Pledge are two bikers full-on dressed in armour,
Either they’re inhuman or they personify karma;
They’ve bumped off bishops and slaughtered men of state,
They keep a kraken in the cellar, a pet they love to bait.

‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ is one weird fucked-up flick:
Half of it is funny and the other half’s plain sick.
Viewed through alcoholic fug or substances proscribed
It’s an out-and-out cult classic, a trash fan’s wild ride.

But watch the thing cold sober and, buddy, you will find
It will (to quote Cartman) warp your fragile little mind;
It’ll leave your brain scrambled and your senses desiccated
And maroon you at a certain blog whose content’s agitated.



*All right, it’s a diesel. But I’m writing this mo’ fo’ in verse so I claim poetic licence. 

**Epic fail on the rhyming in this stanza.

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Lifeforce

It was a few months ago that I watched ‘Lifeforce’, already with a mind to writing it up for the Winter of Discontent. Reviewing my notes, I realise there’s no other way of engaging with the movie than to present, unedited and without contextualizing footnotes, the 500 words of appalled scribbling I produced during the two hours of this holy-fucking-awful excuse for a moving picture:

Five minutes in; first question: when Henry Mancini wrote the score, did he get really fucked up on peyote and hallucinate that he was Hindemith?

Okay, I can live with the shuttle being called the HMS Churchill, but does the alien planet have to look like a giant vulva?

So ... the alien planet: bats, a Nosferatu-like claw and naked chicks in crystal pods. And this was written by the same dude who scripted 'Alien'? Fuck my life!

“I’ve been in space for six months and she looks perfect to me.” No disrespect, bro, but a Tiffany album cover probably would after six months in zero g.

“Stand by for soft-dock.” Somehow I doubt this is a real astronautical term.

Somebody actually said: “Houston, we have a problem.” Please tell me this wasn’t scripted. Please tell me the actor was just taking the piss and it somehow made the final cut.

Interplanetary spaceflight is the norm and the ship’s log is recorded on BETAMAX???

“We were just talking about how to get it open and it popped open of its own accord.” They PAID someone to write this???

Mrs F has just called me “a pervert” for watching this film. It’s very difficult to mount a defence. 

The nudity-to-tedious-exposition ratio is so far swinging heavily in favour of tedious exposition.

Oooh, interesting. Naked alien DUDES. Being shot in phallocentric fashion by army guys. I do believe we’ve rendezvoused with a homoerotic subtext.

OMG! That is THE worst reanimated corpse in the history of cinema.

The hot-alien-brunette nudity to dead-leathery-person nudity ratio is also considerably out of whack.

For an exploitation movie based on the precept “hot naked alien chick wreaks havoc”, ‘Lifeforce’ sure as hell has some boring passages.

“How exactly did he die, Colonel?” “The life just drained out of him.” Yeah, same for the audience.

Jess Franco should have directed this. ‘Lifeforce’ is ‘Female Vampire’ is space, with Mathilda May standing in for Lina Romay.

Telepathy … Volvos … oh dear God in Heaven, Patrick Stewart’s in this POS. I am beginning to doubt my sanity.

Patrick Stewart is screaming fit to wake the dead. He must have got a look at the script.

In terms of production values, this can best be described as ‘Blake’s 7’ with boobs. Not that there have been any boobs for the last half hour. Tobe Hooper, you frickin’ owe me!

“Sterilization by thermonuclear device has been approved.” Whoa! Wait a minute! I work in healthcare and that goes waaaaayyy beyond sterilization. Like seriously, dudes.

15 minutes to go, London’s in the grip of a vampire/zombie invasion, the promised nudity has disappeared, and the level of cinematic craftsmanship on display is making your average Bruno Mattei quickie look like un film de Carl Dreyer.

Swords … bat creatures … columns of blue light. I just don’t have the words …

Peter Firth prevents Steve Railsback from getting it on with Mathilda May and THAT’S a happy ending? I must have missed something.

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Rod Serling

It's not just Jesus's birthday today, it's Rod Serling's too. He would have been 88. Dude created 'The Twilight Zone', a show that plugged itself directly into my imagination and threw the switch. Here's to you, sir!

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Late Night Trains

I’d been told that Aldo Lado’s ‘Late Night Trains’ was a pretty damn nasty movie. I’d been told it was ugly, brutal, squalid and cynical. That it was cold, hard and unflinching. That it made for uneasy viewing. That I’d come away from it feeling battered and soiled. And I’m glad I was given those warnings. But I didn’t realize how truly sickening its most horrible, most repulsive moment would be: four entire minutes in which my sense of aesthetics was viciously and incessantly abused. I refer, of course, to the opening credits sequence which plays out to Demis Roussos singing ‘A Flower is All You Need’.

It’s one thing making a rape/revenge exploitation which lifts set-pieces and plot points wholesale from ‘Last House on the Left’ (which itself happily rips off Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’); it’s quite another to assault the viewer with the tonsil-quivering falsetto of Demis fuckin’ Roussos. I call everyone involved a sick bastard of the highest order.

Of course, it’s easy to see what Lado’s up to in his use of ‘A Flower is All You Need’. It provides, at first, a mawkish accompaniment to scenes of shoppers making their purchases at a German Christmas market. And not a chintzy false one like we have in Nottingham every year. This is the real deal, since the film opens in Germany. During this montage we catch our first glimpse of our soon-to-be-very-beleaguered heroines Margaret (Irene Miracle) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo), as well as a rather aloof middle-class blonde woman, who gets no appellation, in the film itself or the end credits, beyond The Lady on the Train (Macha Meril). We also get introduced to Blackie (Flavio Bucci) – so called for the colour of his hair – and Curly (Gianfranco Di Grassi) – also monikered for follicle-inspired reasons – who, it is swiftly revealed, are a pair of unlikeable thugs. Their first act? Beating up a stallholder dressed as Santa for a few lousy coins. Their second? Taking a knife to a rich woman’s fur coat. It’s at this point that Demis fuckin’ Rossous’s wailings cease being mawkish accompaniment and instead get pressganged into ironic counterpoint duties.

It’s from the fur-coated slicing incident that Blackie and Curly, pursued by the authorities, flee into a station and jump on a train just as it’s pulling out. The same train, as if none of us saw this one coming, that Margaret and Lisa are travelling on. They’re going to Verona to spend Christmas with Lisa’s well-to-do father, Professor Guilio Stradi (Enrico Maria Salerno), a consultant at a metropolitan hospital), and step-mother Laura (Marina Berti). Once onboard, Blackie encounters The Lady on the Train (hereafter TLotT), promptly sexually assaulting her. She responds to the rough treatment and is soon manipulating Blackie and Curly as they menace and inevitably assault the two girls.

Actually, scratch that; the word “soon” has no business in that last sentence. ‘Late Night Trains’ boasts the slowest first half in the history of exploitation cinema. There are endless vignettes sketching in the other passengers on the train – including a delegation from the Catholic church, and a compartment full of ex-Nazis – the end result being that the train is so overcrowded that Lado and his four screenwriters contrive to have Margaret and Lisa, Blackie and Curly, and TLotT change trains (this second one, by contrast, is almost deserted) just so the nasty stuff can take place without interruption. Also during these long, narratively encumbered 40 minutes or so, we’re treated to one of the least realistic operations ever performed on film (it basically consists of Stradi slicing into a piece of foam rubber while saying, more or less, “Scalpel … swab … keep swabbing … okay, we done”); Stradi talking about society’s problems during a hoity-toity dinner party and identifying himself as a peace-loving liberal; and Margaret and Lisa endlessly giggling about boys, the former having done the deed with a spotty fellow student while Lisa remains uninitiated into the global cult of snu-snu.

These moments are so unsubtle that Lado might as well have got the writers to stand in background holding up placards reading “HE’S A DOCTOR, THAT MEANS HE’S SWORN TO PROTECT LIFE, BUT LET’S SEE HOW LONG THAT LASTS WHEN HIS DAUGHTER GETS VIOLATED AND KILLED … IRONY, HUH?” and “SHE’S A VIRGIN. LIKE ‘THE VIRGIN SPRING’. DO YOU SEE WHAT WE DID THERE?” On the subject of the multiplicity of contributors to the screenplay, I’m not sure what depresses me the most – the fact that it took four people to rip off ‘Last House on the Left’, or that anyone wanted to rip off ‘Last House on the Left’ in the first place.

Lado ups the ante during the protracted middle section, though. The manipulation of lower class Blackie and Curly (muscle; no brains) by middle-class TLotT (elegant, seductive; amoral) contrasts effectively with the opulent but empty Christmas celebrations hosted by Stradi and his trophy girlfriend (tellingly, Guilio and Laura are on the precipice of a relationship-destroying argument when their guests arrive and things settle back into a brittle status quo). There’s a conceptually horrible and utterly unexpected payoff to the Blackie and Curly/Margaret and Lisa dynamic, and Lado conjures a shot of a corpse being hurled off a railway bridge that somehow achieves a weird visual poetry.

So: from dull as ditchwater to brutally effective … only for things to go south in the finale. This, folks, is the section in which the scripters might as well have turned up with another placard, this one reading “È L’ULTIMA CASA A SINISTRA … MA CON UN TRENO DEL CAZZO, VA BENE?” For this is, indeed, ‘The Last House on the Left’ … but with a fucking train, all right?

Trundling as I am towards the 1,000 word mark, I won’t belabour the suspension-of-disbelief-severing circumstances that land the killers at chez Stradi, or the unrealistic means by which relatives receive the bad news (because, yeah, you’d hear the victim’s name on the radio before the police had even commenced an investigation), or the utterly pointless scene, on Christmas morning, where a witness makes an anonymous tip off from a petrol station at which a truck driver is filling up. (Where the fuck is a truck driver delivering to on Christmas morning? Does Santa subcontract on the continent?) Suffice it to say that the last twenty minutes steer unambiguously into distraught-(formerly-peace-loving)-relatives-go-apeshit territory.

It’s to the detriment of ‘Late Night Trains’ that Lado and co. draw so slavishly on ‘Last House on the Left’. With its attempt at a genuine social commentary (class differences and exploitation), and its unsubtle but effective shifts between the girls’ ordeal on the train and the facile artifice of Christmas at the Stradis’, Lado’s film is certainly a more effective outing than Craven’s notorious-but-actually-not-very-good shocker. Wasn’t it Stephen King who described the film as “Abbott and Costello meet the rapists”? ‘Late Night Trains’ wants to be a much better film, wants to instigate social, political and ideological debate. But it homages, evokes and outright copies an inferior piece of work in frame after frame to the point where you wish it had simply done its own thing with the material.

‘Late Night Trains’, frustratingly, could have been so much more. More focused, more intelligent, more provocative. Nastier.

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Inglorious Bastards

It was probably just as well for Quentin Tarantino that some enterprising distributor decided that Enzo G. Castellari’s ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’ would clean up in the English-speaking territories if it was retitled ‘Inglorious Bastards’. Somehow, Tarantino’s epic wouldn’t have benefited from borrowing the title ‘That Damned Armoured Train’. For a start, there’s no train in the Tarantino film.

There’s most definitely a train in Castellari’s warsploitation opus. And it’s most definitely armoured. Damned? Given the amount of people who are shot, stabbed or blown up on or around it, that’s pretty much a definite as well. There’s no accusing ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’ of not delivering on its title.

Although it was made eleven years after ‘The Dirty Dozen’ – a rare example of an Italian exploitation director taking his sweet time in jumping on a bandwagon – Robert Aldrich’s cynical classic is unequivocally the primary source of inspiration in a film that also happily pilfers from John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Train’, John Sturges’s ‘The Great Escape’ and, uh, Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Battle of the Commandos’.

If ‘The Dirty Dozen’ is basically bunch-of-crims-cajoled-into-a-suicide-mission, then ‘Inglorious Bastards’ (I’ll stick with the English title for purposes of this review, though I much prefer ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’) is bunch-of-deserters-compromised-into-accepted-suicide-mission. How they become compromised, with only a moderate spoiler along the way, is like this:

It’s 1944 in the Ardennes and a truck containing a dozen or so military prisoners leaves an American base under the command of a prissy sergeant played by John Loffredo who’s not important enough to have a name. He’s got a moustache that’s trimmed to within an inch of its life and a side parting you could use as a slide-rule, so let’s call him Sgt Wellgroomed. The truck sets off but a blow-out strands them out in the open and easy pickings for a passing German fighter plane. Sgt Wellgroomed and his fellow guards pile out and take cover, ordering the prisoners to remain in the truck. Some are killed when the fighter strafes them, others when they pile out of the truck and Sgt Wellgroomed opens fire on them. Once the attack is over and a righteously indignant Private Fred Canfield (Fred Williamson) has throttled Sgt Wellgroomed, the numbers have been reduced to five: the aforementioned Canfield, Lt Robert Yeager (Bo Svenson), and three others who, to the best of my recollection, are only outfitted with forenames: wisecracking asshole Tony (Peter Hooten), thief and forger Nick (Michael Pergolani) and the youthful and perpetually terrified Berle (Jackie Basehart). Together, under the nominal leadership of Yaeger, they decide to take their chances crossing Nazi-occupied territory in the direction of the Swiss border. Meeting up with a fellow deserter – if from the opposite side – Adolf Sachs (Raimund Harmstorf), he briefly becomes part of their merry band even if Tony doesn’t trust him. Mind you, Tony doesn’t much like Fred either on account of him being black. So really Tony’s an asshole is what it all comes down to. Anyway, with Adolf tagging along they have various adventures and narrow escapes until a misunderstanding of brobdingnagian proportions results in a firefight with a group of American commandos disguised as Germans en route to a rendezvous with their French Resistance contacts. Net result: dead commandos, extremely pissed off commanding officer Colonel Tom Buckner (Ian Bannen), and a Resistance cell still in need of assistance to accomplish one of those archetypal could-change-the-course-of-the-war missions.

Said mission involves a train. An armoured one.

Which is where we came in. 

Enzo G. Castellari is one of the minor poets of trash cinema (his second division giallo ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ has already been part of the Winter of Discontent); by the time he directed ‘Inglorious Bastards’, had chalked up spaghetti western classic ‘Keoma: The Violent Breed’ (another title that’s more than justified by the content) and the cracking crime thriller ‘The Heroin Busters’. Later, he’d helm the ‘Bronx Warriors’ trilogy, a mash-up of John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’ and the expected tropes of the post-apocalypse subgenre that became its own epic saga. Castellari knows what makes genre cinema work: pace, story and incident. Plenty of it. 

Barely ten minutes goes by without an explosion, an exchange of gunfire or a hair’s breadth escape. Exposition is slotted in as and when. There’s a hint of character dynamics, but not so much that it would slow things down. Castellari keeps the pedal to the metal – or, this being a movie prominently featuring a train, the firebox stoked and the regulator wide open – and gives the B-movie audience what they want: dangerous guys armed to the teeth cutting a swathe through the Hun, a perilous mission with no guarantee of survival and a token scene of nudity just so no-one can complain that the flick didn’t tick all of the boxes.

‘Inglorious Bastards’ gives us a terrific action movie cast (seriously, when Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson get tooled up you just know it’s know it’s going to be spent cartridges a-go-go) with the unexpected inclusion of Bannen giving things a bit of class. But only a bit, mind. ‘Inglorious Bastards’ doesn’t want to be an actor’s movie; it just wants to entertain you. And it certainly fulfils its remit. You’ll cheer through your beer and popcorn when that model railway blows up at the end.

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