6/1/14 (Part One): Night of the Bumbling Dead

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1980's, airport, alternate title, Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, City of the Walking Dead, exploitation films, fast zombies, Francisco Rabal, horror, horror films, horror movie, Hugo Stiglitz, Italian cinema, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Mel Ferrer, Nightmare City, nuclear power plant, nuclear radiation, Pierangelo Civera, Ruggero Deodato, so-bad-it's-good, Stefania D'Amario, Stelvio Cipriani, twist ending, Ugo Bologna, Umberto Lenzi, Z-movies, zombie movies, zombies, zombies with weapons

A birds’-eye-view of a city, supplemented by a nicely atmospheric, Goblin-esque slowburner of a song, leads to the revelation that there’s been a spill at the local nuclear power plant. Nothing to worry about, since the spill has supposedly been contained, but TV reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) has been sent to cover the story. As he waits at the airport for his contact, Prof. Hagenbach, to get in, an unidentified military transport plan suddenly lands with no warning or radio contact. As the military, police and airport officials, along with Dean and his cameraman, surround the plane, everyone waits for several long, silent, agonizing minutes. Just as the military is preparing to storm the plane, the hatch door opens and we wait, anxiously, to see who (or what) will stumble out. For its first eight or so minutes, Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980) is one tense, restrained live-wire of a film. While the 80 minutes that follow end up being completely laughable and silly, the film manages to succeed as one of those “so-bad-it’s-good” treats, perfect fodder for a drunken party or a lazy weekend of bad films.

Once the plane hatch opens, Dean and company are greeted by some of the shabbiest zombies in memory (I’ve seen more zombie films than are probably healthy for one individual and I can’t recall worse makeup in anything prior to Nightmare City), a shambling horde of fairly normal looking folks with lumpy, gray oatmeal slathered on their faces. Besides being part of a balanced breakfast, the “zombies” are also very fast…and very armed. Yes, folks: this is that notorious zombie film where the flesh-eating creatures spend more time firing machine guns and strangling people than biting them. In fact, as we later learn, the zombies aren’t really “zombies,” at all, but some kind of radiation-mutated, blood-sucking freaks: they’re atomic zompires! As the zompires run riot around the city, Dean tries to find his wife, Anna (Laura Trotter), who’s making a desperate stand at a besieged hospital. Meanwhile, Major Warren Holmes (Francisco Rabal) and Gen. Murchison (Mel Ferrer), two of the most ineffectual military men in the history of cinema, try to contain the zompire threat but only succeed in making everything worse. There are bomber planes on stand-by, however…just in case.

As Dean and Anna try to stave off the zompires, the General’s daughter, Jessica (Stefania D’Amario) and her husband, Bob (Pierangelo Civera) are also running around, trying to stay alive. Eventually, all of these characters will come together in one giant mess of exploding-projectile-television sets, gouged eyeballs, murderous zompire priests and total chaos, culminating in a final showdown in an abandoned amusement park that can best be described as “present and accounted for.” Stay tuned for the “twist” ending, however…or don’t: it really doesn’t change much, in the long run.

Despite how utterly shabby much of Nightmare City ends up being – and we’re talking occasionally Ed Woodian levels of ineptitude here – the film is still consistently enjoyable and quick-paced. I’m still not sold on “fast” zombies (and probably never will be) and feel that arming zombies makes about as much sense as giving The Wolf Man a shotgun but these actually end up being fairly minor quibbles. No one will ever mistake Lenzi’s “opus” has anything more than a Z-grade Italian zombie flick but it’s got energy to burn and is pretty good about not wearing out its welcome. The effects and makeup are consistently awful, although the requisite eye-gouging scene is well-staged and very uncomfortable. The acting is nothing to write home about but Hugo Stiglitz does a decent job as our protagonist and Mel Ferrer gets to act a little agitated as poor, put-upon Gen. Murchison.

Although Umberto Lenzi made a wide-range of films in his career, including various gangster, fantasy and action films, he’ll probably always be best known for his horror films, especially the genuinely disturbing cannibal films The Man From Green River (1972), Eaten Alive (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981). Cannibal Ferox, in particular, is a notoriously nasty member of the cannibal subgenre, although it’s slightly eclipsed by Ruggero Deodato’s legendary Cannibal Holocaust (1980). While Lenzi had a fairly wide and deep body of work, he was never the most distinctive director, to be honest, and it’s a bit difficult to differentiate much between his “style” and similar filmmakers like Deodato or Joe D’Amato. He’s practically the definition of “workmanlike,” although his work in Nightmare City definitely ranks in the lower-midrange of his filmography.

If there’s any one aspect of the film that really stands out, it would definitely have to be Stelvio Cipriani’s electronic score. Although it seems to explicitly reference Goblin, at times, the score is always appropriately moody and, frequently, rather thrilling. Cipriani also did the scores for several Mario Bava films, including his classic Bay of Blood (1971), so his roots in Italian exploitation cinema go fairly deep. While nothing here approaches the dizzying heights of Goblin’s work with Dario Argento, it’s all well-done and definitely enhances the overall experience.

Ultimately, your tolerance/enjoyment of Nightmare City will depend almost entirely on your experience with these kind of films. If you go in expecting an actually well-made, well-executed film (or even a well-made B-movie), you’re going to be sorely disappointed. If, however, you go in expecting a silly, gonzo, violent, shabby-as-hell Z-grade exploitation flick, you might be able to navigate these waters with some ease. Nothing can save that awful ending, of course, but what comes before it is just fun enough to make the journey worthwhile…kind of…sort of…

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1/14/14: The Hell Inside You

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Cannibal Holocaust, cinema, cinema verite, drug abuse, experimental film, Film, found-footage, gone before their time, Hallucinogens, horror films, James Davidson, Jason Banker, Movies, psychadelics, Sara Anne Jones, the Seven Gates of Hell, Toad Road, tragedies, twenty-something angst

Full disclosure: I am a firm believer in the strange, the unexplained and the supernatural. Personal experience notwithstanding, this world we inhabit is just too big, too impossible, to not contain more secrets than we could ever imagine. Until we’ve truly poked under every rock, swam to the bottom of every sea and followed every deserted dirt trail to its terminus, we cannot, honestly, say that we know anything about the world we inhabit. We can make educated guesses…we can analyze and test until the cows come home…but at the end of the day…we’re never going to be 100% sure of anything. We must simply have faith that what we believe to be true is so…until something comes along to shatter that believe, of course.

I begin my discussion of Toad Road in this way for a very particular reason: more than almost any film I’ve ever seen (certainly on the short list), this film explodes any notion audiences might have of cinematic reality/unreality, establishing not only a world where anything and everything can be possible but a film where anything can be possible. I’ll be honest: with very few exceptions, I had an almost impossible time telling the fiction from the reality in Toad Road. This, friends and neighbors, is the living definition of a nightmare.

The genius of the film – and the film is genius, make no bones about it – lies in the ease with which we (the audience) continually have the rug pulled from beneath our feet. The story, itself, is pure simplicity: a group of disaffected twenty-something layabouts do massive quantities of every drug imaginable, have sex where they feel like it and generally thumb their nose at society. Into this toxic mix pours the town’s goodie-goodie new girl, Sara. Sara hooks up with James, one of the defacto leaders of the clique and proceeds to throw herself wholehearted into their druggie lifestyle. Sara becomes obsessed with stories about Toad Road, a local urban legend that posits that the Seven Gates to Hell are located in the nearby woods. Ultimately, she convinces James to accompany her as she drops a massive quantity of acid and walks Toad Road. As can be expected, things do not go as planned and James learns the very valuable lesson that Hell can be wherever you are.

As I mentioned, pure simplicity and certainly nothing that we haven’t seen before, especially since the film is occasionally shot in a hand-held, found-footage style. The acting is very naturalistic: these all seem like the kind of wastoids we’ve known (and possibly been in the past) and the tone of cheerful hedonism seems completely honest. These early drug/party scenes have an almost verite style to them, recalling the similar grittiness of Larry Clark’s Kids. Again, nothing we haven’t seen before but well done. And then the rug gets pulled from beneath our feet because…

…this is all really happening. That’s right: the drug/party/debauchery stuff looks so real because it’s actually happening. Take a look at the cast list: most of the characters (with the exception of the odd police officer here or anonymous driver there) have the same name as the actors portraying them. Sara is played by Sara Anne Jones; James is played by James Davidson. The character of Uncle Damon in the film? Played by Damon Johansen.

You see, writer/director Jason Banker didn’t audition his actors: he found them online. In a coup rarely seen (the last time I can remember something like this was Cannibal Holocaust, waaay back in the day), Banker blends the real debauchery of the drugging/partying (smoking massive quantities of weed; doing shrooms; getting so drunk that they all run around their apartment pantless, setting each other’s pubic hair on fire) with the manufactured drama of the story itself. The effect on your psyche is pretty stunning: once you realize that part of the film is actually happening, why not allow for the rest of the story to be taking place? Where does reality end and fiction begin?

I’ll be honest: once I realized what the film was doing, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. In this day and age, films (especially horror films) are way too safe. Gone are the days of danger when you feared that watching Salo or Cannibal Holocaust or Faces of Death would somehow scar you, change you for the worst into some sort of slobbering beast…the Video Nasties era. No matter how well made modern films are, they just don’t possess that sustained sense of dread because modern times are so much different: we’ve seen and done it all, by this point, and modern technology keeps giving us the ability to do even more. Gone are the days of yore when audiences thought the speeding train would careen through the screen and into the theater: we’ve seen Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth, so we know that absolutely anything can be done.

Here’s the trick: once you realize that the partying scenes are real, it makes you question everything else about the film. How much of this was improvised? Written? Were any of the “friends” actually actors (the lead, Sara, was definitely not a professional, despite her amazing performance)? The film deals with pain on many different levels, particularly with the character of Sara: how much of that was real? The climax of the film pulls a few tricks out, here and there, that serve to remind us that at least some of the film is faked (by my count, there were two shots that satisfied the current obsession with “scary faces” in modern horror films but these were brief and altogether unobtrusive) but so much of the movie revolves around the interactions of the group of friends (at least 80%) that it starts to make you wonder about everything. I know that the end was fake because it’s a movie. But what if…

Lest it seem like the only reason to watch Toad Road is for the dizzying combination of truth and lie, let me set your mind at ease: the film is absolutely stunning in every possible way. When the footage is not hand-held, the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, particularly all of the beautiful snow and winter footage. The sound design is amazing, especially in the scene where they visit a local cave: the sound of wind chimes begins to get louder and louder on the soundtrack until it’s an all-encompassing force, coming from nowhere and yet going everywhere. And that acting…wow…that acting.

Special attention must be paid to the film’s lead and emotional/moral core, Sara. If there is an arc to the story (and there certainly is), it would be Sara’s journey from good girl to lost soul. Her obsession with Toad Road and psychedelics turns her into a completely different character by the film’s end, one stronger and, yet, more vulnerable than she began. There is a moment in the film where Sara explains what each of the Seven Gates of Hell symbolizes and I’ll be honest: I was completely transfixed. The scene could have gone on for 30 seconds or 30 minutes: it was all the same to me. I simply couldn’t take my eyes from the screen, lest I miss one single thing that she said.

And here, of course, is one of the biggest kickers, the fact that proves how truly haunted Toad Road really is: Sara Anne Jones is now dead. She died of a drug overdose shortly after the film was finished, further blurring the line between reality and fantasy: the character of Sara took her journey to its natural conclusion and, so too, would it seem the actual Sara did the same thing.

It’s a tragic epilogue to a brutally sad film, a movie that makes Requiem for a Dream look like a Calgon commercial. The film is brutal and heartbreaking and absolutely brilliant. There are moments that will make you question not only the world around you but the world inside you, as well. These are lost souls, burned-out candle stubs. By the time that James realizes how much of a waste his life is, by the time that he realizes how desperately he and Sara need to get away, it’s already too late.

The actual meaning behind Toad Road may be a little gauzy but I’m pretty sure I got it, anyway: this is one of the single, greatest anti-drug films in the history of cinema. This is a film for anyone who’s ever been there, anyone who ever got out and anyone who’s ever lost someone who couldn’t. It’s a powerful film, one that I won’t forget anytime soon. Aside from the beautiful cinematography, there’s nothing pretty or sweet about this film. The best way that I can sum the whole thing up is to quote that paragon of optimism, Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Toad Road was the abyss and it looked right through me.