Abominable

Abominable (2006)

Dir. Ryan Schifrin

Written by Ryan Schifrin and James Morrison

Starring Matt McCoy, Haley Joel, Christien Tinsley, with Paul Gleason, Jeffery Combs, Rex Linn, and Lance Henriksen

There’s a real thin line you have to walk when you’re making an intentionally campy movie. Camp, in general, is something which works much better when it’s come by honestly, the earnest result of slightly cracked visionaries laboring hard in punishing conditions to realize their stupid dreams. It’s stupid, but it’s honest. It’s personal. In a way, the resulting movies are windows into the souls of artists either too brazen or too delusional to even pretend they understand what other people want to see. Sure, we laugh --and rightly so-- but there’s something kind of sweet about that kind of sincerity. They can’t help themselves. Cultivating camp appeal is another beast entirely. It’s one thing to enjoy the work of someone who tried hard and ended up with something stupid; it’s another to watch someone intentionally make something stupid when they could have chosen to make it good instead. You lose a lot of leeway and goodwill right off the bat, and that’s before we even point out that no matter what goofy thing you want to invent to make your movie intentionally corny, some smug nerd with plenty of resources is never going to be able to out-crazy the legitimately unstable weirdos who made the genuine article. You’re never going to be able to think your way into replicating something that only came into being because someone wasn’t thinking. It’s more likely to make everything feel forced and more than a little desperate.

More likely. But not certain, because with ABOMINABLE, novice filmmaker Ryan Schifrin has made something a bit deliberately arch -- and certainly plenty schlocky-- which is also probably the best bigfoot film ever put to celluloid (not that it has a lot of competition in that regard; really the only other one which could even be considered watchable is probably THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, and that only as an exotic curiosity). It’s cheesy and ridiculous, but with a broad, cheeky style which hovers gracefully just between outright comedy and affable sincerity, a tone that feels just about right for this particular scenario. Which turns out to be bigfoot vs co-eds meets REAR WINDOW.

The explanation for this eyebrow-raising premise is that wheelchair-bound Preston (Matt McCoy, the guy they got for POLICE ACADEMY 5 and 6 when they couldn’t even get Steve Guttenberg to come back for more)* is recovering from a tragic accident in a cabin in the woods (well, more like a well-appointed house in the woods) which is directly across the road from an identical house occupied by a bunch of scantily-clad, frequently-undressed co-eds. I know this will shock you, but try to keep from panicking when I tell you that these very co-eds will one by one fall victim to bigfoot attack, and even though Preston can see it all from across the street, he can’t help them because his irritable nurse Otis (Christien Tinsley, primarily a makeup artist and easily the most distinguished person on set, having worked for Andrew Dominik, The Coen Brothers, Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Mel Gibson, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Bay, and numerous Vin Diesel joints) doesn’t buy his bigfoot-phobia and thinks he needs to chill out.

McCoy, despite being a poor man’s Steve Guttenberg and looking like the unholy love child of Gabriel Byrne and Anthony Perkins, is actually the film’s secret weapon. He has a surprisingly strong grasp of the tone, and he really makes an honest effort to sell the tension here while still giving a wild-eyed, slightly tongue-in-cheek performance. His amusingly antagonistic relationship with the exasperated Otis is really the anchor of the whole film, successfully finding a schlocky midnight movie vibe which is entirely entertaining even when there’s no bigfoot on-screen (which is surprisingly --perhaps distressingly-- often). That’s good, because the rest of the film is all over the place; with the exception of final girl Amanda (Haley Joel [NOT Osment], “young co-ed,” on an episode of Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, who, based on her surprising charisma here, deserved better roles than she got) the co-eds are all entirely forgettable, and even throwaway cameos by the likes of Paul Gleason, Jeffrey Combs and Lance Henriksen don’t add up to much. Combs, at least, looks like he’s having fun as a weird redneck; unfortunately, Henriksen's inability to not be a great actor is somewhat of a hindrance here. He’s also playing a weird redneck, but he’s incapable of not giving a soulful, nuanced performance, which in the middle of this ridiculousness feels a little jarring. But I guess his presence is always welcome.

Still, that’s a lot of filler. McCoy and Tinsley strike that right tone and remain consistently entertaining, but there are constant cutaways to various unimportant side characters, with cops, campers, hunters, farmers, and co-eds, none of whom bring much flavor to the table; even the exquisitely horrible acting of the girls isn’t amusing enough to justify the amount of time they waste. This becomes increasingly a problem because there’s also not a lot of violence to spice things up; the climax brings one violent highlight (spoiler: bigfoot unhinges his jaws and vertically bisects a head with his teeth) but otherwise tends to be surprisingly mild, leaving a little too much of the film on the slack and dry side.  

Fortunately, Schifrin has also brought along two ringers to bat clean-up. The first is Bigfoot himself (designed by storyboard artist Federico D'Alessandro, who has since gone on to storyboards and animatics in many of the Marvel films) which gives the big guy a distinct look, bristling with long teeth and wild eyes (he’s portrayed by special effects guy and occasional actor Michael Deak, who’s had a career which has ranged from DOLLMAN VS DEMONIC TOYS to TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. Granted that’s not much of a range in quality, but in terms of production budget, that’s gotta be the biggest rises in movie history). He looks great whenever you see him, and the movie wisely shows the suit off at every opportunity.

But the other ringer he called in is maybe even more important, and it’s someone he didn’t have to reach through his agent (I hope): his dad, celebrated composer Lalo Schifrin, in his second-to-last (so far) full-length film score.** Schifrin got his big break after being noticed by jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, and went on to record classic themes for all the DIRTY HARRY films, BULLIT, WAY OF THE DRAGON, and perhaps most memorably Mission Impossible (no, Limp Bizket didn’t write that tune. Really! Look it up!). So having him on board makes this feel waaaaay more like a real movie than it probably has any business pretending. It’s not going to go down as one of his all-time classics or anything, but it’s completely respectable horror score, and the swirling, PSYCHO-esque strings do much more than anything else in the movie to lay down a base coat of legitimate horror movie. That might seem superfluous in a movie this trivial, but actually it’s a direly necessary counterbalance to the movie’s otherwise broad tone. Without at least a solid core of genre goods, this would be such a frivolous exercise it would risk evaporating before our eyes.

Fortunately, with a top-tier bigfoot and a strong film score by one of the genre’s acknowledged giants, ABOMINABLE has everything it really needs. It amiably coasts the rest of the way on its affable cartoonish seriousness, keeping the proceedings consistently goofy and exaggerated (but for arch theatrical effect rather than outright comedy). It’s silly, but never quite to the point of parody, which means the final confrontation with bigfoot is actually a real highlight, a grueling scorched-earth battle with enough actual stakes to earn your investment. It ends with a sustained parade of its best instincts --including its cheerfully dumb final zinger, which works much better here than the identical (but clumsier) one that concludes the deadly serious DARK WAS THE NIGHT did, because you might actually consider watching a sequel to this one-- and consequently leaves you feeling more charitable towards it than it probably deserves, all things considered. Still, it can be confidently called one of the best Bigfoot movies ever, warts and all, and probably even the best Bigfoot movie to feature Lance Henriksen (take that, SASQUATCH HUNTERS). As Lincoln once reputedly put it, Whatever you are, be a good one. I doubt he had a low-rent killer Sasquatch movie in mind when he said that, but it’s true nonetheless.

*Weirdly, McCoy would go on to appear in both THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. But by 2005 he was no stranger to hairy bipedsploitation, having already been in BIGFOOT: THE UNFORGETTABLE ENCOUNTER (1994) and the apparently unrelated LITTLE BIGFOOT (1997).

**Tragically, the last was RUSH HOUR 3.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Some Thing Are Better Left Unfound. Or, We've Hunted It For Decades... But Now, Its [sic] Decided To Hunt Us. Or, If The Cops Want To Solve These Murders, They'll Have To Think Big. Really Big
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: The end leaves the possibility wide open, but it's been over a decade and still nothing.
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, and Dee Wallace Stone is in there too.
• BOOBIES: None (?) There's a lot of scantily clad ladies, but I don't recall any specific nudity. IMBD keywords do list "female nudity" so maybe I'm wrong. I bow to the collective horny-ness of the whole internet. EDIT: Dan P. is correct, there's a shower scene, which even features an inexplicable zoom-in on the butt, somehow accomplished with binoculars.
• MULLETS: None of note.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Face bisected.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Sasquatch!
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• VOYEURISM: Tons. This one is mostly a REAR WINDOW pastiche, which is about as voyeur-y as movies get.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Medium, definitely on the radar for serious horror fans.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Women will almost always be grateful to you for watching them through their windows with binoculars, because you'll be able to warn them of killer Sasquatches. In fact, women, just to be safe, you'd be wise not to have any blinds of any kind installed. That's just common sense.
• TITLE ACCURACY: 100% lies, everyone knows that Abominable Snowmen or "yetis" (presumably the "abominable" of the title) are exclusively native to the Himalayan mountains. North American hairy bipeds are known as Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Skunk Apes, or Napes (North-American-Apes).
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

The co-eds talk about their missing friend

Hatchet For the Honeymoon

Hatchet For the Honeymoon (1970)  aka Il rosso segno della follia (“The Red Mark of Madness”) aka Blood Brides aka An Ax For the Honeymoon. But oddly no titles that correctly identify that the weapon of murder is in fact a cleaver.

Dir. Mario Bava

Written by Santiago Moncada, Mario Bava

Starring Stephen Forsyth, Dagmar Lassander, Laura Betti, Jesús Puente

HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON is, almost without question, Bava’s most entertainingly campy film. Coming in 1970, more or less at the first early crest of the giallo wave, this tale of a psychopathic wedding dress designer, an antagonistic ghost, a bunch of models, a hidden room full of mannequins and a suspiciously shiny meat cleaver (no hatchet, though) is a brilliant mix of hilarious ridiculousness and serious technical chops. In fact, it’s so well made it’s actually kind of a shame, in a way, that it’s not legitimately good. But then again, if it was we wouldn’t have a movie this sublimely silly, and I’d probably complain about that too.

Though arguably a giallo, HATCHET has a radically different structure than Bava’s earlier genre-defining THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. There is a mystery killer, but the murder was a solitary crime committed many years in the past. Does that mean this is one of those irritating bloodless giallos that have some convoluted mystery but almost no body count, like AUTOPSY? Not at all! It just means that this time we know exactly who’s been killing people, because he tells us right up front and we follow him for the whole movie.

The “he” in question would be John Harrington, handsome, debonair and enormously wealthy mansion-dweller and wedding dress fashion magnate. Seems like he’s got it all, but it’s not even a full minute after the intriguing abstract-animation title sequence that he’s hacking up a pair of newlyweds on a train with the aforementioned cleaver. But why? Well, there’s a appealingly simple explanation for that. “The fact is, I’m completely mad,” he helpfully narrates to us. And indeed, that self-diagnosis seems richly supported by the facts; he has a bizarre secret mannequin-strewn wedding-dress fetish room hidden in his sprawling mansion, which I would say handily crosses the fine line between “eccentric” and MANIAC even before I mention it’s where he keeps his trusty cleaver.

The sideburns say it all.

But despite his admitted insanity, he has a good, practical concrete reason for systematically murdering a bunch of screaming women (ideally newlyweds still in their wedding gear, hence the title*). You see, he has a repressed memory of his mother getting murdered, but can’t recall the face of the killer. Each murder he commits releases a little more of this memory, and he gets a little closer to solving the mystery of who offed mommy (hint: you’ve already figured it out). Possibly this concept rests on a somewhat iffy scientific foundation, psychologically speaking, but I dunno, the movie seems pretty certain this is a thing so I guess I’ll defer to Mr. Bava’s superior understanding of the human brain. It’s a patently outrageous premise, but I like it because at least it makes him a little different from the usual giallo killers, who are murdering out of psychosexual frenzy or because they saw their mom have sex with a sailor (usually both). Besides, it means he’s free to enjoy his work and his newfound state of productive psychosis, “the realization of which annoyed me at first, but is now amusing to me. Quite...amusing. Nobody suspects that I’m a madman.”

If the movie starts off as totally fuckin’ nuts as its protagonist, it only gets weirder. The slasher aspect is pretty standard, but just as the cat-and-mouse game with a suspicious cop starts to get a bit rote, another unexpected wrinkle crops up. See, John --despite his easy charm with the ladies-- isn’t entirely free to get jiggy at his discretion because of the minor annoyance that he is married to Mildred (Laurat Betti, LA DOLCE VITA) who openly hates him (who could blame her) and lives only to make his life miserable. Well, any abuse of this guy is richly deserved, but perhaps ill-advised because he has that cleaver and all. So it’s not exactly a surprise when she finds herself on the business end of John’s ceremonial slice-a-ma-jig. But what is a surprise is that her dedication to making his life miserable doesn’t end with death; she accompanies him as an invisible ghost that only other people can see, fucking up his murder routine and cockblocking him at every turn. How often do you see that in a movie?

The happy couple. You'd think something like this would bring them closer, but nope.

I’ve read a couple reviews of the film that mention its obvious similarities to MANIAC (the mannequins, the misogyny, the fact that the movie plays from the perspective of the killer) but a more interesting comparison is actually to AMERICAN PSYCHO. John Harrington and Bret Easton Ellis’ Jason Patrick Bateman are both dispassionate, remorseless psycho killers, but they’re also handsome, articulate and wildly successful. Joe Spinell’s Frank Zito in MANIAC shares their love of killing, but he’s also a penniless, greasy loser, weeping into bloody mannequin hair and tortured by his past. MANIAC shows the killer as an outsider, a weirdo who can just barely function on the margins of society. HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON and AMERICAN PSYCHO offer a very different perspective: society is actually set up to reward sociopathic maniacs, and we can see them succeed in pretty much everything they put their minds to. No one notices that they’re absolute monsters, because they’re focused, successful, and conscience-free; on the contrary, we envy their ambition and their power. Of course, AMERICAN PSYCHO was written as a satire, while HATCHET seems to be mostly playing it fairly straight. Still, the fact that John’s mansion is played by the Barcelona villa of notorious Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (in one of Bava’s only cinematic sojourns outside Italy) seems like it must be at least a bit of a wink at the way being a heartless monster can pay dividends.

I’m not convinced that the film is intended to be satirical, or that it has any particular subtext. Still, it’s a surprisingly funny film from Bava, who I never noticed having any sense of humor before. Were it not for the bloody murder scene, the tit-for-tat antagonism between John and Mildred (both before and after her death) is so caustic and blithe that it could have played in an old screwball comedy. There’s some simple but fun irony peppered through, too; John cheerfully hacks up newlyweds, but he’s also so gentle that he literally will not hurt a fly (he rescues one from a watery death, in fact, gently blowing on it to dry its wings), keeps doves as pets, and fastidiously tends to an opulent greenhouse (which also doubles as a body-disposal site, but still).

Interesting man cave.

Not exactly Oscar Wilde, I’ll grant, but this sort of thing is made a lot more effective through the performance of Stephen Forsyth (his last role before retiring to become a composer), who is absolutely perfect for the role in the sense that he over-emotes every single word and expression while at the same time never seeming to have anything remotely resembling a soul. It’s a big, broad performance, but so totally divorced from any kind of recognizable human experience that it manages to be forever hovering at the edge of camp comedy while still maintaining a unnerving undercurrent. It’s actually the sort of role Vincent Price would be great at, but Forsyth’s cartoonish Disney-prince good looks and cold, dead eyes give the character something distinct and different. Like Price, but somehow gayer. A lot gayer. Nevermind John’s ascot and gardening, he’s also a fey, vain and soft-spoken fashion designer with mommy issues and an obsession with wedding dresses. He’s got to be the most outrageously feminine male character I’ve ever seen in a giallo --which tend as a whole to have mostly unfortunate ideas about anyone breaking gender stereotypes (not a terrible surprise in 1970)-- but in this case I’ll allow for it simply because of the campy glory of this over-the-top gayness which at the same time never seems aware of how gay it is. I’m serious, he would be an easy target for the filmmakers to turn him into a mincing, sexually-confused degenerate, but instead they just treat this sort of behavior as normal, no one seems to notice that he’s about one sequen away from being RuPaul.  Maybe that’s just Italy, man. I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that the real star here is Bava himself. Here he mostly avoids using his old tricks of gothic darks and surreal colored lighting, instead opting for a Hitchcockian world of canted angles, opulent sets and finely-tuned suspense sequences. In fact, the film also has a noticeable similarity to FRENZY, which would come along two years later: both have impeccable, sometimes cheekily extended suspense sequences which completely center around the tension over whether or not an utterly despicable character will be able to get away with murder, and they trick us into rooting for him simply through their strong use of cinema. Bava is helped here by a splendid atonal score by Jerry Goldsmith and a plethora of beautiful locations and imagery, but at the end of the day it’s his camerawork (again, he wrote, directed, and shot nearly all of his films) and splendid sense of pacing that wins the day here. Like Hitchcock (which is not a comparison I make lightly), Bava displays a shockingly strong ability to cultivate scenes which eloquently twist the knife with one subtle complication after another. The difference is, while stuffy Hitchcock had to mostly dance around the more puerile aspects of his dark imagination, Bava is free to indulge in as much sleaze and bloodletting as he requires, marrying the arch, campy performances with explicit, sometimes nightmarish gore and topping the whole thing off with rock-solid fundamentals of suspense filmmaking. The result is pure catnip for a horror buff: frequently outrageous, sometimes intentionally funny, sometimes genuinely unnerving, and never, ever dull. Now, if Bava could just learn the difference between a cleaver and a hatchet, he might really go places.

*Except for the “hatchet” part, obviously. Guess Italians don’t do a lot of wood chopping.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No. Seems like they didn't really do sequels to this sort of thing back then.
• REMAKE: None, yet. It'll happen though, you mark my words.
• FOREIGNER: Italian, with a hint of Spanish
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: Nope
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None.
• BOOBIES: ...some T n' A, including one gratuitous scene where the camera just nakedly ogles a bunch of bikini-clad models. But I don't remember any explicit nudity.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Not really, John isn't much interested in that sort of thing.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Much hacking, I think a head comes off? Hard to recall exactly.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: None
• THE UNDEAD: Wife returns as malicious ghost.
• POSSESSION: None
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Yes, arguably, though it's unusual to have such a film from the killer's perspective.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Nah
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Lots of mannequins, PLUS John's childhood bedroom is full of creepy dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Well-known Bava.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If your creepy boss invites you to model wedding dresses in a locked, hidden room in his giant mansion alone at night.... what should we do, ladies?
• TITLE ACCURACY: No hatchet, does kill one couple on their honeymoon but that's it. Say 40%.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Autopsy

Autopsy (1974) aka Macchie Solari

Dir. Armando Crispino

Written by Lucio Battistrada, Armando Crispino

Starring Mimsy Farmer, Barry Primus, Ray Lovelock,

AUTOPSY is the story of a young, bra-averse police pathologist (Giallo queen Mimsy Farmer) who finds herself busier than usual because a wave of sunspots has caused a spike of suicides. Granted, all that makes perfect sense, but then a mentally unstable Roy-Scheider-lookin' ex-racecar driver priest thinks that under the cover of the rash of sunspot-influenced suicides, someone has murdered his sister. Our heroine is the perfect person to come to, because she’s an expert on determining the difference between real and faked suicides (in fact, she’s writing a paper on the subject) but the priest is actually coming to her because she was the last person to see sis alive. The whole “expert in fake suicides” angle actually never comes up, which seems weird.

A lot of stuff seems weird in this movie. I mean, heck, that first paragraph is just fuckin' littered with weird details. Mentally unstable ex-racecar driver priest? Sunspots cause wave of suicide? Bra-averse pathologist? Wha? Shouldn’t there be a dwarf in there somewhere? And that doesn’t even address the fact that every time she tries to fuck her mansome photographer boyfriend, she hears a high-pitched piercing tone, suffers visions of ambulatory (and sometimes copulating) cadavers, gets a headache and has to stop everything. Which is definitely inconvenient, there really oughtta be a pill or something for that. Big pharma, that’s your cue. All I ask is that you name it after me and put Wilford Brimley in your TV ads.

The things you can tell about a man just by poking at his liver...

Anyway the whole sunspots thing doesn’t really end up being important, at its heart this is just a particularly convoluted murder mystery, and in fact a murder mystery centering on a murder which happens off-screen at the beginning of the movie. I think only one other person gets killed during the entire runtime --and not very graphically at that-- so this one isn’t really much of a giallo. But it is enjoyably ridiculous, especially considering that most of the strangest details end up being completely irrelevant to the solution.

I’m not sure it would even be called a horror film were it not for the early scenes of the corpses walking around (only in Mimsy Farmer’s imagination, though) and a weird later sequence in some kind of freaky museum of suicide. But those two elements are among the movie’s most memorable, so it lends the whole thing a (mostly unearned) sense of horror, or at least a mystery which is a bit freakier than most. In a way, it actually sort of feels like Hitchcock -- not in terms of artistry, obviously, but in its cheerful disinterest in telling a halfway believable story and its fetishistic fixation on sordid, perverse details. FRENZY was only two years earlier, and that was probably the closest Hitch (not the Will Smith version) got to really being able to vent his aberrant violent and sexual urges in the context of a thriller. This one seems to be on the same page, happily accepting a convoluted mess of story in exchange for setting up a few loving-crafted, bizarre setpiece scenes.

Talk about your Tourist Trap.

The autopsy scenes with naked corpses milling around seems to be what the movie is famous for, I guess that might have been a little shocking for ‘74. But far more interesting is this strange museum our heroine randomly wanders through, which has huge blowup photographs of real corpses and gruesome murders, as well as a full compliment of creepy wax figures depicting various methods of suicide (one of whom ultimately tries its hand at a little murder, too!). It’s a great set, and if it’s pretty sleazy to use a bunch of real images of genuine death for your goofy thriller about sunspots, well, at least it’s memorably so. Oh, and there’s a slideshow of vintage erotica at one point, always a classy touch. Man, just makes you realize how stupid it was to cut that vintage ertotica slideshow scene out of NOW, VOYAGER. This guy Armando Crispino, though, he knows to deliver the goods.* In fact, the movie’s biggest problem has gotta be that it’s only intermittently creatively sleazy enough to layer on the ick factor. You gotta suffer through way too much plotty nonsense which is nonsensical but not really entertaining before you get another good crazy scene.

Actually, the acting, direction, photography, and even writing are moderately better than you might expect for something like this, but who cares, it’s not stylized enough to be interesting and certainly not good enough to qualify as genuinely involving. The only person who really leaves much of an impression is Ennio Morricone, who --despite scored fucking fifteen (15!) other movies the same year!-- leaves this one with a distinctly unusual theme which unnaturally welds a bunch of pensive moaning women with a morosely liturgical keyboard drone. Kinda reminds me of the weird tribal chanting/gothic choir he did for EXORCIST PART II a few years later in 1977, in a good way. Gotta enjoy that brief period in the 70’s where composers we allowed to really try some experimental shit. Even a cheap little movie like this one would never attempt a score that bold today.

Dedicated follower of fashion.

The score, combined with a few standout scenes that suggest serious mental illness on the part of the filmmakers and the generalized pleasing ridiculousness of the plot, add up to a perfectly worthwhile film if you’re in the mood for this sort of thing. It has enough transgressive imagination to stand out, and a basic low level of competence to make sure you don’t want to gouge your eyeballs out anytime it’s not being actively insane. Unless there are sunspots, then you may well gouge your eyeballs out due to the “malignant influence of the sun,” but that’s normal, don’t worry about it. It’s the people that want to gouge your eyes out in the guise of a perfectly natural sunspot-related suicide that we all need to be wary of. And on this matter, AUTOPSY is pretty much the authoritative artistic work.

(This review dedicated to longtime friend of the site Andy Prestwich, who you can usually just sort of assume is behind it when I watch any incredibly obscure/incredibly trashy Italian film.)

*Yes, you get your obligatory sexual assault scene, too. Jesus fucking Christ, Europe, what the hell.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: Yes, though not quite a typical giallo.
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: No
• BOOBIES: From the very first frame onwards, and then every 15 minutes or so, but sometimes on corpses. Don't worry, though, Mimsy Farmer can't seem to keep her shirt on.
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: No
• ENTRAILS? No
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: There is a killer, but not really a slasher type.
• CURSES: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? Yeah, suicide mannequins.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Quite High. Recently released through Blue Underground after being out of print for a long time
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A