Sodoma's Ghost

I do have to say, this poster is pretty baller. They should have used this for THE KEEP.

Sodoma’s Ghost (1988)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Carlo Alberto Alfieri

Starring Claudio Aliotti, Maria Concetta Salieri, Robert Egon, Al Cliver

Well, one minute and 30 seconds into SODOMA’s GHOST, including credits (which play over stygian blackness in total silence) we’ve got a Nazi cocaine orgy. Unfortunately it’s the same Nazi orgy I already saw in CAT IN THE BRAIN, which blunts a little bit of the shock value they were probably counting on here. And in CAT IN THE BRAIN you also had the added bonus of watching director Lucio Fulci intensely staring at everything from behind the camera, which gave it a little more pizzazz. But still, Nazi coke orgy! I guess that lets you know what kind of party it’s gonna be right off the bat, anyway. Six minutes later it’s still going. Finally, a Nazi shoots a pool ball into a reposing woman’s vagina, and there’s an explosion, and then we’re on to the actual plot. Which is not exactly as severe a pivot as you might assume, because that plot turns out to also be mostly porn, and a lot of it with Nazis, though admittedly the beginning is the only orgy. I realize that to the casual filmgoer, the idea that a movie could just unexpectedly turn out to be Nazi porn* seems even more alien than the idea that you could unintentionally stumble upon the same Nazi porn twice, but I assure you that in the particular cultural beat I report on, this is an ever-present possibility and you just have to learn to roll with it. Well, this is no time to self-reflect about the genre I’ve spent my life studying, come on guys let’s move on nothing to see here.

Once we’ve established the narratively “vital” fact that there is this Italian villa where one time there was a Nazi coke orgy, we’re introduced to the six blandest actors in Italy as they arrive at the very same Nazi villa in modern times, and find it deserted. They hang out there, and one of them has a Nazi S&M dream. Then they leave. And then they come back, and this time they find they can’t leave, the doors and windows are locked (and can’t be broken open). So they prattle obnoxiously at each other for awhile. This takes up roughly 50 minutes of an 84 minute movie. Finally, at 50 minutes, some kind of horror part starts to kick in; it seems there’s an evil, possibly Nazi, ghost and/or ghosts in the house that can tempt you by showing you things in a mirror. “Things” which, in every case, turn out to be boobs. There are endless, endless amounts of boobs in this movie (every female cast member gets topless, with no exceptions) and although this is an admittedly friendly gesture on the part of the movie, it gets old pretty fast when you’re hoping for some kind of horror. Plenty of hustling genre movies try to hedge their bets by dumping a bunch of softcore nonsense into the inevitable downtime that arises from the necessity of putting something on-screen for a minimum of 75 minutes, but this seems like a case where they started to shoot some filler nudity and then just got distracted and kept shooting more and more and then forgot to go back and add the genre stuff. I’m unclear if the Nazis are able to tempt you with other things too, and it just never occurs to them to try. But at any rate, boobs seem to consistently do the trick, so why mess with a winning strategy?

There are literally almost no screenshots from this movie that can be posted unedited on a wholesome family site like this one.

Director Lucio Fulci  (ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, CAT IN THE BRAIN, DOOR INTO SILENCE) is one of those slippery genre auteurs who is justifiably ranked with the greats, but did not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality. Probably his most widely recognizable auteurial trademark is that his films have boldly nonsensical, haphazard narratives redeemed by a few absolutely stellar setpieces. It’s been maybe a decade since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that even his arguably most famous film, ZOMBI 2, is almost entirely absolutely unwatchable dreck except that it also happens to have maybe the three best zombie gore scenes ever put on celluloid. That forgives a lot -- and to be a Fulci fan is inherently to forgive a lot-- but SODOMA’S GHOST is, regrettably, almost entirely unwatchable dreck, minus any of the good parts.

But even this deep into his late-career decline, Fulci was still Fulci, and so, from about minute 50 to minute 60, suddenly Fulci the thriller director, not Fulci the softcore porn director, turns up out of the blue. For a hot moment, things get inexplicably good, with a disquieting, intense Russian Roulette sequence, a surreal walk through an impressionistically lit house with unsourced, untranslated German being shouted from somewhere, and a crazy sex nightmare which ends with the guy grabbing his paramore's boobs, only to find they're filled with decay and maggots. They follow that up by dragging the guy’s body downstairs, where it suddenly starts decaying really disgustingly while the camera digs in close to check out the gnarly detail. Granted, that may not sound like a universally appealing description of a fun night at the movies, but at least it’s making some effort. Stephen King famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” Nothing in this movie was ever going to terrify or horrify, but at least going for the gross-out means they were trying.

Anyway, starting right at minute 50 there’s a legitimately functional 10 minute stretch of a movie which otherwise barely has a worthwhile 10 seconds. It’s enough to get your hopes up that maybe the movie will manage to stick the landing and redeem itself. Alas, immediately thereafter the Fulci who cares checks out again, and things settle right back into the previously established standard routine of people taking their tops off and having sinister Germans offer them more boobs through a mirror, none of which really goes anywhere (for example, there's a long scene where a topless German woman makes a lesbian think her girlfriend is getting it on with another girl, but then she storms downstairs to catch them and they’re not, so nothing happens with that. Not sure why someone felt it was worth including in a movie).

As the MIRROR MIRROR series unequivocally demonstrated, evil mirrors are not exactly the stuff of gripping cinema. Nazis have a slightly better track record, as least as far as sleazy genre entertainment goes, so no real surprise, then, that the best part (of a movie almost entirely lacking in good parts) is Robert Egon (“Italian Street Boy” in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, “Perfect Young Italian” [seriously] in 1990’s CAPTAIN AMERICA) as the young Nazi who is filming the orgy (not participating) and shows up to tempt two of our “heroes” in the present. He has an arresting presence, half smug Aryan malice and half infuriatingly mild politeness. I prefer the idea that he’s not a Nazi at all, but rather some sort of ancient spirit in the house which got to the venal Nazis even more than he’s able to with the horny teens. There’s never anything specific to suggest that, but if there’s anything at all interesting about the movie, it’s the inhuman, opaque quality of the antagonists, which Egon embodies best. Most ghost stories are fundamentally built around the mystery of who the ghosts were and what they want. Here, that question is never raised, and the answer never appears. Do they want, like, revenge, or corruption of the innocent, or what? Does their being Nazis and trying to seduce the youth read like a metaphor? The movie never even seems aware that you might have these questions, which is certainly a symptom of its abject idiotic incompetence more than its narrative boldness, but at least the effect is a little exotic. Anyway, Egon’s only really in two scenes, which is a shame since the whole climax could really use him.

Speaking of which, the climax is such a wispy bit of tired nothing that it feels wrong to even describe it with that term, but I do sort of like the film’s final, insipid twist of a coda. (SPOILERS) See, it turns out that after a long night of obnoxious arguing and death and boobs and Nazis, everyone just… wakes up on the lawn, apparently having dreamed the whole thing! They just laugh it off and drive away, and that’s the end of the movie! Obviously, an ending so amazingly corny and insulting has drawn quite a bit of ire over the years. And it’s not hard to see why; if you somehow managed the seemingly impossible feat of taking the movie seriously up to that point (and there’s certainly nothing in the movie itself which would suggest you aren’t meant to) one can well imagine how an ending this flagrantly dismissive would be an absolutely mortifying affront (see [SPOILERS for THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW]: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). But I actually sort of enjoy the dorky, sincere niceness of it; you get the feeling Fulci ended up kinda liking these dumbass kids and wanting to give them a happy ending, especially after so many of them were nice enough to show him their tits. It’s sort of sweet, really, which is a weird and possibly psychotic thing to have to say about a movie which opens with a full five minutes of Nazi orgy, but here we are. And here we will leave it.

PS: I have no idea who Sodoma is.

Alternate take: “The problem with this movie is it’s just not sleazy enough. So, a sleazy Nazi film without sleaze? Yep, that’s all we have here. While it’s not entirely true that there’s no sleaze as actresses like to shuck their clothes to show us their very modest endowments – though most are small enough that it seems like Fulci did his casting calls at junior high schools – there’s no eroticism or sizzle with the sleaze. It just plain doesn’t feel sexy or even dirty.” --Cult Review’s “Perfesser Deviant” who probably needs to take a break from Italian movies for awhile.

* Hello there, Academy-Award-For-Best-Picture-Nominee THE READER.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, but with a title that lurid, what else do you need to say?
TITLE ACCURACY	Since I have no idea what it means, I can’t begin to tell you. There does seem to be one or more ghost, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Nazis
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but I do want to point out that Art Director Franco Vanorio performed the same duties on PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, which means he worked with James Cameron.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci behind the camera.
NUDITY?	Almost non-stop
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Probably, but if you didn’t stop reading at “Nazi coke orgy” I doubt anything else the movie can throw at you is going to upset you.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Not really
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever moral this movie is trying to get you to learn, I would resist it.

The Hills Have Eyes: Part II

The Hills Have Eyes Too (1985)

Dir. and written by Wes Craven

Starring Michael Berryman, Janus Blythe, Kevin Spirtas, John Bloom, Tamara Stafford

How did it come to this?

Obviously, there’s only one reason to watch the widely-hated 1985 sequel to the Wes Craven’s seminal 1977 original THE HILLS HAVE EYES. With his death a little more than a year ago in August of 2015, I felt compelled to pay tribute to the passing of one of the horror genre’s true modern luminaries by watching one of his movies. But it turns out I’ve seen pretty much everything but the very bottom of the barrel. Faced with a choice of VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN, CHILLER (TV movie) and HILLS HAVE EYES II, I elected to at least go for the infamous one. It has a reputation for legendary awfulness, and was disowned by its maker as a cheap cash grab to pay the bills. Gotta at least respect that honesty. Guy’s gotta eat.

But surprisingly, it turns out not to be that bad. I mean, it is bad, obviously; it’s just not that bad. It’s plenty incompetent, but not entirely unejoyable, which is more than I was expecting given its rap. Its incompetence is generally of the goofy, amusing variety instead of the plodding, soul-crushing variety that you should probably brace yourself for in something this low-rent. Which is good, because it’s also an incompetence which is fairly ubiquitous, and manifests itself in a wide variety of ways, from the many, many flashbacks to the previous movie (including, famously, a flashback from a dog’s perspective) that pad the opening here with what is reportedly 20 full minutes of old footage (it feels like less to me, especially since the flashbacks are spaced out a bit, but I’m not going back to do my own math), to the presumably-improvised awkward chit-chatting in the downtime, to the weird way this sequel fixates obsessively on the original and reintroduces its main characters, only to subsequently ignore and drop them.

Bobby, the brother from PART 1 (still Robert Houston, now known less as an actor and more for re-editing the first two LONE WOLF AND CUB movies into SHOGUN ASSASSIN, as well as directing two Academy-award-winning documentary shorts in 2004 and 2005), opens the film and immediately seems like the main character. He’s some kind of motorbike racing team captain now, (and is said to have invented some kind of super fuel?) but as fate would have it, his latest race involves driving through the same desert where his family was massacred eight years prior. Seems like the perfect setup for some revenge, but then he just decides he’s not stupid enough to go back to the desert and stays behind, never to be seen again. Good move on his part, as it turns out, but a very strange decision from a narrative filmmaking perspective. He does not seem to have mentioned to anyone that there are killer mutants out there, and his crew doesn’t seem aware this is a possibility. This seems like kind of a dick move on his part because while he wisely sits at home watching the first season of Growing Pains, the rest of his crew heads out into the selfsame desert blissfully unaware that they’re in a movie called THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART DUEX. It also makes you wonder how he broke the news to the authorities that his family was gone after the events of PART 1 and that he suddenly had a new family member who was a little short on recognized government identification documents. Did he just tactfully talk his way around the mutants using a series of artful euphemisms?

Speaking of which, the mutant sister from the first movie (still Janus Blythe, EATEN ALIVE) is doing well for herself now. Previously called Ruby and now going by “Rachael” for what I’m certain could be described as reasons, she’s Bobby’s motorcycling manager, and seems surprisingly emotionally stable considering everything. Inexplicably, she also doesn’t seem to be too worried about her old family, nor does she mention anything about the distinct possibility of cannibal mutant attacks to any of the road crew she’ll be shepherding into danger. Once Bobby bows out, it seems like SHE’S the main character, but then even though she doesn’t die or anything, she simply doesn’t seem to be present for the big finale and is never mentioned or seen again. So we spent a good 30 minutes of a 90 minute movie --at least-- laboriously reintroducing two characters who play absolutely no role in the final act. Huh.

isn't it romantic?

So OK, admittedly, there’s some iffy decisions here by one of modern cinema’s great luminaries of horror. But it’s not that bad, at least when you compare it to something like BEYOND THE DARKNESS or SHAKMA. If you find that a standard so low that it makes it impossible to tell the difference between the comical and the tragic, well, you probably didn’t spend the last year writing about ultra-obscure horror movies from the 1980’s.

PART II is suspiciously tame and genial considering how nasty and brutal and mean the original is, which is especially difficult to ignore since PART 1 is referenced so often. And it’s smaller-scale in almost every way; there are less mutants, less violence, less runtime, less of everything except flashbacks, and, presumably, cocaine. I mean, there’s definitely no getting around that it would be a terrific disappointment to any fans of the original, or of Wes Craven, or of watchable cinema in general, if you didn’t go in with drastically lowered expectations. Fortunately while that might not have been possible in 1985, the movie’s reputation as a stinker is pretty inescapable today, so you’ve got no excuse for going into it with anything like hope. I mean, the story is that the studio actually stopped production on the film with only 2/3 having been shot, and only came back and let Craven finish it after NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET came out and was a big hit, and even then only if he didn't shoot any new footage. And, seen in that context, it’s semi-tolerable, mostly.

At least they get a little motorbike chase in there. I’ve seen plenty of movies this year which were both willing and able to pull off some horeshit like introducing a motorbike racing team and a bunch of mutants but then never have anyone chase mutants driving motorbikes. Craven at least knows to deliver on the essential elements of his premise. But it’s true, there’s not a lot of blood. Or a lot of mutants. I guess Michael Berryman survived that dog attack from PART 1 a little better off than he looked at the time (he doesn’t even have any neck scars!) which is especially weird because they actually show his death scene from PART 1 and even the dog seems confused as to why he’s back. But come on, you’re gonna complain that Michael Berryman is back? You most certainly are not. You might fairly complain about all the recycled footage of Michael Berryman when they actually got him back and could have just shot new footage, however. And indeed, almost nothing but flashbacks and driving happens during the first 30 minutes. I’ve seen slower-starting horror movies, but yeah, it’s a slog. The haters are not wrong.

Fortunately, once the kids settle in at an abandoned mine, the movie turns into a fairly acceptable moronic slasher. It’s got all your standard slasher stuff, where people sneak off to have sex during the crisis and get killed and capriciously wander around in the dark even when they’re explicitly told to stay together in the light. It’s dumb and not very imaginative, but once Craven settles into slasher mode, things stay semi-competent for this kind of movie, easily in the upper 50% of no budget 80s slashers, which is not saying a lot but still puts it ahead of dozens if not hundreds of similar movies. The death scenes don’t have a ton of elbow grease in ‘em, but they’re effectively staged at the bare minimum of effort. And hell, it’s positively elegantly constructed compared to MY SOUL TO TAKE.

Speaking of MY SOUL TO TAKE, remember how that one has a random blind character for no reason, and not only does the fact that he’s blind never pay off at all, but it actually makes later plot developments completely nonsensical for no reason? Well, HILLS HAVE EYES 2 seems to have been an early staging ground for this odd auteurial compulsion. There’s a blind character here, too (Tamara Stafford, AGAINST ALL ODDS), but instead of making a big deal about it and then doing nothing with it, in this case the film is perhaps overly tactful to the point of confusion. I was watching pretty closely, and still completely failed to realize that the character who is asked early on if “you’re feeling psychic today?” was blind until probably 75% of the way through the runtime when someone mentions it. After that little fact gets tossed out, she suddenly starts stumbling around and feeling for things, which I would swear she was not doing previously. Anyway, at least the blindness explains her catastrophically ugly alphabet sweater, which is far more horrifying than any mutant could be.

Behold: The ugliest garment ever devised by man.

Sure, it’s an old stereotype that cross country motorbike racing crews always employ at least one waifish blind young woman who sometimes “feels psychic,” that’s a given. But she ends up being the most important character in the movie by virtue of having the only genuinely inspired scene in the whole thing. As the movie meanders to its climax, it concocts a reason for her to venture down into the mutants’ lair, where she’s forced to feel around for the bodies of her dead friends. The lair is actually a creepily lit, artfully decorated set full of excellent horrible detail, and the solitary reminder that Craven is more than the bored hack that most of the movie suggests.

Still, even Craven at his most shameless coasting (and this is about as shameless as coasting gets) manages to make something which is breezy and enjoyable and generally at least LOOKS like a real movie, like he took the time to pick a good angle to shoot things and light them most of the time. This is a bad movie, but the guy’s just simply too naturally talented to make something completely irredeemable, even when all evidence suggests he’s barely making an effort at all. Even his total garbage is miles ahead of plenty of horror movies I’ve endured this year.

One last note: the final climax is so similar to the original that even the mutant comments on it, but that doesn’t stop him from being defeated by the plucky motorbike enthusiasts’ bizarre plan to:

1. Put a fuel bomb in their bus and lure the mutant inside with them
2. Create a larger ring of fire around the bus, trapping them and the mutant inside (?)
3. Have the blind girl quickly run out of the ring of fire before it spreads, while boyfriend stays inside with mutant
4. Then have blind girl feel her way over to a nearby mineshaft and push in a cart, which acts as a counterweight and pulls a string attached to boyfriend’s hands, yanking him off his feet and dragging him face first through the burning ring of “jet fuel” as it’s described (can’t melt steel beams OR burn human faces, it turns out), an eccentric means of removing him from danger under any circumstances, but particularly so given that a blind girl just walked through the same stuff with no issues at all only moments earlier.
5. Then for some reason the mutant gets on the bus even though he just specifically said he knows they plan to blow it up, and a huge fireball ensues.
6. Despite having just had his entire body dragged through burning jet-fuel face first, hero is not even singed, and he and lady walk off into the sunset, completely forgetting there's another character who is not dead and whose fate is never resolved.

Now, is that the climax of a good movie? Oh fuck no. But it is, I believe, the climax of a movie with at least a vestigial instinct to entertain. Given the kind of surprises the world has been serving up recently, that’s demonstrably enough to qualify PART 2 as a welcome one.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

TAGLINE	So You Think You’re Lucky To Be Alive
LITERARY ADAPTATION	None
SEQUEL	Yes, to the 1977 original.
REMAKE	Yes, there’s a completely unrelated 2007 sequel to the 2006 Alejandre Aja remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES which is called THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2, but it has exactly zero in common with this one except that it’s also not very good.
DEADLY IMPORT FROM:	USA
FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK	No
SLUMMING A-LISTER	Best I can do for you is Robert Houston, who would be nominated for the Academy Award for best short-subject documentary film in 2003 for his MIGHTY TIMES: THE LEGACY OF ROSA PARKS and win it the following year for MIGHTY TIMES: THE CHILDREN’S MARCH .
BELOVED HORROR ICON	Michael Fuckin’ Berryman, that is all.
NUDITY?	I don’t remember any, but IMDB’s keywords include “female nudity” and they’re usually pretty unnervingly thorough about that.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Nah.
GORE?	Not much to speak of, though some beheading may enter the picture.
HAUNTED HOUSE?	No
MONSTER?	Yeah, I think mutant cannibals count.
UNDEAD?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
SLASHER/GIALLO?	Since by the end there’s really just one mutant stalking them, it really slouches into a pretty typical stalker structure, which is out of line with the original but hardly unusual for a cannibal killer movie.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	none
VOYEURISM?	The Hills have eyes don’t they?

OBSCURITY LEVEL	Medium-low. Sequel to a well-known classic, but obscured by its terrible reputation.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Dude who decided “you know what, I think I’m actually just not going to go back out into the Mutant Murder Desert to risk being murdered again simply because there’s a motobike race out there, thanks a lot,” we need more like you.
TITLE ACCURACY	Accurate, but the “PART II” makes it sound a little pretentious. This ain’t the fuckin’ GODFATHER, Wes.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE?	N/A

This is at the very, very bottom of a 3-DTV rating, but I couldn't in good conscience go lower. C--