Rings Of Fear

RINGS OF FEAR aka TRAUMA aka Enigma Rosso (1978)

Dir. Alberto Negrin

Written by (seriously!) Marcello Coscia & Massimo Dallamano & Franco Ferrini & Stefano Ubezio & Alberto Negrin & Peter Berling. All named in the opening credits. IMDB goes on to name Thomas Danneberg (dialogue: German version) and Miguel de Echarri (screenplay). Maybe they didn’t have room on-screen to include them?

Starring Fabio Testi, Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor, Fausta Avelli

(WARNING: in case the following pullquote doesn’t ring your alarm bells, this is probably one of those reviews you shouldn’t read if you would be the type to get upset about things which it would be completely reasonable to get upset about. Italy, man, what can I say?)

“The pace is brisk and the school shower scene is truly gratuitous.” -- IMDB reviewer HumanoidOfFlesh, Nov 19, 2010.

  

            RINGS OF FEAR starts out by ogling the nude breasts of an underaged corpse. But before you get too judgmental, I have some reassuring news: except for one scene where it blatantly ogles a bunch of 16-year-olds playing together in the showers (the camera reluctantly follows the action of our leading girl as she leaves the showers, and then zips back in for one more peek before it cuts) and one scene where a girl is murdered at an orgy via penetration by a giant dildo… well, other than those scenes and a few others it gets a little classier as it goes on, at least as far these things go! I wasn’t aware of this going in, but apparently RINGS OF FEAR is considered the third film in the loose “schoolgirls in peril!” trilogy which began with WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and continued with WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH YOUR DAUGHTERS?, and would have continued seamlessly here if not for the death of director Massimo Dallamano* (still one of the six credited co-writers). But the dream was too beautiful to die with its author, and so, just as it looked like we might have to live in a dark world with only two sleazy "schoolgirls in peril!" Italian movies from the 70's, in stepped TV director Alberto Negrin (the Secret of the Sahara miniseries starring Michael York, Andie MacDowell, and Ben Kingsley[!]) to offer us one last wild ride with those schoolgirls who, darn it, just can’t seem to stay out of peril.

            The peril these particular schoolgirls have found themselves in began prior to the events of the movie, as our protagonist, Inspector Gianni Di Salvo (Fabio Testi, THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, but most known for having a name which literally translates as “Fabulous Testicles”**) discovers when he steps in on a case which concerns a 16-year old schoolgirl. This particular schoolgirl is now thankfully out of peril, as she is currently deceased, having been killed by a giant dong (hey, I warned you!). Her classmates seem to know more than they’re saying, which becomes a real problem for them when they start to get targeted by a mystery avenger operating under the nom de guerre “Nemesis,” who may be a vigilante trying to avenge the dead girl, or the real killer trying to intimidate these co-conspirators into silence. Either way, Di Salvo is on the job, and he knows just what to do: kick his way into the school in the dead of night, rouse everyone from their beds, and shout at everyone incoherently that a girl was murdered and raped with a huge penis. When that somehow fails to produce the desired results, he’s gotta get creative.

            Despite the three “M”s prominently on display,*** this is probably more poliziotteschi than giallo, with a tough-guy cop as the main character, and most of the movie devoted to his hard-nosed attempts at shaking down the local underworld characters for information on this mysterious fiend with the killer johnson. Its style is more gritty than surreal, with a handful of action-packed chase scenes and fights, nearly always shot on-location during the daytime. But it has a few appreciably nutty stalking/suspense sequences too, probably just barely enough to justify describing it as a horror-thriller, if you were inclined to be generous about such things for some reason, such as if you were a person who blogs mostly about horror movies and saw this during October and was consequently honor-bound to write about it, for example.

It is a whodunnit, anyway, and, in fact, one with a batty enough solution to please even the most discerning connoisseurs of psychotic Italian exploitation cinema. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!) It turns out, in fact, to be a double mystery -- “Nemesis” and the dildo murderers are actually unrelated, and Di Salvo has been unknowingly chasing two perps, not one. The whole thing with the dead schoolgirl actually ends up mostly only being a sex conspiracy, not a murder conspiracy; it seems the young woman in question was just an participant in a totally normal and consensual school-wide orgy between underaged classmates and creepy old men, and one of the participants simply miscalculated what size of dildo he could use on her without fatal results. You know how that goes. What a faux pas! Anyway, just a completely understandable misunderstanding; in fact, I’m not even sure the movie ever bothers to actually identify the person responsible for the original death, it’s much more interested on the subsequent coverup. “Nemesis,” though, turns out to be a little more interesting: it is, in fact, the adorable little sister of the dead girl, resorting to some straight up fucking SAW shit to punish her sisters’ complicit classmates. The movie seems pretty comfortable with her assessment that these terrified 16-year-olds are equally culpable (if not more!) than the adult males who presumably put together this sordid little soiree; so much so that when Di Salvo finally figures it out, he doesn’t even punish this little fucking psycho, and in fact the movie implies that they may team up from here on! Seriously, it ends with an unmistakable "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" scene! Jesus, this has to be the most depraved, Machiavellian little kid since… well, I DRINK YOUR BLOOD only eight years earlier. What the fuck was up with the 70’s and thinking murderous little tykes were cute? (END SPOILERS)

Anyway, that’s a pretty nutty solution to a pretty nutty mystery, but still, it does basically kind of make sense. Not, like, in the way real things in real life make sense, of course, but in the sense that most of the basic questions posed get answered, and the solutions roughly conform to the basic tenets of the plot up to that point. Frankly six screenwriters (and possibly as many as eight!) adding up to a whodunnit which even vaguely coheres is kind of a miracle in itself, and when you throw 1978 Italy into the mix, we’re basically talking about quantum probability here. Nice work, RINGS OF FEAR. Not that the solution really matters, of course; the real enjoyment of this sort of thing --if you are, like me, the sort of person who has it in them to enjoy this sort of thing, and if you’re not, I sincerely commend you on being a better person than I am-- is in the journey, not the destination. A lot of it is disappointingly down-to-earth, considering the ludicrous premise, but it’s peppered all the way through with colorful details. You got a red herring character with a mysterious fake hand, a death by spilled marbles, an interrogation on a real roller coaster which absolutely looks none-too-safe (featuring the venerable Jack Taylor, THE GHOST GALLEON,  something of a Euro-sleaze staple), and one of the most hilariously abrupt suicides of all time. So it’s a pretty good time, especially when it’s rockin’ the jazzy, uptempo title track by Riz Ortolani (DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST), which is as funky and catchy as it is wildly inappropriate. RINGS OF FEAR is by no means essential cinema, even by Italian trash standards, but it is both idiosyncratic and sleazy enough to satisfy the only people on Earth who would ever come across it.  

Which is all, now that I think about it, just a unnecessary longwinded way of saying exactly what we began with: “The pace is brisk and the school shower scene is truly gratuitous.” Next time I’ll let it go at that.

* Dallamano, by the way, directed a handful of giallo and poliziotteschi flicks, but is most known as the cinematographer for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE. Seriously!

** Warning: translation may not be accurate.

*** Murder, Mystery, and Misogyny

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	No Girl Can Ever Feel Safe, warns the poster.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yeah, no idea what that means. I think the Italian title is just “Red Mystery,” which also is inaccurate, in fact I’m not sure there’s even any blood in here.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Giallo (sort of), Whodunnit
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although Fabio Testi worked with Vittorio di Sica, which is pretty baller.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, but you’re obligated by law not to enjoy it, so don’t get too excited you creep.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
THE UNDEAD?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No.
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Just by the camera.
MORAL OF THE STORY	It is entirely possible to have a productive conversation with a murder suspect while also riding a roller coaster, and you should do it.

American Gothic

American Gothic (1988)

Dir. John Hough

Written by Burt Wetanson, Michael Vines

Starring Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo, Sarah Torgov, Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins

            AMERICAN GOTHIC has been on my radar for very nearly 20 years now, ever since my first girlfriend back in high school told me that it was the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel, worst movie ever made, in language so uncharacteristically salty that it stuck with me through the better part of two extremely eventful decades. I have a very clear memory of the VHS box taunting me from its high shelf in the horror section of the video store where was employed back then (my recollection is that it was the very first movie in that section, shelved alphabetically; we didn’t have ALICE, SWEET ALICE, and I believe THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES was in the “classics” section, even though it was only 28 years old at the time, younger than AMERICAN GOTHIC is today). At the time I was a budding cinephile with a neophyte’s earnest pretensions for the medium, and, lacking the jaded bemusement which would so endear terrible cinema to me later in life after all meaning and joy had leached from my dessicated soul, I was in no hurry to watch something which was supposed to be so terrible. But even so, I thought I had AMERICAN GOTHIC pretty well pegged. I mean, look at that cheesy box art. This looks like it would be a good companion piece to HEAD OF THE FAMILY or GHOULIES.

            Except, actually not. Because the first two things that happen in the movie demonstrate both why it is very much not in the same vein as those lovable Charles Band joints, and why someone might consider this to be a movie with some serious, perhaps movie-breaking tonal issues. I’ll let wikipedia describe the film’s opening:

“Cynthia [Sarah Torgov, MEATBALLS, in her last peformance before becoming an artist/illustrator] is traumatized by the death of her baby after leaving him in a bathtub, where he accidentally drowned. She and five of her friends, Jeff, Rob, Lynn, Paul and Terri decide to go on a vacation.”

A representative image from this movie called "AMERICAN GOTHIC"

            So right off the bat, we have, 1) holy shit, traumatic baby death, dealt with in a way which very much wants us to understand and take seriously that trauma. Not exactly a fun way to kick off the hacky bodycount slasher which is strongly suggested by the second sentence, which brings us to the more familiar territory of 2) a bunch of disposable white people behaving in an utterly alien manner (‘Cynthia, let’s go on a couples vacation to get your mind off that whole unpleasant business with your dead baby!’) on their way to meet their death in an isolated location. And for better or, --let’s face it-- probably for worse, this is not some kind of embarrassing miscalculation on the movie’s part, this is AMERICAN GOTHIC telling you what it’s all about. And what it’s all about is introducing weird, cartoonish, campy horror movie tropes and then treating them with absolutely dead seriousness that borders on misery porn. It shouldn’t work at all, but it’s so steadfastly committed to its mordant tone that I think it somehow sort of does. Not that it’s the kind of “working” that would necessarily suggest that you or anyone else would enjoy it.

In the cartoonish, campy corner, we find the basic premise: our six vacationing white people get stranded on an isolated island when their plane breaks down, and are surprised to find that the only inhabitants are a family of bizarre, eccentric misfits. “Ma and Pa” (Yvonne DeCarlo, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, SILENT SCREAM, and Rod Steiger, DR. ZHIVAGO) are puritanical religious zealots with three adult offspring (Janet Wright, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE TALL MAN, William “Hoot” Hootkins, STAR WARS, and Michael J. Pollard, BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE ARRIVAL) who all behave like --and appear to believe they are-- prepubescent children. And, uh, not the kind of precocious, perceptive prepubescent children you usually get in movies, more like they smoked an eight-ball of meth and marathoned The Little Rascals and then based their entire personality and demeanor on what they remembered from it.

There is, I think, no denying the silliness of that basic setup. But in the dead serious corner, you have the relatively realistic violence that these nutcases eventually visit on our unsuspecting outsiders, which at some point makes a hard left turn from uncomfortable awkwardness to straight up THE HILLS HAVE EYES sadism. It seems like an insane choice for a premise this loopy, but the movie is absolutely resolute on this point. As absurd as the “kids” are, Steiger and DeCarlo are playing their severe, repressive roles with absolute 100% seriousness, and there’s a grounding realism to the direction which makes the broad, unhinged performances of the “kids” seem unsettling and perverse when it could easily slide into high camp. Most of the victims are not at the same level, and some of their corny hip kid dialogue threatens to sink the whole enterprise early on, but they start dying off pretty quick, and as the direness of their situation sets in it’s increasingly hard to laugh at them. Director John Hough (THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) seems bound and determined to make this no fun at all, favoring a bleak, hopeless tone matched by the gloomy naturalism of DOP Harvey Harrison (who had just worked with Nicolas Roeg the previous year for a segment of ARIA, and would work with him again in 1990 for THE WITCHES). The craggy woodlands where most of the film takes place are perpetually overcast and full of a wet, sodden sense of decay which feels hostile and wild in the most Hobbesian sense (in fact, it strongly reminds me of another unexpectedly dour wilderness-set slasher, 1983’s THE FINAL TERROR).

The overall effect is a real downer. While creative, none of the kills are very “fun,” and the movie sets its sights on really getting you to understand the depth of these poor victims’ helplessness in the face of these psychotic, self-righteous freaks. This is a task at which is it, against all odds, largely effective; that it is an experience anyone would want to voluntarily subject themselves to is a somewhat different question. Not that it’s exactly wall-to-wall misery porn (though there is at least one incident so shocking it actually elicited gasps from the crowd I viewed it with); it’s just grotesque and miserable, lacking the blind adrenaline rush of THE HILLS HAVE EYES or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (which it is clearly seeking to emulate) and just resulting in a dismal, hopeless march to the slaughter of characters who are too loosely sketched to care much about, but whose frantic misery is all too clearly articulated.

But again, this is not miscalculation on the movie’s part. It begins with grueling emotional trauma, and grueling emotional trauma is what it’s interested in. This provides no help at all for its anemic bodycount slasher section, but its centrality to the movie suddenly makes sense when it runs out of fresh victims early, leaving time for a thoroughly unexpected final act which changes directions considerably. Despite the unusually sour tone, watching the generic pretty people getting bumped off one by one plays more or less the way you expect of such a thing, which leaves us at around minute 70 with a comfortable assumption that our confirmed “final girl” will rally, confront her tormentors, and manage an unlikely escape. Instead (SPOILERS) she joins them. The trauma of all this is so great that instead of finding a hidden strength and resolve to overcome adversity, Cynthia’s mind simply snaps, and she comes to believe that she is the fourth “child” of the family, dressing in frilly little girl clothes and mimicking the exaggerated childlike affectations of her new “siblings.” You keep assuming it’s an act, that she’s just playing along and waiting for a moment to escape, but no, the old Cynthia really is gone, and not going to return.

(SPOILERS continue) But turnabout’s fair play. Just as “Ma” and “Pa” have honed their other “children” -- who we now learn are victims of the same brainwashing scheme which has now ensnared Cynthia-- into psychotic killers, the now-deranged Cynthia turns out to pose quite a bit of danger to the very people who made her what she has become. The sight of a desiccated baby corpse that Janet Wright is using as a dolly (!) stirs memories of her own dead child. In another movie, this flash of insight might restore her to sanity, but not here. Instead, it churns up her already fragile mental state into something primal and destructive. In short, it transformers her into a Jason-like slasher in her own right, and she wastes no time in butchering her entire adopted “Family” in a pleasingly sadistic manner. Not out of revenge, or desire to escape, but out of pure psychotic frenzy. Hey, you break it, you bought it, you fuck-o's. Cynthia’s tragic past as a baby-drowner is so over-the-top it threatens to get a laugh for much of the film (though actress Torgov is actually quite excellent in the role), but I like that it turns out to be the key to getting her to hulk out and murder everyone at the end. “Worth it” might be going a little far, but “helps redeem what was probably always a bad idea” comes closer.

Now, I’m not really sure what the point of it all is, which is kinda a problem for something this mean, especially when you posit the villains as ultra-religious conservatives haranguing about the debased outside world and all that, and especially especially when your movie is fucking called AMERICAN GOTHIC, for heaven’s sake. It seems like it’s supposed to be some kind of send-up of backwards, evangelical American repression, but the stuff that happens is so crazy and over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine what it’s getting at beyond “wow, conservative religious nutcases sure are scary, huh?” But I do like the implication that this iteration of the TEXAS CHAINSAW family isn’t trying to eat you, it’s trying to terrify and harass you until it breaks you and can subsume you. And in doing so, might turn you into something even worse. It’s interesting that whatever their faults, “Ma” and “Pa” are certainly not hypocrites; they’re true believers, and the film even ends with (SPOILERS) Steiger --upon arriving home to find his family butchered-- raging at God for betraying him after he did everything he was supposed to, which both the film and the actor treat with 100% sincerity and commitment.

Sincerity and commitment AMERICAN GOTHIC has; whether that’s enough to make it worthwhile is a pretty open question. On one hand, I have to admit, it says something that it affected me enough to provoke a reaction. On the other hand, that reaction was “well, this certainly is unpleasant.” So maybe my old girlfriend kind of had a point. Like all the John Hough films I’ve watched so far (including THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, TWINS OF EVIL and THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) this one is competently assembled and deliberately paced, but also like all of those, it seems absolutely bound and determined to take a ridiculous premise and ensure it’s no fun at all. It’s not exactly boring, but it’s nowhere near exuberant enough to just get by as a meat-and-potatoes slasher. It has a great cast and some genuinely committed, effective performances, but it’s nowhere near interesting enough for that to do it any good. Fundamentally, it seems like a movie that doesn’t quite understand the reason for its own existence. Writers Burt Wetanson and Michael Vines have no other significant writing credits, and one is certainly tempted to imagine that they simply watched THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE make a bunch of money and figured “sure, I could write something like that.” Like so many other hucksters who were similarly disabused of that notion after their ill-conceived attempt at a ripoff crashed and burned (the miserable ISLAND OF DEATH comes to mind), they seem to have assumed the success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was due to its sadism and depravity within a family dynamic, instead of its masterful sense of nightmarish intensity. Without that intensity, the sadism and depravity are lifeless objects on-screen, rousing disgust, perhaps, but never much more

Still, gotta give ol’ AMERICAN GOTHIC a little credit for being so fucking crazy hardcore when I assumed it was gonna be a straightforward genre lark. At one point they (SPOILER) rip a baby carcass in half while fighting over it. God damn, honkie. It’s not really very good, but at this point in my death march of horror movies, I’ll settle for “unexpected.”

Side note: Actor Mark Lindsey Chapman (who plays Rob, and, holy cow, was in TITANIC!) once played John Lennon in a biopic of Mark David Chapman called CHAPTER 27. What the everlovin' fuckity-fuck?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

  

TAGLINE	The Family That Slays together… stays together. Which is solid Horror taglineing at its finest, except that it absolutely does not accurately describe the tone of the movie at all.
TITLE ACCURACY	Meh. They don’t even mention the famous Grant Wood painting, which appears only in the VHS box art.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	IMDB says UK/Canada. It definitely seems to have been filmed in Canada.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, TCSM rip-off, “Evil Town”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Yvonne DeCarlo
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
THE UNDEAD?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Oh hell yes.
EVIL CULT?	Well, technically these people are subscribers to one of the world’s major religions, but definitely of a sect which could be called cultish.
MADNESS?	Oh, certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Some spying-on
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you suspect God would like you to butcher a bunch of vacationing teenagers, maybe switch to the New Testament for a little bit. (But not Revelations, and I’d stay away from Paul too, now that I think about it.)

Here, I figure you probably deserve a picture of Michael J. Pollard for your troubles.