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.

Temple

Temple (2017)

Dir. Michael Barrett

Written by Simon Barrett, Story by Neal Edelstein, Shinya Egawa, Mike Macari

Starring Logan Huffman, Natalia Warner, Brandon Tyler Sklenar

TEMPLE (no "the") begins in the most tiresome possible way, with the lone survivor of a mysterious fatal incident being interviewed in police custody by a skeptical Japanese official (Naoto Takenaka, AZUMI, MANHUNT). The survivor’s face is bandaged to obscure his identity, which is not a good sign for viewers who don’t like to have their intelligence insulted. And that impression is reinforced as any lingering hope that this might still turn out to be the beginning of a story rather than a tedious framing narrative quickly fades with the inevitably segue into “five days earlier.” The events which would presumably be of official interests actually began the previous evening, but we’ll be getting a full five day lead-in because these particular police inspectors definitely want to hear about how this guy’s vacation went before tragedy struck. And otherwise, ahem, there probably would not be enough material here to get the film to feature length. This flashback structure will turn out to be, incidentally, both a horrible cliche and utter narrative nonsense, because the protagonists all split up for the climax, so it’s not even the survivor’s point of view we’re flashing back to. Apparently his testimony is so vivid and transporting that the listeners are able to visualize the entire story, even the parts that the teller was not present for. But thankfully they also have some found-footage to throw in there as well, just to complete the triumvirate of insufferable framing devices. What is this, an H. P. Lovecraft story?

Anyway, in the part of the movie which is not an unbearable framing narrative, a terrifyingly chipper young woman (Natalia Warner, THE DOUBLE) invites her totally platonic wink-wink male best friend (Logan Huffman, FINAL GIRL) to come to Japan and lurk just behind her and her Boyfriend (Brandon Sklenar, VICE), obsessively shooting video of them making out. As far as I can tell, this is the entire purpose of their Japanese expedition; certainly, it seems to occupy virtually all their time. Boyfriend is threatened and openly uninterested in hanging out with this random guy he’s never met before who has an intense, very touchy emotional relationship with his girlfriend. Which is, if hardly commendable, at least understandable, because Third Wheel Dude is intensely awkward and clearly interested in banging her. This is pretty much the most uncomfortable situation imaginable, which both men tactfully point out to zero acknowledgement from her, probably because she’s really more interested in having them videotape her while she gives unconvincing expository dialogue while staring into the camera with a huge fake smile and empty, terrifying eyes.

Recognizing that this is an delicate social situation, they immediately agree to all stay in the same hotel room, and of course Boyfriend and Camgirl are gonna need a better excuse than that not to have hot naked sex above the covers, which suits Third Wheelie just fine, since he can silently but not exactly subtly videotape them doing that, too. I’d say this behavior is creepy beyond belief, but guys, you fuck naked on the floor of an empty room three feet away from a pervy Jake Gyllenhaal lookin’ dude, you had to know this is what would happen. I have no idea how any of them ultimately feel about any of this, because in addition to being the three most unpleasant characters on earth, they’re also the three most placid actors on earth, spending a lot of time basically just staring vaguely into space.

I have now described by far the most terrifying section of the film, which is the part where the world’s three most intolerable white people not named ‘Trump’ vacation together. But this must eventually become some sort of horror movie, so in keeping with tradition they also take some time to establish that in addition to being profoundly socially uncomfortable, they’re all also dolts of the highest order. Third Wheel speaks Japanese, but he seems genuinely startled when a guy in a bar points out that Japanese books go from right to left, a little detail one would have assumed had come up already. He also “translates” English dialogue spoken by Japanese people to his colleagues, a habit so asinine that I've seen it played for comedy before, but which here is presented in complete earnestness. This would be infuriating enough all by itself, but when you add that he also translates basically every fucking sentence he hears into English even though we can see the subtitles --making every conversation at least twice the length it needs to be-- we’re pretty much rooting for this guy to get Temple’d to death with maximum speed. Also at one point he nods to blind guy. What a jackass.

Anyway, they end up at a bookstore and try to buy a mysterious off-inventory evil book which happens to be sitting around there, a move that distresses the bookseller enough that she immediately refuses and closes her shop, but not quite enough for her to actually say aloud “No, don’t buy that, it’s an evil book.” Fortunately, Third Wheelie returns in the dead of night, when the evil ghost child (Yamato Tazawa, Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi Summer Special 2016) working the midnight shift at the bookshop will happily hand him the book he wants for no payment, which he seems to think is a real validation of his clever negotiating technique. Are we sure this guy’s not a Trump?

The book in question at first seems like complete gibberish, and then some guy in a bar tells him to try reading it from right to left because it’s written in Japanese, and after that it makes perfect sense. Turns out it’s a book of hidden arcane knowledge about a secret TEMPLE that can only be entered using special knowledge of… oh wait, it’s actually right down the road, there's a bus stop and everything. The ghosts or whatever could have just handed them a tourism pamphlet. But oh well, the book does its job, because now Camgirl is absolutely fucking desperate to go to this temple, despite everyone they meet along the way politely but firmly warning them it’s evil and haunted and almost inevitably fatal and it would be a bad idea to go there, especially when there are basically more fucking temples than Starbucks in Japan and the vast majority are conveniently unhaunted. A representative incident: while they’re walking to their demise (because no one will ferry them there, you know, for fear of the evil) they meet an old guy who tells Wheelie the story of some jackass who, back in the day, went to the temple like an idiot even though everyone told him not to, and “came back holding his eyes.” When Wheelie translates this to his companions in his typical excruciating way, he puts his fingers to his eyes as though he’s covering them. ‘No, no,” says the guy, grabbing two convenient oranges and holding them face up in the palms of his hands. “Like this.” “OK, I don’t understand,” our boy says, and fucks off. “Mucho Arigato” says the Boyfriend. Guys, guys, I already wanted these fuck-os dead, you don’t have to keep doing more to convince me.

The closer they get to the Haunted Temple Of Evil, the more obviously concerning supernatural shit starts to happen, starting with the fact that the evil ghost child bookstore employee who sold them the book in the first place suddenly turns up again, and seems suspiciously focused on facilitating their little day trip of evil. They’re Americans, though, so it never dawns on them to consider that this little tyke is a little too eager to cater to their caprices. And that’s not the only red flag; they encounter a weird old lady with (growths? ears?) under her hair, marching monks with baskets over their heads, and I’m pretty sure I saw that one-legged umbrella guy from the YOKAI MONSTERS movies.* Granted, because it’s Japan, it’s hard to tell what are supernatural horrors and what are just really committed perverts, but still, guys, come on. They breeze through every warning sign and you’ll be very surprised to hear that when they finally do get to the temple in question, they discover it is indeed evil and haunted just like literally everyone they met told them. By this point we’re glad enough just to see them killed off for being such dipshits, and wouldn’t be fussy about the details. Pleasantly, though, in a rare concession to people who would want to see something entertaining happen in a movie, towards the very, very, very end we do get a few seconds of some kinda nifty multi-headed wolf monster and a couple sharp-toothed children. But not much. And certainly not nearly enough to justify watching a whole movie.

Even if there's rarely anything interesting on-screen, though, at least it's visually legible most of the time, which was by no means a given. Considering how much they threaten it, there’s less found footage in here than I initially feared, which my lawyer informs me is sufficient to keep the movie from being technically classified as a crime against humanity. Still, one would hope for slightly more visual ambition here, considering director Michael Barnett is usually cinematographer Michael Barnett (KISS KISS BANG BANG, YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, TED, GOTTI) and this is his first film as a director (his cinematographer here is Cory Geryak, a longtime gaffer/camera tech [PUMPKINHEAD2: BLOOD WINGS, THE DARK KNIGHT[!]]). Sadly that does not appear to be the case; the characters say they need to get home before dark, but it’s hard to tell when that is since everything is constantly tinted fucking blue like a goddamn UNDERWORLD movie. It’s possible that it's not the movie's fault because the country of Japan is covered by an enormous cerulean lampshade and other movies just balance it out with artificial yellow lighting. I can’t rule that out, but I think it’s more likely some kind of color-correction horseshit.

Why are these people blue?

Which raises the question: do cinematographers really like that, or did the director, having spent his previous career as a cinematographer, seize this opportunity to fuck up some other cinematographer's work just as other directors had done to him, continuing the cycle of misery? It makes everything look like it has an Instagram filter on it. I mean, it’s not a complete disaster, and some of it looks nice enough; there’s a portion at the end which takes place in a cave illuminated only by a single flashlight, and the camera does a nice job of giving us a sense of the claustrophobic, alien world down there, effectively using hard light and pitch dark to play with our anxieties. It’s not really an eyesore, just drab. But what’s up with all the color tinting? Why would hardworking professionals who care about image allow the final product to look like someone spilled a bottle of ink on the film? I know Steven Soderbergh did it once, but guys, he’s done everything once. You weren’t supposed to make this a thing. 

(the cave sequence is much better)

I’ve seen uglier, of course, and I’ve seen much more incompetent, and even more pointless. But being kicked in the head by a human is definitely better than being kicked in the head by a horse, and I still I wouldn’t recommend either one. There might be a germ of a good idea in cribbing details from Japanese folklore for a modern-set horror movie (the script is by frequent Adam Wingard scribe Simon Barrett** [DEAD BIRDS, YOU’RE NEXT]) but they just barely register here, while the intolerable and interminable non-relationship drama between these three bland anti-actors takes up virtually the entire runtime. The listless direction doesn’t help matters, but this really is just a dysfunctional script. For one thing, I can’t imagine why it makes sense to have this story be about visiting Americans rather than native Japanese people, a conceit that serves only to clutter the plot with needless exposition and to impart upon the whole scenario a simmering low-key xenophobic cast that sours any hope for goofy fun. But that’s only the beginning of the structural problems here; you’ve also got the useless vestigial framing narrative, a hopelessly confused lack of clear point-of-view, and a complete absence of narrative conflict, or, hell, narrative in general. There’s maybe five relevant minutes of plot before the 50 minute mark, and even then, it’s only in the last 15 minutes that anything really happens. Not an acceptable return on investment, even at at merciful 78 minutes. Other than a few fleeting glimpses of local Japanese color, there’s just no content here. I’ve seen films which are technically much worse, but few which make as feeble a case for their own existence.

* Warning: I may have imagined this last detail as my brain instinctively worked to protect me from having to rip my eyes out and hold them in the palms of my hands out of boredom.

** I suspect that Simon and Michael Barrett are related in some way, but I cannot find any information which directly confirms that.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, which is pretty representative of the level of effort on display here.
TITLE ACCURACY	Can’t deny that a temple does end up being pretty relevant to this wisp of a story. Interesting that it’s just called TEMPLE and not THE TEMPLE.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA / Japan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Demons
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, though Simon Barrett has enough horror scripts under his belt to earn me recognizing his name.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Yes, probably
CREEPY DOLLS?	Some creepy statuary
EVIL CULT?	None, as far as I can tell religion isn’t the source of the problem with the titular temple
MADNESS?	Possibly?
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	You’d think it would be “don’t invite a creepy third wheel openly lusting after you to follow you and your boyfriend and videotape you making out” but actually all that works out fine, really the only lesson here is “don’t go to that temple that everyone says not to go to because it is haunted and evil and inevitably fatal.”