Underworld (1985) aka Transmutations

Underworld aka Transmutations (1985)

Dir. George Pavlou

Written by Clive Barker, James Caplin

Starring Larry Lamb, Denholm Elliot, Steven Berkoff, Nicola Cowper, Ingrid Pitt, Art Malik, Sean Chapman, Miranda Richardson

Let me sing you a familiar tune: Look! It’s this ultra-obscure horror movie with a great cast, written by one of horror’s acknowledged modern luminaries, featuring some kind of crazy plot about a drug that mutates you based on your dreams! I wonder why it’s not better known? There’s no WAY that’s not great!

Guess what kiddies. There is a way. But hey, at least the nagging possibility that it was somehow an unfairly forgotten gem won’t haunt me anymore, because at great expense and with some difficulty, I acquired this rightfully forgotten early 80’s horror dud which marks the fairly inauspicious screenwriting debut for Clive Barker (The HELLRAISER series, CLIVE BARKER’S BOOK OF BLOOD). Guess what, it ain’t that great. It’s not a total disaster, but it’s plenty bad, and, more damningly, pretty dull. But to justify the expense of finding out exactly why this one was so immediately and thoroughly scrubbed from the culture’s collective memory, I’m going to have to delve into it a little.

Things start off with some promise -- there’s some handsome, expressionistically lit 80’s cinematography (plenty of that nice blue haze they loved back then) and a compelling tone of freaky mystery. We open with some weirdos in an opulent London brothel being attacked by a gang of crazy ninja monster freaks, who carry off the comatose 80’s-fabulous Nicole (Nicola Cowper, DREAMCHILD, LIONHEART), a perfectly adequate setup for a bizarre mystery. Nicole is apparently some kind of completely irresistible siren of beauty, which we know because multiple characters discuss it as well as from a heartfelt algorithm-composed synth ballad that croons over her prone form.* That’s a hard claim to reconcile with what we’re seeing, inasmuch as she’s so aggressively 80’s fabulous that she resembles Gozer from GHOSTBUSTERS, but with less charisma. A lot of the movie looks suspiciously like it was shot on the Total Eclipse of the Heart video set, so maybe it’s just a vibe thing, otherwise I don’t know what to tell ya.

Nevertheless, shifty crimelord Hugo Motherskille (Stephen Berkoff, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS [medical student, uncredited], A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) wants her back, so he drags this guy Roy (Larry Lamb… uh, BLOOD, THE LAST VAMPIRE?) out of retirement to go looks for her. He correctly guesses that Roy will eventually for no reason happen to be standing nearby to a pothole and see the mutants go in, which would be easy to criticize as an unfeasible and asinine plan except that, hey, it works. Motherskille --who halfheartedly claims to not be a villain, despite the fact that his name is literally Motherskille-- has a good reason to suspect that Roy can get the job done, though, because he knows that Roy is the fucking baddest mother this side of Chris Pratt in Jurassic World, at least in terms of how devoted the script is to telling us that he’s awesome. This is always a bad sign, particularly when we get to see the questionable way he goes about setting up his so-called investigation. Everyone keeps insisting that Roy is the best, but boy, if this really is the best, it’s hard to see how society functions at all. As you begin to get more and more annoyed about Roy’s somnambulistic monotone and his ineffectual detective work, you’ll also start to notice that people in this movie say his name a lot. Which will either begin to exponentially infuriate you, or, if you’re taking a drink every time they do, will save your moviegoing experience (but also possibly kill you, so plan accordingly).

As Roy begins to unravel the mystery, the few hints of genuine intrigue the beginning managed to conjure quickly fade, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the answers (to the extent that the nonsensical plot even delivers answers) are surprisingly uninteresting and straightforward. Seems there is some kind of drug being manufactured by Dr. Savary (Denholm Elliot, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, and, uh, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC I guess) which does… something with dreams (?) and then turns you into a mutant drug addict. Only Nicole is immune from its mutating effects, for reasons which might be interesting if the movie ever got around to explaining them. Everyone wants a piece of Nicole so they can figure out what the deal is, although it’s kinda unclear what the drug does anyway or why it’s such a big deal to everyone. It’s kinda cool that the mutants here (spoilers?) actually turn out to be the good guys, kinda prefiguring the structure of Barker’s later, better NIGHTBREED, but the villains here aren’t as good and neither are the monsters. The  makeup design looks like shit -- you gotta either go cooler or grosser; just lumpy ain’t getting the job done, especially since we never really learn much about any of them. Gradually the whole conflict kind of runs out of steam and goes nowhere, ending in an indifferently staged gunfight, which is something tantamount to an unforgivable failure of imagination considering this is a  Clive Barker film.

Despite having Denholm Elliott, Steven Berkoff, Art Malik, Ingrid Pitt, Sean Chapman (uncle Frank from Hellraiser!) and even a little Miranda Richardson, things get less interesting with every minute of screentime. You want to like this one, but it just doesn’t give you a lot of ammo to defend it. It’s too uneventful, sometimes to the point that it seems deliberately anticlimactic. At one point both our hero and the villain are injected with the supposedly deadly transmuting drug. And guess what -- absolutely nothing happens, and no one ever mentions it again! They don’t even seem to get high! Far too much time is spent on the gradually deflating mystery narrative, and once it finally gets where it’s going, none of the interesting possibilities are really touched on, it just turns into a small-scale gang fight between gangsters and monsters (but the monsters don’t have special powers or anything, just guns). Clive Barker has apparently stated that this film was one of the reasons he directed HELLRAISER himself (which turned out to be a great decision), but shit, it’s hard to imagine how this could ever have worked to begin with, unless they completely changed the screenplay -- which may well have been the case, considering the interesting hints that there was originally something about, I dunno, dream zombies or something? If there ever was anything interesting, though, it didn't make it to the final version. It’s not the absolute worst Clive Barker adaptation (BOOK OF BLOOD is easily duller and uglier; at least this one is nicely lit) but it may well be the most disappointing. But hey, at least it ultimately led us to HELLRAISER. Whenever you’re experimenting with really new ideas, you gotta expect a few unfortunate Transmutations along the way.

*The film's music was produced by synthpop group Freur, which later evolved into the band Underworld (apparently they named themselves after this film! Well, at least someone was a fan). They suck, but at least they give the whole enterprise a little personality and energy. They’re also on the soundtrack for LET ME IN, so good for them, coming up in the world.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Adapted by Barker from one of his own short stories
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: England
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Denholm Elliot? I don't really think of him as a horror icon, but he racked up an impressive amount of horror films over the years.
• BOOBIES: No
• MULLETS: Good bit of 80's do's (and don'ts) but I dunno. Art Malik looks like he kinda has one, but it's also slicked back on top so a little hard to tell.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Melting guy rips off his flesh first, pretty cool.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No.
• MONSTER: Mutants!
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Man into mutant, but that's all happened before the events of our story.
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Very high, long out of print and never on DVD.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Drugs are whack.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Pretty generic, but reasonably accurate.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

The House That Dripped Blood

The House That Dripped Blood (1970) *Note: actual house does not drip blood

Dir. Peter Duffel

Written by Robert Bloch (wikipedia also lists “Russ Jones” but the opening credits do not)

Starring Jon Pertwee, Denholm Elliott, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Joss Ackland

A detective seeking a missing actor (Jon Pertwee, Dr. Who #3) is regaled with stories about other mysterious occurrences which took place in the man’s seemingly abandoned home in the unnecessary framing story to this amiable but minor Amicus anthology. The most interesting thing about the film is its impressive cast and the script from PSYCHO scribe Robert Bloch (we encountered him early this Chainsawnukah season as the writer of the short story that became THE SKULL). But other than its pedigree, this one's a bit on the forgettable side, though not entirely without its merits.

The first and best section involves Denholm Elliott as a horror/crime author who gets so into his work that he begins seeing his murderous antagonist in real life. As we learned in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, Elliott is fucking great at emoting panic and terror, and he uses this power to amp up the tension here rather nicely. This one is a perfect example of a good horror anthology segment, with a simple premise, a steady escalation, a respectable twist, and a lean runtime. After the initial high point, each segment gets progressively weaker --though never quite completely embarrassing-- so don’t get too excited here.

Problem?

Next up we’ve got Peter Cushing as a flamboyantly dressed bachelor who discovers a sinister wax museum with one figure in particular that bears a striking resemblance to a lost love of his. He’s weirded out by the experience, but becomes strangely obsessed with the statue. When an estranged old friend (Joss Ackland, in equivalently gaudy garb) shows up and becomes equally fixated, you gotta figure things are gonna end badly. Though not as narratively elegant as the first segment, this one gets high marks for its dreamy, surreal visuals. There’s a particularly great dream sequence where Cushing, bathed in intense colors and distorted by fish-eye lenses and weird angles, wanders through a nightmarish wax museum of grotesque and bizarre figures. The film could have used more of this kind of aggressive stylishness, and Cushing, of course, is always a joy to watch even when the story sort of peters out at the end.*

Cushing in an early make-up test for his role as the Hulk.

After that, though, things take a decided downward turn in quality. First, we get Christopher Lee and a likable Nyree Dawn Porter (Blanche Ingram in 1970’s JANE EYRE) in an unfortunately dull tale of a dour widower (Lee) who hires a tutor (Porter) for his severely disciplined young daughter. The tutor becomes fond of her ward and can’t understand why her employer seems so scared of the child, it’s almost like there’s some sort of really obvious horrible secret which relates to her mother and her fear of fire… hmmm. While it’s always fun to see Lee, he doesn’t get a very interesting role here and the twist is telegraphed from about 30 seconds in, making it feel unnecessarily fatty. The cast sells it, but even as a short it feels like there’s precious little story here and an insufficient climax.

Dolls are just the worst.

So that’s a bummer, and the ending --which dovetails into the framing story-- isn’t a whole lot stronger. Jon Pertwee --in a role that seems tailor-made for Vincent Price, who was offered the part but unable to take it due to his contract with American international Pictures-- plays a mincing old horror film vet, who, disgusted with the amateurish production he’s currently starring in, acquires his own vampiric cape from a mysterious shop of evil. Gee, what could go wrong? In a departure from the other segments, this one is broadly comic, full of slapstick and not especially subtle postmodern jokes about the horror industry (as with the CRIMSON CULT two years earlier, it seems horror movie in-jokes were around quite a while before SCREAM came along and let Americans get in on that action). Unfortunately, it’s only mildly funny and noticeably less stylish than the other segments. Pertwee is fine, although of course Price would have been much better (he’d get his own chance at postmodernism three years later in the ultra-weird MADHOUSE) but the story here is pretty silly and not really hilarious enough to make up for it, though it does have some honest chuckles in it. Alas, it sheds any goodwill remaining by subsequently linking back up with the framing story about the detective and attempting to reframe a light farce as a tense horror story (though it is funny that the detective walks around with not just one lighted candle, but with a gigantic five-pronged candelabra which is literally half as tall as he is).

Altogether, any hopes for a classic you might have entertained for this one based on the combination of writer and cast are sunk by director Duffel, who mostly worked in TV and makes a movie which looks like it. Other than the dream sequence in Cushing’s episode, the movie is resolutely unstylish and criminally short on atmosphere, leaving the heavy lifting to the stories which are, alas, at best mid-level Twilight Zone trifles. It’s not offensive, but it’s also pretty unnecessary viewing, particularly since the dull framing story pushes the runtime to an overblown 102 minutes. Elliot and Cushing’s segments alone are probably worth your time, but the rest is highly skippable. Hopefully, Bloch’s other Amicus anthologies, TORTURE GARDEN and ASYLUM, show a little more effort. And they must, because Cushing plays a character named “Lancelot Canning” in one of them. On the list for next year!

*Wikipedia claims that someone named “Russ Jones” scripted this segment from Bloch’s short story, but I can find no definitive evidence that this is the case. If it is, Jones’ own wiki page mentions nothing of it, nor any relation I can find to Bloch or Amicus or films in general.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yes, Bloch adapts from his own short stories.
• SEQUEL: No.
• REMAKE: No.
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No, Amicus
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? Indeed.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None, all regulars to this sort of thing.
• BOOBIES: No
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: One beheading, as seen depicted in eye-poppingly terrible graphic art on the poster.
• ENTRAILS? No.
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: Yes! You gotta wait til the last segment, though.
• SLASHERS: Nah.
• CURSES: The House seems kinda cursed, but it's not explicit.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? Segment three has some good doll stuff.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid-high, little remembered mid-level Amicus.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: She did.

To the Devil A Daughter

To the Devil A Daughter (1976)

Dir. Peter Sykes

Starring Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliot, Natasha Kinski

                TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, adapted from the Dennis Wheatley book of the same name, is a serviceable if unexceptional Hammer film with a few touches which are undeniably awesome but not quite enough to make it great. That’s a hard truth to face about a film which features Richard Widmark facing off against Christopher Lee in a paranoia-drenched battle of wills over the not-insignificant issue of whether or not the antichrist should be brought to Earth, but there is it. You want it to be great, you sort of know better than to hope, but you think maybe, just this one time, your instincts are wrong and it’s actually going to be everything it ought to be. And then instead you get pretty good just like you knew you would. Hammer films are like that. They’re the asshole boyfriend that does the exact minimum it has to do to keep you from completely giving up on his ever being more than a lousy good for nothing layabout. He gets drunk and passes out on the couch with his stupid friends, and one of them throws up on your roommates’ weird fad diet DVD collection, but then just when you’re about to throw him to the curb he also casts Christopher Lee as a heretic priest who holds masked orgies in the name of resurrecting Satan and tricks you into thinking maybe there’s really something there, he just has to grow up a little.

But enough about my life. The pretty good here is obviously Lee, who, yes, plays a heretic priest who holds masked orgies in the name of bringing forth the antichrist (under the watchful gaze of a giant 20-foot-tall golden cloven-hoof devil idol being anally penetrated by an inverted cross. Tacky, but admittedly attention-grabbing). And man, bringing that fucker to Earth is a messy, convoluted business which requires all manner of confusing shenanigans over several decades, some of which I think are probably dreams but it’s a little hard to be sure. Figures Satan would make it some shit like that. With God, he arranged all that shit ahead of time, and all we had to take care of was the killing. But no, Satan’s gonna make you work for it. What an asshole. It’s fairly standard Satanic stuff for the most part, and made somewhat less threatening by the fact that there seem to be only two other elderly people assisting poor Christopher Lee in this endeavor. And one of them dies like 20 minutes in. 

Still, Lee gamely steps up to the plate and turns in an unusually awesome performance, even for him. He seems a bit more awake than he seems in some of these Hammer Dracula films, and I’m thinking that might have something to do with the fact that he almost has to actually do some acting this time around. His character is a former Catholic priest who did a little too much reading in the forbidden book section (see, Harry Potter? This is why they lock that shit up) and came to the conclusion that this Satanism thing probably has something to it. But it’s kinda cool because he honestly doesn’t seem to see himself as a bad guy, I think he really believes that he’s actually the only good Catholic left (he still wears his priest collar thingy, for instance, and when we see him get excommunicated at the beginning, he belligerently tells the bishop:, "It is not heresy... and I will not recant!" (remember, from the beginning of that Rob Zombie song?). So while he’s not afraid to play rough, he comes across more as an intensely religious fanatic than the usual cheeseball movie Satanists, and that’s both scarier and more interesting. His followers, including the film’s McGuffin character, somehow seem to think they’re just an obscure sect of Christianity and get quite offended when other people suggest that it’s in any way evil to bring about the birth of the antichrist. 

The McGuffin in this case is Natasha Kinski (yes, Klaus’ daughter), a nun raised by Lee who implausibly seems to have never noticed how obviously evil everything going on around her is, like my cousin who was raised by Republicans. It was only her second movie, and she was apparently only 15 when she shot it. Oh wait, you didn’t know that? Now you’re regretting that big smile you had during her full frontal scene. You sick fuck. Always ID first, champ. 

Anyway, she has only a vague idea of how she fits into the plan, but Lee plans to have her end up the mother of the incoming antichrist. Fuckin’ Europeans, man. Always gettin ‘em when they’re young. Denholm Elliot plays her father, who somehow missed the fact that his wife was a Satanic cultist and got roped into the whole deal at the last minute, when he apparently happened to wander into the exact wrong illicit ceremony at the exact wrong time (note to Satanists: why not lock the door?). He’s her father and he’s the only one who knows what the stakes are, so naturally he frets about it, grabs a random American off the street who seems to have some background in the Satan stuff, and foists the whole thing off on him on his way to go cower in an attic. Way to represent, English. On the other hand, Elliot is pretty great here, cranking up his frenzied panic to 11 and really selling us on how worried we should be about this thing, even when his fellow cast members seems somewhat less interested.

Widmark is that American, an expert on Satanism so familiar with the subject that he can kind of sound bored when he talks about it. Like, really bored. He wears a floppy old man hat and sweater vest for almost the entire runtime, but he’s the only American, so I guess he’s the only one who can save the world. Widmark-- who in all honesty cannot fairly be accused of trying too hard here-- varies between mildly concerned and unabashedly bored throughout the whole thing, but he does have one truly splendid moment where some guy he seems like he kind of know gets burned to ashes next to him. He finally takes off his leather-elbowed jacket, covers his buddy, throws his arms to his side, cocks his head back, and howls in his thin, reedy old guy wail: “Daaaaammmmmmmmnnnn   yyyyyyyooooooooOOOOOOOOUUUUUU!!!!” That's pretty rad. Then he awkwardly runs off to the big climax (where he achieves victory by throwing a rock at Christopher Lee and then walking away, probably about as much as he was up for at that point). Man, all those years of planning, and the one thing ol' Chris Lee never considered is that someone might throw a rock at him right at the end. That's gotta sting.

I’m making fun, but the movie does have some genuinely effective disturbing sequences. The big evil orgy is notable for its unexpectedly high volume of Christoper Lee ass (IMDB breaks my heart by suggesting it’s a stunt double, but I’ll never believe it). So it’s funny and a little cheesy, but it also gets genuinely transgressive in places. There’s some pretty crazy mixing of sex, violence, and Satanism which must have been at least a little shocking at the time. Kinski keeps having visions of the fetal antichrist, which looks hilariously like a sort of ground hog puppet turned inside out – but I bet you weren’t expecting it to crawl up onto her bed in a trail of blood, demonstrate its considerable oral sex prowess on her (yes, really) and then crawl up inside her womb. That’s admirably depraved, and even if a part of your brain will never be able to not laugh at bloody rodent puppets, you’ll also have to admit it kind of gets to you on some level.

                                       Yup, not OK with that at all.

 It’s also helped by a nicely paranoid, atonal score which occasionally teams with a few tense scenes and an effective Christopher Lee to produce some commendable tension and repulsion. There’s a great sequence where Lee attempts some handy mind control via the medium of turning over plates, which would be completely ludicrous if not for the deadly serious way Lee, the music, and the cinematography sells it. Ditto a scene where Widmark goes to find Denholm Elliot, who is cowering in an attic surrounded by protective symbols and literally incoherent with fear. It’s a minor scene, but Elliot sells the character’s jibbering panic so effectively that it becomes unsettling. Scenes like that are the “I’m sorry” flowers and wine which will probably get remembered longer than the thing that needs apologizing for. That’s how these Hammer films role. Mostly pretty disappointing, but it’s the good bits that will end up sticking with you and making you dare to hope the next one will win you over.   

There’s another Hammer adaptation of Wheatley’s work starring Lee called THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, which Lee actually cites as his favorite Hammer film. God damn it, that sounds awesome. Here we go again.