The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)

Dir Emilio Miraglia

Written by Rabio Pittorru, Emilio Miraglia

Starring Barbara Bouchet, Ugo Pagliai, Marina Malfatti, Sybil Danning

WARNING: WE TALK BRIEFLY BUT BLUNTLY ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THIS ONE. DON’T BLAME ME, BLAME ITALY.

THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES is a pleasantly convoluted, handsomely appointed giallo with what may well be the single most quintessentially giallo title ever designed by man. I guess I’d feel a little safer if there was an animal in there somewhere (“The Red Serpent Kills Seven Times”?), and I admit that it has to contend with the existence of the greatest single title of any artistic work, any genre (YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY), but just from a technical standpoint it’s hard to imagine how you could top it. Baroque, sensual, and suggesting an obscure sort of poetry, while at the same time being utterly indecipherable nonsense (a description which, now that I think about it, would be a fitting conspectus for the genre itself). All the more stunning, then, that THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES is a rare giallo with a title that gets satisfactorily explained within the first five minutes, and actually literally describes the events of the movie! Except the "queen" part, I guess, I don’t know what that means, but they do say it on-screen.

 Before we’re introduced to anyone who may or may not kill seven times, the threat of brutal violence is already in the air: the movie begins with five whole minutes of escalating savagery as a little blonde girl and a little brunette girl violently contest the ownership of a doll (who, of course, is dressed in red) like they're auditioning for the damned fight scene in THEY LIVE. As their duel escalates from playful sibling rivalry to BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99, their grandfather (Rudolf Schündler, SUSPIRIA*) intervenes. He seems a little shaken by what he’s seen, (though not nearly enough considering his intervention was necessitated by one of them grabbing a knife) and subsequently regales them with a calming story about their ancestors, whom a lavish oil painting depicts in a similar murderous confrontation (the children immediately identify with them). “Now then. The explanation of that awful picture. I swore you’d never be told, however, perhaps you’re old enough now,” says Grandpa (they look to be around 10, so I guess he didn’t have to swear they’d never be told for all that long).

It seems that the two women in the portrait were also sisters, who we’re told, “over the years... have become known as the Red Queen and the Black Queen.” Long story short, Grandpa breathlessly exposits that the two hated each other from childhood, and that the Red Queen was a real bitch, and the Black Queen finally stabbed her seven times in revenge. Pretty routine stuff, I bet pretty much every Italian family that resides in a menacing, dilapidated castle has a couple stories like that. What gives this one legs is that subsequently the Red Queen returned from the grave and committed seven murders -- six of random, hapless strangers, and the seventh, the Black Queen herself. The origin of the curious royal nicknames here will remain obscure, but there you have it: less than five minutes in and we already have a Red Queen Killing Seven Times. I’ll be damned.

Anyway, this turns out to be relevant for more than purely thematic reasons. It seems that “the same thing happened a hundred years later --seven murders-- and the same thing a hundred years after that. And always, always in this castle. And always involving two sisters.” It’s true that three incidents does establish a pattern, and grandpa eyes the two kids significantly before telling them to forget about it, it’s just an old wives tale that he’s sure isn’t true. Although I can’t help but notice that when the kids mention it could happen again he knows the exact year off the top of his head.

That year, of course, will be 1972. (Incidentally, I looked into 1672 to see if I could figure out the historical context for the inaugural sister-stabbing. If there was anything going on that would explain it, it didn’t make the wikipedia page for that year. Maybe they were just bored?). A credit sequence set to an A+ spooky-funky track by composer Bruno Nicolai (ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, EYEBALL) reinforces what we already suspected: this was not an isolated incident of homicidal violence between the two sisters. So when the fateful year rolls around, we’re ready to see some merciless sister-on-sister smackdown, and are surprised and suspicious when only one sister is in evidence. In fact, it seems that the blonde one has already prevailed over her brunette counterpart, bashing her head against a stone pillar and dumping her body in a nearby pond. That seems like it would have solved things pretty neatly, except that some mysterious black-gloved red-cloaked figure has recently murdered Grandpa, and one can’t help but reflect on the circumstances of his “old wives tale” now appearing unexpectedly germain.

Remaining sister Kitty (now played by Barbara Bouchet, BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA, DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING**) works at "Springe," some sort of nightmarish company that manufactures fashion, depicted here in the form of a motorized scooter resting on top of a small hillock of what looks to be a sheepskin taken from an animal roughly the size of a mature african elephant. Or maybe it’s a big pile of building insulation? Anyway, everyone seems to agree it’s extremely fashionable. And in case you didn’t pick up that it was now 1972 from the gratuitous shot of a newspaper dateline, you may direct your attention to literally every article of clothing or building interior in the entire movie. I’ve often heard critics identify the setting of a film as an unbilled principal character, and in this case not only is that true, but 1972 is a total ham that is simply incapable of not stealing every scene by doing some kind of ridiculous nonsense in the background. As evidence, I offer everything from an indoor statue that appears to be a blooming onion made of metal penises, to plaid suits that look like they were sewn together from the skins of errant midwestern hunters, to an all-checkerboard three-piece on a lady that frankly is a red nose away from a clown suit. Observe:

That’s a lot of 1972, right there. 

Anyway, there’s definitely some kind of Red Queen on the loose, killing multiple times without exceeding seven, and of course Kitty is understandably convinced that this is either the supernatural revenge of her sister, or a sinister impostor motivated by something fashion-related. She has no shortage of suspects, because pretty much everyone who works at “Springe” is a backstabbing cunt of the highest order. I’d like to highlight all the possible persons of interest, but that would be impossible because they’re all identical blondes (the casting director definitely had a type) and I have no idea how many of them there are, although I can confidently say that one of them is Sybil Danning, the Austrian actress and model who is so famous that both you and I immediately recognized her name, though looking at her filmography I cannot really explain why. She’s in BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, I guess.

There’s no shortage of red herrings and fake-outs and ridiculous convoluted nonsense before we get to our appreciably ludicrous solution. That leaves the plot a little all over the place, which is fine for a giallo, and it’s abley buoyed by Nicolai's kickin’ score and the handsome photography of Alberto Spagnoli (Bava’s SHOCK, in his first film as a director of photography). It’s much more freewheeling mystery than gruesome slasher, though, so you’d better be invested in the whodunnit angle. The kills are nothing special --mostly just off-camera stabbings-- though I am absolutely a big fan of the killer’s deeply unsettling mask (the most unnatural human face since Shatner’s DEVIL’S RAIN getup) and unhinged laugh.

One thing I’m not a big fan of? The out-of-the-blue brutal rape scene. It is never mentioned again by anyone, nor does it seem to have any subsequent impact on the victim, and the perpetrator dies minutes later and nobody even realizes it, so I’m gonna have to assume this was one of those “the producers said we needed a sexy rape” situations, but if that’s true I could really have done without seeing the victim weeping and shaking and covered in blood two minutes later. The sleazy rapist is at least portrayed as a degenerate scumbag who dies painfully and unlamented a few minutes later, but then again like half the cast here dies painfully and unlamented, so I don’t see how this whole incident was at all necessary or beneficial to the film in any way. Not an uncommon plot element at the time (though this one seems especially sadistic), but definitely one little aspect of some of these 70’s films that hasn’t aged as charmingly. To which I say, frankly: good.

Other than that one sour note, though, most of the movie is light, fluffy fun, with no shortage of cheerfully dumb dialogue and confounding plotting. “I can assure you there wasn’t any negligence on our side,” says the doctor who allowed a hallucinating psychiatric patient to escape and impale herself on a fence. That sounds a little suspicious, but the dead patient’s husband seems to happily accept this assessment, even when the Doctor goes on to say, apropos of nothing, “We’ve had patients from aristocratic families. We’ve tried to preserve their anonymity, like the Gotterschaums and the Wildenbrucks.” Fortunately, when hubby asks which Wildenbruck, the doctor informs him “you’re asking for too much information.” Good to know there’s a limit. I guess in his defense, all he claimed is that he tried.

Director Emilio Miraglia’s previous (and only other) giallo THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF HER GRAVE is more gothic and unsettling and probably the better movie overall, but who can argue with such a bounty of frothy, airheaded fun (give or take the odd brutal rape scene)? The whole thing is about as tightly plotted as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, but there’s nearly always something colorful and ridiculous going on, and it frequently looks and sounds great (especially in the handsome Arrow Video restoration from 2017), plus you’re never far from some gorgeous blonde taking off her clothes (and for the ladies: mustaches!). So it goes down pretty smooth for anyone with an affection for the genre (and who else would ever consider watching?). Besides, while there is no shortage of gialli which feature abrupt, insane twists, this one is a real doozy. In fact, just as it seems to be wrapping up with a resolution which would be --well, logical isn’t nearly the right word, but at least imaginable -- suddenly it takes another turn out of fucking nowhere right into the craziest god damn resolution I ever heard of, involving (SPOILER) a secret identity, a faked death, a swapped sibling, a castle dungeon, and a clue that requires a flashback to a pair of tits, and that still doesn’t get us to the true culprit behind everything. That's the kind of giallo my spirit craves. It's the kind of giallo this world needs.

I close, then, with a word of caution: if the imposing castle you live in has a history of siblings murdering each other and then returning from the grave for revenge every 100 years, maybe consider just moving.

* Schündler has a filmography interesting enough to merit its own footnote: he began his career in 1924, appeared in fucking THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (!), then stuck around Germany during the war years appearing in more films than I am comfortable with (though they look to be mostly non-political, and Goebbels banned at least two of them) only to re-emerge in the post-war years as a director, move on to a handful of German Krimi films in the 60s (THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS) and sex comedies (SEXY SUSAN KNOWS HOW…!, I LIKE GIRLS WHO DO, and the magnificently named SEX IS NOT FOR VIRGINS) before somehow bouncing back and winding up as “Karl” in the fucking EXORCIST and Prof. Milius in SUSPIRIA, and even turning up in Wim Wender’s THE AMERICAN FRIEND and the David Hemmings/David Bowie JUST A GIGOLO before becoming a staple on German TV until his death in 1988. He’s terrible here, but the dubbing isn’t doing anyone any favors.

** One more reason this movie should have an animal in its title.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	IMDB claims The Corpse That Didn't Want to Die! But I can’t actually find any evidence in the wild that this tagline ever appeared anywhere.
TITLE ACCURACY	Almost stunning accurate, considering the source
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy (though partially filmed in Germany)
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Giallo, slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Barbara Bouchet had a pretty good run on gialli, with BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA, AMUCK, THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS, THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES, and finally DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING all within two years.
NUDITY?	Plenty
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Unfortunately yes
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None, which is, I guess, why they figured they couldn’t go with an animal in the title. But come on guys, let’s be a little creative. Was there actually a cat in CAT O’ NINE TAILS?
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Certainly, there is the suggestion of a vengeful ghost
POSSESSION?	A lighter suggestion that, at the very least, these ladies are fated for this.
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	There’s this weird stalking creep who peeps at them in one scene.
MORAL OF THE STORY	(HUGE SPOILERS!!!) If you’re concerned enough about your daughters being fated to kill each other that you would adopt a decoy, maybe just move?

Hell Fest

Hell Fest (2018)

Dir. Gregory Plotkin

Written by Seth M. Sherwood, Blair Butler, Akela Cooper, “Story by” William Penick, Christopher Sey, Stephen Succo. Yes, you read all that right.

Starring Amy Forsyth, Reign Edwards, Bex Taylor-Klaus

            HELL FEST is an absolutely by-the-numbers, low-concept, meat-and-potatoes slasher flick, distinguished only by two minor details. The most immediately obvious of these details is that it’s set in a gigantic, spectacularly elaborate Halloween-themed amusement park from whence the film takes its name. But the more startling detail is that it is an absolutely by-the-numbers, low-concept, meat-and-potatoes slasher flick which hit theaters in 2018. There was a time (the 80’s) where you could just count on this stuff getting churned out like clockwork, but these days it’s almost a high concept in itself to have a film this simple. Just a normal old slasher, where there’s some young women in a place and a stabby guy kills them off one by one in colorful ways. By law must contain at least 50% fun. HELL FEST meets that modest goal efficiently, and seems pretty content with that. And why not?

            Little enough needs to be said about the setup: a straight-laced young woman named Natalie (Amy Forsyth, A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY, BEAUTIFUL BOY) returns to her hometown to visit her slightly estranged best friend (Reign Edwards, The Bold and the Beautiful, Snowfall) and, to her obvious annoyance, an obnoxious old classmate (Bex Taylor-Klaus, THE LAST WITCH HUNTER, Scream: The Series) who she would clearly have preferred to leave safely in her past, but who is inconveniently her BFF’s roommate. In order to avoid talking to one another, the trio heads to Hell Fest, a sprawling horror-themed amusement park that we’re told travels across the country during Halloween season, which --given the immense scale and functional complexity of the park-- seems like a questionable business proposition at best. But that’s a thread best left unpulled, especially when we begin to consider how remarkably blaise they appear to be about the possible legal ramifications of their extreme caveat emptor philosophy of park attendee safety. At any rate, the girls also drag along some body count boys including one for Natalie to shyly flirt with.

Alas, any burgeoning relationship is going to have to remain unconsummated, for you see --and sit down, because this is going to come as a real shock-- there is a masked killer on the loose. And this is a particularly appealing hunting ground for a masked killer, because, of course, in Hell Fest, everyone is wearing a mask, and everyone is acting creepy and vaguely threatening. So even though our heroine is starting to suspect that some creep is stalking her and her friends, of course no one is going to believer her. This is the basic gimmick of this almost gimmick-free movie, and it allows for a light dusting of (spoilers for the 1944 movie GASLIGHT) gaslighting plot on top of our normal stalk-and-slash mechanic. It’s not strictly necessary, and HELL FEST is content to pursue this line of thinking only in the most casual sort of way, but it really doesn’t matter, because the movie’s real gimmick is the park itself, a genuinely magnificent creation (A+ work, production designer Michael Perry [THE WILLIES, IT FOLLOWS] and art director Mark Dillon [BLOOD MONEY]) absolutely stuffed with loving detail and grand scope, and rapturously photographed by José David Montero (THE HOLLOW POINT) with an altogether pornographic eye for gaudy monochromatic lighting. Ripping off SUSPIRIA’s signature look has gotten to be a bit of a cliché in recent years for low-budget horror films hoping to see artsier than they actually are (to the extent that the actual SUSPIRIA remake avoided it altogether) but hey, repetition has not made it any less pretty, or any less apt to evoke a surreal, slightly dreamlike vibe which makes a slasher’s sudden outbursts of visceral violence more potent.

Which is good, because HELL FEST does not exactly have an overwhelming abundance of violence to fall back on. It’s rated R, and it’s not exactly averse to bloodshed, but it seems like between the six (yes, six) credited screen and story writers, not everybody was on the same page about what the point of a gimmick slasher is. Because we get two agreeably over-the-top gorey kills (including a bravura “how have I never seen this before?” kill where a guy gets his head smashed in on one of those “test your strength” hammer games) and then after that, the kills completely fall off the radar. The only remaining characters to die get obliquely stabbed in one confusingly shot rampage, and after that’s it’s on to the final girl chase. Which is fine, I suppose; lots of those slasher movies I loved from the 80s were a lot of fun, but abandoned the sublime cat-and-mouse adrenaline rush of HALLOWEEN in favor of silly splatter. HELL FEST is no HALLOWEEN, but it is just barely competent and imaginative enough to make a suitable meal of a final chase sequence through an intricately curated haunted house (that plays like a walking tour through virtually every distinct horror cliché the genre has accrued in its century of life, from cannibal butcher shops to creepy doll rooms), and eventually settles on that goal. We get a handful of beats that play off the colorful setting, a handful of neat-looking images, a few effective stalk-and-shock moments. It’s as by-the-book as these things come, but I like the book it’s by, and this is a perfectly adequate rendition. Tony Todd has a cameo, anyway, so that’s good. 

Of course, six credited writers does not exactly speak to an overwhelming abundance of laser-focused artistic vision, and while the movie overall is generally competent (and let’s face it, technical competence has gotten so easy in the decades between 1980 and 2018 that this is not the pleasant surprise it once was), there are a few real obvious blunders that remind you that in 2018, even a movie this unambitious and conventional can’t quite escape being overthought and re-written into an inelegant kludge of half-scrapped ideas and malformed detrietus from various early drafts that fit into the final product so awkwardly and uncomfortably as to stand out. The most obvious to me is the (SPOILERS) final fate of Bex Taylor-Klaus’ obnoxious, attention-craving character, who is clearly set up to die in the big, elaborate set piece which would have been the movie’s third big gimmick kill. But then, obviously, some later screenwriter came along and decided she should actually be around for the final act, maybe even get a shot at redemption, and so inexplicably she ends up surviving this laboriously set-up death machine, and realizing that Natalie was right all along about the crazed killer. But then, apparently, some other screenwriter came alone and decided, no, the last act should really just focus on the core two friends, and so Taylor-Klaus needs to die after all. But instead of going back and re-writing the script so she just dies where she obviously should, he kept both previous revisions and just wrote a new scene where she gets randomly stabbed in a crowd two minutes later along with all the other remaining characters that the finale has no use for but the script has not yet disposed of.

An effective slasher has no real need for good writing in most of the traditional senses of that phrase (which suits HELL FEST just fine), but good structure is another matter, and the way the movie sets up and pays off this character is bad structure, a failure to properly capitalize on the things that it invests in. It’s not the kind of problem people usually have in mind when they use the phrase “bad writing”; they're thinking of clichéd characters, unrealistic situations, tin-eared dialogue. All of which HELL FEST has in abundance, of course, but that's not the problem. It’s just bad economy of storytelling. What’s the point of so carefully cultivating us to hate this character and setting her up for a spectacular death scene if she’s just going to get knifed off screen and never mentioned again? You can insult my intelligence all you want, but don’t waste my time.

Likewise, the movie has a curious little coda that I kind of like, but also demonstrates that they didn’t really think this through very carefully. (SPOILERS FOR THE VERY END) Natalie defeats the killer, of course, but he, equally of course, manages to sneak off into the sequel night before the cops can bring him in. Completely standard-issue, taken directly from the HALLOWEEN playbook. But the movie doesn't end right there; instead, it cuts to an unassuming, upper-class house in the suburbs that we've never seen before. We see the killer casually enter, and we realize this is his house as he walks into what is clearly his serial-killer hidey-hole, where he takes off his mask and places it in a cupboard with a dozen others, like Mr. Rogers changing into his friendly lounging sweater after a hard day at the office. Honey, we got any beer in the ‘fridge? You won’t believe the day I had at work. But then, he walks into a nicely-appointed living room, where a cute little girl is sleeping on the couch, and he stands menacing over her for a moment until she awakes, and greets him with a hug and a 'daddy, you’re home!' Cut to credits.

(Spoilers continue) Now, this is, in a way, a kind of provocative ending to a nasty little slasher, no? The movie has steadfastly told us nothing whatsoever about this killer (we never even see his face) but this puts to bed the idea he’s some kind of mythical boogeyman, and instead tells us something arguably even more disconcerting: this is just a normal, everyday citizen, someone no one would suspect, someone even his own family doesn’t suspect. It makes the killer retroactively more grounded in reality, but also even more frighteningly unknowable. It's an interesting and suggestive detail... but it’s also a damn strange note upon which to end this studiously unambitious gimmick slasher flick. It’d be like ending Skid Row’s 1989 debut album with a tender rendition of Judy Sill’s Enchanted Sky Machines. Nice, but, uh, what does this have to do with anything? It seems like you can’t end a movie this way without trying to say something, but I’ll be damned if I could imagine what. And in fact, all evidence points to this ending being just one more dumb little detail that somebody thought up in some earlier draft and it just kinda got stuck in there wherever it would fit because it never got entirely written out.

 I’m not asking for the film to make some kind of sweeping thematic statement of course, but I am asking it to stick to its established central conflict. The way it plays, the last beat of the film suddenly introduces a completely different conflict totally absent anywhere else in the film. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t the very last shot, but ending it that way makes it the thing we leave the film thinking about. Again, bad structure.

(Incidentally, even something as simple as reversing those two beats in the coda would go a long way towards making it land more gracefully; since we see him go to his murder closet first, we understand immediately that this is his house, and therefore this is likely his daughter. Since he’s obviously been doing this for awhile and living a successful double life, it makes the idea that he’s any threat to this girl sleeping in his own living room seem unlikely, so the final shot is robbed of both tension and purpose. Better, I think, to introduce the killer standing in this unknown living room. Oh shit, he’s escaped, and now he’s gonna take out his revenge on this poor girl! Oh wait, no, this is his daughter, holy shit, he’s been living a double life! Maybe he’s rethinking his evil ways now that we see him in a tender domestic situation? Nope, look at his closet of murder, not only has he done this before, he’s done it far more than we ever suspected and is surely going to do it again, setting up a sequel! THEN you smash cut to title, back on message.)  

Not that any of this is movie-killing, it just kind of irks me when a movie which obviously has plenty of resources fumbles such easy material. I often reference Vern’s “Blues Theory Of Slashers” which holds that "slasher movies are a classic American artform not equal to but similar to the blues. There are simple, familiar tunes that you follow, and you put your own spin on it, but you don’t have to get too fancy, you still want it to be recognizable." But to that, I like to add George Carlin’s line about the blues: “it’s not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played.” Imitation will get you most of the way there, but sooner or later you’re gonna have to improvise at least a little, and if you haven’t really considered why you’re playing these notes in the first place, it’s probably gonna come off a little bit muddled. Not enough to ruin something with such a solid and familiar structure, but enough that you notice a few errant notes that jar you out of it for a second.

            Anyway, not really that big a deal, and certainly not worth devoting half a review to these small bumps in a mostly enjoyable road, but what’s done is done. Mostly HELL FEST is a perfectly serviceable genre movie with an ingratiating cast, some stellar production design, and the bare minimum amount of effort and imagination necessary to pull off its modest goals. There’s about 40,000 slashers which are easily superior, but at least twice as many which are substantially worse, and frankly in this crazy world of found footage anti-cinema and “post-horror” po-faced gloomfests, just being a normal, mildly entertaining genre outing with a few good parts and a run time of less than 90 minutes is something worth applauding. Or at least enjoying. I’d be up for a sequel, anyway.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Fun Going In. Hell Coming Out.
TITLE ACCURACY	Sure, it’s the name of the theme park, which is without a doubt the most important thing in the movie.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None as of yet. Not a huge box-office money-maker, but surely made enough of a profit to justify a DTV sequel, no?
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Tony Todd
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Totally.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Standard stalker stuff, but no POV shit.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Someone needs to take this same premise and set it in Disney World with a killer Mickey.