Bloody Hell! It's British Horror Week! - Happy Birthday Hammer! Nightmare (Freddie Francis, 1964)

Sorry for the slight hiatus there folks, life intrudes! As I said in a previous post, the British horror blogging is probably gonna run till the end of the month anyway. So then, as I also mentioned earlier, Hammer Films is celebrating its 80th anniversary this month. We'll be looking at quite a few of their movies before November is through but first up I figured I'd share some of my initial impressions of one I saw for the first time recently and it's a film that's 50 years young this year... the Hitchcock inspired Nightmare.

Bloody Hell! It's British Horror Week! - Madhouse (Jim Clark, 1974)

More Amicus on the menu today folks, and like Asylum, this is something I discovered recently for the first time, though unlike that movie, I'd never even heard of this one! I know another Madhouse, but that one's Italian and from '81, where as for this film, we're heading back forty years to 1974...

Bloody Hell! It's British Horror Week! - Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972)

So my plans to have a belated Halloween blogathon went right out of the window but no matter, there's always next year! On the watching films front I've been busy as ever though and for the next week/possibly till the end of the month, I'm gonna be talking about an area which has been shamefully neglected by me up until recently... homegrown horror!

While there are certainly many British horror films I love, some of which have been firm favourites for years, for some reason I still haven't checked out as many of the classics of the British horror canon as I no doubt should have. This recent kick I've been on started somewhat accidentally with the film I'll be looking at today, but when I discovered that Hammer are celebrating their 80th anniversary this month, I decided to start immersing myself in as much Anglo-horror as possible.

I'll be getting to Hammer in due course over the next week (including a write up of a moviethon I had to celebrate said birthday) but the first few films are courtesy of Amicus...

What's Goin' On? or Where on Earth is Simon Wright?

Howdy strangers!

As is no doubt self-evident from the lack of posts since July(!), I've been slacking in epic fashion during the summer months. No reason really, apart from the overriding compulsion to watch movie after movie after movie (and then not write about it!).

I'll be tied up with commitments relating to the real world this month and over Halloween, so this year's Hootenanny will be a much more subdued affair than the last two... plus, I'm gonna let this spill over into November so I can enjoy some belated Halloween viewing and blogging shenanigans.

Coming soon in that regard, I'll be talking about an impromptu theme weekend I've just had, featuring the likes of Vincent Price, Cameron Mitchell and a posthumous contribution from Lucio Fulci. I'll say no more for now though...

Also in the none too distant, I'll be returning to my 1984 retrospective with an extended piece that'll hopefully make up for the fact I've been neglecting my birth year blog wise as of late. To celebrate my 30th birthday at the beginning of this month I watched 30 films from '84 over 8 days and I plan to write it up and give y'all a whistle stop tour of where I went on my filmic travels.

And last but not least, I want to mention a print project I was involved in which should hopefully be of interest to readers of this blog...

Richard Schmidt of Doomed Moviethon, Cinema Somnambulist and Hello! This is the Doomed Show was kind enough to ask me to contribute to the second issue of his Euro-horror/giallo 'zine Fang of Joy and of course I jumped at the chance. 

You can still get hold of issue one (from Goblinhaus) which is also well worth a look but this second is a serious step up in terms of the amount of content it has and also production value. Kudos are especially due here to Richard's wife LeEtta (check out more of her artwork here and she also has a piece in the 'zine) who designed the amazing cover, which should speak directly to the hearts of any horror fans out there.

Featuring some great pieces from the likes of Jeffrey Canino, Jose Cruz, Brad and Elizabeth Hogue, Scott MacDonald, ship's captain Richard and many more fine folks, this is a must read for fans of Euro horror and the giallo. 

I won't give it all away but it includes two interviews with noted horror filmmakers, insightful essays on Scooby-Doo Gialli and the Spawn of Romero, reviews aplenty and a checklist of essential gialli. 

I had several ideas fighting it out for what I wanted to cover but in the end I went for a giallo double bill... and more specifically I chose a pair of films one could show someone as Giallo 101, as it were... the sublimely entertaining, twisted slasher/giallo hybrid Pieces and the proto-slaser-esque Sergio Martino classic Torso. It occurs to me now that another good giallo crash course would be Case of the Bloody Iris (which is Martino-esque) and Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (which has a connection to Torso in the form of John Richardson)... might have to do that one day as a companion piece to my contribution to this wonderful 'zine. 

Thanks again to Richard for asking me to contribute, it really is an honour to be between the same pages as so many excellent writers/enthusiastic horror fans. 

Here's a link for anyone interested in ordering themselves a copy or three.

And Jeffrey made an awesome trailer for his Scooby-Doo Gialli essay which you can check out here.

Giallo July - Late Night Double Feature: Hatchet for the Honeymoon (Mario Bava, 1970) & Opera AKA Terror at the Opera (Dario Argento, 1987)

 

As per usual, I've spent far more time watching movies than writing about them recently, hence the highly sporadic output during this sorry excuse for a theme month. All that aside, I figured I'd try and get one more post in before the month comes to a close.... and seeing as I had something of an impromptu giallo double bill last night, I figured I'd share some brief thoughts I gleaned from re-watching the films...

First up, an atypical example of the genre and one that was pretty much pre-convention (it being contemporary to Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which itself cemented most of the tropes that would later become cliches)... Hatchet for the Honeymoon...

Giallo July - Five for Friday: Five American Gialli

As I said in the previous post, the Italians aren't the only ones to have made films one could arguably label as gialli. It's well known what a seminal influence this European sub-genre had on American horror cinema and specifically the slasher but for the most part these later films divert from their elder relations enough to be considered their own separate thing. Unsurprisingly though, there are times when these two worlds have overlapped, bringing things, as we'll see, essentially full circle

Before we begin though a quick controversy alert(!)... depending on your definitions, you may or may not consider some or all of these gialli at all... and if you don't, please feel free to hit me up with your two cents in the comments

For your consideration then, here are five "American gialli"....

The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945)

An appropriate film to start with for a couple of reasons... Firstly, it's very much a Transatlantic affair, having a German born director but being American made. But more importantly, there seems to be a direct line of decent from these old dark house thrillers to Italian gialli. For one thing, we know Argento is a fan as he's openly said so... and even if he hadn't, a murder scene from Tenebre, which is staged in a strikingly similar fashion to one from Siodmak's film, would make it pretty damn obvious.

Giallo July: A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (León Klimovsky, 1974)

As giallo aficionados will well know, Italy wasn't the only country to produce films that can be seen as belonging to the sub-genre.... and without getting into the can of worms that whole area presents (though we may return to it before the month is through), I'll simply say for now that after the Italians, the Spaniards were among the most prolific in terms of producing gialli. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy ended up appearing in a few in his time... and out of the three I've seen, the film we're looking at today is perhaps not the best... but if pressed, I'd say it's probably my current favourite.