Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Director: Shusuke Kaneko
Writer: Kazunori Itô
Released: 1995
Cast: Tsuyoshi Ihara, Akira Onodera, Shinobu Nakayama, Ayako Fujitani, Yukijirô Hotaru

Shrooms

Director: Paddy Breathnach
Writer: Pearse Elliott
Released: 2006
Cast: Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, Max Kasch, Maya Hazen, Alice Greczyn, Robert Hoffman

NIKKI says:
You know for a brief moment I forgot horro movies could be so shockingly awful. This one got points from me for doing something a tiny bit different with the whole horror visions and magic mushrooms premise. But the people behind this one don't know what scary means. And so they fucked it all up. The guys here come from that black pus looking like blood school of horror -- the more black pus we can squeeze into out movie, the more terrifying it will be!

Sorry guys -- we also need atmosphere and tension and, here's a thought -- A STORY. A story, of course, that's not semi-cribbed from every horror film in the land that features religious cults and orphanages.

Nope, I could barely stay awake this was so effing boring. Lame! (Although the poster is mildly rad.)

1/5

The Killers

Directors: Marika Beiku, Aleksandr Gordon, Adrei Tarkovsky
Writers: Aleksandr Gordon, Adrei Tarkovsky
Released: 1958
Cast: Yuli Fait, Aleksandr Gordon, Valentin Vinogradov, Vadim Novikov, Vasili Shukshin

STEVE says: I had my writing class read Hemingway's short story this week, so this one's been on my mind. Whereas both feature versions of The Killers (1946 and 1964) use the story as an opening, telling the full story in flashback, this Russian student film is the story. And it's not great.

That's nothing against Hemingway's story, and it's not to take anything away from Tarkovsky as a filmmaker - but this just didn't work. Pacing was the big problem for me. When Nick Adams goes to the Swede's room to warn him somebody's out to kill him, one expects him to be gasping, out of breath, maybe urgently delivering the news... Not so much, here. Adams walks in, tells the Swede some guys are out to kill him, and it's all done in a very funereal sort of style, as though they're already lamenting the Swede's passing. It just didn't fly.

It's good to have - Criterion can really put a disc together, yeah? - but not so much to revisit. For that, I've got the Robert Siodmak version.

2/5

Birthday Boy

Director: Sejong Park
Writer: Sejong Park
Release: 2004
Cast: Joshua Ahn

Yella

Director: Christian Petzold
Writers: Simone Bär, Christian Petzold
Released: 2007
Cast: Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Hinnerk Schönemann

STEVE says: Okay. First: Not a bad movie. Beautifully shot, well-acted. Somehow managed to make corporate accounting, if not interesting, at least a source of intrigue. But by the 12-minute mark, I could see where it was all going. Am I the only person who's seen Carnival of Souls?

As the movie went on, it became less a question of What's Happening? and more How Will These Events Lead to the Inevitable Conclusion?

As a movie on its own, it probably deserves a higher rating, but it was hard to buy into the suspense when I couldn't get Carnival of Souls out of my head, so it's losing some points there.

2.5/5

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (aka. L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo), dir. Dario Argento (1970)

NIKKI says:
Well, this officially becomes my second favourite Argento flick after the brilliantly awesome Profondo Rosso. The reason I loved this one so much? Because I understood everything that was going on. That's unusual with Argento. Often there's so much subtext going on, and concentration on frightening visuals that the plot gets left a bit behind. (I think Argento himself has said that plot and acting talent are the least focused on ingredients in his pictures.) Here, though, the film is plot-heavy with great actors and decidedly light on thrills and effects. It's clearly early Argento (his debut as a director, I believe), and its just great.

Tony Musante (the great and tragic Schibetta from Oz) plays a guy who witnesses a fairly harrowing murder inside an art gallery. He spends the rest of the film searching for the murdered in the black suit, hat, and gloves. The killer taunts him, kills others around him, and he must hunt deep in his memory to piece together just what he really saw at the museum.

The whole thing about memory and the mind playing tricks is fascinating. So, not only have you got Argento telling a story, he's doing it with a message. Just what do we see when we view events from afar? How can we ever be sure that what we're seeing is the truth? What is truth when it comes to reliance on memory and sharp-moving visuals? This is a really great exploration of those themes, and it's tense and scary when it needs to be, bloodthirsty at just the right moments, and packed with interesting characters.

It's truly one of his best movies. The development of the artist is so obvious in this one, down to the black gloves, the close-ups on the eyes, and the spurting blood. Old Dario is always the best, and this just proves that.

4/5

STEVE says:
On the back of the DVD packet, Argento is said to have "single-handedly created the Giallo genre". Just think about being the one who created a genre. That's pretty fucking cool. Romero and Zombies, Stoker and Vampires, Bava and Giallo. Sweet.

This claim, however, is almost immediately disputed on the commentary track by Alan Jones and Kim Newman. It's Mario Bava, they say, who created the genre, but Argento - and specifically this film - was the first to make use of it after all the rules were laid out.

Either way, I don't like to think of Giallo as a genre. I think of it as a style, like Film Noir, something that happened organically and only classified in retrospect.

Even if he didn't create it, Argento clearly knew how to use the style, and this movie has it in spades - unlike some of his later work in and out of the Giallo mold. At some stage Argento became less interested in story and more in shocking visuals, and I think Giallo - whether a genre or a style - was the poorer for it.

3.5/5

Garden of Love, dir. Olaf Ittenbach (2003)

NIKKI says:
Just look at that poster... as if I'm not going to rent it. I was hoping for an undiscovered horror classic and got a movie worthy of the MST3K treatment. This was shockingly awful. But not in you typical shockingly awful way. The writing was so misguided that it almost became endearing. Just try to watch the scene where Rebecca is told of her father's crimes in detail and tell me you don't just want to give the movie a big hug for trying.

But the plot is not the point here. It's background, really, with the effects taking centre stage. This one is all about the kills, and they're actually very effective. The director is apparently a modern-day German Tom Savini, responsible for the gore work on Bloodrayne, Seed, and Uwe Boll's new Tunnel Rats.

The basic, basic plot is this: a girl starts seeing her dead father in TV screens and learns she is the sole survivor of a massacre 12 years before in which her father slaughtered about eight of his friends. Rebecca lived, but lost all memory of the event... until now! Now she hears her father beckoning to "join him" at their old farm, because things are not as they seem. Cue lightning strike.

Rebecca gets a few people killed on her way to learning the truth about the Garden of Love Massacre. You'll guess the ending a mile off, and marvel at the script that lets a guy get an electric drill several time to the face and live to converse.

The acting is poor, the direction is terrible, the editing is almost non-existent (five-minute soliloquys without cuts or coverage -- it's like a play!), and the plot holes are so big, my entire head could fit through them. (They kill a guy for his daughter's inheritance, get it all, then have to kill her to get her inheritance?!?!?)

But we laughed and laughed. I said to Steve -- I'll remember this one fondly for as much as we laughed during it. So bad, so silly, so brutal.

1.5/5

STEVE says:
Short of outright recommending Garden of Love, I will say that it wasn't a complete waste of time. I mean, it was complete and utter shite, but it did have two things going for it: 1) the effects, which were kick-ass, in-camera splatter and gore effects and not CGI, thank the maker, and 2) the unintentional hilarity-bordering-on-absurdity of the script.

I have to give a heads-up to the film's costume designers, Cordula Jung and Barbara Schwarz. I knew this movie was going to be a laff-riot when the professor/love interest came sauntering in wearing a cravat without a hint of irony. Thank you, ladies.

1/5

Killing Words (aka. Palabras encadenadas), dir. Laura Mañá (2002)

NIKKI says:
Steve might be right -- maybe it is time for a foreign films extravaganza at our place? We're just enjoying them so much lately. I'd forgotten all about this one. We got it from BigPond Movies ages ago. It was so long ago now, that I thought it was a documentary about speech or bullying or something.

How wrong I was. This is a movie about a guy who kidnaps a woman and ties her to a chair. He plays her a videotape of him confessing to several murders of women and children (and taxi drivers, we learn later). Then he challenges her to word game called Word Chains, in which one person says a word and the other person must say a word that starts with the last syllable of the previous word. If she loses, he tells her, he will pluck out her eye.

Then the movie cuts forward in time, to the guy in an interrogation room, and every development you've just seen shifts a little bit out of place, and the film becomes something much more interesting than your basic killer-and-his-prey scenario.

The twists and turns are all really well done. Like 13 Tzameti, this is not a movie that wants to explain everything. It often lets you come to its conclusions rather than handing them to you. You have to do a little work, I guess. And it's exciting, brain-tingling work -- you're all, so he, but she, who's that, what's this... I love movies that turn your brain upside down, that challenge you, that tell stories in non-standard ways.

This is a great film. The direction was good, the acting was absolutely chilling, and the story was intriguing and new. We had a slight issue with the ending, it probably went on five minutes longer than it needed to, but that's not so bad.

3.5/5

STEVE says:
As with 13 Tzameti, the less said about this one, the better. I'll leave it at that, and let my rating speak for itself.

3.5/5

13 Tzameti, dir. Géla Babluani (2005)

NIKKI says:
And the preview tapes come through once again... Here's a movie we'd never otherwise get to see. A French film from 2005 that appears to be getting a little DVD exposure in Australia. It's such a small release (and foreign and black and white -- all the killers) that my video shop won't get it. And neither will most others around me. So, without the preview tape, a movie like this would just pass us by. Ugh, think of the ones that must have done so in the past? How horrifying.

Anyway, 13 Tzameti... it's impossible to reveal anything that goes on here without utterly ruining it. We knew very little -- just that a man assumes the identity of another man in order to possibly gain a lot of money. How, what, where, and why is the crux of this. The 'how' part of that scenario, when we learn as the guy does, just what's going on is probably one the tensest moments I've spent ever when watching a movie. Lots of "oh my god"s and "no fucking ways"s. It's not that the 'how' is all that out-there in a conceptual sense -- this isn't Hostel -- but our young, naive hero in this place with these people who appear otherwise sane -- what is this all about?!?!

And the great thing about this film is that it chooses not to reveal everything. We leave still wondering what and why and who, but we don't question that so much because the experience we've just had has been and fascinating and shocking, cruel and brilliant. One tiny thing lets it down at the end -- but I'm looking into the reasons behind it. If I can find an explanation that satisfies me, I may have to lift my rating a full point.

Great, great movie. Apparently Brad Pitt holds remake rights.

3.5/5

STEVE says:
Oh my everloving Christ!

4/5

[REC], dir. Jaume Balagueró / Paco Plaza (2007)

NIKKI says: I thought he meant Wreck, as in a boat capsizes and there are zombies or something. Oops.

What is going on with all this good horror? I'm not used to enjoying so many of them in a row. We're going to have a hell of a time picking our Top 5 for this month. So much has been great.

This one just heads straight to the top of the list. I never would have guessed we'd see another film this year that would match the frights or the smarts of Welcome to the Jungle, Cloverfield, and Dead in 3 Days.

And, yet, not a day later, we watch this one, which manages in 70 crazy minutes to top all three.

Yep, [Rec] is brilliant. It is so cleverly written that each mark the movie hits, you just want to stand up and applaud. The first bite comes without warning, and it's absolutely frightening. Then the second person goes down, and the method in which that happens is even worse than the first bite. And so it goes... it just gets scarier and more effective as it goes on.

Assisting here, too, is some excellent character development. We meet some of these people so briefly, bit we're somehow devastated to see them go.

Steve and I both noted, too, the screaming of a lot of the dialogue. You know how in movies when victims are being pursued by rampaging killers, they're scared, screaming, maybe sweating a bit and breathing heavy? Well, here they do things a bit more realistically. The panic in the voices of these actors is perfect. I've never heard dialogue delivered this way in horror before. I sometimes felt they were really freaking the hell out of the girl playing the lead the way she spews out her words at times with such terror. Whoever requested that of her, and the others, is a bit of a genius, I reckon.

So much about this was fresh and different. And that's saying something in a genre so overcrowded. From the dialogue and its delivery, through to the actual horror itself -- some great effects here, and absolutely no punches pulled in the grossness of neck bites and hatchet kills. And then there's final ten minutes of the thing which pretty much sent us over the edge of what we thought we could handle, movie-wise.

Good luck, horror makers, topping this one.

4.5/5

STEVE says: [REC] left me speechless. Even now I'm having a difficult time articulating what it was, exactly, that made the movie work for me, because so little of it actually felt like a movie.

I can tell you what didn't work for me: There's a bit early on where Angela asks Pablo to run some footage back for her, and we actually see the footage rewind and watch it again. And the voice-over bit at the end where one of Angela's lines from earlier is repeated once she meets her fate. If we're meant to be experiencing their footage as it was shot, these little flashes of clever film making don't help. They take me out of the movie - or, rather, bring me back into it - which was my major problem with Diary of the Dead (the narration and the score) in that you're dragged right out of the drama and reminded that, no matter how good the movie is, it's still just a movie.

But [REC] is second only to The Blair Witch Project as far as presenting a believable reality. The only reason I'm not rating it any higher, apart from the aforementioned, is the pseudo-explanation for the Zombie outbreak. While certainly original, it raised more questions than it answered, serving only to stretch the movie for an extra five minutes. And damn it for that, because I would have loved to give this a perfect score.

[REC] was scary as all fuck.

4/5

In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot (aka. Dead in 3 Days), dir Andreas Prochaska (2006)

STEVE says:
One question, before I get into this: When the hell did Austria start making teen-slasher flicks? I like to think I've got my finger on the pulse of the teen-slasher flick market, but the Austrian contingent has apparently left me alone in the dark.

Makes me wonder what I've been missing all these years 'cos this one rates right up there with the best of the sub-genre.

If I'm being honest, though, it really wasn't all that original - kind of a re-telling of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with a grisly twist - yet it felt like what that film wanted to be. Like this was the original and Last Summer was the pale American imitation. It was very tense, well-acted and beautifully shot... which already separates it from Last Summer by leaps and bounds. And our teen heroes weren't complete knobs, either, which scores the movie extra points in my book. For once I didn't want to see everyone killed in nasty ways.

The sad bit is, no one is going to rent this one because of the sub-titles. Yet shite the likes of Saw IV and Hostel 2 is leaping off the fucking shelves. Too bad.

Apparently there's a sequel on the way. Normally, that would bother me. But here, Prochaska is returning - not only as director, but also as writer this time around - as well as Sabrina Reiter as Nina, Julia Rosa Stöckl as Mona and Andreas Kiendl as Officer Kogler. I don't know how they're going to make it work - as in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel seems as implausible as it is inadvisable - but I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.

4/5

NIKKI says:
We were supposed to watch a Spanish movie called Rec but the version we had didn't have any subtitles. Man, were we pissed. So, at was nearly midnight, my holidays are over (sigh) and we needed something stat -- somehow a Masters of Horror episode just doesn't feel, to me, like our daily movie quota filled.

I scrabbled through the preview tapes looking for something 80 minutes long that screamed HORROR and came up with Dead in 3 Days. We fretted, but went with it. Lately, the second-thought movies have been some of the best.

This was really good. We enjoyed it right from the start. The scenes with the kids finishing school were genuinely funny, and the classic slasher set-ups were in place -- happy kids who have no idea what's coming to them, a sneaky nerdy kid who seems to dislike them, and a scene involving roadkill that shifts our mood from jovial to wary. Stuff can turn on a dime. Ah, horror movies. How can you not love the art?

And then the kids start getting weird calls, and start disappearing, and it's all so tense and interesting. The film hits every mark. It throws us red herrings then proves they can't be responsible. It reveals possible reasons behind the slaughter at mid-point and by the middle of the movie, everything that needs to be set up is set up and so we're not scratching our heads, but nodding along because it makes perfect (inevitable) sense. And it reveals it's basic truth right at the very end, which is the classic tying of loose moral ends.

This is a smart, stylish horror movie that knows what it's doing. That's all we ask for in horror, right?

4/5

Il Mistero di Lovecraft: Road to L., dir. Federico Greco / Roberto Leggio (2005)

NIKKI says:
I said to Steve last night -- April has become "Handheld Month". We've had Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, Welcome to the Jungle, and now this. Although not entirely handheld, the scary bits were mainly seen through a camera lens. I've decided movie directors are right: Things are scarier when presented in that style.

In this movie, the group is down in some abandoned tunnels. They stumble across some gutted fish. The one guy is all, hmm, let's go back. And then he looks forward and sees... briefly, quickly... SOMEONE! They scream and head back. Because this is Lovecraft territory, and we know it's not a person but a giant FISHMAN!

Not that we see the giant fishman. But still... we know.

The situation is this... A group of American filmmakers come to Italy because of a manuscript that has been found that features journal entries by H.P. Lovecraft that suggest he visited certain parts of Italy prior to writing his most famous works, Call of Cthulhu and Shadow over Innsmouth. The entries specifically mention the creepy things Lovecraft supposedly saw in those abandoned places.

The filmmakers want to solidify this apparent connection by finding something specific that proved Lovecraft was inspired by Italy, and not just his imagination.

So, they take their cameras and they start their seeking. Meanwhile, the main director guy just becomes more and more of an arrogant prick, and alienates everybody, so they get very little done. It's not the area that's doing this guy in, he was an asshole from the start, so we get this weird juxtaposition of an angry group in an angry area that just wants to be left alone. It's an interesting tension. And separates this film from Cloverfield with its camaraderie in a bad situation, and Welcome to the Jungle, in which the stresses of the situation turn those guys against each other.

Here, it's tense from the outset. Very cool twist on this sort of group-tries-to-solve-mystery sub-genre. This group eventually finds what they're looking for, and the final moments of the film are really creepy. I was afraid of fishmen in the house for a little while after it ended. The best scene, though, was the group asking some old fishermen for directions... man, that was harsh. Oh, and the scene where they hear music playing FROM NOWHERE!

Good movie, interesting story, love the concept, and there was some phenomenal acting by the one guy -- Fausto -- who just couldn't take the director's smarminess for one more second.

3/5

La Terza Madre (aka. Mother of Tears), dir. Dario Argento (2007)

NIKKI says:
Did somebody say this movie was Dario "back to form"? I'm sure I heard that prior to watching it. It's very true, at any rate. For the first time since discovering Tenebrae or whichever Argento I watched first way back when, I felt genuinely creeped out, by the story, the effects, the horror, and I genuinely cared for the woman in peril.

My god, how gruesome. New wave horror has nothing on Dario. The blood spatter here proves that old school horror/violence is still the most effective, even if you can tell the spike through the eyes is so totally fake. It just looks good. And I don't think much of it was CG, which is even better. The woman at the start stumbling around in her own intestines -- gross! But awesome.

The story wasn't bad, either. This is apparently the final film in the Three Mothers trilogy that includes Suspiria and Inferno. Here, Asia Argento plays the daughter of a woman killed by the Mother of Sighs from Suspiria. In this movie, she and a friend at a museum open an ancient urn, inadvertently bringing into this realm, the Mother of Tears. Asia must steel herself against the witch and her powers, which see the entire city turning on itself in horror and fury.

Asia goes to an old house to face off against the witch, ad stumbles across an awful party scene where the women are all chanting and singing for the one main witch in the little red dress. It's all so creepy and weird. Asia ends up swimming through a body-infested sewer, and -- ugghh -- it's just awesomely revolting.

But it never feels exploitative. I did find myself cursing Dario when not one, but TWO, babies found themselves at the receiving end of his horror vision, but that's Dario, I guess. Taking me places I don't want to go so sharply and so quickly that I barely have time to register it. These days, with the drawing out of the gore, they've just got it so wrong. It's so much harder to process Dario's type of violence that aims not to gross out, but to shock. It's fast, and it's mean. Just dare to watch the woman get her mouth ground open (AHHHH!), or the spike up the dress, or the spike through the gullet, or the poked out retinas. Snap, snap, snap.

This was a fitting conclusion to the director's weird vision.

3.5/5

Angel-A, dir. Luc Besson (2005)

NIKKI says:
I haven't seen Wings of Desire, which this apparently borrows from in terms of theme and style. Had I seen that film, my perceptions of this one might have been different. In any case, I enjoyed Besson's little fable, and while I realise Angela's eventual means of making Andre believe in himself are a little simplistic, I still found it moving.

The style, too, adds much. What a beautiful picture to watch. The Parisian streets, the landmarks, the quadrangles overlooked by the Eiffel Tower, the bridges. I think Angela comments several times in the film just how beautiful Paris is, and at the end, when she's rising above this gorgeous backdrop, in full flight, it's even more exquisite, with this heavenly feel.

I remember reading that Angela's "job" was supposed to be some great secret. As if knowing she was an angel would ruin the thing like finding out Bruce Willis was actually dead the whole time. I don't think that's true. You'd have to be quite the simpleton not to see what was going on. She shows up out of nowhere, she's absolutely stunning, her name is ANGELa, and, at one point, she stands up against a statue, the statue's cement wings protruding up as though out of her back. It's a brilliant shot, and purposely reminding you this woman is otherworldly.

So, visually it's brilliant. The story is funny and touching, and a tiny bit inspirational. I thought the end was a bit too easy. I think Andre should have taken Angela's advice and gone off to live his life. But the movie chooses a different fate for him. If only what happens to him could happen to us all. Suicide might be eradicated, that's for sure.

3/5

A Bay of Blood, dir. Mario Bava (1971)

STEVE says:
Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (or Twitch of the Death Nerve, or Carnage, or any one of the eighteen titles it goes by – including the strangely misleading Last House on the Left, Part II) was not our first pick to begin this project. It was Gremlins. And I was really looking forward to watching Gremlins again, I’ll tell you, because I wanted to see if it was as annoyingly saccharin as I remember it. “Bright lights, bright lights,” and all that. Damn your eyes, Chris Columbus!

But the disc we rented was all scratched up and wouldn’t play past 39 minutes, so we had to come up with an alternative.

Scanning our shelves here at home, still in the mood for something that leaned in the general direction of horror (Gremlins fits that description, even though it’s more of a black comedy – either way, what it’s doing in the kids’ section at VideoEzy, I’ll never know), Nikki pointed out A Bay of Blood.

Mmmm. Bava. Good. We went with it.

I remember watching this something like fifteen years ago with my friend Doug. It was pretty much the first slasher film, he’d said, and that Friday the 13^th, Halloween and their endless spate of sequels and rip-offs (see The Burning) all owe their existence to this movie. And I could see it – remote location, killer’s POV shots, post-coital teenage slaughter (there’s even a scene that’s replicated almost frame for frame in Friday the 13^th Part 2) – but at the same time, I felt that those movies had totally missed the point. A Bay of Blood has a plot that can, at best, be called intricate, but when compared to that of the Friday the 13^th or Halloween films (“demented madmen running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins”) it becomes downright Chandleresque.

Because I can’t do it justice, here’s the blurb from the back of the DVD packet: “Countess Federica, the elderly owner of a coveted piece of bay side [property], is brutally slain by her husband Flippo (sic) Donati - who is himself then killed by a mysterious third person at the murder scene! Who is the killer? Could it be real estate [developer] Frank Ventura? Or Paolo Fosatti, an entomologist neighbour who wants to preserve the natural insect life thriving around the bay? The Countess's illegitimate son, in a bid to claim [a name] for himself? Or could it be Albert, the weak-willed husband of Donati’s ambitious daughter, Renata? Brace yourself, because no one's a suspect for very long in Mario Bava's black comedy of human greed - which boasts 13 characters and 13 of the most shocking murders ever filmed!”

Like a synopsis for a Young and the Restless story arc, innit?

And the beauty of it is, there’s not just one killer. As soon as we meet someone, get to know them a little bit, they’re killed off. Then we get to know the killer, get familiar with their story; they’re killed off, and so it goes. It could have been played as straight comedy, but I don’t think it would have been quite as funny.

There were some lame elements. Bits of the soundtrack do not hold up, if they ever worked to begin with, and Bava had apparently just pioneered Zoom-O-Vision because he uses the hell out of it. But this, I argue, does not detract from the story, which, if I may say so, is way-cool.

A Bay of Blood is the Short Cuts of horror cinema, a Giallo Magnolia, if you will. Sure, there’s an overall story, but it’s just an excuse to get these people in the same general location. The movie is practically a series of vignettes strung together by the fact that some of the characters have dealings with some of the other characters. And then kill them.

I’m giving it 3 out of 5.

NIKKI says:
I, too, was really up for Gremlins. Much as I've been saving the new DVDs that come my way (The Kingdom, Lucky You) for this project, I loved the thought of beginning the new year with a flashback, with a classic. Gremlins with its holiday perversity seemed a key choice. Alas, it wasn't to be. Though we should take note -- we own Critters, we own Ghoulies, why do we not own a non-scratched, well-looked-after copy of Gremlins? Shame on us.

So, we went with A Bay of Blood. I'm not sure it set the tone for the project, as Steve desired. But it turned out rather an interesting choice, mainly because it was so out there. I liked the fact it wasn't a safe choice. Perhaps that's our tone, our point? To always be challenging ourselves? This one did that. Not that we don't love our slashers, but a new year, new project, Summer-evening film, this wasn't.

Also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, A Bay of Blood is a plot-twisty thriller, which uses its 13 ultra-gruesome murders as a selling point. They win, too, because the murders are graphic, icky, and realistic. I had to swallow a revisit of my dinner right in the very first few minutes when the Countess gets it. Bava does this thing where he presents a problem-free environment with lazy, lingering shots and then just ruins it all with immediate grossness. The Countess, for instance, wheels around her home for about five full minutes before she falls victim to a Wile E. Coyote-type rope set up and winds up hanging in the air and choking to death. Same thing happens with the naked, bathing Brunhilda, the couple making love in bed (their names, who knows?), Bobby brooding by the fire place (was it Bobby?) ... serenity, peace and then DEATH. But you know it's coming, you just never really know when, and that's Bava's genius. I thought Brunhilda was going to get it Jaws-style in the water, but instead she winds up neck-sliced on land, running away from her attacker, who wasn't even anywhere much near the water. The suspense works.

I spent much of the following scenes thinking about the Italian directors and their love affairs with carnage. Why do I dislike the modern horror "director" who revels in torture, and cheer when Bava or Fulci or Dario plugs an unsuspecting, personality-less character with similar brutality? Why do they get away with little character development and structure, people introduced seemingly to top up the body count (the massacred teens served little purpose here, as far as the plot goes). I loathe it in modern films, love it here. I have to work that one out. It could be because Bava is Bava and can do what he likes. It could be the time period. These guys were experimenting, defining a genre, rebelling and reflecting as all good filmmakers do, while guys today are ... I don't know what. Making a quick buck? Riding the wave? No one who has seen a Bava picture like this one can argue today's violent, gross-out horror is pushing boundaries, as is so often suggested. The boundaries had well and truly been pushed by the Italians 30 years ago. And no one, but no one, does random torture like the Italians.

But then, I guess, the murders aren't the real key to this one's enjoyability. The famed "13 characters, 13 murders" thing kept me glued. Who's going when? Who is left alive? Well, no one if all 13 people die. Wait, let's recount, there's that guy, that girl, the real estate man, the entomologist ... those children? Where do they fit in? It was so much fun putting the pieces together, watching just how the whole thing works. And there was motive for each and every slaying, even the teens, which made things a bit less random. The end, though, while clever, was a bit anti-climactic for me. Steve mentioned it's lack of earlier set up, and I agree. It came about quite suddenly, in an Amazing Stories kind of a way (you thought it was this, but it was THIS!), and we chuckled and we loved Bava for his cheekiness, but it let the movie down a tad. Every murder had motive, let's just say, bar the final two. Still, heaps of fun, and some really horrendous yuckness, like the dead guy covered in squids! Oh man, why?!

I'm giving this one 2.5 out of 5. Here's to a great movie-watching year!