Here’s another entry in Shelf Life, Aaron’s ongoing series of viewing diaries, where he writes about stuff he’s picked off his shelf, is seeing for the first time, and so on. You know the drill by now, basically it’s a way for Aaron to force himself to clear his ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies… In this blog Aaron reports back on three amazing-sounding films you’ve probably never heard of and, like us, will want to track down pronto.
DEATH WISH CLUB
It happens more than I care to admit: I watch a movie so freaking weird that when the time comes to write about it I cannot actually put it into words, or do it justice WITH words. You just gotta SEE this thing. This is the case with John Carr’s Death Wish Club (aka Carnival of Fools) (1983) . I’m not sure where to start with this one, so I’ll just start by saying two things: (1) this movie has nothing to do with the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish (now there’s an idea: a movie about a club for Death Wish fans!) and (2) this is most definitely not some softcore erotic thriller that the generic VHS cover art makes it out to be:
I’ve had this tape sitting on the shelf for a while now, and been aware of its context in the “trash film world”, having seen Night Train to Terror a few years back where portions of the film were sloppily edited together to serve as a segment in that also-extremely-bizarre and super-cheesy 1985 musical/B-horror anthology. But I was finally moved to watch the film in its entirety after seeing the incredible screenshots posted on Cinema De Meep, which say infinitely more about the film that I probably can:
If you’ve seen Night Train, you might be surprised (or maybe dumbfounded/disappointed?) that it doesn’t really give a good impression of what Death Wish Club is really about. Where the Night Train version focused on its most apparent, exploitable selling point – a group of death-obsessed thrill-seekers come together to play Russian Roulette in twisted variations – the film centres on the loopy love story between “Glenny”, a lanky porn-watching med student (Rick Barnes) and Gretta, a somewhat unhinged Chopin-hating actress (Meredith Haze) who also works as a nightclub pianist for sleazy rich old George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers). Glenny’s in love with Greta but not too taken by her perverse ways, i.e. her Death Wish Club membership, so they break up and she reinvents herself in male drag with the name Charlie White.
Death Wish Club is, believe or not, a comedy, but from the pen of clearly-past-his-prime Oscar-winning screenwriter Philip Yordan (Broken Lance, The Big Combo), it’s a comedy of pain: it’s only funny because it’s so unfunny. Meaning you have scenes like a laaame running gag involving an elderly couple listening in whenever Glen and Gretta are having sex, and an indefensible routine where Glenny’s psychiatrist advises him that he only way to get Gretta back is to use his “weapon” as a “surprise attack” on Charlie. Next scene: he jumps under Gretta’s sheets without seeing who’s actually bed and screws her – then ba-dum-tssh – Charlie walks in through the door. Now imagine all this howlingly bad comedy, accompanied with those Death Wish Club sequences (most inventive use of a wrecking ball in a movie ever), and an exasperatingly manic, wild-eyed, overwrought performance from Haze, and you have one head-scratching whatsit of a movie that may have you hanging onto your dear sanity by the end. Stray thought: I would LOVE to see Brian DePalma remake this – with a straight face.
WOLFPACK
One of the things I love about IMDB user comments is stumbling upon actors commenting on their own film. Of course this doesn’t really happen with big name stars in big productions, but for smaller films and lesser known actors you’ll occasionally find someone from the crew reminiscing on their participation in the making of the film. It’s especially helpful for films so unknown that Google can’t even dig up much info, like this high school obscurity from 1988.
The plot – about a quarterback (Tony Carlin) trying to gain popularity for a student body president election by using dirty tactics – seems like another dramatisation of The Third Wave, Ron Jones’ ill-fated 1967 social experiment which most recently was made into the 2008 German film Die Welle (there’s also a hard-to-find 1981 ABC TV movie starring Bruce Davison). But maybe it wasn’t intentional: in his user comment, Nick Di Archangel, who acted in the film, said once he told Wolfpack’s screenwriter Fred Sharkey (his English Lit teacher!) the plot resembled the ‘81 film, it “didn’t go well”. That’s not exactly confirmation that Sharkey knew of The Third Wave and ripped it off etc, but there’s another fascist tenet that’s explicitly mentioned in the film – John Stuart Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” – which would’ve more likely been his source of inspiration. That, and obviously the Third Reich.
Anyway, I don’t think Wolfpack has the guts to tackle these themes in any thought-provoking or indelible fashion – it’s designed as an after-school TV special, and certainly feels that way, minus the unintentionally laughable weirdness some of them have. Carlin gives a charismatic performance as Jack “Boot”, the power-hungry star quarterback, but Jim Abele, the new dude in school who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his “football is football, politics is politics” stance, makes for a dull, slightly goofy lead. Most of the cast are unknowns who haven’t gone to do much else of note, but Abele’s been working bit parts in TV for the past couple of decades, appearing in everything from 24 to Mad Men.
YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY
Sergio Martino was probably the most skilled giallo director working in the ‘70s who wasn’t Dario Argento. He made at least four or five gialli that rank among the best of the genre, films like All the Colours of the Dark and Torso which rivalled Argento in style, atmosphere and perversion. I’d place Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) slightly below his better works, but there are enough psycho-sexual depravities, red herrings and hysterical performances here to satisfy seasoned fans of the genre (newcomers are advised to look elsewhere).
A nasty, twisted adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat written by giallo specialist Ernesto Gastaldi, the film stars Luigi Pistilli (For a Few Dollars More) as Oliviero, a sex-crazed slimeball of a failed writer who spends his days in his crumbling mansion abusing and humiliating his wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) and hosting debauched parties with hippies. When one of his young mistresses is bumped off, and Irina’s fetching niece Floriana (bob-haired giallo queen Edwige Fenech) arrives to stay, their batshit relationship goes further off the rails.
Boasting quite possibly the best title ever in the history of cinema, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (aka Gently Before She Dies) is filled with such loathsome, spiteful characters it’s almost off-putting, and often hampered by a low budget (one eye-gouging scene is laughably amateurish). But the narrative kinks to Poe’s oft-filmed tale – and in turn, the overturning of giallo conventions – make this one uniquely off-kilter entry that isn’t starved of lurid content. This includes but isn’t limited to: gratuitous nudity, sickle throat slashings, lesbianism, incest, a bag of sheep eyes, sex in a dove coop, and a cat named Satan.
