Aaron Yap dusts off another trio of seldom-seen titles from his pile of unwatched films in the latest edition of Shelf Life. This time around, allow yourselves to be lured in by the wonderfully titled Haunts, School of the Holy Beast and Closet Land – none of which may be about what you first think…
HAUNTS
As much as I love the hideously awful drawing on this VHS release of Herb Freed’s Haunts (1975), it doesn’t do any favours for the film, which (a) isn’t your usual slasher flick or (b) some Z-grade turkey that cover would have you believe. It is, however, more in line with female-centred psychological meltdowns like Images, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Repulsion et al, albeit done on a much lower budget, and with a more unusual crew that contributes to its appealingly offbeat feel.
Freed, who wrote the film with his wife Anne Marisse, used to be a Rabbi (!); he later went on to make ‘80s B-horrors like Graduation Day and Beyond Evil. May Britt was a Swedish actress whose marriage to Sammy Davis Jr. caused a ruckus in its day, and her presence in this distinctly-Americana setting, acting alongside hammy, gruff genre pros like Aldo Ray and Cameron Mitchell, is definitely weird. To top it off, there’s Italian composer Pino Donaggio, who did Don’t Look Now and many of Brian DePalma’s movies (Carrie, Blow Out), scoring occasionally grander, lusher moments than you’d expect from a threadbare production like this.
Britt plays Ingrid, a mousy middle-aged woman who lives with her Uncle Carl (Mitchell) on a farm. The film doesn’t waste any time hinting there might be something up with her, cutting shots of her innocuously milking a goat with brief flashbacks of a couple rolling around in bed and a young girl getting molested by an unseen man. Meanwhile, a homicidal maniac is on the prowl, raping and killing women in the community. The sheriff (Ray) can’t figure it out, though red herrings point to womanising butcher Frankie (William Gray Espy), or the new dude in town, Bill Spry (Robert Hippard) — both whom are pretty keen on Ingrid.
Despite the unpleasant subject matter, nothing overtly graphic happens in Haunts; Freed’s game here is atmosphere over gore, and the film succeeds in discharging a drowsy late-night spell, so much so that I feel stupid for not seeing the goddamn twist coming. It’s not an especially original twist, but a nifty example of the ol’ bait-and-switch — I’ll give it that. The Psycho-like post-mortem ending that follows directly after explains plenty, but I’m not sure if Freed and Marisse adequately balance between explaining TOO much and holding back just a little to retain some mystery. That final freeze frame is dang creepy though. Worth a look if you like your cheap ‘70s rural psycho-sexual slow-burns.
SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST
Time for another doooozy! Cult Epics released this Japanese nunsploitation pic on DVD nearly 8 years ago and I’ve only found the inclination to break the seal last week. Nunsploitation is a bit of a weird one for me; I don’t naturally gravitate to this subgenre as I would to others, but it would seem that on some subconscious level I have a place for it in my heart, having enjoyed some of its finer entries, such as The Devils (an all-time fave), Alucarda and Killer Nun (I’m a huge fan of Black Narcissus too, if we want to include that on a list of crazy nun movies).
Produced by Toei in ‘74, School of the Holy Beast is generally considered one of the best of its type from Japan — or any other country for that matter — due to the exhilaratingly stylish direction of Norifumi Suzuki, a seasoned pinky violence specialist who’s helmed such luridly titled fare such as Beautiful Girl Hunter and Sex and Fury. Comparable to Italian horror auteurs like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Suzuki’s visual inventiveness elevates potentially bog-standard sleaze into the realm of arthouse-worthy artistry.
The film’s basically just a nunned-out prison movie, complete with uninitiated newbie and evil, sadistic warden-type character, plus tons of gratuitous nudity, bondage and torture scenes to satisfy its exploitation quota. Yumi Takigawa stars as Maya, a girl who enters a sacred convent to investigate the mysterious death of her mother there 18 years ago. Of course, instead of finding a haven of discipline and devotion, it’s a hotbed of repressed sexuality, medieval savagery, wicked conspiracies and naughty, self-flagellating nuns.
Crammed with tasteless debauchery, astonishing political incorrectness and stylized colour schemes that’ll have your eyes screaming “holy shit!”, School of the Holy Beast is an audacious, wildly profane, deliriously entertaining F-you to religious hypocrisy — a great place to start for anyone looking to step into the world of nuns gone very, very bad.
CLOSET LAND
Apologies for covering back-to-back films with torture themes… I didn’t exactly have a torture double feature planned out, but since we’re living in the age of post-9/11/Patriot Act/NSA bugging/Zero Dark Thirty etc, what the hell, this bizarro little curio from ‘91 is timely as ever. The question is though, what did super-producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard — and Universal Pictures — see in this decidedly uncommercial, two-character, one-set chamber piece from debuting writer/director Radha Bharadwaj (apparently the first Indian to have have a film released by a major Hollywood studio)?
The holier-than-thou closing quote from Amnesty International indicates politically driven motivations at work, even if Bharadwaj, interestingly, has denounced its inclusion as too propagandistic. Taken at face value, Closet Land is perhaps too heavy-handed in its ideas to function as effective political treatise, and is best appreciated as a moderately gripping Orwellian nightmare, featuring strikingly surreal sets by noted costumer designer Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Cell) and little-seen but superb performances from Alan Rickman and Madeleine Stowe.
Stowe — a totally underrated actress I don’t think Hollywood ever knew what to do with — is a children’s writer who’s yanked from her bed at gunpoint, blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location where she’s subjected to all manner of brutal interrogation by a government official (Rickman, at his snaky best) accusing her of “subliminal indoctrination”. Mind-games ensue and intensify, with Rickman doing what ever he can to squeeze a confession out of Stowe, including, but not limited to, tarting her up in pigtails, garish make-up and black underwear, and breathing garlic in her face (that was a weird sentence to write).
Other than the odd bit of trippy, folk-arty animation used to illustrate Stowe’s stories, the action rarely strays from the minimalist, power-struggle set-up, and although Bharadwaj’s direction tends towards the static, the potent acting and baroque strangeness of Ishioka’s production design held my attention. If any of those screenshots above grab you, it’s likely you’ll find Closet Land of some interest.
