EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN AT THE HORSE HOSPITAL

I have always been of the opinion that the best place to see a film is in a cinema. Not in a pub or even in your living room. And certainly not in a horse hospital.

Not that it's a horse hospital now of course, it's a 'three-tiered arts venue' just behind Russell Square tube, but still far enough out of my comfort zone that it took a very special film to get me there on a Wednesday night. Or at least, a very special title. 'EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN' said a sheet of A4 paper stuck to one wall of the building, and beside it an arrow pointed to the entrance and the small queue in front of it. I felt slightly wary about joining this queue. What might passers-by think? It didn't say anything on the paper about it being a film.

Frankenstein, it seems to me, is the least erotic of the classic horror myths. Vampires, as we know, are sexy, and so are werewolves if you like a bit of rough. Even the mummy can do a striptease if it comes to it. But Frankenstein? All those disembodied brains? Definitely one for more specialized tastes - and therefore intriguing. My Aurum Horror Film Encyclopedia referred to this film as 'a slapdash quickie', but that sounded quite exciting in its own right.

First, however, I had to get into the venue. The queue was slow going. People went in, and didn't come out again, and then a long unexplained pause would follow. Were they being 'processed' in some way? Maybe they were having holes drilled in their heads. It didn't help that I needed the toilet. And what if the place was too avant-garde to have one?

Eventually I found myself in a low-ceilinged stone-floored basement room that wouldn't have looked out of place in Frankenstein's castle itself (though it did have a toilet). The sound of fallen beer bottles clinking on the stone added atmosphere.

The film is directed by the outstandingly prolific Spanish director Jess (Jesus) Franco, who made films at such a rate that they practically went directly from his brain onto celluloid. Yes he dreamed them, which may explain their incoherence. It turned out that this was the 'clothed' version of the film, the one that met General Franco's standards of decency (not that he probably saw it). There was no stampede for the exits when this was announced, as the guy introducing it feared. The film remains diverting enough.

Dennis Price plays Frankenstein, killed early on by a blind vampire bird woman. This is an imperfect creation of the legendary magician/charlatan Cagliostro (Howard Vernon) who did it by 'impregnating a bird's egg', we are told. Cagliostro steals Frankenstein's monster and sets about creating a mate for it with the unwilling assistance of Frankenstein's daughter, whose name is Vera. The idea is that the resulting 'perfect woman' will mate with Frankenstein's monster in front of a lot of resurrected dead people ('the sect of Panthos') in a kind of, well, erotic rite for want of a better phrase. Cagliostro, he of the hypnotic eyes, selects likely body parts from a number of passing females to create his 'perfect woman'. It might be noted that he seems a lot more concerned with the looks of his female creature, than with those of the shambling Halloween-masked monster, but this kind of disjunction will be familiar to even the most casual viewer of porn.

As for the venerable Dennis Price's Frankenstein, despite being killed in the early stages of this, he is frequently resuscitated (using his own 'fixation ray') by various characters who wish to ask him questions. Judging by his grimaces and bodily contortions this is a very disagreeable process - almost as though Price himself were continually being reawoken to the realisation that he's a long way from Kind Hearts And Coronets. Eventually he manages to rouse himself voluntarily and attempts to strangle one of his questioners; another throws sulphuric acid over him, dissolving him completely except for a hand. Meanwhile the film keeps returning to a woman called Esmerelda, who finally proves to have very little to do with any of it.

Well, I thought to myself, it makes a change from Downton Abbey. The music's great and Franco himself makes a Hitchcockian appearance as 'Morpho', Frankenstein's assistant - that's Jess Franco, not General Franco of course. A nice guy, apparently (Jess) . He's been making films since the early sixties and is still doing it. Despite the nature of these he has recently been awarded a Goya, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar - proof, tonight's speaker Stephen Thrower maintained, that if you carry on doing anything for long enough, you will eventually get a medal.

Hmm, maybe there's hope for this blog yet.

I Air My Views

Work is as ever the home of innuendo. The girls at the end of the corridor were showing each other pictures of their pets on their mobiles. Or, as Lorraine, put it: 'They're looking at their furry friends.'

I said I'd knock before going in.

The new 'interim donor award' has been in the office - a crystal column. This has been run past donors (not too closely I hope, as it has sharp edges) and apparently they gave it the thumbs-up. The only donor I've consulted on the question of donor incentives, Richard Sell, had quite different ideas, but I couldn't see his suggestion (a blow-job) getting through the committees. Though it would have been interesting to see the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) they would have come up with for that.

It might have made our health and safety training more interesting, I suppose. We did it online this week. It wasn't awfully exciting but I was touched by their belief that 'staff should always go home unharmed'. Physically, at least.

Such is their concern for us that we were also invited to air our views on our employers in a session called, erm, Air Your Views. Initially we were told that this would merely be a matter of listening to a presentation and 'voting' using a special keypad. However, when we turned up it seemed that we were actually expected to speak! On a Monday morning! It came as a shock.

My favourite moment came when someone from our department said that sometimes she felt invisible, and the guy leading the session (who was writing something down at the time) turned round and said 'Who said that?' It wasn't a joke, which was why it was funny.

The voting aspect of the thing was meant to be anonymous, but when using the keypad, you still felt a bit bad about being the '8%' (as it came up in the bar chart they instantly created from your views) who had voted for an unpopular option. It happened to me when there was a question about whether you were 'proud' to work for NHS Blood And Transplant. I said that I was 'neither proud nor not proud', but it turned out that everybody else was at least slightly proud. I thought pride was a sin - it seems to me rather a strange idea, being 'proud' to work for someone, as if you would stride out of the house every morning, chest puffed out, sneering at dustmen. I consider it a plus point that I am not actively ashamed to work where I do. I mean, I've liked them on Facebook, what more do they want?

At the end I was asked what the organisation could do to improve itself and I said something about being 'more flexible'. Unfortunately I was then asked to elaborate, so I mumbled something incoherent about 'rigid structures'. Hopefully they understood that what I really meant by 'flexible' was the flexibility to give me more money and more time off. Please.

More FrightFest

A Night Of Nightmares

Grounded in two solid performances by the leads, this isn't necessarily scary, but it's always intriguing. The director (Buddy Giovinazzo) described it as his first genre movie, but if it is a genre movie, it's decidedly 'off-key' (to use a phrase from the film). This is no bad thing as far as I'm concerned, but then you should hear some of the music I listen to.

This guy who runs an indie rock website goes to interview a singer in the remote cabin she's rented, only for her deranged ex to turn up. The stage is set for a standard ordeal-in-rented-cabin psycho-thriller, except the psycho is despatched pretty quickly, and then the ghostly manifestations start. As does the hokum, you might think, except these manifestations are not the usual ones. A vomiting of coins, a cake full of hair – well if spirits really were trying to communicate, they wouldn't just call you up on the telephone, would they?

Although in this film, come to think of it, they do.

Errors Of The Human Body

Not precisely a horror film, this is more a drama about guilt and grief worked out in sf/horror terms. The gory highlight is the severing of a laboratory mouse's tail. Michael Eklund plays a scientist whose baby dies of a new disease – a disease which then becomes his, er, baby. If you see what I mean.

Someone once rejected a story of mine, saying that it 'works well in its own terms'. What they meant, I think, was: you'll never sell it. Similiarly with this film, it was telling that the first question from the audience was about how they were going to market it. With difficulty, came the reply. It isn't quite arthouse, it isn't quite Cronenbergian body-horror. And yet it does work well in its own terms, and Michael Eklund (the thinking man's Paul Rudd?) is great.

I was less convinced by the appearance of Rik Mayall as the clinic director. Whenever he appeared onscreen I was afraid that he was going to disrupt the carefully-maintained atmosphere of low-key unease by bursting into hysterical laughter or smashing a table over someone's head.

He looked like he was afraid that he was going to do that too.

Sleep Tight

Not exactly a horror film either, this Spanish thriller from Rec director Jaume Balaguero was a highlight not only of the festival but of my cinematic year thus far. Luis Tosar plays the concierge of a hotel who spends an inordinate amount of time under the bed of one of the guests (a pretty young female one), only surfacing – chloroform in hand- when she is safely asleep.

No mere pervert, Cesar, our concierge, is a complex and plausibly human monster, an anti-hero the equal of Tom Ripley, which makes the news that there won't be a sequel disappointing for once.

Less disappointing is the news that there won't be a Hollywood remake. Perhaps they think it might be hard to persuade Tom Cruise to play a man who hides under women's beds and rapes them in their sleep. Considering some of the things he is said to do in real life, I'm not so sure...

Berberian Sound Studio

Sleep Tight dealt with a scenario that's normally about voyeurism but turns out in this case to be about someone trying to hide. As well as hiding physically, Cesar is constantly trying to conceal his true nature behind the mask of a helpful concierge – his worst fear is being seen.

Same kind of thing here. In Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones' repressed sound engineer enjoys a quiet life living with his Mum, or he would be if he wasn't in Italy providing sound effects for a horror film. It's 1976. We never see the film, bar the opening credits. Instead, the focus is very much on the crushed melons and broken marrows used to imitate the sounds made by ill-used human bodies. It's a refreshingly oblique approach to the genre, and one that grows more oblique as it goes on. How you react to the ending is dependent upon how far you are prepared to follow Jones's character, who is so at odds with the world of brash and stylish Italians he finds himself in, that he seems to want to disappear into the film itself. Or maybe he was dead all along.

I enjoyed this; but then, I would, wouldn't I? Some critics felt that by opting for an obscure ending director Peter Strickland had missed a chance to go mainstream. Personally, I can't see a film about shattered melons setting the box office on fire, but who knows? Maybe this is even the kind of thing that floats Tom Cruise's boat. Ask Katie Holmes.

In order to give you a taste of the last-reel plot contortions of BBS and their bemusing impact, let me just tell you that although this entry is entitled 'More FrightFest' and although the film played just after Sleep Tight at FrightFest, I didn't see it there – I saw it when it went on general release a week later. Ha. Now how do you feel?

FrightFest 2012: Hidden In The Woods

This Chilean film is based on a true story. And, as Richard Littlejohn says, you couldn't make it up. A drug dealer drowns his wife in the sink and subsequently turns to his two young daughters for 'comfort', siring upon one of them a retarded and deformed son (Manuel), who they keep in a shed. When Daddy, in an unguarded moment, chainsaws two police officers to death, the kids go on the run, hiding out in a remote shack, where thugs sent by the kids' drug baron uncle soon arrive, seeking the location of some drugs Daddy was looking after. Fortunately - though up until now they have been portrayed as innocent, even sentimentalised, victims - they also turn out to be enthusiastic cannibals, and not the kind who bother with a knife and fork either. Having gruesomely dispatched the drug dealers, plus two sleazy male back-packers, the girls and Manuel decide to pay a visit to their Uncle. And kill him.

During the course of  the visit, the Uncle reveals that he is in fact the father of one of the girls, I forget which one, and as they are soon all lying on the floor drenched in gore, it's academic really. There is some doubt as to who, if anyone, survives and - this being a 'true story' after all - I was expecting some kind of 'catch-up' in the closing credits. 'Manuel now runs a coffee shop in Santiago', that kind of thing. This was not forthcoming, but the director was present to fend off questions. A number of audience members seemed to find the film funny. Perhaps I'm losing my sense of humour when rape, cannibalism and child abuse no longer do it for me, but there was some amusement to be gained from the subtitles, clearly written by someone who wasn't especially familiar with the English language. 'Where the drugs are', cry the thugs torturing the girls, over and over again, 'where the drugs are'. Making me wonder if the girls' lack of response was down to their uncertainty as to whether their torturers were asking a question, or beginning a statement.

Might make a good slogan for the Chilean tourist board though...

This is a crude film in every sense of the word. If it occasionally achieves a brutal intensity, this is down to the content rather than the talents of the people involved. The director got funding by claiming that he was making 'a social drama'. That got a laugh.

Perhaps it's one redeeming feature is that in the movie we are siding with what in other films would be 'the monster'. And so vile are all the men in this (except Manuel, who in any case more resembles a dog) that it could almost be called a feminist film. Although before anyone embarks upon a thesis to that effect, they should perhaps take into account the fact that the (boyishly excited) director referred to his lead actress (not present) as 'the one with the big tits'.

Post-feminist, then.