Schmollywood Babylon

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

I once gave a copy of William Friedkin’s Cruising to the local branch of RFSL (Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) in Östersund, because I felt they only had boring, correct rom coms and Academy Award winning dramas with suicide-endings to offer their guests. Their collection of movies needed a boost, a real boost. And Cruising is one of the most hard-hitting, brutal and brutally honest gay-themed films ever made, focusing on the subculture of really, really, really tough leather bars in New York. William Friedkin’s project - originally something Brian De Palma wanted to make - wasn’t without its controversies at the time of its making and release, but looking back it’s easy to see why and also why it has been reevaluated. A the the time the LGBT community still was fighting to be accepted, and such a dark story could hurt the fight.

Brian De Palma’s brilliant but deeply inaccurate trans-thriller Dressed to Kill and the ultra-bad and homophobic Windows also came the same year, which didn’t help. This is not Friedkin’s first foray into gay-themed films, The Boys in the Band is a modern classic (I might review it sooner or later) and he sure is a friend of the community. But like always, just look at his filmography, he’s not into classic feel-good films with an optimistic view on the society. So it’s fair he makes gay-themed films with his this also. I appreciate the honesty and in the end Cruising is not only an odd thriller, it’s a landmark in showing this subculture during the era before AIDS.

“There's a lot you don't know about me”, Al Pacino’s young policeman Steve Burns tells his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen in a thankless role), which just adds to the closet-feeling of his character. He’s very eager to take part of being an undercover to catch the serial killer (based on the never caught serial killer The Doodler), almost too eager to get into his leather chaps and get into the bars. He slowly gets drawn into both his own world of latent homosexuality and the world of S&M and fetish, cruising in parks - sometimes he almost seems to do it because he want to, not necessary to only catch the killer.

Cruising is a thriller of course, some kind of mystery - but never goes into whodunnit territory. It feels more like a time capsule, a drama which just happens to be set inside a serial killer investigation. Al Pacino is very convincing in his part and surrounding him are a bunch of the finest character actors of the time: Paul Sorvino, Don Scardino, Joe Spinell, Powers Boothe, Ed O’Neill, James Remar and Mike Starr. Gene Davis, later more famous for the infamous Charles Bronson movie 10 to Midnight, also makes a fine performance. Cruising is a man’s world, which is pretty evident by the cast.

There’s been a lot of controversies about the ending, can being gay make you a killer for example. Which is of course complete bollox. The Doodler was never captured, never. They thought they had him, but no one wanted to come forward as a witness against him because of the stigma of being outed as gay in the 70’s. Cruising make no stance whatsoever against the world it’s set in, but tells us that a killer could be anyone, anywhere. Friedkin’s idea of switching actors playing killer and victims between scenes is brilliant idea, it makes everything very ambiguous. The ending is both frustrating and complete genius, which I like. It’s not always I want to be told what’s happening, sometimes my imagination needs a kick in the ass like this. For me there’s no question what’s going on. The killer captured is just one dude, but the real killer is at large. Steve Burns realizes in front of the mirror that he’s living a life he doesn’t want to live and at the same time a domestic quarrel results in the death of his newfound friend. That’s it. Nothing more complicated, nothing controversial.

Classic movie magic, if you ask me.

Emanuelle in America (Joe D'Amato, 1977)

This is one of those few much talked about Italian exploitation films I haven’t seen until now (I still haven’t seen Patrick Still Lives, to name another one) when found it cheap at Monkey Beach (THE best film store in Stockholm, visit it!). I will be honest with you and say I never been that interested in nudity, especially female nudity. I mean, a movie which revolves around this subject - the MacGuffin of naked women - ain’t that interesting for me. And really, I’m not even sure I would find any more interest in male nudity on this level either. When Jess Franco does his magic it’s often so much more than the sleaze, there’s something else, a darkness, an artiness that attracts me. Joe D’Amato on the other hand seldom goes beneath the surface of his characters - but it happens, and Emanuelle in America is one of those films where he actually seems to have something to say. Kinda.

Emanuelle is of course, as usual, a famous photographer with a semi-ugly boyfriend with way too tight jeans and lots female, nude, friends around her. She’s also, I guess, a nymphomaniac and goes out on adventures all over the world to partly take cool photos she can sell to magazines, but also fuck around a lot - sometimes with ugly men, sometimes with semi-ugly women (I know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder blah blah blah). In Emanuelle in America she infiltrates a Harem, she visits an orgy (and participates, what else?!), visits an African tribe (or is it?!) and of course uncovers an organisation that delivers snuff films to the very, very, very, very, very rich people of the world! Just a day in the life of Emanuelle!

Alright, there’s a lot of female pubic hair and men with perfect helmet haircuts with eyes that glisten of cocaine, George Eastman shows up in a cameo and has I (I guess!) a stunt cock for his Tarzan-esque sex scene, some not-so-tasteful zoofilia and lots of gorgeous cinematography by Aristide Massaccesi - D’Amato himself of course, under his real name. The mix of comedy, drama, sex and in the end, thriller, makes this one helluva exploitation film - maybe one of the purest in this very special, sleazy, bizarre genre. What makes it a lot better than a lot of other similar films is how it suddenly turns around at the end, delivering some very dark, nasty fake snuff scenes. Emanuelle wants to see some real hardcore and her lovers puts on a snuff movie - and then takes her to the set of that place.

Here D’Amato goes for the throat. This is NOT fun, this is violent and nasty and very graphic. A brilliant touch is how he keeps the battered look of the snuff scenes even when Emanuelle is watching it life, to make it both very real - and maybe even just an LSD-hallucination by our heroine. Even if it’s hardly tasteful or well, close to not being arty, I find this to be a great twist during the end - before the even sillier ending, maybe a nod from D’Amato and friends that we shouldn’t take their filmmaking so serious. It’s all fun and games at the end, an illusion.

And it’s during those last twenty minutes Emanuelle in America becomes superior to a lot of other exploitation movies. It dares to provokes us in so many different ways. Mindfucking deluxe. I like that. A lot. .

Nightmare (Romano Scavolini, 1981)

Nightmare (In a Damaged Brain) is a movie I get back to from time to time. Today it’s almost two years since I saw it the last time, just when I got the DVD from Code Red - and it’s of course the same way I’ve seen it now. When I first saw Nightmare it was on a Swedish x-rental, surprisingly uncut and in decent quality. It was me and a couple of friends, none of them particularly interested in the horror genre - but everyone was blown away by the gritty style and the in-your-face graphic violence. It took some years for me to actually realize its a great movie - for real, not just because of the splatter, but the simple storyline and exploitative roots might confuse us to think it’s less good than it actually is.

Blair Stafford is brilliant in the lead, George Tatum, a mentally ill man who just escaped from the hospital and now is conducting a killing spree on his way to his ex-wife and his kids. As the murders gets more and more violent, his obsessiveness with his family and the trauma that might have lead him to go bonkers in the first place, becomes more and more intensive…

The story isn’t much to write about. It’s a basic plot: killer escapes, goes on a rampage and kills a lot of people. What it doesn’t lack is a intelligent storytelling by Scavolini, sometimes almost documentary style footage, a bit too intimate sometimes, mixed with very stylish and brutal special effects-driven kills. Tom Savini was the supervisor on the film - but the filmmakers credited him as the actual special effects guy - which caused him to sue and refusing to talk about the film forever since. Personally I think it’s something in-between. Maybe he felt it was a bit to exploitative for him (I mean, the man has never been simple to work with) and felt he needed to get away from the cheaper gore after a few years in the biz. And instead he did stuff like The Burning and starred in The Ripper. Says a lot. I still like him though.

Yeah, anyway. The special effects are all great. They’re very f**king graphic with a lot of artery spray hitting walls and nearby objects as George uses knives, axes and a few other things to chop his way through the cast. It’s never “fun”, like in Friday the 13th or any other similar slasher from the same time. This is much more dirtier, more painful. I can only imagine an audience of horny teengers waiting for the kills start, expecting something cheesy and silly and instead gets the death angst of George tossed in their face together with black, gooey blood.

The finale is truly one of a kind, but I don’t want to reveal anything for you who haven’t seen it. But it sure delivers on the gore front. That’s a fact.

Nightmare isn’t just an effective slasher/horror/thriller, it’s a fine low budget film with an inspired director behind the camera and a fine cast of talented nobodies. Blair Stafford is alone worth watching it, and him in combination with the massive amount of graphic violence makes this a roaring exploitation success!

The Barrens (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2012)

My interest of cryptozoology finally made me see Darren Lynn Bousman’s The Barrens, also known as The Jersey Devil in certain parts of the world. Based on a real-life legend of a mysterious creature, part bear...part horse-ish/bull-ish...part bat.. and part demon. At least that what it looks like. The story tells it’s the 13th child of of wicked woman, who made a pact with the devil...or something like that. Somehow I can believe there’s ape creatures or unknown sea “monster” living out there in the unknown wilderness, but a creature like the Jersey Devil is of course too bizarre to ever be true or have something to do with reality. There’s no other creature like it, and in the end it just sounds like something some old fart made up to scare the kids with.

Thankfully The Barrens is so much more than this monster, it’s a damn fine thriller of it’s own. Richard Vineyard (Stephen Moyer) and his wife Cynthia (Mia Kirshner) is out hiking with the kids, teenage daughter Sadie and boy Danny. Richard have one goal, to go to the Barrens, a forest area, to spread the ashes of his father - which use to take him there when he was a little boy. Something happened in that forest and now Richard starts to see stuff, gets hallucinations...and everything is connect to the myth of the Jersey Devil. But is there any truth in what he’s seeing, or is something else happening to him?

The Barrens is a great, great movie. It was shot in 18 days (two days was lost because of rain, from the beginning the schedule was 20 days) and is one damn effective drama-thriller-monster-horror-thingie. It just feels very real. The fine chemistry in the family is the highlight of the show. You feel for them and with them and the story is unfolded in an intelligent and logical way. Even if it has monster sequences I would rather see it as a drama-thriller with the Jersey Devil as the MacGuffin, there’s so many layers of story here: a lost dog which makes the little son extra sensitive, an interesting side story of jealousy, a teenage daughter who wants to find herself, the loss of a father, even a campfire scene right out from an eighties slasher movie and a lot more. Yeah, including the damn monster.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t write that much more about the story or other details. But I’ve always liked the laid-back style of Bousman’s directing. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but a lot feels like the first takes - not only in this film - and the visuals is often very relaxed, very simple - but still impressive in form of intimacy. I know the guy have directed a bunch of the Saw movies, but at least part 2 and 3 is - to me - two of the best sequels in the franchise. Part 4 not so much, to be honest. But that’s more because of a weaker script than the director.

The Barrens is one of those few serious, adult, horror-thrillers out there. It’s as far from a teen horror as you can get, it’s not hip and trendy, it’s based on “reality” and has a nice cast of really competent actors. Either you see it as The Barrens, The Jersey Devil or Devil in the Woods, it’s worth giving it a chance.

White of the Eye (Donald Cammell, 1987)

To explain White of the Eye for something who haven’t seen it is virtually impossible, but I’ll give it a try: imagine a serial killer/erotic thriller set in a world of slightly more low-key David Lynch absurdity and a heavy dose of an eighties soft rock music video. I know most distributors will try to market it as a thriller, a murder mystery, a serial killer chiller...but it’s something completely different, an entity who only can been seen as a film by Donald Cammell. I have very weak memories of Performance, his 1970 film starring Mick Jagger, but Demon Seed, the utterly bizarre Dean R. Koontz sci-fi/thriller starring Julie Christie and a horny computer is a minor masterpiece. One of those films that only could have been made in the seventies.

That’s why White of the Eye is so damn good; it’s one of those films that only could have been made in the eighties.

Cathy Moriarty is Joan White, semi-happy woman living with the stud of the county, the HiFi specialist Paul White (David Keith, in the tightest pair of jeans the production could find). He mostly installs fancy sound systems to rich people and then goes home and have wild sex with his wifey. She ended up out there in the desert by a coincidence, leaving her then boyfriend Mike (Alan Rosenberg) for the hunky, fuckable Paul. But something is off in this place of tumbleweeds and horny housewives: a serial killer is on the prowl, brutally killing women… and the traces lead to Paul. But is he guilty or might Mike lurk around out there, thirsty for blood?

White of the Eye is on the surface a very mainstream thriller. Sex, violence, more sex and fancy cinematography by Larry McConkey. But everything is so damn odd. Cammell was clearly not interested in directing a typical thriller, he wanted to make an oddity. A melodrama, like a serious, laid-back John Waters - with a touch of terror. The kills are spectacular and violent, not that different from some of the kills Dario Argento conducted in his life (a comparison many, many people makes), but really not scare. So with the few chases or red herrings. There’s never a trace of fear or terror… or horror. This is just not what you really want it to be.

But don’t be afraid. Just because it’s not what you want it to be it surprises you even more. It’s a wicked, twisted drama with violence and sex… and some strange mystery that’s not really a mystery from time to time, like Cammell didn’t care about that specific detail. It’s a chamber piece set in a desert, or among stylish, expensive villas in the desert… or in semi-white trash homes. You could easily transform this to a stage play, but with the desert as a room instead of the glorious wilderness show in the film.

David Keith and Cathy Moriarty makes a perfect couple - both the chemistry between the actors and the characters themselves. Wild and kinda self-destructive, while Alan Rosenberg goes from a hot native American lover to a pathetic, self-pitying car mechanic. All excellent actors, but the best of the bunch is little Danielle Smith, playing Danielle White, the daughter. It’s hard to say why she’s brilliant, maybe it’s her vapid look and behaviour, slightly stupid - but maybe just a bit smarter than everyone else. It’s one of the few child characters I’ve seen in a genre film that actually is damn good.

I fucking love White of the Eye. But it’s sure a very special film. Not for everyone… but if you don’t expect a slick, normal serial killer thriller and more of an arthouse serial killer drama, the form of arthouse that never even reach into the normal arthouse playhouses because it’s a bit too mainstream… then you also will fucking love this film.

The Stendhal Syndrome (Dario Argento, 1996)

While I’ve always enjoyed the later works of Dario Argento I can be safe to say that The Stendhal Syndrome is his last masterpiece. Uneven, as all his films, but with that original, twisted touch of graphic violence, art and twisted sexuality. I’ve always seen it as Dario Argento ripping off Brian De Palma ripping off Alfred Hitchcock (which of course is something the latter one always do), and I still stand behind that opinion. But this time around I’ve seen more Argento-esque movements and ideas jumping out at me, more than each time before.

As a film I think it’s mostly connected to Tenebrae and Dressed to Kill - the De Palma one because of the wordless and magical scene at the gallery and Tenebrae because of it’s cold, distant style and sudden burst of sadistic sexual violence and graphic, bloody murders. The sex is something I’ve always felt never belonged in Argento’s movies, something producers and distributors demanded when he got more and more popular. Even if his earlier films and up to Inferno have sexual tension it’s always beneath the surface, and almost asexual characters. The only one’s allowed to show their lust is his - often - very interesting LGBT characters, and with interesting I mean not only positive personalities - but that’s like life itself.

The Stendhal Syndrome is more focused on his daughters - Asia’s - adventures with Thomas Kretschmann rapist/serial killer and not so much on getting to know the characters. But Argento dives into his favorite subject, gender, with Asia transforming herself into a very manly version of herself, even simulating a rape against her boyfriend - and later meets a new man, French, with the unisex name Marie, something she’s surprised to learn. The film never reaches deep down into Asia’s psyche, even if Argento and his usual collaborator Franco Ferrini tries. I get the feeling he wants to do a Repulsion, a slow descent into madness, but they only manages to scratch a little bit on the surface. The connection with art never feels totally justified either, more of a gorgeous way to show the madness in Asia.

But the film as a whole, if you’re not staring yourself blind at details, holds up very well. It’s a stunning-looking movie, using the sets and locations to the fullest. Some of the effects doesn’t hold up today, but I can’t be bothered by that! There’s show-stoppers - and I think most people remember the gunshot to the head-scene, still very impressive today, or at least the idea and maybe not always the execution. Asia has always been a very uneven actress (she’s terrible in Dracula 3D for example), but she gives us a fine vulnerability as police inspector Anna Manni here and Thomas Kretschmann delivers a brutal force of sexual malevolence. The rest of the cast is pretty anonymous, pretty boring Italian male faces mixed with some over-acting female actors. Nothing to tell mom about.

The ending borders to stupidity, but so does many Argento-endings (I’m looking at you, Terror at the Opera!), but survives because of the outrageousness - and there, once again, we have the spirit of De Palma coming in, a director who more than Argento loves to step over the line of realism and create pure cinema.

I take back what I wrote in the beginning of the review, The Stendhal Syndrome is not a masterpiece, but it’s sooooooooooooooo close being one. It’s an excellent film which only lacks that final emotional punch to be the best DePalmaRippingOffHitchcock-movie Argento ever made.

Mannen från Mallorca (Bo Widerberg, 1984)

For the genre fans outside Sweden Bo Widerberg might be best known for his sensational and violent 1976 cop thriller The Man on the Roof, in my opinion THE best movie ever to come from Sweden, an ultra-realistic, satirical and very spectacular story about a sniper who takes revenge on the government - especially the police force. Like always, Widerberg is a radical and the story isn’t black and white, there’s a lot of grey zones in his masterpiece. Eight years later he’s back with Mannen från Mallorca (The Man from Mallorca), which never reached the same international fame, but you can be sure it’s of the quality. Loosely inspired by a sex-scandal (which also inspired Mikael Marcimain’s 2012 drama-thriller Call Girl) a few years earlier, where some high ranking politicians was said to be involved in a prostitution ring, Mannen från Mallorca might be our best (not many title to compare with though) conspiracy thriller.

Inspectors Jarnebring (Sven Wollter) and Johansson (Tomas Von Brömssen) is the first men to arrive at the scene of a robber and Johansson follows the robber, but loses him inside a school. The robbery itself is just a routine case, but when some of the people involved - directly and indirectly - starts to die, our heroes slowly understands they’re dealing with something bigger. They suspect a staff of the Swedish secret service, SÄPO, to be involved - but when he suddenly has the best alibi ever they understand there’s something even more fishy going on…

To quote someone on IMDB: “The best political thriller you never heard of”, and it might be true - at least for you outside Sweden. While it’s a quite famous film here, it’s still in the shadow of The Man on the Roof, and that’s a fucking pity. I would even say the acting is more even in this film, with very solid performances from Wollter (for the international audience known for his part as the old viking king in The 13th Warrior) and Von Brömssen. Håkan Serner, who also ruled in The Man on the Roof, plays a similar part here, and he’s brilliant. Ernst Günther’s part, Dahlberg, was suppose to be played by Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt, but his health at the time prevented that - but Günther is great also - like a mix between a bored bureaucrat and a walrus. You’ll understand when you see him. As always Widerberg also casted some odd people in supporting parts - Hans Villius, a famous TV-host and speaker as the perverted politician, the, at the time, famous magician Johnny Lonn as a some shady government henchman and of course Karin Bergstrand, Widerberg’s neighbor, who also played a confused old neighbor in The Man on the Roof! And lets not forget Ingvar Hirdvall, who played the sniper in The Man on the Roof, playing a similar, anonymous - but extremely cold and evil - man in this one.

The script never answers all the questions it raises, but it also gives the movie a sense of uncomfortableness. You never know who will turn against you. At the end one the most skeptical characters suddenly starts believing the conspiracy theory and one of the believers - it’s hinted - tries to plant disbelief in another character. The ending is chilling in it’s simpleness. A few words and you understand how big this is and how much this small - in comparison - scandal affects the Swedish society. It always gives me goosebumps.

Rumour says David Fincher got some inspiration from Mannen from Mallorca when directing Se7en. I don’t know so much about that, but there’s two excellent chase scenes - a bit more realistic because it’s a Swedish production, but enough thrilling to compete with international productions. I really hope someday someone will buy the rights from SF and give it a proper DVD- or blu-ray release. Olive Films have bought a lot of Widerberg’s films to release on blu during 2014, including The Man on the Roof, so lets hope those will sell well and give them a reason to release more Swedish films from the time when Swedish film still was worth watching.

DeathPenalty.com (Ryota Sakamaki, 2011)

Here’s a hidden treasure from Japanese production company JollyRoger, DeathPenalty.com, and believe it or not, there’s not one single ghost in the whole damn movie, which is odd for two reasons: it’s about a website and it’s from Japan. Just by looking at the title you would presume it’s about a deadly, haunted homepage - but instead it does weaves a wonderful, pseudo-smart thriller around a deliciously macabre subject. Our hero, if you can call him that, works at The Honey Pot, a call girl center in Tokyo where he’s responsible for connecting customers with the young women working together with him. Everything is quite alright expect that his boss, one of those annoying Hitler-esque middle-bosses roaming most companies, behaves like an asshole most of the time, steals money, rapes the girls and just is the ultimate douchebag. Lucky for our hero he once day receives a spam mail which says: do you want to have someone killed?

He clicks on the link and enters a chatroom which centers around a strange man with a white mask. Several others are there to and he soon learn the rules:

1. Everyone in the chatroom wants to kill someone. But everyone need to kill.
2. One person will arrange the weapon.
3. The second person will do the killing.
4. The third person will remove the body and evidence.

No one knows who the other one is and it’s a safe way to kill someone you hate and get away with it. Our hero wants to kill his boss, but of course he needs to help out in the other kills. If anyone break the rules the masked man will send out his angels to kill! But not long after his boss is fired and he really don’t want to kill him anymore, but he’s already deep inside the game… and is it even possible to escape this little problem?

DeathPenalty.com has one of those stories just made to create intrigue, and it sure succeeds in that! While not the most original thriller out there it still manages to squeeze in a lot of surprises along the way in what basically is a very fucked-up situation. Because our unlucky hero is trying to fake his way through the game, which quickly gets out of hand and he can’t trust anyone anymore! Shot on the cheap in a very economical way, most of the movie is actually set inside The Honey Pot, which is a normal boring office, often with him in front of the screen watching these masked faces discussing murderous plans. It’s not until the second half when the action sets in, but it still keeps everyhing quite low-key - which makes it more powerful in a small-scale painful way, because most of the time you just want to scream at the screen: DON’T FUCKING DO THAT! And he still does it, the moron!

Fine acting and a script which ties most of the knots together at the end, this was a surprise. Of course, because it was probably a success on the home video market in Japan, JollyRoger quickly squeezed out a sequel, DeathPenalty.com: A New Beginning, with the same director and screenwriter - and even if it tries to to something drastically new with the subject it fails to generate the same tension. They should have stuck with the same idea as the first one, because it was a strong idea from the beginning and it could have been worked into at least one nice sequel more instead of going so far away from the original idea. I kinda like some parts of the sequel and I admire the ambition to do something new with it, but it could have been so much better.

DeathPenalty.com was a surprise and something I can recommend. If you’re into smart, fun low budget thrillers set in a claustrophobic Tokyo, this is the shit. And it’s my kinda shit.

The Butterfly Room (Jonathan Zarantonello, 2012)

To paraphrase a very boring movie, The Butterfly Room  is The Expendables of horror! Check out this fine cast: Barbara Steele, Adrienne King, Heather Langenkamp, James Karen, P.J.Soles, Ray Wise and Camille Keaton! Director Jonathan Zarantonello really hit the jackpot here with the cast, the question is if the movie can live up to the talent involved? Now, what’s even more cool is the strong, good female cast - most of them over the tender age of 40, which is so rare I guess this movie is two of a kind together with Rob Zombie’s excellent The Lords of Salem! I love my mature ladies, always. Don’t take it the wrong way, I’m still gay as David Warbeck on weed.

Barbara Steele is Ann, a recluse. But also a very twisted lady who loves her butterfly collection more than everything else. She also obsesses about little girls and especially Alice, the neighbor's daughter and… oh shit, I can’t write another synopsis again! IT’S SOOOOO BORING. Really. Check the official page at IMDB instead. Or Wikipedia. Or call the director for I care. But I’m not gonna write a damn word about the story. No way, José!

But don’t worry, don’t judge my disinterest in writing yet another pointless story synopsis so it seems like this is a bad movie, it’s not. It’s actually a damn interesting indie flick, shot like a movie with a lot bigger budget and with a killer cast. So it’s worth watching. Let me get back to interesting female characters in film. Here we have a horror movie where more or less every main character AND supporting character is a she. Barbara Steele of course steals the show as the charismatic actress she is. She’s always had more charisma than actual talent in my humble opinion. She’s cool as hell but not very versatile when it comes to deliver performances out of her world of characters. Here she’s highly effective, especially the longer the movie goes. She get’s more twisted and freaky the further the script takes the character, which is awesome.

While not a typical murder mystery, it still has a feeling of giallo over it - from the childhood trauma, dolls and a few twists here and there. The ending is ambiguous and not totally clear, but I think it rocks - it’s just a bit too subtle of the traditional ordinary Joe crowd out there who just wanna see something together with their microfood dinner.

The biggest flaw now is that it feels like a cavalcade of cameos. Nothing wrong with that really, but the episodic nature of the script becomes more evident when there’s a new legendary horror star who makes a guest spot. No, I shouldn’t complain. The Butterfly Room is a very ambitious and good-looking horror movie, one of those that actually has ambitions to be something else than a quickie DTV movie. One of those with a seriousness, the stuff the genre desperately needs.

No, this is not The Expendables of horror. This is more than that. This is a bunch of strong, interesting female actors playing interesting and complex female characters in all ages, instead of The Expendables boring bunch of more or less untalented Republican men with penis-envy.

The Last House On Dead End Street (Roger Watkins, 1977)

This is one movie that has escaped me for the main part of my movie collecting career, so when I found the Barrel release at Stockholms no. 1 video store Monkey Beach a while ago, I of course took the chance to see it and judge by myself! I can understand how this film attracts sleaze monglers and people obsessed by very, very regional and cheap horror films of the seventies. The Last House On Dead End Street is a wannabe Taxi Driver before Taxi Driver was made, mixed with a very gritty 42st cinema approach - badly lit and amateurish acting. This of course doesn’t mean it sucks, far from!

This guy, Terry, is terribly bitter after being in prison once again. So he comes out with a rage towards the society which means he decides to make his own snuff movies and yeah, kill people for the real in front of the camera. He gets a small crew and the start to find their victims…

Its not much of a story to talk about, but it’s strangely effective and artistic. We follow Terry’s struggle to make his first real movie mixed with some truly surreal and strange scenes, both in this movie alone and in the movie-in-movie. Somehow it feels like a nice bunch of New York intellectuals trying to make the sleaziest, grittiest exploitation movie they could make - but never scene. This makes The Last House On Dead End Street almost too cynical for its own best. But it keeps it together until the end - until the unnecessary voice over at the very end. There’s some truly impressive shock scenes - all to the wonderful - no! - MASTERFUL score by...a stock music archive. There’s some use of a low-key, brooding opera during one of the kill scenes that alone makes this movie a lot better than it should be.

At the same time it’s just another exploitation movie, a bit fancier version of Michael Findlay’s Snuff. Those two also share the snuff-myth. The Last House On Dead End Street was made with alias for everyone involved, which started rumours that it was a snuff movie. Roger Watkins, who later admitted to be the director, never really knew until 1979 that it got a cinema release - when someone stopped him on the street, recognize him from the movie. And it’s a grim and very cheap film, with lots of unconvincing gore and boobs and asses and everything in-between. Most of it is quite arty, not sexy (which I’m sure is the deliberately) and entertaining. The short running time of 77 minutes is perfect - I can’t even imagine what the rumoured 175 minute version could have delivered (probably more boring scenes) to its audience!

Surprisingly stylish and freaky, The Last House On Dead End Street is a minor exploitation masterpiece. So if you want to see a man giving blow-job to a hoof and a half-naked woman in blackface being whipped by a retarded hunchback, this IS the movie for you.

Good luck.