Schalcken the Painter

 

Forget the various hokey Hammer Horror films based on the works and characters of the Irish Gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu, like Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) starring Ingrid Pitt, Jimmy Sangster’s Lust for a Vampire (1971) and John Hough’s Twins of Evil (1971) starring Peter Cushing, Schalcken the Painter (1979) directed by Leslie Megahey (Duke Bluebeard's Castle, The Advocate aka The Hour of the Pig) is not only hands down the greatest and most cultivated Sheridan Le Fanu reworking from the 1970s, despite being based on one of the writer’s lesser known works, but also, aside from Carl Th. Dreyer’s masterwork Vampyr (1931), the best, most ambitious, and singular film based on a work by the Victorian era Dark Romanticist ever made. Indeed, I do not like to throw around the word ‘masterpiece,’ but with its tight and claustrophobic direction, decadent yet dignified tableaux and mise-en-scène, cool and collected yet foreboding atmosphere, ostensibly docudrama-like yet classical approach to storytelling, and truly striking and idiosyncratic all-around flavor, Megahey’s 68-minute piece of phantasmagorical Gothic horror is certainly a work that seems to be free of all flaws, or at least hides them well. Adapted from Le Fanu’s 1839 short story A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter—a work aesthetically inspired by the ghostly atmospheric candlelit paintings of 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painter Godfried Schalcken, who also happens to be the lead character of the story—Schalcken the Painter is a darkly (anti)romantic doom-and-gloom-addled ghost story about a young and cowardly yet nonetheless talented Flemish painter who finds himself forsaking love and happiness for artistic ambition after letting has beloved fall into the hands of a grotesque elderly ‘demonic lover.’ As the head of BBC’s arts documentary program Omnibus, auteur Megahey cleverly sold the story as a ‘documentary’ and was ultimately able to assemble what amounts to an experimental Gothic horror flick, which was also screened as part of the BBC's annual broadcast ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ on December 23, 1979. 

 Like a Gothic horror film as directed by the rampantly heterosexual twin of Teutonic dandy auteur Werner Schroeter, albeit minus the camp elements and featuring a relatively straightforward storyline, with a mise-en-scène inspired by paintings by both the eponymous subject and his more bourgeois Baroque fellow countryman Johannes Vermeer, Schalcken the Painter is like a virtual living Dutch Golden Age art museum set in some sort of perennially pernicious Calvinist purgatory where all love is lost and has been replaced with lust and where sin, especially greed, reigns. Inspired by the paintings of an artist that is probably best known for his unrivaled mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight, Megahey’s celluloid chiaroscuro might seem like it was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s underrated epic European period piece Barry Lyndon (1975), but the director has credited its inspiration to the more obscure tragic medieval love story Blanche (1972) directed by Polish painter turned animator turned cinematic auteur Walerian Borowczyk. A multilayered subtextual work that is simultaneously a morality tale about the haunting dread that accompanies fame and fortune over true love, an anti-capitalist fable that depicts money as the root of all ‘evil,’ a scathing crypto-feminist critique of the so-called institution of marriage, an experimental art history (pseudo)documentary that analyzes the life and work of Schalcken, and a foreboding abstract re-working of arthouse folk horror, Schalcken the Painter is a film that does many things and somehow manages to do them rather well, thus making it seem like auteur Megahey, who is far from a household name, made some sort of Faustian pact that gave him the artistry but not the fame and fortune. 

 Opening with an off-screen Godfried Schalken (Jeremy Clyde of the British TV series William Tell aka Crosswbow (1987-1989) and The Iron Lady (2011) starring Meryl Streep) telling a beauteous classical Nordic model to, “Turn from the light. Your breast bare. Look into the dark,” Schalcken the Painter then sends the viewer into literal and figurative darkness where the viewer is greeted by an unseen narrator (fittingly provided by Charles Gray of The Devil Rides Out (1968) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in a role considered for Vincent Price and offered to Peter Cushing) who describes how his great-grandfather knew the Flemish painter well and states regarding a painting featured in the scene: “To my mind, there are some paintings that impress one with a conviction that they represent not merely the imagined shapes and characters conceived in the mind of the artist, but scenes or faces or situations that have actually existed. There is in one strange picture that intangible something which stamps it as just such a representation of reality. It’s a remarkable work by the Dutch painter Schalcken.” The painting in question features a beautiful young woman in the foreground holding a large candle while a young man is drawing a sword in the background as if afraid of the seemingly harmless lady, with the rest of the painting being total abyss-like blackness. By the end of the film, the viewer will know what inspired this painting, and that the antihero Schalcken, through weakness and self-absorption, unwittingly sired a demon that haunted him until his lonely death. Schalcken’s story begins in 1665 at the Leiden-based studio of his teacher Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and The Day of the Jackal (1973)), who was the student of the great Rembrandt van Rijn and earned great fame due to his “exquisitely detailed and minutely executed paintings,” but by age 30, had gone progressively blind and thus became a teacher. While Schalcken will receive a “traditionally formal and academic education” from Dou, his later and greater work “seems to have its roots in some private world of dreams, perhaps never otherwise expressed.” The gatekeeper of this “private world of dreams” is Dou’s stunning young niece Rose Velderkaust (British TV actress Cheryl Kennedy), who “had all the charm of the fair light-skinned Flemish maidens,” hence why Schalcken will fall in love with her at virtual first sight “as much as a Dutchman can” (unquestionably, the film has a less than favorable view of the national character of the Dutch), but he will ultimately prove not man enough to be worthy of her love. 

 Behind goofy old fart Dou’s back, Schalcken and Rose start a seemingly harmless love affair mostly comprised of sensual glances and romantic whispers, but their love is soon tested when an elderly ghoul of a fellow named ‘Minjheer Vanderhausen of Rotterdam' (a rather ghastly and corpse-like John Justin of The Thief of Bagdad (1940)) with a chest full of gold jewelry demands that Dou sign away his niece to him immediately in exchange for the small fortune he has brought. Somewhat reluctantly, Dou gives into his greed and sells his niece to the tall and seemingly rotting ghoul despite Rose’s plea, “Oh Uncle, what a terrible creature. I could never look on that face again for all the wealth of the states.” Rose also reveals that she remembers seeing Vanderhausen, who she describes as an “old wooden figure,” staring creepily at her at a Rotterdam church when she was just a little girl, but her uncle couldn't care less because, as the film’s narrator states, “Marriages were matters of traffic and calculation. The unfortunate girl was simply the object of a contract.” While Rose attempts to convince Schalcken to run away with her, the painter refuses and states, “I will work, Rose. In the future, I will buy back the contract. I will buy it back double.” Of course, he never has the opportunity to buy her back and as the narrator states regarding the rest of the film, “I have no sentimental scenes to describe, no exquisite details of the cruelty of a guardian, no agonies or transports of lovers. The record I have to make is one of heartlessness, nothing more. The contract was signed, and settlements made even more splendid than Dou ever dreamed of.” Naturally, Rose and Vanderhausen wed but, after the ceremony, both bride and groom disappear without a trace, as if pulled into the bowels of hell to consummate their unholy marriage. When Dou does not hear from his niece or her new husband after weeks, he sends Schalcken to Rotterdam to look for them so as “to satisfy himself as to the comfort and safety of Rose,” but “no one had ever heard of the rich Minjheer Vanderhausen.” 

 While one might suspect that Schalcken would fall into a deep van Gogh-esque depression after losing his beloved, “bit by bit, the impulse of love gave way to that of ambition” and the painter satisfied his sexual longings by regularly meeting with a prostitute named Hendrijke (Helena Clayton of exploitation trash like The Brick Dollhouse (1967) and The Rebel Rousers (1970)) to satisfy his carnal lust in between devoting virtually all of his time to his blossoming painting career, whose work the narrator describes as seeming “to draw upon elements of a peculiarly personal nature, and yet with no apparent foundation in what we know of the life of the painter. In all the paintings I have seen, I have remarked a strange distance in the relationship of the human figures therein. Contacts made only perhaps by the expected conventions and courtesies of polite society, or by commercial transaction. Sensuality without warmth, without passion. Trappings that are ornate and lovely, and yet set in a darkness that the faltering lamplight or candle flame never seems capable of penetrating.” As for Dou, he suffered great grief over the disappearance of his niece Rose because “he felt most strongly that he had been defrauded, and he did not know why. In order to dispel his loneliness, for he could no longer work, he continued to keep close company with his now famous pupil.” One day while Dou is hanging out with his “now famous pupil,” Rose randomly shows up at the house and demands wine and food, which she scoffs down like a starving Congolese toddler. After eating, Rose states hysterically, “Find me a minister of god. I’m not safe until he comes. Send for him quickly!” and demands that she “must never be left alone. I’m lost forever if you leave me. The dead and the living can never be one. It is forbidden. The dead and the living can never be one.” Schalcken takes Rose to a back bedroom to rest where she complains, “This is the darkness. The darkness is unsafe. Give me light,” so the painter yells to Dou to bring her light, but when the old fart takes too long, he decides to get it himself, only to hear his beloved scream in terror just seconds after walking out of the room. When Schalocken returns to the bedroom, he discovers that Rose is gone and that she may have fallen to her death in a dam via an open window. 

 After his beloved disappears once again, Schalcken hires a dirty prole girl to be his model and begins painting portraits of mythical figures like Pandora, Ceres, and Lesbia instead of the biblical figures to which he had been accustomed. The painter also ditches his regular whore Hendrijke when the whorehouse he regularly visits gets a new girl named ‘Rose of Rotterdam’, who looks more or less like an evil and lecherous version of his beloved virgin-like Rose. While in his late-30s, Schalcken marries a girl from a rich merchant’s family named Francoise van Dimen de Breda (Amanda Carlson), who is a bitch of a broad that is “several years his junior” but is “adequately trained in the household arts.” Meanwhile, Schalcken demonstrates he is just as big of a whore as his teacher because while he refuses to do commissioned portraits, he caves in when a rich fellow offers him a chest of riches just as Dou caved in when Vanderhausen offered him great wealth for his nubile niece’s hand in marriage. As the narrator describes, “Gerrit Dou later faded into obscurity under his much more famous pupil" and when he died in 1675, Schalcken attended his funeral, only to come home in a seemingly haunted state and started painting immediately in his studio without saying a word to anyone, not even his wife. As depicted in an exceedingly macabre scene of necro sex, Schalcken felt a presence luring him to a vault at the church where Dou’s funeral took place and upon entering the room, he found Rose—or some sinister apparition that resembled her—who took him to a bed where she strips, mounts, and screws her undead husband Minjheer Vanderhausen right in front of the positively petrified painter, who subsequently faints after witnessing the ghastly sight. After waking up, Schalcken finds the tomb of Rose and Vanderhausen, thus making him realize that he has just witnessed two ghosts copulating. Indeed, the painting presented at the beginning (and end) of the film was inspired by that horrifying night when Schalcken witnessed the ghost of his one great love humping her horrifying haunted hubby and as the narrator states at the beginning of the film: “To his dying day, Schalcken was convinced of the reality of the vision he had witnessed, and he left behind this picture as testimony to it. But look more closely, and remember his last terrible meeting with Rose Velderkaust. If you recall, the painter had fainted dead away at whatever apparition she had presented to him. Here he has painted the observer, himself, in the act of drawing his sword as if to defend himself against the powers that were threatening him. A self-portrait, perhaps? Perhaps also a little self-deception?” 

 Somewhat notably, when the real Godfried Schalcken visited England between 1692–1697, his seemingly archetypical Dutch rudeness and all around lack of manners made him a sort of unofficial persona non grata, so it is only fitting that Leslie Megahey’s Schalcken the Painter portrays the painter in a most unflattering light. In fact, I cannot think of another film that portrays the Dutch in such an unwaveringly negative fashion and that includes everything from the arthouse works of Paul Verhoeven to the dark comedies of Alex van Warmerdam. Indeed, it certainly says something about a people when the British—arguably the most ruthless and cutthroat capitalists aside from the Jews—depict you as soulless materialists who always choose the lucrative over love and professional success over perennial sensuality, but such is the result of Calvinism, which is something that source writer Le Fanu was all too familiar with as a man whose father was such a strict protestant that he raised the family in an “almost Calvinist tradition.” As a sort of dilettante fan of Flemish Renaissance painters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch and the Dutch master painters like those depicted in the film, as well as a man of Dutch extraction whose great-uncle was a degenerate modernist artist of some note, I especially enjoyed Megahey’s film, which not only introduced me to the work of Schalcken, but proved to be one of the most singular, chilling, and unforgettable Gothic horror flicks I have ever seen and not just because it is a rare work of celluloid spectrophilia that features arguably the most haunting ghost sex scene in all of cinema history. Indeed, while Dreyer’s Vampyr is certainly up there among my favorite horror films, I have to confess that Schalcken is now probably my favorite Sheridan Le Fanu adaptation. 

 Not surprisingly, the film was advertised as “one of the most frequently requested programmes in the BBC archive” when it was released on DVD/Blu-ray by the British Film Institute’s excellent BFI Flipside label. Notably, also included with the BFI Flipside set is the rare experimental British Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Pit (1962) assistant directed by Peter Collinson (who would go on to direct the popular British caper The Italian Job (1969) starring Michael Caine and Noël Coward), as well as a 39-minute interview with auteur Leslie Megahey and cinematographer John Hooper about the making of the film. Notably, Megahey would once again team up with cinematographer Hooper and narrator Charles Gray for another film about a painter, Cariani and the Courtesans (1987), for the BBC series Screenplay. In the film’s deconstruction of Schalcken’s work and experimental approach to depicting an arrogant young artist, Megahey’s work owes comparisons to Peter Greenaway’s Rembrandt ‘biopic’ Nightwatching (2007) and masterpiece The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). With its scathing depiction of the devilish relationship between art and commerce, Baroque period setting, and harpsichord score, Schalcken the Painter certainly deserves comparisons with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) aka Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, though Megahey’s film is seemingly infinitely more enthralling and aesthetically intriguing, as a rare experimental period piece that has great replay value. Indeed, for an old Grinch like myself, Schalcken the Painter will most certainly be a new holiday season tradition for me. 

-Ty E

Sleepwalker (1984)

Without question, the last thing the world needs is another leftist horror flick, especially those of the effortlessly effete British persuasion, but somehow I managed to find a tinge of preternatural potency in the less-than-feature-length blood-soaked Thatcher era satirical scare-fest Sleepwalker (1984) directed by white Rhodesian-British auteur Saxon Logan, who was influenced to become an ‘auteur’ by his much more famous comrade and mentor, filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (if...., O Lucky Man!).  Considered lost for nearly three decades until the BFI rescued the sole print of the film from the director’s attic, restored it, and released it in late 2013 on DVD/Blu-ray under the BFI Flipside label along with two of Logan’s earlier shorts Stepping Out (1977) and Working Surface: A Short Study (with Actors) in the 'Ways' of a Bourgeois Writer (1979), a 69-minute 2013 interview with the forgotten filmmaker, and Rodney Giesler’s thematically similar 45-minute short The Insomniac (1977), the quite literally bloody Brit satirical black-comedy-cum-horror-show was assumed to be even hearsay by some, as very few people had actually seen it and it had only been referenced in print form by English journalist/film critic Kim Newman (who, incidentally, is a big promoter of BFI Flipside and hosted the label’s screening of the 2010 ‘sampler documentary’ Kim Newman's Guide to The Flipside of British Cinema) some 14 years after its release in the FAB Press release Ten Years of Terror: British Films of the 1970s. Quite ironically yet most fittingly, the film owes its past obscurity to the very regime that the film ruthlessly critiques whose pro-big-business policies ultimately led to the work’s rejection by British film distributors (who found the film’s horror-satire style inexplicable and thus unprofitable), as well as the termination of a government subsidy to theater owners promoting the showcasing of British-made shorts before feature presentations (notably, Logan’s 1977 experimental short Stepping Out played before screenings of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) in UK theaters). A sort of poor man’s take on Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), albeit more literate and cultivated and minus the supernatural elements, Sleepwalker has been advertised by the BFI as an “outrageous mix of biting satire and stylish horror” that “recalls the work of otherwise unlikely bedfellows, Lindsay Anderson and Dario Argento,” yet the film has more obvious influences, namely James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932), German expressionism, and Hammer horror films. Partly inspired by a true anecdote from Logan’s life about a rural retreat when his friend’s wife uncomfortably revealed to him and their mutual friends while tipsy that her husband once attempted to murder her while he was sleepwalking, Sleepwalker is a largely metaphorical work that was heavily inspired by Anderson’s underrated box-office failure Britannia Hospital (1982)—a work that uses a hospital as a metaphor for Britain—featuring characters that are more or less archetypes/allegorical figures and set at an old quaint country home that acts as the “embodiment of the United Kingdom” (as described by the director) about an unhappily married, mis-matched couple who come to visit their ‘friends’ in the countryside, only to fall prey to a somnambulist-based slaughter after a nasty night of venomous verbal class warfare.

Opening with a classic eerie nightmare scene involving blood-covered broken glass and a person being strangled to death in a bathtub that would probably lead the viewer to assume they are about to watch a classic Gothic haunted house film, Sleepwalker then cuts to a grey-haired chap named Alex Britain (played by Scottish director Bill Douglas, who is best known for an autobiographical trilogy about his working-class upbringing) preparing an insulin injection and milk and cookies for his bedridden sister Marion Britain (TV actress Heather Page), who has spent all afternoon in bed and who is the one who suffered the nightmare during the phantasmagoric introductory montage. Although initially seeming like an old (and regretfully) married couple, Alex and Marion are actually brother and sister who opted to move in with one another after their mother croaked and they inherited the North England rural estate ‘Albion’ (which is, somewhat notably, the oldest known name for Great Britain).  The two siblings are expecting company, Marion’s friend Angela Paradise (Joanna David of Italian auteur Roberto Faenza’s The Soul Keeper (2002) aka Prendimi l'anima, which depicts the romance between psychoanalyst C.G. Jung and holocausted Jewess Sabina Spielrein) and her cannibalistic pseudo-conservative capitalist hubby Richard Paradise (Nickolas Grace of the classic dystopian cult sci-fi TV movie Max Headroom (1985) and the hit 1998 fantasy-adventure TV mini-series Merlin), who works “in video” (surely, a jab by Logan and his co-writer Michael Keenan at the desecration of cinema via the video boom). On their way to Albion, the Paradises get lost and Richard demonstrates his innate assholery and callous control of his wife by screaming at Angela, “Just let me remind you that this rural blood retreat was your idea. They’re your fucking friends. You find the place!” just before almost running over an old man on a bike. When the married couple finally arrives at the estate, it is quite apparent that emasculated bleeding heart socialist wimp Alex cannot stand alpha-asshole Richard’s audacious airs of arrogance. Since Marion’s planned evening of “al fresco” has been ruined by the rain and an exploding light bulb and shattered window which destroyed the kitchen, the four emotionally volatile adults are forced to spend the evening at a local restaurant where Richard uses the opportunity to loudly espouse his quite humorous homo-hating and sweatshop-saluting Weltanschauung and Alex demonstrates that he is a tired old leftwing weakling who is all talk and no bite just like so many others of his cuckold kind. 

Upon arriving at the restaurant, Richard declares, “The place is full of bloody queers. Didn’t know they had them this far north” after noticing the elderly old queen waiters and proceeds to tell the following joke that would have probably upset queer auteur Derek Jarman: “What does G-A-Y stand for? 'Got AIDS yet?'” In an exceedingly feeble attempt to verbally battle Richard, Alex remarks that he recently read an article in the ‘New Scientist’ stating that AIDS is not an “exclusively homosexual” disease. From there, Richard demonstrates he is not a true conservative or traditionalist by revealing he is a sadistic sort of multiculturalist who advocates sweatshops and complains regarding country living that it is “luddite rubbish” and “sheer antiquated claptrap” and gives a toast by declaring “Here’s to microwaves.” Needless to say, Richard is not impressed with Alex’s sentimentalist speech about living in the country and being proud of his country home. Eventually, Marion reveals that her brother Alex once attempted to murder her when he was sleepwalking. Additionally, Marion, whose job involves reading the works of prospective writers for a publishing house, describes how she suspects that her brother submitted a thriller novel, “about a woman who has a dream about peeling tomatoes. Then, when she wakes up, she’s sliced her husband to bits with a carving knife.” After declaring in regard to her brother that “translators don’t have style,” Marion states that she suspects that the novel was written by her brother due to certain “technical details,” including “Russian expert. German expert. But particularly well up on sleepwalking.” Cleary, the two couples are mismatched, which auteur Logan emphasizes by sitting the two assholes (Richard and Marion), as well as the well-meaning weaklings (Alex and Angela), together during the dinner scene. Indeed, like Richard, Marion also hates the country and complains that she was forced to move to Albion when she was 13 after her estranged father abandoned the family and, “pissed off to Africa. About a century too late.” Richard is so excited by what Marion says, that he declares, “damn right. Big pond for big fish. It’s the only place to be in this country. Money. Massive unemployment. Marvelous! I’ll drink to London,” which rather irks Alex. The last straw for Alex is when Richard states he is a proponent of Thatcher era unemployment, stating, “bloodletting…Sucking the poison out of the system. Dog eat dog. If you can’t go to work, go to hell.” When Alex asks him if he is serious, Richard replies, “Deadly. Don’t you know your own history?” and then proceeds to berate his adversary, calling him a “kept man” and “a bloody pimp, a bloody little pimp who thinks all prostitutes ought to be virgins.” From there, Alex, who has had a little bit too much to drink, gets up to pay the bill and passive aggressively tells Richard to “don’t get up,” as if he has the testicular fortitude to fight him or something. Needless to say, the guests don’t tip so well, or so complains the waiter to his fellow “arch queen.”

When the four frenemies get back to Albion, Alex uses the excuse that he needs to chop some wood and Marion follows, with Richard begging his wife to leave that night, but Angela refuses because she feels the need to pay back her friend for her support for when she was in the hospital. Indeed, although never mentioned explicitly, it seems that Angela has some mental problems that no Valium overdose could cure as she met her fellow mental cripple Marion there. Angela also feels sorry for fellow mental invalid Alex, but she soon becomes frightened of him after seeing him chopping wood with a sort of murderous rage and screaming “bastard” in regard to Richard, as if carrying out some sort of murder. When Angela confronts her friend about her brother’s behavior, Marion reveals that she and Alex met with a psychiatrist who diagnosed the latter with suffering from “deep-rooted trauma” which is “all the result of a deeply insecure childhood.” Marion also trashes Alex’s bibliophilia and Teutonophilia, remarking regarding her brother’s book collection after Richard asks about it, “Von Kleist’s stuff of Alex’s. German dramatist. Death, rot, misery. Right up his street.” Marion also reveals her more morbid side by quoting from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, which is about a hypnotist who puts a man in a suspended state of hypnotism as he dies. After Alex calls his sister a “bitch” and walks out of the room and she responds by calling him a “dog,” Marion begins hitting on Richard right in front of her friend Angela, who becomes quite dismayed upon accidentally turning on negro porn and subsequently goes to bed. While Richard is prepared to cheat on his wife and commence coitus with his kindred cruel spirit Marion, she screws it up by complaining that her brother called her a “prick teaser,” thus hinting there is a somewhat incestuous relationship going on between the two disharmonious siblings. After their failed attempt at romance, Richard and Marion head to bed and the real fun begins.

During the final ten minutes or so of Sleepwalker, everyone falls asleep and dark dreams ultimately degenerate into deadly real-life nightmares. First, Angela has a nightmare of Alex coming into her room and disemboweling her hubby Richard, whose guts he pulls out with his bare hands (according to auteur Logan, while shooting this scenario he, “had a slight problem with Bill Douglas; he hated blood and gore of any sort” and even fainted after shooting the scene). Next, Marion has a recurring nightmare about her brother strangling her to death in the bathroom. From there, Marion sleepwalks into the Paradises' room and undresses in front of Richard, who becomes so aroused that he begins licking the somnambulist’s armpit and then proceeds to suck on her tits, but the fun soon ends when Richard is sliced up with a butcher knife, presumably. Shortly after, Angela wakes up, steps in a huge puddle of her deceased hubby’s blood, goes to the kitchen, and eventually takes a butcher knife to the back of the head. The next morning, Alex wakes up from a nightmare and goes downstairs where he notices blood dripping from the ceiling. Before he can do anything, sleepwalking Marion appears and stabs Alex in the chest with a butcher knife and he cries out “wake up…wake up…Please, wake up!” just before he dies. In a metaphorical scene, blood covers old Victorian furniture. Maybe if Richard had cheated on his neurotic wife and banged unconscious psychopathic killer Marion, the midnight massacre could have been avoided.

As exceedingly heavy-handed socio-political subtexts of most of the works of mainstream ‘masters’ of horror George A. Romero and Wes Craven demonstrate, horror and politics do not mix well together and the last thing a jaded gorehound wants to see are zombies ripping out and eating the hearts of pansy bleeding heart liberals.  Indubitably, if Saxon Logan’s Sleepwalker does anything even remotely notable, it is creating an unholy cinematic marriage between scathing political satire and blood-drenched phantasmagoria of the shadowy anti-Thatcherite sort. Politically speaking, the film is notable for ruthlessly reaming all aspects of the mainstream British political spectrum during its time, with mainstream ‘conservatives ‘ (as personified by Richard) being depicted as deracinated psychopaths of the globalist technocrat sort whose only loyalty is to money and their own egos; socialists (as personified by Alex) being depicted as introverted emotional cripples who prefer to hide in an imaginary utopia and cower before their enemies; the British middle class (as personified by Angela) being portrayed as well meaning yet hopelessly feeble pushovers and cuckolds who support corrupt regimes despite knowing better; and Britannia (as personified by Marion) as an emotionally erratic and savagely snide whore and murderess who walks through life aimlessly and unconsciously slaughters both friends and foes. Notably, the film’s co-writer Michael Keenan was a diehard commie, as Logan revealed in the interview O Lucky Man: Saxon Logan in Conversation (2013) regarding his collaborator: “…I would say that most of my education in cinema came from going to movies with him. He was phenomenally intelligent and we enjoyed each other’s ideas, and although he was an avowed Marxist, we still managed to get on. And he brought to our work a kind of rigor that perhaps wouldn’t have necessarily been part of my work if I had been solely the author.”

Although the film was an abject failure commercially speaking, Logan initially had high hopes and thought he was “made” upon completing Sleepwalker having it screened at the opening of the Berlin International Film Festival (aka Berlinale) where it received a standing ovation, but when he later brought the work back to England and screened it, it was even hated by the filmmaker’s friends, thus reflecting the longstanding hatred Brits, especially of the elitist sort, have for the horror genre (after all, the classic horror-thriller Peeping Tom (1960) more or less destroyed auteur Michael Powell’s career). Of course, Logan’s filmmaking career never even began and Sleepwalker reflects the promising formative work of an auteur who could have developed into something much more interesting and provocative than the various hack filmmakers that were working in England at the time, though I doubt he would have became the next Lindsay Anderson (who, incidentally, was supposed to have a cameo role in the film but injured his ankle while in NYC and could not make the flight back). Notably, in a September 2013 interview with Celluloid Wicker Man, auteur Saxon would reveal that his somewhat admirable but undeniably unmarketable intentions with the film were as follows: “I had a great deal of freedom to make whatever film I wanted. I love Britain and care about it deeply. That is why I chose to make SLEEPWALKER. I naively thought it would be a “wake up” film that would be entertaining, too. It is not entirely rooted in Thatcher’s time nor does it knock the aspirations of the young and thrusting. Instead, it knocks rapacious and unthinking greed, spineless idealism, and meek acquiescence. I feel it is still relevant now. For all its surface appearance Britain is dilapidated. There is a cold aggressiveness to the culture. Politically the current parties are like high street banks: in the same business only differentiated by the colour of their debit and credit cards. I think “Albion” is incrementally decaying while the rich concentrate on getting richer, the middle class acquiesce and the poor can just go to hell. Bill Douglas got the script in one. He came up to me and said: “Marion is Britannia gone mad, is she not?””  Too eloquently directed, sophisticated, and restrained for the average video nasty junky and far too gory, politically incorrect, and cynical for the average art fag cinephile, Sleepwalker is ultimately an uneven celluloid enigma that is nowhere near as bad as it sounds but is also nowhere near as important as the BFI believes it to be, as a cult film without a cult.  For those sadistic bastards that jumped for joy and sang “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” when the “Iron Lady” croaked in 2013, Sleepwalker is, next to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), probably the most clever and creative anti-Thatcher flick ever made.

-Ty E

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

Certainly, you cannot fuck with a film with a title like The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972), or so I thought while attempting to watch every single one of the surviving films of sadomasochistic queer gutter auteur Andy Milligan (The Ghastly Ones, Fleshpot on 42nd Street). Easily the worst of the films that the fucked filmmaker made while taking a temporary sabbatical over the pond in London (the others being Nightbirds, The Body Beneath, Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Man With Two Heads), the film is, somewhat absurdly, a lycanthropic anti-family melodrama of the ostensibly period piece oriented sort that was originally titled The Curse of the Full Moon and was shot in 1969, but the producer/distributor thought the film was too banal for even Milligan standards and later had the auteur shoot a series of pointless scenes in the director's then-hometown of Staten Island involving two rats that were actually named ‘Willard’ and ‘Ben’ to capitalize off the success of Willard (1971) and Ben (1972) and was finally released in 1972. Moneyman Mishkin did the same thing with Milligan’s superior English era work The Man With Two Heads (1972), which, despite being a reworking of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and being originally fittingly named Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Blood, was renamed to cash in on the unwarranted popularity of Lee Frost’s race-baiting blaxploitation-horror-sci-fi-comedy hybrid celluloid turd The Thing with Two Heads (1972) and released a couple years after it was actually completed. Admittedly, aside from wanting to complete my viewing of the director’s entire oeuvre, my main interest in seeing The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! is due to the fact that it features auteur Milligan in a cameo role as a ghetto-dwelling arms dealer, which, at least in my less than humble opinion, is worth the price of admission alone, even if it is one of the filmmaker’s more second rate fucked filmic family affairs. Unquestionably, the world’s greatest (and probably only) werewolf melodrama and, for better or worse, easily more ‘idiosyncratic’ than the other American-directed London-set lycanthrope film An American Werewolf in London (1981), the flick will certainly satisfy Milligan maniacs, but probably no one else, not even spastic Troma fanboys. The film depicts in slow and painfully hetero-hating detail the suffering that an ancient English family suffers as a result of a longstanding curse of both the literal and figurative sort. Featuring a decidedly degenerating werewolf family led by a morbidly and elderly half-dead patriarch who is attempting to assemble a formula to cure the family curse, as well as an eclectic collection of siblings, including a belligerent beast-man who is fed live chickens and lives in a cage with said chickens, as well as a savagely sadistic sister who gets off to slaughtering both rats and peasants, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! is a vaguely fleetingly charming and charismatic piece of celluloid crap directed by the horror genre’s most exquisitely misanthropic and cynical anti-gentleman. 

 The Mooneys are a very ancient aristocratic family from “Northern Europe” who have been cursed ever since one of the patriarchs was bitten by a wild beast and developed a degenerative disease that he would pass on to every newborn family member. The family used to be much larger, but now only one line exists. It is the early 1900s and the current patriarch of the surviving family is Pa Mooney (Douglas Phair) and due to a formula he created that he is regularly injected with by his eldest daughter Phoebe (British TV actress Joan Ogden of James Mitchell’s thriller series Callan (1967-1972)), he is 180-years-old, though he seems like he will croak at any moment. The eldest son of the family, Mortimer (Noel Collins), who seems like the humorous twin brother of Mr. Bean, is responsible for maintaining the family finances. Unquestionably, the most demented of the Mooney siblings is middle sister Monica (played by Milligan regular Hope Stansbury, who was responsible for penning the director’s debut 1965 queer short Vapors), who is a sadist that wallows in morbidly mutilating and murdering her pet rats and torturing her younger brother Malcolm (Berwick Kaler of Milligan’s 1969 arthouse masterpiece Nightbirds), who is the youngest and most animal-like member of the family. Indeed, Malcolm is so majorly messed up that his family members keep him locked up in a cage and feed him live chickens. When the youngest daughter Diana (Jackie Skarvellis of Milligan’s The Body Beneath and Michael Sarne’s The Punk and The Princess (1993) aka The Punk) returns home from medical school in Scotland with a husband Gerald (Ian Innes), she surprises the entire family, not least of all Pa Mooney, who sent his daughter away so that she could learn enough to help him with his scientific research and certainly not so she could bring home an outsider. Since Gerald is a starving artist of sorts, Diana thought it would be a good idea that she and her hubby move in with Pa so that they will be financially supported. Of course, little does Gerald realize that his wife’s family is comprised of a bunch of loony lycanthropes that are just as liable to rip out the throats of each other as they are that of strangers and enemies. Indeed, as ruthless, degenerate blueblood rabble, the Mooneys are more or less incestuous cannibals who eat and fuck one another (indeed, as the eldest sister Phoebe reveals towards the end of the film, she and Pa used to practice father-daughter coitus). 

 Monica, a deranged bitch with a murderously sadistic streak, introduces herself by humorously stating, “Hello, I’m Monica, the middle sister…the bitch. The one they always talk about behind her back,” and attempts to warn Gerald about his wife by telling him that his wife/her sister Diana is a self-centered bitch who only cares about herself. She also informs him that the Mooney family has a curse that he “better find out about now." Instead of taking heed of Monica's advice, Gerald says to his wife, “She has a few problems, doesn’t she?!” and then proceeds to ask her about her retarded brother Malcolm, who she describes as follows, "He’s a year older than me and he’s not quite normal. He’s almost animal-like. We don’t know how it happened…the genes got mixed up in conception and he never developed into a normal baby. When he was a youngster, we had to keep him locked up in a room. He has the instincts of an animal. Oh, he’s not dangerous or anything like that, but to this day we keep him locked up in a room.” Diana also reveals that Monica hates her because they have different mothers and that her mother was mysteriously poisoned after she was born. Vowing to no longer keep secrets from one another, Gerald also describes his own rather unsavory family background, stating, “My father deserted my mother when I was five. Two years later, he was arrested for raping and murdering a six year-old girl” for which he was subsequently hanged where “he hung there for two weeks. His body became so hideous that they had to cut it down for health reasons. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the yard of an insane asylum. Two weeks later my mother died of grief and shame.” After his mother died, Gerald was shipped to an orphanage in Scotland where he was regularly stripped naked and beaten by sexually sadistic nuns. Instead of being turned off and disturbed by her husband’s story, Diana declares, “my god, I love you so much” and embraces Gerald, who has no idea that his wife is a two-faced wench that has pernicious plans for him and her family. 

 Eventually, Pa Mooney gets around to berating his daughter Diana, telling her that she is “playing with fire” due to her marriage and proclaiming, “…the Mooney’s are a selfish lot…but we need that selfishness in order to exist. When we think of the family continuing, we must not think of ourselves but the family as a whole. We’re the last of the Mooneys and we must protect our heritage. Society does not accept us because of what we are, so we’re an enemy of society and we must protect ourselves by being self-sufficient.” Of course, Pa loves his youngest daughter more than any of his other children and sees the rest of the family as completely expendable. After dealing with enough of his wife’s family’s demented behavior, Gerald confesses, "I’m not happy here” and “there’s something not normal here, I don’t like it” and even offers to give up painting and get a real job if she agrees to move out of Mooney manor, but she refuses. On top of that, Phoebe and various other family members encourage Gerald to divorce Diana, but he flatly refuses, even after discovering the mangled and dismembered corpses of chickens that retarded beast brother Malcolm has rabidly slaughtered and devoured. When brother Mortimer attempts to comfort Diana and recommends she divorce Gerald for the sake of the family, she responds, “I don’t think this family stands much chance of surviving as a whole for much longer. I think we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves.” 

 Meanwhile, in a pointless subplot, Monica goes to a shop after killing her pet rat “Ben” with a butcher knife (since Hope Stansbury refused to kill the animal, Milligan apparently coerced a boy sporting a dress into killing the rodent) and buys a couple human-eating rodents from the cripple vendor Mr. Micawber (Chris Shore), who lost his arm and part of his face (which is partly black, as if Milligan was too cheap to get the actor’s face completely covered in blackface) after his rats got a hold of him when he was asleep. After killing the rats, penny-pinching mad cunt Monica attempts to return them to Mr. Micawber because she doesn’t want any “ungrateful rats,” but he adamantly refuses as he spent all the money on booze, so she malevolently murders him. Meanwhile, Diana goes to a curious queen ‘gunsmith’ (played by Mr. Milligan) and has her hubby Gerald’s silver cross turned into silver bullets, as she expects all her siblings to transform into wolves as a result of the full moon. Meanwhile, Pa Mooney finally kicks the bucket and eldest sister Phoebe becomes so upset that she reveals that she and her father carried on a love affair and that she also poisoned Diana’s mother out of jealously. From there, Phoebe then transforms into a werewolf and all the other siblings follow except Diana. While most of the siblings end up killing each other while in lycanthrope mode, Gerald ends up shooting Mortimer with the silver bullets that were made from his mother’s cross. In a twist ending, Diana finally reveals her true character by telling Gerald that she no longer has any use for him because he has impregnated her, declaring, “I’m different from the rest of my family…I can change myself at will,” transforms herself into a werewolf, and slaughters her beloved. 

 In his biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan (2001), Milligan’s comrade Jimmy McDonough wrote in regard to his decided dissatisfaction with The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, “RATS is hampered by a talky script; flat, amateurish performances; and effects that are bad even by Milligan standards. Seeing Hope Stansbury and the rest of the cast skulk through the shadows in very cheap werewolf makeup is funny for about a second, but the film meanders. It just doesn’t possess the crazed energy one expects from Milligan in this period.” Indeed, aside from dark-haired diva Stansbury, who seems like a meta-bitch prom queen high on coke and PCP, all of the performances in the film are conspicuously plagued by just plain bad and seemingly unending mediocrity and banality, not to mention the fact that the direction is shockingly dull and oftentimes nonsensical (with many of the scenes being far too dark to see anything), and the special effects and makeup are akin to that of a play put on by autistic preschoolers, yet the work will ultimately at least slightly wet the lips and semi-satisfy anyone that has gotten used to the nasty habit of devouring Milligan’s misanthropic family melodramas. Notable for being Milligan’s first PG-rated work despite featuring a pointless scene where a real rat is tortured and killed with a knife, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! is arguably the most impotent and insipid werewolf flick ever made as a work where the lycanthropes are slow and clumsy like Special Olympics contestants and ultimately meet their demise in exceedingly anti-climactic ways that make it quite clear that the director had little, if any, interest in the horror elements of the film and was much more interested in the venomous verbal (and sometimes physical) bitch fights between the rather repellant female characters. Additionally, the film is also notable for the fact that the female leads look more like New Jersey-debased guidettes than cultivated members of a Northern European aristocracy, with the pseudo-medieval England of Torture Dungeon (1970), which was shot on the quasi-beaches of Staten Island and starred a number of sub-literate working-class wops, being even more believable. Indeed, despite being shot at the scenic Hampstead Heath estate in London, which was also used for Milligan’s previous film The Body Beneath as well as Joseph Losey’s big budget psychological-thriller Secret Ceremony (1968) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow, the film has about as much ‘Gothic’ atmosphere as an early 1990s mestizo boy band. If Tennessee Williams suffered brain damage after a car wreck, got addicted to Roger Corman horror turds and queer style misogyny, and was sent to England with a couple thousand bucks given to him by some scheming Semitic exploitation producer like David F. Friedman to direct a cheap quickie lycanthrope flick, it would have probably resembled The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, which is certifiably Milligan-esque in all the wrong ways!

-Ty E