Horror Archive

This sleazy little film was a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. Director Pete Walker generates a fair amount of tension early on, and populates the film with some entertainingly bonkers characters, plus plenty of naked female flesh.

When the appropriately named Mark E. Desade picks up a young French model, Ann-Marie (played, with a surprisingly decent French accent, by Penny Irving) he soon displays a perchance for the perverse but it’s only when takes her home to meet his mum and dad that things really get interesting. Dad’s a demented old judge and mum’s a sadistic ex-prison warden and they’ve set up there own correctional facility for wayward young ladies, where even the simplest crime results in the ultimate penalty. The prison is staffed by a pair of matrons, one a butch older woman with lesbian tendencies, the other getting her pleasure from torturing the inmates.

It’s more thoughtful than you might think though, David McGillivray’s script portraying the would-be defenders of morality as the real perverts. Most of the torture isn’t explicitly shown and while early on some of the nudity is pure titillation, there’s little to get you excited once the story moves to the prison (unless of course you’re as twisted as the people who run it). It also displays a ruthless efficiency with its characters, leaving you wondering if anyone will survive to see the credits.

I’ve a lot of time for the Pang Brothers, their films are visually stylish but not at the expense of character and they’ve managed to avoid getting pigeonholed as horror directors. The Eye is probably their most well known film, and also the most successful, spawning two sequels, but I found it a little disappointing and not particularly original.

A cornea transplant patient starts seeing dead people and the mysterious shadow figures that come to take them away. Sound familiar? The Eye borrows a lot from The Sixth Sense and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it.

The pace of the film is quite slow, not uncommon for Asian horror films, and adds to the feeling of mounting tension and there are some very creepy set pieces. Angelica Lee is excellent as Wong Kar Mun the woman who regains her sight after being blind since she was an infant but the love story angle of the film, that sees her doctor falling for her, doesn’t work and feels superfluous.

The film seems to lose its way at the end, with the reason behind the visions more tragic than terrifying, something the Pang’s must have realised as they seem to rush through this part of the film in order to get to the Hollywood style explosive climax, which put me in mind of The Mothman Prophecies, a film that was released a few months before The Eye. I can’t help wondering if this ending was a late addition, something the brothers came up with after seeing Mothman but regardless, it feels at odds the with quiet chills that are generated throughout the rest of the film.

This is the small-group-of-people-in-a-confined-space-trying-to-keep-the-monsters-out style horror movie that has an obvious appeal to those with a limited budget. We’ve seen it so often, in everything from Night of the Living Dead to Dog Soldiers, yet, if it’s backed up by a clever script and a director who knows what he’s doing, it can still be extremely effective.

The writing team of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton know their horror movies and take great delight in turning the genre conventions upside down. To say too much would be to spoil the surprises, but it’s fair to say that very early in the film you’ll realise it’s not going to be easy to predict who will still be standing at the end of the film.

Director John Gulager manages to create plenty of tension and some cool action set pieces as well as showing a commendable talent for early Peter Jackson style gross out humour. He may have lacked for money but blood definitely isn’t in short supply.

The cast is made up of mostly unknowns with a few familiar faces here and there. Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes and the director’s dad, Clu Gulager, are the familiar faces. Mewes isn’t around for long and Getty seems to be playing Charlie Sheen but Rollins is great fun playing against type as a gun hating coach who’s in the bar when the shit hits the fan. As for Clu Gulager, for a guy in his seventies he’s looking pretty good and it’s nice to see the old pro getting stuck in to the action.

Set, for the most part, in just one cell in a French prison, Maléfique has an intensely claustrophobic feel to it. The lead character is Carrère, a white collar criminal doing time for fraud. Sharing the room with him are some very eccentric characters – Marcus, a transvestite muscleman, Paquerette, a retarded young man who grew up living with pigs before eating his infant sister and Lassalle an intellectual driven mad by too much knowledge who murdered his wife at breakfast one morning.

When these odd and decidedly unpleasant characters stumble on a book hidden in one of the walls, written by a serial killer at the start of the twentieth century, things start to get a little weird. For as well as being a serial killer, Danvers, the books author, was also adept in black magic. When they realise that the spells in the book really work they see it as a way to escape their prison, but will it lead them to freedom or to eternal damnation? To call this Hellraiser meets Cube in a French prison would be oversimplifying things but there are certainly elements of those films present. It’s to the writers’ credit that this never feels like a rehash of old ideas.

I’ve never come across any of the cast before but they are uniformly excellent. With such an enclosed environment the interaction of the characters is very much to the fore, and it’s down to the playing of these four actors that the film is so successful. While director Eric Valette cranks up the tension admirably and there are some extremely effective gory set pieces it’s the characters that will stay in your memory.

Prior to The Devil’s Men in 1976 Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence had appeared together in three classic productions – the 1954 BBC TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, the Burke and Hare tale The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) and From Beyond the Grave, one of the best of the Amicus anthology films, in 1973. Given that, I had high hopes for this US/Greek co-production. Silly me.

Pleasance hams it up as an Irish priest convinced the Devil is up to no good in a little Greek village, while Cushing gets too little screen time to do anything with the part of Baron Corofax, the Devil’s right hand man. The actors portraying the young tourists captured by the Minotaur worshipping cult were obviously picked for looks and a willingness to get their kit off rather than any great thespian ability. Unfortunately it fairs no better at titillation that at terrifying the audience.

From a historical perspective the film is probably most noteworthy for having a score by Brian Eno. While not his best work it’s a cut above the rest of the film, although, as you might expect from such an avant-garde composer, it sounds dated now.

Even for a diehard Cushing fan like me this was a chore to sit through, so unless you‘re a Cushing, Pleasence or Eno completist I’d recommend steering clear.