A closer look at Donald Cammell’s psychedelic Sci-Fi horror masterpiece

There’s a look, a tone and visual texture to science fiction films from the early to mid 1970’s; a sanitized glimpse of a future that, seen today, exists only as a perversion of the past. The blinking light boards, silly tubes that lead nowhere, white washed walls, turtleneck wearing intellectuals, the list goes on. Think of the great glossy glimpses into ersatz tomorrows of that era – THX 1183, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, SOYLENT GREEN, LOGAN’S RUN, CLONUS – and you’ll see what I mean. But outside of the curiously antiseptic funkiness of their art direction, 1970’s sci-fi was also incredibly thoughtful and bold, criticizing politics, people and modern technology with a somber humorlessness and nightmarish immediacy that suited the material beautifully.

Then Star Wars came along and fucked it all up.

But the very same year that George Lucas and his company of Goodwill-garbed action figures were saving Hollywood’s waning box office takes by demolishing sophisticated cinema, wobble-psyched British filmmaker Donald Cammell was unleashing his own mind bending glimpse at a far grimmer future. A loose adaptation of a very early and only so-so same named Dean R. Koontz pulp thriller, Cammell’s seminal (and I mean that literally) 1977 technology run amok masterwork DEMON SEED has never gotten its dues as a serious piece of sci-fi / horror cinema. Don’t get me wrong, the film has its fans, but, I mean, I’ve never seen anyone prancing about with a picture of an electrode wearing Julie Christie on a T-shirt or anything. But if you follow me down into prophetic disco-era cyberspace for the next few paragraphs, you may just find yourself wanting one.

Continue reading “On DEMON SEED” →

In conversation with an icon of Spanish horror

Legendary Spanish horror actress Lone Fleming on her role in TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and its sequel ATTACK OF THE BLIND DEAD.

There was a period, a golden age for European horror, one that coincided with a demand in the US for grittier, sexier material, a wave launched post BONNIE AND CLYDE and one that evolved right in the middle of the visceral media coverage of the Vietnam war. With the MPAA loosening their belt, a wave of “new guard” young filmmakers emerging and the movies at the drive-in mirroring the real sex and shenanigans that went on in teenagers back-seats, European distributors saw an opportunity to make some money by injecting their fantasy films with grand dollops of suddenly commercial and permitted sex and violence, while never sacrificing that patented atmosphere, eccentric narrative arcs and textural sensuality.

In the middle of that wild wave came Spanish director Amando de Ossorio’s terrifying and surreal 1971 chiller LA NOCHE DEL TERROR CIEGO or as it was known in the US and other English language territories, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (or in the truncated AIP version, simply THE BLIND DEAD). Often dismissed as a Latin redux of Romero’s groundbreaking zombie classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, TOMBS is something richer, darker and ripe with mythology. In it, three friends – macho Roger, his girlfriend Virginia and her college friend Betty – go for a pleasant train ride into the Portuguese countryside. However, as the ride progresses, we learn in flashback that Virginia and Betty had a lesbian relationship in school and now, as Roger and Betty appear to be getting a little chummier that she’d like, Virginia has a momentary breakdown, jumps from the moving train and wanders to the ruined nearby church nestled at the foot of the hill.

And that’s when the terror begins.

Virginia’s comely presence rouses a mummified sect of blood-drinking, centuries dead Templar Knights, their skeletal, eyeless and hooded visages shambling out of their graves in a mass of fog, wielding swords, riding equally desiccated horses and looking for victims. Shot in gauzy slow-motion, the Templar attack sequences are the stuff nightmares are made of and the horror film that supports their appearance is equally eerie.

Ossorio’s signature magnum macabre opus would spawn three more Templar companion films 1973’s ATTACK OF THE BLIND DEAD (aka RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD), 1974’s THE GHOST GALLEON (aka HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES) and 1975’s NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS,  but none would reach the heights of fright that TOMBS offers in its finest hour.

At the center of TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD’s humanity is a compelling turn by actress Lone Fleming as Betty, a strong woman whose love for her murdered friend spurs her on to solve the mystery of the blind monsters. And Fleming is no stranger to horror. Along with TOMBS, she would star in Ossorio’s ATTACK OF THE BLIND DEAD and his 1975 EXORCIST clone, DEMON WITCH CHILD as well as others like Mario Sicilano’s BLACK CANDLES and 1973’s IT HAPPENED AT NIGHTMARE INN directed by her husband of many years, HORROR EXPRESS legend Eugenio Martin.

With her blue eyes, strong features and earthy sensuality, Fleming’s presence always added a kind of intelligent beauty to whatever picture she graced and it’s that intellect that makes her one of the most interesting survivors of the Spanish horror boom.

Now in her 60’s,  Fleming looks fantastic, embraces her cult movie past and now has a successful career as a fine artist, working in paint and sculpture.

ALEXANDER: Let’s go back to your early days in cinema. What was the climate in Spain like at the time, creatively speaking? Was it hard to find roles? Did you have to audition a lot?

FLEMING: You know there were a lot of films going on when I came to Spain. Really, it was almost an industry because we had a lot of comedies, a lot of terror or horror films. Everybody was really working and we didn’t get a lot of money. You know I started from the bottom but I’m very professional and that is one of the most important things for you to get the role. If you’re good, if they like you and you’re professional then it’s much easier.

ALEXANDER: At what point did you meet your husband? Was it during a film?

FLEMING: We met on the film, as you call it in United States, DEATH AT THE DEEP END OF THE SWIMMING POOL  (aka THE FOURTH VICTIM) with Carroll Baker and Michael Craig.

ALEXANDER: Ah, so you met on set. That’s fantastic. What was that initial connection? Was it love at first sight?

FLEMING: Yeah it was. And then we went out and it went on and off and I went to Denmark and I came back and it went on and off again for many years and of course it was a secret.

ALEXANDER: Do you ever go back and watch any of your older films?

FLEMING: Sometimes if I have to go to a festival and I know they want to ask me about something then I go in and have a look at it. I never like myself in films.

ALEXANDER: Why is that?

FLEMING: I don’t know (laughs). When you do a role you sink yourself so much into it that you don’t know how you’re going to come off on the screen. I never think about if the light is correct on my face, if I look better this way, I just jump into the role and I couldn’t care less if I’m not pretty from that side or the other.

ALEXANDER: The late Jess Franco spoke often about how hard it was to make these kinds of films in Spain initially because of General Franco’s pious rule. Did you feel any effect of that? Did it adversely affect the arts in your opinion?

Continue reading “Interview: Lone Fleming on TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and more” →

Late, great character actor discusses the making of a horror fantasy classic

In 1971, late actor Paul Koslo starred in director Richard Sarafian’s existential 1971 automobile thriller VANISHING POINT. But that same year, Koslo also starred in the second adaptation of Richard Matheson’s influential novella I AM LEGEND, THE OMEGA MAN, whose magnificent Ron Grainer score we discussed here last week.

In THE OMEGA MAN, Koslo plays the laid back Dutch, a motorcycle riding refugee of a dead world inherited by a legion of deranged, hooded mutants intent on destroying any trace of humanity left on the planet, chiefly two-fisted survivor Robert Neville (Charlton Heston).

And though Koslo would also star in many other notable ‘70s film, including the TRUE GRIT sequel ROOSTER COGBURN, the Charles Bronson vehicle MR. MAJESTYK, Jack Starret’s THE LOSERS and Michael Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE, it’s his tales of fighting side by side with the larger than life Heston in Boris Sagal s brilliant THE OMEGA MAN that concerns us today.

Here’s some words I once had (excerpted from a longer chat I published in the pages of FANGORIA) with Koslo, who we lost in 2019 and who remains one of the greatest character actors of 1970’s cult cinema.

ALEXANDER: Can you tell us about your humble beginnings?

KOSLO: Well, I was born in Germany during the end of the war and, you know, the whole country was decimated, totally destroyed; so all of our parents were like disoriented, like, what the hell happened?” and the kids, well, we were running amok. I was 4 or 5 and there was tanks rumbling down the street and the Brits and Americans were throwing out Wrigley’s spearmint gum and Hershey bars and the kids were going crazy. We had no supervision. We started to fantasize about America, about cowboys and Indians, or what we thought were cowboy and Indians. Then, when I was 7 we immigrated to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. This is in 1951. We couldn’t speak any English so in school they would say stuff like “Germs are bad I thought they were saying Germans. I ended up fighting with people a lot. We were like aliens. We were always in trouble.

ALEXANDER: Did your parents embrace your decision to become an actor?

KOSLO: Actually, my dad was a career soldier and so was my grandfather and my great grandfather. He was a hard guy to get to know. So I up and left home when I was 13 and never looked back. See, to him, I was never an actor. It didn’t matter that I had been in over 100 TV shows and movies. He wouldn’t hear it.

ALEXANDER: Let’s talk about how you ended up as the other last man on earth in one of my favorite films, THE OMEGA MAN. Tell me about Charlton Heston; what did you learn from him?

Continue reading “Interview: Paul Koslo on THE OMEGA MAN” →

Why Boris Sagal’s 1971 pulse-pounder is a terrible adaptation of a perfect book, but still a great movie.

I got to know iconic author and genre-lit icon Richard Matheson during the last stretch of his life and, while I’m forever grateful for that 11th hour connection, the version of Matheson I met was anything but cheerful in regards to his work. And really, he had many reasons to be irate. When Matheson first began self-adapting his stories for Rod Serling in THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Serling left the author alone to transpose his own tales to fit the show’s format. Later, TV horror hero Dan Curtis (DARK SHADOWS) also ensured Matheson’s many scripts remained untouched (THE NIGHT STALKER, DRACULA etc.) and the resulting pictures speak for themselves. The reason guys like Serling and Curtis did this was because they fully understood just how good a scribe Matheson was and how well he was able to bring his words to simple, cinematic life.

Among that trove of tales and tomes penned by the late, great Matheson, its his terrifying, cerebral and existential 1954 novella I AM LEGEND that has perhaps most greatly defined his legacy. I AM LEGEND pioneered a gap-bridging between science fiction and Gothic fantasy, with its lurid, skin-crawling story of a plague that eliminates the living, only to resurrect them as blood-hungry vampires. In it, only one human has inexplicably remained immune to this apocalypse, a suburbanite named Robert Neville, who boards himself up at night with mirrors and garlic to ward off the monsters who want to drain him, while sifting through the city by day and staking the ghouls in their lairs. It’s a sparse set up for a book, but at its core its an epic tale of one man’s journey into his own soul, a personal, harrowing, meditation on loss, love, loneliness and what it is to truly be “alive”.

The novella (my favorite book of all time, incidentally) is written, in typical Serling fashion, practically, with a few key locations and characters (both living and undead); a packaged gift to Hollywood, elemental to adapt, economical to produce. Really, all one needs to make a proper screen version of I AM LEGEND is faithfulness to the story, a sense of style and mood and one helluva a central actor to embody Neville and his exhausting evolution.

Matheson knew this.

“So why does Hollywood keep fucking it up?!” he said to me back in 2003.

That’s the eternal question. The answer is anybody’s guess.

Britain’s Hammer studio hired Matheson to adapt his text as NIGHT CREATURES in the early ’60s, but the project died after the UK censor pre-banned it for being too violent in concept alone. Annoyed by this, Matheson took his script to producer Robert L. Lippert who took it to American International Pictures and mounted a low budget Italian/American picture called THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. Matheson was told Fritz Lang would direct, but instead he got Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona, with AIP standby Vincent Price starring as Neville, who was inexplicably renamed Robert Morgan during re-write. More changes were made to the script against Matheson’s wishes, causing the exasperated writer to slap his pen name Logan Swanson on the credits. The resulting film is – despite Matheson’s sneering – an excellent little horror drama and embodies much of the soul of the source book. But the changes that ARE made are so odd and pointless, one wonders why they were done at all.

Continue reading “On THE OMEGA MAN” →

John “Bud” Cardos’ underrated eco-ghoul film still packs a punch

The dawn of the 1980’s saw more than its share of eco-minded, “human monster” movies, a sub-genre spawned most likely by the one-two-punch of George A. Romero’s ghoul virus 1978 masterpiece DAWN OF THE DEAD and James Bridges shattering and successful 1979 thriller THE CHINA SYNDROME. Films like director Graham Baker’s Meg Tilly and Tim Matheson vs.Freudian-zombie vehicle IMPULSE (itself somewhat reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s 1975 breakthrough exploitation film SHIVERS) and Hal Barwood’s underrated 1985 toxic-zombie chiller WARNING SIGN; movies that mixed corporate cover-ups with sacrificial small-town paranoia, usually dealing with some sort of spill that mutates average people, causing them to do terrible things to any non-infected person within biting distance.

One of the best of this lot is KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS helmer John “Bud” Cardos’ lean and mean horror gem NIGHT SHADOWS, widely released on home video and cable in the 1980’s as MUTANT, a title it retains to this day.

It’s a shame its distributor decided to slap that moniker on such an eerie, urgent and earthy horror film; MUTANT is the alternate title for Roger Corman’s ALIEN ripoff FORBIDDEN WORLD and the packaging for Cardos’ film had that handle displayed, widely-spaced letters a la ALIEN and even featured a Giger-like fanged face on the front. In some European markets it was even released as MUTANT II.

Those looking for a deep-space shocker in line with Ridley Scott, were bound to be bummed.

MUTANT does have a dose of science-fiction at its core, but it’s the maddest kind of science, spawned by man, not the stars. Rather, the movie is an atmospheric, unpretentious down-home horror flick that, more often than not, feels like Meth-fueled remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV movie adaptation of Stephen King’s SALEM’S LOT.

Continue reading “On MUTANT” →

Sprawling drama takes on the horrors of the opioid industry

Writer/director Nicholas Jarecki’s mesmerizing anti-opioid film CRISIS is being marketed as a thriller, which it is, I suppose. Structurally, its triple-arc, multi-character, puzzle-box narrative behaves like many drug-centric thrillers that have come before it (Steven Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC being the obvious comparison) and certainly, it occasionally has some of the dizzying flash of a Scorsese film as it zips around explaining the mechanics of an international narcotics operation, complete with narrated expository sequences slathered in The Rolling Stones. But really, at its core, CRISIS is a kind of horror movie; a human tragedy where the monster is not the drug itself (as in something like, say, Darren Aronofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, where the smack was the villain) but a kind of banal, socio-economical bottom line; one exploited by fringe-dwelling hustlers, status-quo intellects and corporate kingpins alike. And while CRISIS shines lights on the grafters and amoral parasites who push these pills around, its focus is mainly on the victims of their trade, who sell their souls and who are often duped into doing so while trustingly filling a prescription.

Armie Hammer (THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.) stars as Jack Kelly, a dangerously deep undercover DEA agent posing as the middle man for a Canadian/Armenian opioid drug cabal that has wound its way into America and who lives in constant fear of his ruthless associates discovering his true identity. Meanwhile, in Detroit, straight-laced professor Dr. Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman, late of MANK) slowly begins to realize that a supposedly safe painkiller his University has helped develop is anything but. And elsewhere at the same time, architect Claire Reimann (Evangeline Lilly, ANT-MAN) is shattered when her teenage son is found dead after an apparent Oxycontin overdose, a truth that doesn’t sit well with her when an autopsy reveals that he has in fact been battered about the skull, the pills potentially poured down his throat instead of being ingested willingly. All three of these tenuously connected stories come together in ingenious ways to hit home a singular truth: our society is in the grip of a passive, silent enemy that infested the corners of our lives like vermin and, if not addressed soon, will continue to breed and evolve. A crisis, indeed.

Continue reading “On CRISIS” →

A look at Michael Winner’s leering 1977 theological horror film

What are horror films but morality tales whose serpentine roots lie deeply grounded in campfire ghost stories, myth, folklore, fairy tales and of course, in theology. Organized religion has almost universally employed narratives of fear and terror as warning signs to obey the rules and exist divinely, to avoid the pitfalls of base temptation and vice lest ye be tossed into the bubbling cauldrons of Hell itself. And Since Edison first ran his one reel Frankenstein through a Kinetiscope, this pious, raw, stripping-down of elements both spiritual and corporeal have exemplified the best efforts our beloved genre has to offer.

Now, as any good student of history should know, the 1960’s were a time of change in America and abroad; of social and political upheaval. With JFK getting his noggin shattered on live television and the bloody shadow of the Vietnam conflict looming large, the people – fresh out of the pastel perfect 1950’s-were no longer blindly trusting of their flag, of themselves…or of their God.

Right and wrong became blurry. Black and white dissolved into various shades of grey. Good didn’t always conquer evil and sometimes The Devil would win and there was nothing your endless bible-to-bosom clutching could do about it. As the 60’s oozed into the 1970’s, Americans were shell shocked and, much like the angry youth coming out of post-war Germany, Italy and France, they began to seriously question their previously unchallenged beliefs. And, as mainstream pop culture began to reflect this disenfranchisement, so then did horror movies become more morally checkered, delivering the bleakest, most nihilistic answers imaginable.

So too then were the streams of guarded religious idealism attacked with profitable and controversial relish. This cycle of irreverent, theology-based pop-terror started in 1968 with Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s bestseller ROSEMARY’S BABY; it went sexually rabid with Ken Russell’s depraved 1971 melodrama THE DEVILS; it perfected itself with William Friedkin’s 1973 classic THE EXORCIST and it climaxed with the operatic pulp of Richard Donner’s 1976 shocker THE OMEN. But one picture that sought to ride this potentially blasphemous wave got lost in the shuffle, coming out after films about the persuasive power of The Devil were popular, receiving its cinematic communion perhaps a wee bit too late. Though many people that saw it theatrically back in 1977 still cite it as one of the scariest movies ever made, for whatever reason THE SENTINEL has kind of, sort of just disappeared from those omnipresent “best horror movies” discussions. It still exists primarily on the fringe.

Pity poor Alison Parker (Christina Raines, NIGHTMARES), beautiful model and actress by day and nail biting nervous wreck by night. As a teenager she accidentally stumbled upon her father engaging in a tawdry threesome with two rather rotund whores and, after being beaten by her old man for the intrusion, promptly dragged a razor blade across her own wrist. Though she survived the bungled suicide, years later she tries again after her lover’s wife, who, upon discovering her hubby’s infidelity, jumps from a bridge to her own emotionally devastated demise. Again, Alison lives through it. Now shacked up with said lover, a slightly sinister high priced lawyer named Michael (FRIGHT NIGHT’s Chris Sarandon), the terminally tortured starlet, feeling she needs some much needed independence and space to figure out who she is, rents an apartment in a looming NYC brownstone.

Continue reading “On THE SENTINEL” →