Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
Welcome!
This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.
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Director: Dan O’Bannon
While showing a new employee around a medical supplies warehouse, manager Frank accidentally cracks open a military canister containing a chemical that can bring dead bodies back to life. The leak infects a corpse in the freezer which they manage to dismember and cremate, but the contaminated smoke falls on a nearby graveyard.
This is a high energy, gory teen comedy, with plenty of slapstick moments, just like Evil Dead 2, but it’s more of an ensemble piece than that. The punks hanging out in the graveyard are everything I wish I’d been as a teen — vibrant, trashy, horny, loud, and sometimes naked in public. The downside is that there’s too much shouted dialogue in small rooms.
Hidden in the chaos is a tragic moment when an undead woman, tied to a table, is asked why she needs to eat people’s brains, and she says it’s the only thing that eases the pain of being dead. Which broke my heart a bit.
Evil Dead 2 (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
In the role he is most famous for, Bruce Campbell tears up the screen as Ash, a man who wanted to have a romantic weekend in the woods with his girlfriend, Linda, and is instead made to fight for his life against demon-possessed corpses. And trees.
It starts with a recording of a missing archaeologist reading mysterious words from The Book of the Dead. This summons a demon who quickly possesses Linda. When the professor’s daughter, Henrietta, arrives looking for her father, instead she finds a half-mad Ash covered in blood, and her undead mother in the cellar.
It’s showing its age and budget constraints, but this is more than made up for by the charisma of the cast, Raimi’s creativity with the camera, and a relentless pace that doesn’t let up. Ash’s transformation from awkward nerd via slapstick comedy and self-mutilation to action hero is one of the wonders of the horror genre.
Director: Tobe Hooper
Continuing my Tobe Hooper deep dive, Invaders from Mars takes us to small town America, a loving family, and a boy, David Carlsen, watching lights land in the field behind his home. Neither of his parents believe him, but the next morning his father has a cut on the back of his neck and is behaving strangely. Soon people all over town are doing the same and David is on the run.
Hooper is playing with a pastiche of black and white science-fiction films, but subverting it by having the aliens turn people into conformist fifties stereotypes instead of communists as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wish it were shorter, less of a children’s film, and with a sharper ending — there’s too much shouting and running around. Karen Black as school nurse Linda has fun hamming it up when the impressively gross and made-with-practical-effects aliens appear. Fun fact: David was played by her real son, Hunter Carson.
I didn’t know Hooper did this pivot from horror into sci-fi. He signed a three-movie deal with Cannon after Poltergeist, of which Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars were the first two. I’m not sure I’ve got the will for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part 2.
Lifeforce (1985)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper had a long career and is still talked about reverently on the film podcasts I listen to, but I’d only seen his greatest hits — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, and The Funhouse. But where to start with his other films… naked space vampires hidden in Halley‘s Comet, you say? I’m in!
Colonel Tom Carlsen is the only survivor of a science expedition into the tail of Halley’s Comet that discovered an alien spaceship inside it holding three humanoid aliens encased in glass. The aliens seem unharmed and are taken to a UK army facility. The female breaks free and escapes into the countryside, so the British government bring in Colonel Colin Caine to work with Carlsen, who seems to have a psychic connection with the alien woman, to track her down. The alien spacecraft leaves the comet and approaches Earth, and the aliens plan for humankind soon becomes clear.
Like The Quatermass Experiment, astronauts bring alien life home with them, but Lifeforce looks like it had a big budget, with lots of guns, explosions, London in flames, hundreds of zombie-like extras running around, army units, helicopters, the whole shebang. It looks amazing. The Space Girl (!) walks around naked for the first half of the film, coolly dispatching all who attempt to stop her by sucking psychic energy from her victims.
Carlsen is both her strength and her vulnerability. There’s a whole explanation of how she’s shape-shifted to appear as his idealised woman, and his unhinged behaviour in her presence is an amusing manifestation of how it feels to be in love in that crazy way where the other person isn’t seen as real — in this case, a seven-foot tall bat creature.
Infinity Pool (2023)
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
James and Em travel to a luxurious resort in an obscure foreign country to help James find ideas for his next novel. It’s been six years since his debut, so when flirtatious fan Gabi invites them to dinner with her husband, James accepts, and the foursome soon find themselves outside the resort driving to a deserted beach in a rented car. On the way back, James drives into a local farmer, killing them, and the local police explain that the penalty for doing that is death… but if they can afford it, the police can make a clone of James, and the clone can be killed instead.
It’s wonderful that the films of father and son are in conversation with each other. Crimes of the Future is about a man’s desire to use his natural generative energy (aka organs) for art. Infinity Pool is about the price a man will pay to escape the despair of writer’s block. Gabi switches from seductive to direct to monstrous in the blink of an eye, which is at times very funny, and like us James is transfixed.
At the start, Em half-jokes that she is with the creatively impotent James because of daddy issues, but James has far more destructive mother issues, swapping the financially supportive but emasculating Em for the manipulative Gabi who demands James prove his strength though ever more dangerous acts. His self-destructive nature meets its match in someone who wants to test him to destruction.
Director: David Cronenberg
I’m more drawn to the philosophical body horror with which David Cronenberg started his career: Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome. That’s as distinctive and interesting run of films as anyone’s ever made. The extremes of the psyche and technology are again to the fore in Crimes of the Future, which is a clear call at the end of his career back to the beginning.
Saul has “accelerated evolution syndrome”, which means his body is constantly creating new organs without an obvious purpose, and while he is often uncomfortable, he cannot feel pain. His artistic partner Caprice performs surgery to remove the organs in front of live audiences as performance art. This attracts the attention of two overly-into-it civil servants at a new National Organ Registry, as well as the government police, a pair of tech mechanics, and the father of a murdered child.
It’s a chaotic film, full of graphic mutilation, big ideas and knowing performances that lead to some laugh-out-loud moments. The ridiculousness of humans’ desire to replace the wonders of the natural body with technological equivalents is clear, and as one character says, surgery is the new sex. It feels like this film is a raised eyebrow from Cronenberg at his whole career. Perhaps he’s making sure we got the joke.
Messiah of Evil (1973)
Director: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz
Sticking with the year of my birth, Messiah of Evil is a masterpiece in a different vein to Don’t Look Now. The mood is just as intense, but achieved through a series of impressive set pieces, a creepy seaside location, unsettling set designs, and a constant drip of respectable-looking citizens doing weird and unsettling things.
Arletty is looking for her artist father who’s gone missing from his home in the seaside town of Point Dune. She runs into Thom, who is interested in the legend of Point Dune’s blood moon, but is familiar with her father’s work and didn’t know that’s where he lived. He and his girlfriends, Toni and Laura, appear at Arletty’s father’s empty beach house because the townsfolk won’t rent the unconventional group a room. Going through her father’s increasingly morbid diaries, they try to understand the mystery of his disappearance as the danger from the oddly-behaving townsfolk grows.
A pickup truck has bodies in the back with eyes gouged out. An artist’s studio is painted with staring faces. Groups of suited people gather over bins in alleyways. People bleed from the eyes for no reason. The slightly sleazy Thom begins to care for Arletty, who might be succumbing to the town’s evil, and honestly, I can’t get enough of this vibe.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
A friend suggested we see Don’t Look Now on the big screen, and that’s how I found out it was fifty years old — like me. A potent year. It hasn’t been that long since I last saw it, October 2019 in fact, but it still felt fresh, and there are so many small touches of artistry it was like seeing it for the first time.
Laura and John’s daughter Christine drowns in the garden pond, and as a reaction they move to Venice where John works on restoring an old church. His avoidance of grief damages their marriage, so when two sisters approach Laura, one of them a psychic, telling her Christine is happy in the afterlife, John hates the idea, and as Laura finds comfort in the sisters’ presence, John becomes more and more obsessed with his work and the brutal murders simultaneously taking place in the city.
It’s a masterpiece — a ghost story, sort of, a psychological thriller and family drama, certainly, but I think the reason it’s still talked about is the magical way Laura and John’s marriage is portrayed as they excavate the grief that’s pushing them apart. Everything works as a whole - the score, the imagery, the editing, the script, the acting — it’s a perfect film.
Director: Ken Russell
This was the first time I’d seen this film since being a teen. Eve Trent and her sister, Mary, are running a B&B in the Peak District after the mysterious disappearance of their parents the year before. Archaeologist guest Angus uncovers a monstrous skull in their garden, to the great interest of their suddenly returned neighbour Lady Sylvia Marsh. Landowner Lord James D’Ampton is a descendent of the knight who killed the mythical White Worm in the nearby caves, so when the skull is stolen from the Trent’s house, he takes an interest.
What a difference thirty years makes. It’s camp horror fun with a nasty edge. I taped this off the TV back in the day and watched certain bits over and over on a fuzzy screen trying to work out exactly what was going on. Naked nuns and Amanda Donohoe were going on, of course, but that’s what being in the sticks in the eighties was like. Stimulation was scarce. But as a film, it was dull — not scary, the plot made no sense, and it felt like a comedy failing to be funny. I WAS SO WRONG.
Perhaps I’m being dazzled by the creative will that brought the low budget films I’m watching this year into existence, but I found this to be joyful, anarchic, erotic, disgusting, surreal — qualities I don’t find in many modern films. Ken Russell was a genius.
Slugs (1988)
Director: Juan Piquer Simón
A slimy romp where a small town has been infested with slugs coming up through the sewers into people’s homes. Public health officer Mike Brady gets suspicious when a local drunk is found half-eaten in his dilapidated house on the edge of town. When more people start to die in horrific ways, the (seriously grumpy) local sheriff doesn’t listen to any of Brady’s concerns… yes, it’s a bit like Jaws.
The slugs aren’t particularly scary, but the ideas are, and there are some fine set pieces, the standout being a man in a restaurant who ingests part of a slug in his lettuce and basically explodes at his table. Of course, it’s silly — it’s called Slugs! — but as lots of these cheap 70s and 80s horrors were, it’s creative, fun and weirdly sexy.