Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma (1968)

... aka: Hebi musume to hakuhatsuki
... aka: Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, The
... aka: Snake Girl and the Witch with Silver Hair

Directed by:
Noriaki Yuasa

Up until this point, young Sayuri Nanjo (Yachie Matsui) has had to live most of her life in a nun-run boarding school for orphans and away from her parents. That's all about to change when her real father (Yoshirô Kitahara) mysteriously comes to get her and finally bring her home. As soon as they pull into the driveway, an ambulance is leaving. They've come to pick up the body of one of the maids, who they claim died of a heart attack. We, however, know better. We've already seen someone wearing black gloves toss a poisonous snake at her in the pre-credit sequence. And that's not the only strange thing going on. In Sayuri's absence, her mother Yuko (Yuko Hamada) was involved in a car accident which wiped her memory clean of everything that occurred beforehand. Now she's absent-minded, addle-brained and needs to rebuild her relationship with her daughter from scratch. Dad is a toxicologist who studies poisonous animals and has a collection of snakes, scorpions and other dangerous insects and reptiles in cages downstairs in his basement lab. Not to mention a huge vat of acid (?!)

Dad receives a call from a colleague about a new species of snake that's been located and immediately has to go to Africa for several weeks. Later that night after he's left, Sayuri starts to notice bizarre things. Her mother talks to herself and to Buddha, wants her to keep secrets from her father and drops off a plate of food late at night, which soon disappears into thin air. There's a hole in Sayuri's bedroom ceiling where someone peaks in on her and slips snakes through at night to scare her. She eventually sees a creepy, shadowed figure in her room, who her mother eventually introduces to her as Tamimi (Mayumi Takahashi), her until-now unmentioned older sister. So why didn't either parent tell Sayuri she had a sister? And why does she spend all of her time in her bedroom, locked away like some dirty secret? Sayuri will soon find out since she gets her mother to let the two of them share a bedroom.

Tamimi is mean, throws a doll at her sister and then rips its head off. She's cold to the touch and a scratch mysteriously appears along the outside of her face. Sayuri has a weird dream complete with psychedelic swirls where her doll comes to life, grows to normal size, grabs her hand and the two fly toward the dad's lab. They're stopped by Tamimi, who transforms into some kind of witch / vampire who throws snakes at them and then feasts on the doll's blood (?) When Sayuri wakes up, she finds large snake scales on the bed. Tamimi continues to behave strangely, rips a frog in two and then throws it in Sayuri's face. She finally confesses to being a snake and tells her little sis that "I just want to taste your soft little hands!" Dad's gone, mom's not right in the head and can't help and the stern maid Shige-san (Sachiko Meguro) accuses her of lying about everything and seems to be playing dumb.

Much of this seems almost to be a parable about mixed families and sibling rivalry. Tamimi rules the roost in her father's absence and has so much power over her mother and the maid she eventually has Sayuri banished to the attic! While there, the little girl has more weird trip out fantasies, which involve everything from giant spiders, to fighting a giant snake with a sword to the titular silver-haired witch popping in to scare her. That witch finally materializes in real life, as well, though there's a silly twist to all this.

Snake Girl , which is based on a comic by Kazuo Umezu, tries to have it both ways. It wants to be an uplifting family-friendly fantasy film for kids, but it also wants to be a horror flick for everyone else. This at-odds combination results in a wacky hybrid that adult fans of bizarre cinema may want to check out but any sane parent shouldn't let their child anywhere near. Well, unless they don't mind their little ones watching a nun get stabbed to death, animals being tortured and killed or a finale where our little heroine is dangling from scaffolding while someone smashes her hands to a bloody pulp with a plank of wood trying to make her fall to her death!

Sayuri is a plucky, syrupy sweet and impossibly patient young girl who tries to see the good in everything and everyone, but it's to the point of being extremely annoying to watch. No kid on Earth is going to react to all this horrifying stuff with such poise regardless of how mature they are. The character also constantly talks to herself and there's a continuous, often redundant voice-over where she analyzes the events in her mind as they unfold. Being the mean-spirited SOB that I am, I have to admit that I didn't feel the least bit sorry for that little bitch Tamimi either. She's such a sadistic, shrill tyrrant throughout this movie that when they finally tried to pull out the sympathy card at the very end, I was too busy cheering her demise to really care. Can't say this movie affected me in any emotional way, as was intended, but it's certainly imaginative enough to make it worthwhile.

★★1/2

La morte ha sorriso all'assassino (1973)

... aka: Death Smiles at Murder
... aka: Death Smiles on a Murderer
... aka: Morte sorride all'assassino, La
... aka: Sette strani cadaveri
... aka: Seven Strange Corpses

Directed by:
Aristede Massaccesi (Joe D'Amato)

Joe D'Amato is usually linked to two things: Italian gore-fests like BEYOND THE DARKNESS (1979) and THE GRIM REAPER (1980) or sexed-up junk like his long running Black Emanuelle series starring Laura Gemser, not to mention over a hundred (often-well-produced) hardcore porn films. But there was a time before all that when D'Amato was mingling around with more 'respectable' mainstream filmmakers. D'Amato had shot the well-regarded giallo WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (1971) and also helmed this ghost / zombie tale, made back when he was still using his real name, Aristede Massaccesi. Most of D'Amato's later efforts are notable for how sleazy and grimy they looked and felt, but this one is nicely, sumptuously photographed (by D'Amato himself), has an elegant score from Berto Pisano and a few actors who certainly wouldn't be caught dead in one of the director's later films. It's also extremely bizarre, confusing and frequently downright senseless. There's some nudity and outbursts of gory violence sprinkled throughout, but neither is as excessive as you'd expect given D'Amato's later work.

Innocent-looking, wide-eyed, blonde Swedish beauty Ewa Aulin (still riding high on her Candy fame) stars as Greta von Holstein. Greta's hunchback brother Franz (Luciano Rossi) is madly in love with his little sis and has even gone so far as to rape her. Greta plays along until she runs across Dr. Herbert von Ravensbrück (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), an older gentleman who sweeps her off her feet and eventually knocks her up. Unfortunately, she dies giving birth to their child. Three years pass and an out-of-control carriage crashes outside Herbert's castle home; impaling the coachman in the process and leaving an unconscious young woman inside the cab. Herbert's grown son Walter (Sergio Doria) and his wife Eva (Angela Bo) now live in the castle and bring the girl inside. Dr. Sturges (Klaus Kinski) is called in to evaluate her. She has amnesia and doesn't remember how she even got there. After noticing she's wearing a medallion around her neck with the name "Greta" and the year "1906" on one side, and a strange symbol on the other, the doctor proceeds to stick a pin through her eyeball (!) Greta doesn't even flinch or react.

Walter and Eva decide to let Greta live with them and both quickly fall in love with the troubled girl. Eva eventually becomes jealous, lures Greta down into some catacombs underneath their home, locks her inside a room and then bricks it up. She tells everyone that Greta has left but two weeks later she materializes yet again to even the score. Meanwhile, Dr. Sturges experiments with corpses in his lab. He concocts some green serum utilizing the formula - actually an ancient Incan spell - found on Greta's necklace, and uses it to resurrect a corpse. The doctor doesn't get very far in his endeavors, though. Someone sneaks in and kills both him and his assistant. That same person then starts stalking and killing off the Ravensbrück family (including Herbert - who shows up in town after a three-year absence to attend a funeral) as well as the nosy butler Simeon (Marco Mariani). An understandably confused inspector (Attilio Dottesio) pops in from time to time to investigate what's going on.

To say the events that transpire in this film are inadequately explained may be the understatement of the year. During an early scene, a maid at the Ravensbrück home keeps seeing visions of the hunchback brother's ghost in her bedroom, who grabs her and appears in her mirror. She attempts to leave and someone blasts off her face with a shotgun. This isn't so weird per se, but it is when it's the only scene featuring the brother's ghost. That whole idea is just dropped afterward. The zombie formula stuff also doesn't quite gel. It's revealed that Greta is revived with the elixir, but has somehow not only gained eternal youth, but has also gained supernatural powers. And I don't just mean being able to live through things that should kill her. I mean like throwing a bouquet of flowers at someone and having it turn into a vicious Siamese cat that claws someone's eyeballs out!

Strange and senseless as much of this is, it does have that really soft, dream-like, intoxicating early 70s Euro-horror feel to it. The whole thing looks pretty good, the acting isn't bad, there's some bizarrely frenetic editing, lots of zooms into eyeballs and some genuine surprises in here for more lenient viewers who don't mind wading through a muddled storyline to get to the rewards.

★★1/2

Alligator (1980)

Directed by:
Lewis Teague

While on vacation at one of those reptile tourist traps in Florida, a young girl gets herself a baby alligator she names Ramon. The family returns home to Missouri, where dad gets pissed off and flushes the little lizard down the toilet. Twelve years later, in St. Louis, animals and people are turning up missing. Well, at least partially missing: random body parts seem to be occasionally turning up at a sewage treatment facility. Officer David Madison (Robert Forster) is promptly put on the case by his superior (Michael Gazzo, and his crazy eyebrows). The first victim - a sewer worker - seems an almost random pick, but the second victim - pet shop owner Luke Gutchel (Sydney Lassick) - has ties to a company called Slade Pharmaceutical. The scientists there have been working on some kind of new growth hormone. They've used stray dogs that Gutchel has managed to round up in their experiments and have also enlisted his services in disposing of the carcasses once they're through with them. Gutchel has cut corners on the costs of cremating the dead doggies by simply tossing them into the sewers.

Ramon, meanwhile, has grown to somewhere between 30 and 40 feet in length by consuming all of those hormone-laced canines. Since he's no longer getting frequent handouts from Gutchel (you know... since he ate him), he'll eventually be forced above ground for his next meal. Well, after chowing down on a few more officers and a nosy reporter (Bart Braverman), that is. Because David keeps coming back to the pharmaceutical company, president and founder Mr. Slade (Dean Jagger, in his final role) pulls some strings and gets him shit-canned. But David doesn't let that, or insecurity about his male pattern baldness, stop him from getting the gator. He receives help from Marisa (Robin Riker), the now-grown young girl who brought baby Ramon to St. Louis to begin with. Marisa has parlayed her love for all things reptile into a career as a world-renowned herpetologist. There are a lot of good scenes in here, but my personal favorite is when the gator crashes an outdoor wedding reception and gobbles a bunch of people up, thrashes others with its tail and smashes a few people inside a car.

Director Lewis Teague, who'd later direct the King adaptations CUJO (1983) and CAT'S EYE (1985), writer John Sayles and the cast have managed to successfully walk a very fine line here. There are plenty of laughs, but they're weaved into this in a way where they never turn it into a send-up, or even really a horror-comedy. It's more of an action-oriented horror film, played rather straight by many of the actors, where the humor is simply an added bonus. The creature effects are done two different ways. A real gator is placed on model sets for some of these, but at other times use is made of an excellent animatronic one. I thought both were very convincing. And damn, don't you just miss the hands-on labor that went into creating real fx back before CGI came into the picture and turned everything into a laughable cartoony mess? Just compare the old school fx seen here to anything you'll see today on the SyFy Channel. I rest my case.

In addition to sharp writing, plenty of action (and explosions), fun nods to everything from The Honeymooners to THE THIRD MAN and effective special effects, there's also a pretty great cast here. Forster makes for an ideal and relatable 'everyman' type of lead. Henry Silva has perhaps the most amusing bit as a skirt-chasing great white hunter who ends up having a fatal encounter with the gator in a dark alley... after drafting some black ghetto youth to be his 'native' guides! There's also Jack Carter as the city mayor, Perry Lang as a police officer who gets eaten after helping disarm a mad bomber, Sue "Lolita" Lyon (in her last role to date) as the news reporter Silva hits on, Angel Tompkins as another reporter, John F. Goff, Mike Mazurki and many other familiar faces. After filming, the animatronic gator was donated to the Florida Gators to use as a mascot.

Saying this is probably the best of the killer crocodile / alligator movies might not sound like much, but there are actually many more of these than most people realize. Just to start the list there's EATEN ALIVE (1976), CROCODILE (1979), THE GREAT ALLIGATOR (1979), KRAI THONG (1980), KRAI THONG 2 (1985), CROCODILE EVIL (1985), DARK AGE (1986), CROCODILE FURY (1988), ENEMY UNSEEN (1989), KILLER CROCODILE (1989), KILLER CROCODILE II (1990), LAKE PLACID (1998) and its three sequels, BLOOD SURF (2000), CROCODILE (2000), CROCODILE 2: DEATH SWAMP (2002), PRIMEVAL (2007), ROGUE (2007) and SUPERGATOR (2007). Alligator itself was popular enough to spawn its own sequel: ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION, in 1991.

★★★