Excitação (1976)

... aka: Excitation

... aka: Excitement

Directed by:

Jean Garrett

Born in Azores, Portugal as José Antônio Nunes Gomes da Silva, director Garrett settled in Brazil permanently in 1966, where he worked as a bookseller before opening an advertising / photography studio specializing in soap opera photo stories. That led to work as a still photographer, set dresser and actor on two short films made by Brazilian horror legend José Mojica Marins. These, "Ideologia" and "Pesadelo Macabro," ended up being used in the horror anthology features The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) and Trilogy of Terror (1968). After a few more years doing photography and acting gigs for several other filmmakers, he moved up to assistant director on several films for Fauzi Mansur. By 1975, he was making his own films and, five years after that, had his own film production company. At the time, soft-core "pornochanchada" (crude comedies with lots of nudity and sex) were a dominant force in Brazilian cinema. Perhaps due to his previous association with Coffin Joe, Garrett (pictured below in a rare starring role in Ody Fraga's 1981 drama A Fêmea do Mar), ditched the comedy and made completely serious erotic films right out of the gate. Many of these proved to be just as successful as the comedic ones.

Garrett teamed up with David Cardoso, the most famous male star in these kind of films, for his first two efforts; the murder-mystery A Ilha do Desejo / "The Island of Desire" and the serial killer film Amadas e Violentadas / "Loved and Violated," which both ended up amongst the highest grossing domestic films of the year at the Brazilian box office. Excitação, his third effort out of eighteen total, was an attempt at a Gaslight-style psychological horror film, again with quite a bit of nudity.

The pre-credits sequence opens on a promisingly stylish, albeit minimalist, note. A mostly-empty white room. An open door. A red chair. A noose. A sweaty, nervous man eyeing said noose. The shots cut back and forth between all of the objects, with nicely composed images peering through the noose at the eventual suicide and an interesting comparison drawn between the Windsor knot on the man's necktie and the hangman's knot of the noose. That's followed by a long, unbroken shot of the camera strapped to the front of a car traveling down the beach until it settles on a small and very interesting-looking white beach house.

This home has just been purchased by wealthy engineer Renato (Flávio Galvão), who works at "one of the biggest computer companies in Latin America," and his troubled wife Helena (Kate Hansen), who inherited said company from her late father and thus technically owns it. Needing to get out of São Paulo due to Helena's recent nervous breakdown and stint in a mental institution, this isolated home seems like the perfect place for her to recuperate. Well, except for the fact it's the same location as the previous suicide. Arlete (Betty Saddy), the now-widowed previous occupant, sold them the home shortly after her husband Paulo's (João Paulo Ramalho) death but is still living nearby in one of their smaller homes. She becomes the wife's confidant and, uh, gets even closer with the husband.

Since Renato basically lives at work, he's not around when Helena is almost suffocated after smoke pours out of the shower nozzle instead of water. This sequence is not only the first of many to put her sanity into question but also one that shows the commercialized aspects of the film. Was it necessary to have panning shots up and down her body, or a close-up shot of her scrubbing her ass, or shots of her ecstatically massaging her breasts? Well, not really. Was it necessary to include that to sell movie tickets in Brazil in the late 70s? Probably. Though she seems to be enjoying herself at bath time, Helena hasn't been able to make love to her husband since leaving the hospital. And one really can't blame her. When she tells him about the shower incident, instead of sympathy she gets skepticism that it even happened.

Later that night, Renato encounters Arlete down at the beach clad only in a dress shirt and panties. She informs him that she regularly goes down there to talk to the sea. She finds it calming. He finds that interesting. Next thing you know the two are rolling around in the water making love, and they'll continue meeting down on the beach late at night for sex. Meanwhile, Helena is plagued by more weird events. The TV, showing some kind of Satanic cult ritual, keeps coming on all by itself and then an appliance / electronics theme starts to form as a blender pulverizes her smoothie by refusing to turn off, a fan almost scalps her and other things in the home (lights, a record player...) seem to take on a mind of their own. She also keeps seeing images of Paulo dead and hanging. And it may be no coincidence that Renato has brought a loaded gun into the home.

Against her wishes, Arlete's freewheelin', free-lovin' sexy younger cousin Ludmilla (Zilda Mayo) stops by unannounced for a protracted stay, which arouses feelings of jealousy from both women. She especially angers Arlete by flirting with Renato, tempting him by riding her motorcycle around on the beach wearing only a skimpy bikini and doing a long, crazy dance to Nazareth's "Go Down Fighting." Some voodoo practitioners are brought in to try to cleanse the home and there's also a nameless fisherman (Carlos Alberto Meni, also the production director) lurking around who seems to be keeping an eye on both homes.

While the drive-the-mentally-unstable-women-crazy script, co-written by Ody Fraga and the director, is ultimately pretty predictable even with the techie and supernatural embellishments, and the acting is mediocre at best (nice looking cast tho), many of the production qualities are quite good. The whole beach atmosphere, and use of the surrounding scenery, is very nice. The director proves to have an excellent visual eye when it comes to framing shots while cinematographer Carlos Reichenbach keeps the camera moving to give the film a sense of momentum and thus help along the slow-paced narrative.

The credits announce Liana Duval (who plays Joana the maid) and Abrahão Farc (who plays a detective) as the "guest stars," so I'm assuming they were known entities in Brazil at the time. Garrett, who passed away in 1996 at the age of just 50, also made a few other titles that could end up on here one day. Aside from the previously mentioned Amadas e Violentadas, there's also A Força dos Sentidos / "Force of the Senses" (1978), which is said to involve ghosts in some capacity, and O Beijo da Mulher Piranha / "Kiss of the Piranha Woman" (1985), a hardcore porn that involves a female vampire. None of the director's films have ever been officially released in the U.S.

Apparently fairly well received in its home country at the time, this won awards for Best Cinematography and Best Score (Beto Strada) from Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (São Paulo Association of Art Critics). I was not able to find a single home video release for this anywhere in the world. The version I watched was taken from an airing on the Brazilian TV channel Canal Brasil and had fan-made English subtitles.

★★1/2

Almohadón de plumas (1988)

... aka: Feather Cushion

... aka: Feather Pillow

Directed by:

Ricardo Islas

This was made by the same fella who'd just done the ultra low-budget shot-on-video vampire film CROWLEY (1987). Since I already wrote a bit about him on that review, I'll give you the Cliffs Notes version here: Islas was a horror-movie-loving teenager living in Uruguay, a low population country (around 3 million when this was made) that didn't have much of a film industry to speak of. Still, he didn't let that stop him from making his own camcorder-shot features, which appear to have only been shown on TV in his home country. Islas churned out quite a few of these in the late 80s into the mid 90s (including a Crowley sequel) before relocating to the U.S., where he continues to make ultra low budget horror films to this day. This one is an adaptation of a short story (a very short one) of the same name by Horacio Quiroga, who's sometimes referred to as "The Edgar Allan Poe of Latin America" and was born in Uruguay but spent most of his professional career working in Argentina. El almohadón de plumas was first published back in 1917 in a collection of eighteen short stories from the author titled Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte ("Tales of Love, Madness and Death"). Though he's mostly unknown here in America, apparently his work is frequently praised in Spanish-speaking countries.

The cheap-looking title screen and opening wobbly shots around a curio shop looking at dolls, masks and the titular pillow set to synth music is oddly charming, but we're also immediately slapped right in the face that this is an amateur home movie. The camerawork is shaky, the videography is sometimes blurry, everything is blindingly bright in the day yet too dark at night and there's almost no attention whatsoever paid to making sure we can actually hear what the actors are saying in the first scene. As our protagonist is discussing some kind of construction deal with his colleague Antonio (Richard Perlas) the audio is muffled and voices are drowned out by passing cars. Cars can even sometimes be heard in some of the scenes taking place indoors and a faint hissing sound is present over most of the dialogue from relying on the camcorder's built-in mic.

The story centers around Jordan (played by the director) and Alicia (Norma Morgan), former college sweethearts who have just gotten married, yet sleep in separate bedrooms. He's so preoccupied with work that he usually brings it home with him and it seems like it's all he can ever talk about. She doesn't seem to have a career or much to do aside from sleeping a lot. Alicia has recently purchased a fancy red feather pillow with a curious, hand-painted design on it (a six-pointed star with an eyeball in the middle) that she seems to be pleased with.

Alicia starts getting headaches and passing out. A doctor is called in and recommends she change her diet. However, her issues continue and she starts getting even worse. Woken up by a noise, she thinks she sees a black-clad figure lurking around their home and follows it into the cellar, where a ping pong ball eyed woman with rotten teeth charges at her. After hearing his wife screaming, Jordan rushes down to the cellar to find her unconscious. Back to the doctors they go. This time they run some more tests and question whether she's on drugs, vomiting blood and / or suffering from "nasal or vaginal discharge" (?!) They finally come to the conclusion she's having hallucinations brought on from anemia and recommend she get more rest. No problem there. All this chick ever seems to do is lie around in bed! Nevertheless, Jordan has his sister Nancy (Beatriz Rossi) come stay with them to help around the house so Alicia has even less to do.

Further encounters with the mysterious lady follow, which leads to more screaming and more passing out, plus dramatic physical changes like dark under eye circles, paleness, rapid loss of weight, rapid loss of blood and small sores on her face that resemble bug bites. After the doctors assure Jordan there's nothing to worry about, Alicia suddenly passes away in her sleep, just five days after first becoming sick. The doctors complete their analysis postmortem and reveal that she had been drained of her blood by something of a parasitic nature.

Considering what medium was used to make this, the unavoidable pratfalls of using said medium and the fact very little money was spent here, this showcases enough care, talent and ambition to keep it enjoyable if you can tolerate zero budget videotaped horror. Though there are awkward, bland and / or technically inept moments sprinkled throughout, a surprising number of scenes are professionally staged, paced and edited, to the point where you sometimes actually forget about this being a home movie. It's almost as if scenes were (gasp!) planned out by the director in advance to the point he may have actually (double gasp!) storyboarded them. Faults and all, I genuinely appreciated the effort that went into this, especially when compared directly to most other SOV horrors from this same time period.

This is also one of those instances where I don't recommend reading the source material before seeing the movie. You can breeze through that in just a couple of minutes afterward like I did, but watching the movie version play out with no knowledge of what's going to happen offers up some surprises you won't be getting if you familiarize with it beforehand. The film does a pretty nice job respectfully staying faithful to the story while also elaborating upon it, especially adding an ambiguous element about the source of the pillow that sends it into faintly supernatural territory.

There are a number of other filmed versions of the same story. It was adapted by Mexican filmmaker Alicia Violante in 1990 (which appears to have been a student film), was the subject of Cuban and Chilean shorts in, respectively, 2000 and 2007, was an episode of the Argentinian TV series Fantasmagorias in 2018 and an episode of the Paraguayan TV series Relatos Clásicos de Misterio y Terror in 2020. There's also Japanese TV movie version from 2022 and it's been featured on several Spanish-language podcasts. To my knowledge, this particular version has never been given an official home video release, nor has it ever been released with English subtitles.

★★1/2