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

Bi gui zhuo (1986)

... aka: 俾鬼捉

... aka: 誰當鬼

... aka: Bei gwai yuk

... aka: Ghost Snatchers, The

... aka: Invasion from the Beyond

... aka: Shui dang gui (Who Is the Ghost?)

Directed by:

Ngai Choi Lam

Nearly every guy working at Fox Centre, a high rise office building, has the hots for secretary Judy Hsu (former Taiwanese model Shu-Yuan Hsu). She's so in demand she makes interested parties fill out an application that, according to the subtitles, is "To check if you've in recent years got V.D., syphilis or AIDS. Also your size and lastingness." What nobody knows is that Judy is the target of evil spirits. During a late night office party, lightning strikes the building and Judy is accosted in the bathroom by said spirits. The walls split, a long corridor opens up, hands burst through and start throwing her around and then a giant hand grabs her. Now possessed, a voice regularly calls out to her, demanding she "Kill all men and women!" Sometimes her eyes glow red and she's aided by the pale-faced ghosts of former Japanese soldiers. So why Judy? Well, it has something to do with her having a yen horoscope.

Meanwhile, we meet luckless "fatty" Bong Chu (Jing Wong); your standard HK ghost-comedy leading men who creates a mess out of pretty much everything he touches ... and life returns the favor! He's the type who can't even sit down for a simple breakfast without a fly landing in his fish congee. Since he's unemployed and still living at home, his parents make an arrangement with his uncle, Pien-Chou Fan (Stanley Fung), for him to work as a security guard at Fox Centre. He's trying to save up money to get married to his girlfriend, Hsueh Tai, who's played by the super-cute Joey Wong. Yes, part of the joke is that she's way out of his league, even though there's a catch. Hsueh's brother, Erh-Lung (Michael Wai-Man Chan), is a low rent underworld figure with a thug entourage who swindles his money away and tries to prevent him from dating his sister. Also, a bird shits on his lunch.

Because of its design, the Fox Centre is cursed. It all has something to do with yin and yang and magnetic forces and spiritual fields and feng shui and Japanese soldiers being executed on the site of the building during the war and now wanting to rebuild the Nippon Empire and, well, let's just say Fox Centre was erected in the wrong place in a super-specific way that's made it a hot spot for paranormal activity. Back when the building was first being built, several construction workers died under mysterious circumstances. And then the architect who designed the project (supposedly) died by suicide. And then the Inquiries Commission chairman in charge of investigating the mysterious deaths died himself. You get the picture.

Since it's a special time of year when all the yins and yangs are compromised or something, anyone working there who was also born during a certain time of the year is in danger, which happens to include Bong, his uncle and Hsueh. They seek assistance from Hsueh's fortune teller godsister, Ling Chang (Miss Hong Kong 1984 and future Mrs. Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi), who advises the chairman (Wai Shum) of things he can do to thwart the evil. That involves closing up parts of the building, like the top floor and the parking garage, and other things that he's not willing to do. 

Ling, who's young, beautiful and has a good personality, also becomes the unlikely love interest of Pien-Chou, who's middle-aged, average and a pervert who spends all his free time in porn theaters and massage parlors. Hey, you guys already used that hot-chick-who-can-do-1000-times-better-hooking-up-with-a-complete-idiot joke once already! Ling goes out of town for a single day to try to get them help and what does Pien-Chou do? He tries to have sex with the possessed Judy, even after he's explicitly told she's a ghost!

Dumb moments aside, this movie is packed with so many ghostly, gory, weird shenanigans that it almost succeeds in spite of itself. We get a face pulled off, an ear bitten off, a heart ripped out of a chest, eyeballs ripped out, an exploding head, a nightmare inside of a nightmare, someone split in two with a giant guillotine, someone split in two with a samurai sword, centipede eating, a ghost pissing blood, a movie theater slowly filling with ghosts, a "safety charm" that can be used once to ward off ghosts, a male spirit medium with a dubbed-over female voice, a haunted TV set that eventually sprouts arms and legs and lots of other entertaining stuff. The only thing we don't get is a decent screenplay.

While there's certainly some fun to be had here, that's a bit compromised by needless complication in the plotting, overly familiar characters and too many detours away from the primary story. A good example is a long and utterly pointless scene where Ling summons a "Mahjong ghost;" an awful, big-nosed, stuffed animal looking puppet wearing sunglasses, to help our bumbling heroes win a game. And then there's a subplot where one of the guys loses 3 of his 10 souls and the rest of the cast have to rush around trying to find them and then reunite them with his body before the hospital staff can conduct an autopsy. So what does any of that have to do with the haunted building? Not a damn thing really. It's like someone just came up with ideas they liked and threw them into the stew whether they belonged here or not.

Toward the end, we learn the only way to banish the evil is to locate the portal to a spiritual realm called "Asolo Field." While there, they must find the "Ghost King's skeleton," put a spell on it, return intact with something called a "longevity rope" and then let a virgin (Joey Wong's character) hold it. Oh yeah, and the only people who can enter are those that are yang. Got that? Nope, well then forget that and just enjoy the strangeness of the colorfully-lit ghost realm, which is accessed through a portal in the women's restroom mirror and culminates in a fight against an undead Japanese general and his animated skeleton (a well-executed puppet effect) around a lake of acid.

The director also made THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986), a better, more-polished horror-comedy than this one, the excellent rape-revenge film Her Vengeance (1988), the manga adaptation and box office hit The Peacock King (1989) and its sequel, Saga of the Phoenix (1989), Erotic Ghost Story (1990), another big hit in Hong Kong, the cult classic Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and, his final film, The Cat (1992). With a track record like that, it's a true shame he abruptly stopped working in film altogether in 1992.

Also in the cast are Charlie Cho (THE FIRST VAMPIRE IN CHINA) as a Mahjong player, Lap-Ban Chan (HOUSE OF THE LUTE) as Hsueh's granny, Tony Leung (who also wrote the script) as a security guard, Tau-Wan Yue as a cross-eyed security guard, Siu-Ming To as a cross-eyed TV ghost and lots of other familiar faces.

This Golden Harvest production did middling business at the box office. It was first released on VHS in Hong Kong in 1986 on the Pony Canyon label. That was followed by VCD and DVD releases from Fortune Star. The latter includes an English subtitle option, as does the Malaysian DVD release from Speedy Video. There's no Blu-ray to my knowledge, though this seems like a prime candidate for such a release so it'll probably happen eventually.

★★1/2