Cross-Roads (1955)

Directed by:

John Fitchen

This 20-minute 16mm independent short isn't quite public domain but instead falls under the “orphan work” umbrella. That is, the original production company that made it (Bartlett Films) no longer exists and the most recent copyright holder(s) cannot be located or contacted. In other words, seeing how this was made over 65 years ago and it's highly unlikely anyone bothered renewing the copyright for something so obscure / forgotten for all those years, the film no longer has an official owner. That's where the European Union Intellectual Property Office steps in. It's their job to ensure that threatened titles are kept in a database and digitized / preserved for future generations. However, now as officially registered intellectual property, the titles can be limited to when and where they're shown.

The primary point of interest here isn't the writer (who barely did any other film work), director (ditto, plus he is rumored to have killed himself not long after making this) or any of the other production people, but the casting of two future genre icons in the lead roles. That ultimately makes this, middling as it is, of historic importance. The first and most notable is a man who needs no introduction: Christopher Lee. Lee made one of his earliest genre film appearances right here (the very first was supposedly in the now-missing 1954 Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation The Mirror and the Markheim) several years before he became one of the most prolific / famous horror stars of the next several decades. The second is Ferdy Mayne, who didn't reach the same heights of fame as Lee but is an icon nonetheless, best known for playing the vampire count in Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). He solidified his credentials also working for Hammer Films, Freddie Francis and in numerous other German and U. S. genre films.

A man recklessly speeds down a country road late at night headed toward a hospital that's several hours away. His dying sister is in the passenger seat and has just attempted to kill herself after being rejected by a man she's fallen in love with and become pregnant by. As the sister slumps over dead, the brother panics. The car goes off the road, hits a tree and then goes up in flames. Sixth months later along the same stretch of back road, Betty (Mercy Haystead) is taking her brand new car, a 21st birthday gift from her father, for a joyride. She spots a well-dressed man (Lee) walking alongside the road and reluctantly offers him a lift. He introduces himself as Harry and claims he's going to London to attend "to business." Peculiarly, he also knows what kind of cigarettes she smokes and that she's hosting a party here soon; two things she never told him about.

Elsewhere, slimy impresario Bernard J. Maskell (Mayne) is in the middle of making his secretary Mary (Beryl Nesbitt) feel really uncomfortable. Though she already has a boyfriend and is not the least bit interested in him, he insists she go on a date with him, inappropriately touches her and more or less suggests she needs to have sex with him in order to keep her job ("The secret of success, my dear, is being nice to the right people.") Mary rushes out the door; hopefully on her way to finding a better job. Harry has Betty drop him off at Bernard's office, where it's revealed that he has other things in mind than investing in one of Bernard's productions.

This very predictable story of ghostly revenge has some nice noir lighting at times and decent acting but comes off like a lesser episode of a show like One Step Beyond or The Twilight Zone. It likely would have been slightly improved with better structuring of the story; namely moving the opening car crash scene to a later point in the film and turning it into a flashback so that we don't know exactly what's going on and exactly what's going to happen after just a couple of minutes. It's still worth a viewing for fans just to get to see Lee playing an early sinister / supernatural role and is an interesting footnote in the actor's long career.

The first home video release of this short subject was from Sinister Cinema, who paired it with an interview with Creature Features host Bob Wilkins. BFI then started distributing the title and included it as an extra on the 2016 Blu-ray release of Beat Girl (1960), also starring Lee. They have since put it on Youtube.

★★

I pianeti contro di noi (1962)

... aka: Hands of a Killer

... aka: Le monstre aux yeux verts (The Green-Eyed Monster)

... aka: Man with Yellow Eyes, The

... aka: Monster with Green Eyes, The

... aka: Planets Against Us

... aka: Planets Among Us, The

Directed by:

Romano Ferrara

"Your gesture was quite moving. I guess it was a primitive sign of affection. I have the power to judge you. You people of this puny world move swiftly towards your own destruction. You still fail to understand, even after thousands of years, what a magnificent gift life is."

Famous physicist / atomic scientist Dr. Landersen and his cocky son Robert (Michel Lemoine), who refuses to wear his seat belt, are among those aboard a small airplane that crashes in the Sahara desert. Although all are assumed dead, Robert's is the only corpse that was never located. A few months later, every attempt to launch a rocket into space is met with disaster in both the U. S. and the Soviet Union. A military conference is held in New York City at the O.N.U. where possible sabotage by another country is initially suspected. However, Professor Miller (Peter Dane) has film that shows the same man was present at the sites of each disaster... and that man also happens to look an awful lot like the supposedly dead Robert. Prior to each explosion, radar systems mysteriously went haywire (thanks to a "strong magnetic interference") and, immediately after, the mysterious man seemingly vanished without a trace. Even stranger, the man also happened to be at explosions in different countries at nearly the exact same time. Officials really have no other choice but suspect something alien or supernatural is involved.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Professor Giorgio Borri (Jacopo Tecchi) and his colleagues have concocted a nerve gas that's able to paralyze whoever inhales it for days at a time. Not that his fiancée, Marina Ferri (Maria Pia Luzi), cares so much. She keeps busy hobnobbing with much more exciting folks, along with her best friend, Audrey Bradbury (Jany Clair). While Marina is having second thoughts about being wed to the uptight scientist and living an ordinary life, Audrey is a free-spirited artist who drinks and smokes and is outgoing, flirtatious and sexually upfront to the point where she has no issue picking up men who interest her and immediately taking them back home. She even regularly goes to a sleazy part of the city to hang out with prostitutes and other unsavory types because she finds them more interesting. However, the latest man to strike her fancy just so happens to be that odd Robert-looking fella who's now the subject of an international manhunt.

Officials in the U. S., USSR and Italy are all after the man, who's now going by the name Branco, claims to be of Slavic origin and always wears black leather gloves. The authorities trail his every move with surveillance cameras and monitors, but have good reason to keep a safe distance for the time being until they figure out just what they're dealing with here. Besides, hanging around highly-radioactive beings just isn't good for one's health. Matters become even more complicated when a second Robert look-a-like who claims to not be Branco is located.

Audrey brings Branco to a party to introduce him to her eccentric artist friends, where Marina (who has suddenly decided to forget all about her fiancé) promptly stabs her buddy in the back and leaves with him instead. Branco hypnotizes her with his glowing eyes and has her act as his chauffeur around the city for the night. When they're pulled over by the police, Branco removes one of his gloves and grabs one of the officers, who falls over in pain and then is reduced to a withered corpse. Several others will meet a similar fate and plot revelations eventually reveal an attempt at an alien takeover using cyborg duplicates.

Italian science fiction films of the 60s and 70s have a very bad reputation... and this forgettable effort does little to help that reputation. It's nicely-shot, watchable, scenic at times and the scenes between the alien cyborg and the two human females are actually quite interesting and entertaining, which makes it a shame this instead spends much more time with a bunch of bland, stiff cop and government agent characters sitting around discussing what's going on. Ah, but such is the bane of many an Italian production from this era. They love their cops and love showing their cops sitting at desks and yapping on the telly discussing redundant things that add nothing interesting to the film at large.

As far as the fx are concerned, there's very little to mention. Aside from very unconvincing model work of a toy spaceship hovering around the desert and some passable two-Robert-clones-at-once split screen, they throw in a tiny bit of poorly-executed stop motion animation at the very end after the robot is wounded by a laser, assesses the damage and his skin melts away.

Lemoine, who's very well-cast in the lead and probably the highlight of the entire film, tried for years to be a mainstream actor, but his general appearance (namely having large eyes set pretty far apart) made him a hard fit for romantic leads and he usually ended up playing bad guys or secondary characters instead. It probably didn't help matters that he didn't start regularly getting lead roles until he was around 40 years old. A few years after this he was appearing in sleazy films for sleazy directors like Jesus Franco and José Bénazéraf, then decided to direct his own sleazy films, which culminated in Seven Women for Satan (1976); a film that was so sleazy it was banned in France. After that, he started making hardcore porno flicks using the alias "Michel Leblanc."

While Lemoine and Clair represent the French contingent of the production, this definitely feels far more Italian. It was filmed in Rome by an entirely Italian crew and most of the rest of the primary roles are filled by Italian actors. Despite making a prestigious debut in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), lead actress Luzi had a very spotty filmography throughout the 60s. Things eventually picked up a bit when she married exploitation (and sometimes porno) director Alberto Cavallone (BLOW JOB, THE EROTIC DWARF) and started appearing in some of his films using the alias "Jane Avril."

An English-dubbed version (which is actually pretty well-done) was theatrically released in the UK (under the title Hands of a Killer and double-billed with the Filipino film TERROR IS A MAN) but this appears to have entirely bypassed a U. S. theatrical release and went straight to TV instead. There were VHS releases from Sinister Cinema and Something Weird and it's now available in pretty pristine condition on Amazon, Tubi and other streaming services.

★★

Põrgu (1983)

... aka: Ад

... aka: Enfer

... aka: Hell

Directed by:

Rein Raamat

Typically horror anthology films use short stories (sometimes original, sometimes not) or condensed portions of longer novels as the basis for their tales. This one, however, has a very interesting idea to use actual individual pieces of artwork as the basis. The inspiration for this 17-minute animated short is Estonian graphic artist Eduard Wiiralt [1898-1954], who worked in many different mediums during his career but is best known for his engravings, lithographs and etchings. The "three surreal engravings of enormous generalizing power" used, all of which date back to the early 1930s, are Jutlustaja ("Preacher"), Kabaree ("Cabaret") and Põrgu ("Hell"). Before viewing this, I wanted to take a look at each of these pieces, and mull over them a bit, just to get some idea of what I felt the director needed to accomplish to capture the true spirit of the art. The first thing that leapt out at me was just how busy all of these engravings are. From left to right and top to bottom, there's no wasted space. These are filled with action, distinct and interesting-looking characters and numerous tiny little details to pick up on. I'm going to go ahead and post all three of the inspirations behind this short below so you too can first take a gander at them and then see how well they stack up to Raamat's film adaptation.

Jutlustaja ("Preacher")

Kabaree ("Cabaret")

Põrgu ("Hell")

Though all of these pieces have a grim undercurrent, there's also dark whimsy and humor to be found in them. Kabaree, for instance, features adults indulging in drink, smoke, dance, music and lewd entertainment (dancers in sheer dresses and outright topless women), but tucked away in the left corner is a multi-breasted fountain pouring milk to children while elsewhere another baby is seen hidden under a table being breastfed while his mother simultaneously drinks.

Behind the fountain's milk streams there's also something else unusual; a passed out man who doesn't appear to fit in with the rest of the crowd. While the other male cabaret guests are clean-cut, short-haired, shaven and well-dressed bourgeoisie types, this guy has long hair and a beard, plain clothes, is the only unconscious person in the entire piece and appears to represent something else entirely. It could be he's meant to remind us of a certain famous religious figure who's asleep on the job while everyone else is busy sinning it up. Perhaps he's already tried to reach them but has since just given up. Or this figure could well represent the working class out of their element or perhaps stunned into submission by the decadence or lack of morality of a ruling / upper class that generally sticks its nose up at his type. I'm not so sure but it's all interesting to think about.

Right from the beginning it's obvious just how much care went into doing the original artist's work justice. There are exact replicas of nearly all of the characters found in each of the engravings; the cabaret dancers, the musicians, the old couple sitting at the edge of the bar, the tiny man lost in his dance partner's generous cleavage...; all meticulously-drawn (mostly using cross hatching) to match Wiiralt's characters. However, highlighted most of all at the beginning are a thin, older violin player and a nude, more menacing-looking bald man playing a horn while fire wisps around him. Of course these figures are meant to represent the good and the evil of the scenario. There's nothing wrong with having a good time and enjoying yourself... but there are limitations to that, right? Yet the insatiable cabaret patrons don't know the meaning of moderation and work themselves into exhausted lumps on the floor before all is said and done.

As opposed to the "start-stop-insert title for next story" format other anthology-style films employ, this one uses a slicker overlap between stories, with all three of the art pieces being blended into a cohesive whole. The Preacher from Jutlustaja turns up in the cabaret and attempts to silence the horn-playing demon man (who's been carried over from the Põrgu piece himself), but it's only temporary and he starts up yet again, energizing the patrons. However, the gun-nosed robots from Põrgu then appear and start shooting everyone in sight and the people start transforming into some of the nightmare figures seen in the Põrgu engraving. Characters are ripped apart by tentacles, turned into trees and animals and heads explode into mushroom clouds.

Reading up a bit about Estonian history, both where it was when the original engravings were made (in the midst of the Great Depression during a transitional period between major wars and various occupations and the region on the verge of the Era of Silence) and where it was when this animated adaptation was made (declining standards of living under long Soviet occupation) certainly sheds some light on the proceedings. Estonia's long battle toward independence was finally won in the early 90s when the former ESSR (Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic) became The Republic of Estonia. Though Estonian through and through, this is technically still considered a Soviet film because of when it was made.

This won numerous awards at various film festivals, including top honors at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. There was a 2011 DVD release through Tallinnfilm, who've paired it with two other Raamat shorts: Kilplased / "The Simpletons" (1974) and Suur Tõll / Tyll the Giant (1980). It's also easy to find on Youtube and no subtitles are needed aside from the opening title cards and the brief introduction as there's otherwise no dialogue.

★★★