Portrait of a Matador (1958) [short]

Directed by:

(Theodore) Zichy

Just wrapped up the first half of BFI's inaugural "Short Sharp Shocks" collection and, unfortunately, the first disc has proven to be something of a dud. None of the five shorts deserve above a 2 star / average rating, so here's hoping there's a gem or two to be found on disc #2. The first three shorts are simple storytelling vehicles, with one person addressing the camera to speak directly to the audience. Lock Your Door and The Reformation of St. Jules (1949) feature writer Algernon Blackwood reciting his own stories. THE TELL-TALE HEART (1953) has Stanley Baker giving a dramatic, word-for-word reading of Edgar Allan Poe's titular story, which at least features a little cinematic quality in the set design and photography.

After those is the 18-minute-long Death Was a Passenger (1958) from director Theodore Zichy. Set in WWII-era France, this mild suspense piece features a unnamed British man (Terence Alexander) boarding a train from France to Spain. He unsuccessfully attempts to pass himself off as French with a beret and bad accent, but it's obvious to all of those traveling in the same car that he's not who he claims to be. The man is actually a British pilot who was shot down, but survived, and is now attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France for Spain. Among those on his car are a Mother Superior (Harriette Johns) and a beautiful and shy-acting novice nun (Marigold Russell), who both figure into a twist at the end. While this was OK and perhaps the best this first disc has to offer, it's also not even remotely in the horror genre, so I won't be reviewing it here.

The fifth and final short - Portrait of a Matador - is from the same director and team of filmmakers as Passenger, and actually does qualify for a review. Sadly, it also sucks bull testicles and I'd probably prefer writing a bit more about Passenger than this, but that's how it goes sometimes.

In London, painter David Crane (Anthony Tancred) has been chain smoking and staring at the same unwrapped portrait for three straight days, almost as if it has somehow hypnotized him. David's concerned friend, Ian Butler (Dermot Palmer), calls a doctor (Ralph Tovey) over to help, and then recounts the history of the portrait.

A year earlier in Seville, Spain, David and Ian became acquainted with beautiful blonde Carmencita Manrique (Sandra Dorne) and handsome bullfighter Manuel Suarez (David Ritch). While they're both nice to look at, the pair otherwise leave a lot to be desired. She's descended from aristocracy, attracted only to winners and uses her feminine charms to always get her way. She also has something of a cruel streak: Once you're no longer on top, she's no longer interested. The extremely arrogant Manuel is one big ball of seething anger who self-identifies as "the greatest bullfighter of them all" and claims that he wouldn't hesitate to kill a human enemy if only he could get away with it. David manages to ruffle his already fragile feathers by openly discussing his dislike for the sport ("Slaughter doesn't appeal to me as a spectacle... I have a morbid distaste for violent death!").

Carmencita somehow manages to talk Manuel into letting David move into his family's villa, where he meets and becomes fond of Manuel's sister, Maria (Yvonne "Warren" / Romain), who is kind, polite and nothing at all like her sibling. Carmencita then suggests David paint a portrait of Manuel; one showing who he truly is on the inside, which obviously turns out to be a big mistake since Manuel's a dickhead. The resulting portrait greatly offends the bullfighter to the point where he almost stabs David through the neck with his sword. Later that day, Manuel is critically injured in a bullfight. On his deathbed, he places a curse on the artist. A year later, David (who has since returned to London) receives a surprise package in the mail. It's the portrait of the now-deceased matador, which seems to have placed a strange, possibly supernatural, hold over him...

The only thing shocking about this bland 23-minute short is the atrocious (though admittedly pretty funny) overacting from much of the cast. It's no wonder most of these folks didn't move on to much else of note, with the two females being exceptions. Dorne was already established prior to appearing in this (hence why she was given above the title billing) and would go on to a number of other roles, notably (at least per the contents of this blog) ALIAS JOHN PRESTON (1955), The House in Marsh Road (1960) and Devil Doll (1964), which featured Romain as well. Romain can also be seen in CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958), CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960) and the Hammer films The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) and NIGHT CREATURES aka Captain Clegg (1962).

The director was the son of a wealthy Hungarian count and, at one point, had his own namesake production company. He also worked as a race car driver, ferry pilot and foot fetish photographer (!) but failed at igniting either an acting or a filmmaking career, despite attempts at both. The two shorts in this collection certainly give us a good indicator as to why.

Disc 2 opens with Twenty-Nine (1969), a non-horror title, and THE SEX VICTIMS (1973), a mild, cheap and poorly-made ghost / revenge story with lots of nudity.

★1/2

Tell-Tale Heart, The (1953) [short]

... aka: Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, The

Directed by:

J.B. Williams

It's time to crack open the "Short Sharp Shocks" Blu-ray collection from BFI and take a peek inside. This first set (there are two collections) contains nine short subjects over two discs, which date anywhere from 1949 all the way up to 1980. My plan here is to head down these discs and review all of these shorts in the order in which they appear. I'm not going to be reviewing them here like bam-bam-bam in succession over the next few weeks but will instead squeeze them in periodically and do my usual reviews in between. Of course, the shorts still have to meet my guidelines for this blog, meaning they have to be horror enough for yours truly (many in the collection aren't horror by anyone's standard) and they have to be made or released between 1950 and 1990 or else I will not be reviewing them. That scratches the first two shorts from Disc 1, both from 1949, off my list but I'll talk about them briefly.

Lock Your Door and The Reformation of St. Jules, which fall just short of 15 minutes apiece, are both from director Anthony Gilkison and were shot at the same time on the same simple sets. These are nothing more than an old man in a room (usually sitting down) looking into the camera and telling us these stories. Nothing is visualized. The true appeal here is actually the old man: Algernon Blackwood, a great-named, prolific British writer who specialized in ghost and paranormal tales. Reformation and Lock are two of his own short stories. Blackwood isn't very well known here in the U.S. (I assume he is the UK, though), so it's cool to get a little sample of his work. This is also one of the only filmed documents of the writer, who passed away just two years after filming these; not much of a surprise considering he looks ancient here and was around 80 years old.

Following these is a 20-minute short that I actually can cover here because it's from 1953. It's yet another version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, a story so often adapted that this isn't even the only one from its year... there are three others! The most famous of these by far is the 8-minute-long animated version narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmelee, which was nominated for an Academy Award (category: Best Short Subject, Cartoons) and was also selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2001. This particular version was long ago forgotten until it found its way into this set.

The story itself features an unknown narrator but this one opts to name him: He's Edgar Allan Poe and he's played here by Stanley Baker. Unlike the Blackwood pieces, which are like grandpa telling his grandkids a scary story in a brightly-lit living room, there's a POV change-up here and an attempt to provide a claustrophobic, gloomy atmosphere more befitting the tale. However, this is still little more than a dramatized reading of the Poe story, told verbatim. At least it can never be accused of not being faithful to the source material!

Set in a dark, dreary, grimy and slightly expressionistic looking room, this has a very theatrical and overwrought Baker dressed in mid 19th century period clothing as he addresses the camera and tries to convince us he's perfectly sane recounting the killing and dismemberment of an old man whose malformed, blue "vulture" eye drove him to murder. Music and some sound effects (ticking clock, a loud beating heart [a crucial element of the story]) have been added for dramatic effect and there are also occasional cutaways to things like the moon in an overcast night sky, wind blowing curtains, a steaming kettle, a clock, etc. to help with editing the monologue snippets together. There's nothing really wrong with any of this, it's just not very inspiring.

The story behind how this finally found its way onto DVD is perhaps more interesting than the short itself. Thought missing for half a century, this was found in the attic of a home in Scotland. It had been purchased at a junk shop in Brighton in 1984 by a nurse and film collector, who then filed it away and thought nothing of it. It wouldn't be until 2018 when he was doing some cleaning that he discovered the film. He planned to sell it on eBay for £5 but found out researching the title that historians had been looking for it for years and the rest is history. Once in the hands of BFI, it was restored, archived and digitized. (See Daily Mail and The Independent articles for more details.)

Despite being just a man in a room telling a story, this was amusingly given a "Horrific" rating by the London Country Council and forbidden to those under 16. Imagine if they could take a look into the future to see what 16 year old's are watching nowadays. 😄

Death Was a Passenger (1959) and PORTRAIT OF A MATADOR (1958), both from director Theodore Zichy, follow on disc one.

★★

Batas Impian Ranjang Setan (1986)

... aka: Cauchemar (Nightmare)

... aka: Ranjang Setan

... aka: Satan's Bed

Directed by:

(H.) Tjut Djalil

"We feel ghosts are responsible and religion does teach us that, as well as us human beings, God created spirits annnnd it's my confirmed belief that, ummmm, that's what we got here."

Due to the overwhelming popularity of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), there were loads of similar films made to cash in during the second half of the 80s. Most of these just utilized the general concept of killer dreams, others were very blatant in their approach, especially low budget foreign films that probably didn't have to worry about copyright laws. Batas Impian Ranjang Setan from Indonesia, given the English title Satan's Bed, is the most blatant copy I've seen thus far. The borrowings from Craven's film are almost too numerous to mention. There are the four teens dealing with typical teen stuff often seen riding around in a jeep. There are the self-absorbed parents who are too busy dealing with their own drama to pay proper attention to their children. And, most notably, there's the clawed, disfigured killer who haunts the dreams of the teenagers and kills them in their sleep. This just barely tries to camouflage what it's doing by giving the haunted home a different sordid backstory. 

A Dutch family consisting of a dad (Didier A. Hamel, now a popular artist), mom (Marianne Wolf) and their three young children, frequently seen in soft focus shots dressed in white doing jump rope in slow motion (sound familiar?), were all senselessly murdered there on Christmas day while doing a Dutch rendition of "Silent Night" (!!) at the piano.

Siska Baskoro (Linda Lolita Husein - ANITA: FEMALE SNAKES) moves into the same home years later. She's recently divorced from her lawyer husband (Mansyur Syahdan) and now dating an asshole named Marcus (Doddy Sukma), who pays all of her bills and claims he's going to soon divorce his wife to be with her. Siska's teenage daughter, Maria (Chintami Atmanegara), and teenage niece, Nina (Eva Eliza), move in with her, along with rotund maid Wanda (Sofia) and goofball gardener Bokir (H. Bokir), who are both involved in some ill-fitting comedy scenes. The two girls immediately start having terrible nightmares about a clawed ghostly figure (the Dutch husband / dad killed from the prologue) trying to kill them. Their idiot boyfriends, Irawan (Richie Ricardo, apparently a popular singer and teen idol in Indonesia at the time) and Rudy (Gusti Randa), mock their concerns until people actually start dying.

This goes right down the Elm Street 1 checklist, with little deviation. Remember when Freddy's face pushed through a wall? Remember when Freddy laughed with glee after cutting off his own finger? Remember when Freddy's claw emerged Jaws-style from the bathtub to yank Nancy underwater? Remember the sticky stairs? Remember the dead friend showing up in a body bag nightmare? Yep, that's all here, though this shuffles the order in which these moments occur in the narrative and also sometimes mixes up who they occur to. After the Nina character is killed (while wearing a "This is my SEXY t-shirt" oversized tee), Rudy is blamed for the crime. He's hauled off to prison, escapes and is later seduced by the ghost of the Dutch woman and then hung from a tree in the haunted home's front yard. Since two people have now been killed in her home and she's unable to run off to see her sugar daddy, Siska becomes depressed and lounges around all day in her robe sucking down booze.

An exorcist (Simon P.S.) is eventually called in and goes to battle with the ghosts in a foggy dream world, but it ends prematurely when the spirits detach their heads, throw them at him and then the woman's head bites down on his crotch. Siska learns from real estate agent Mr. Hendra (Anton Indracaya) that the home was built on an ancient burial ground and then this suddenly starts ripping off Poltergeist left and right, with coffins emerging out of the ground, skeletons popping out, etc. A second shaman (Belkiez Rachman) shows up, only to get killed when Dutch Freddy sticks his claw through his back and out his chest. Can a third holy man - a dwarf Catholic priest armed with a giant wooden cross (!) - save the day?

Amusingly, even with a preexisting template to steal directly from, this can't seem to do anything right. All of the NOES copycat scenes are ineptly staged, the acting is poor, the pacing is off, characters behave brain damaged and as if they could care less when people get killed (often times not even mentioning it), the editing is abysmal, the continuity is nonexistent and the make-up job on the duck-lipped Freddy substitute looks like it was applied by a toddler using finger paint.

While Satan's Bed obviously wouldn't be any good even in its original Indonesian language due to its weak attempts at emulating a vastly superior film, this is a case where the horrific English dubbing (featuring terrible voice actors and ridiculously dumb dialogue) actually help by turning what is a cheap, unscary and poorly made rip-off into a comedy goldmine. Fans of the Elm Street series should definitely get a few laughs out of it.

Unlike many other Indonesian genre films from this same time, this actually made it outside of its home country during the video era. There were at least three non-Indonesian VHS releases; one in Germany dubbed into German (under the title Satan's Bed), one in France dubbed into French (under the title Cauchemar / "Nightmare") and one in South Korea (again using the Satan's Bed title). Though I could find no evidence this was ever officially released in the U.S., UK or any other English-speaking country, at some point an English audio track was recorded. The German DVD and Blu-ray releases from Schröder Media and WMM come with both English and German audio tracks. Though a heavily-damaged print is used, the fact it's widescreen AND available in English makes it a real anomaly as far as 80s Indonesian genre films are concerned.

This actually wasn't the only Elm Street rip-off to emerge from Indonesia. There's also Sisworo Gautama Putra's Perjanjian di Malam Keramat / "Pact With the Forces of Darkness" (1991), which stars the legendary Suzzanna as the clawed killer! There were also several Indian / Hindi copies, like Khooni Murdaa / "Bloody Corpse" (1989) from Mohan Bhakri and, a little late to the party, Mahakaal / "The Monster" (1994) from the Ramsay Brothers.

SBIG