A zombie romance, Nazis vs vampire, and sex and death in a Manhattan highrise from Vinegar Syndrome

I had imagined that I’d slip easily into retirement, free at last to settle down and tackle all the disks I’ve been neglecting for far too long – how about devoting a week to working through my Arrow Jacques Rivette box set, and the new Masters of Cinema Louis Feuillade collection …? But the first month has proved unexpectedly disorienting. Instead of unlimited time, the lack of an externally imposed structure has left me feeling an odd mixture of torpor and urgency as I struggle to get anything done. Embarrassingly, I find myself sitting at my computer for hours on end getting sucked down YouTube rabbit holes and playing solitaire instead of immersing myself in fine cinema. Too early to panic no doubt, but undeniably frustrating. On the plus side, I do have more time for leisurely lunches and coffee dates with friends. Maybe there’s more to life after all than watching and writing about movies.

One notable shift as I try to readjust (both mentally and financially) to my changed circumstances is letting go of some habits. After subscribing for several years to Vinegar Syndrome, it wasn’t difficult to decide not to renew in January. There were two main reasons: the cost, which has escalated each year, and the fact that over the past year their offerings have become less interesting to me. It would obviously be better to return to ordering the occasional individual title instead of hoping that each month’s slate wouldn’t contain too many duds. In addition, without the subscriber discount I won’t be thoughtlessly ordering large numbers of additional partner releases I might be vaguely interested in. I’ll be saving more than just the hefty subscription fee.

I did order one disk in January (Sidney Lumet’s Child’s Play [1972]) and three new February releases (a double-feature by Tai Kato, whose work I’ve never seen; Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Mansion of Madness [1972], an upgrade from DVD; and Janis Cole and Holly Dale’s 1984 documentary Hookers on Davie), but find the majority of what’s being offered uninteresting. However, there are still some of last year’s later releases that warrant a few words.

Hong Kong

Vinegar Syndrome has dipped into the deep well of action and horror movies made in Hong Kong in the ’80s and ’90s, mirroring companies like 88 Films and Eureka. The supply seems inexhaustible (one of the year-end highlights was Arrow’s third Shawscope box set, which I enjoyed even more than the first two releases in the series). The most recent title, Billy Tang’s Dial D for Demons (2000) is also the most disappointing, a rather tame horror comedy from a director best-known for extreme Category III movies like Dr. Lamb (1992), Red to Kill (1994) and (my favourite) Run and Kill (1993). Here, we get a group of work friends who rent a vacation home together and find themselves trapped in a kind of space-time bubble where they’re attacked by malevolent ghosts. It has its moments, but leans too much on “comedic” bickering among the characters.

The period films Corpse Mania (Kuei Chih-Hung, 1981), Chinese Torture Chamber Story (Bosco Lam, 1994) and Chinese Torture Chamber Story 2 (Cho Kin-Nam, 1998) are more effective, the former something like a giallo in which a series of murders turn out to be the work of a compulsive necrophile, while the latter pair are similar to Teruo Ishii’s fetishistic horrors of the ’70s which use historical atrocities to both expose and exploit the unsavory inequalities of feudal societies.

Although I haven’t gotten to all of the more contemporary movies, both David Lai and Corey Yuen’s Women on the Run (1993) and O Sing-Pui’s An Eye for an Eye (1990) add a layer of Category III sexual violence onto otherwise effective crime stories. In the former, a woman from the mainland forced into prostitution by her boyfriend teams up with a female cop when her cop partner turns out to be corrupt and frames the pair in a drug smuggling operation. In the latter, two cops are involved with the daughter of a gangster who’s trying to go legit; when her father is sent to prison, she takes over the business but is usurped by the gang’s second-in-command, who brutalizes and blackmails her into escalating criminal activity with her father’s business as cover. Both films would’ve worked well as straightforward crime thrillers, but the added unsavoury Cat III violence is a bit off-putting.

*

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (Fred Burnley, 1972)

Curiosity spurred me to order the Blu-ray of Fred Burnley’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972), released under the sub-label Vinegar Syndrome Labs; this is a movie I’d been aware of since the time of its release but had never actually come across before. It actually registered at the time because it was written by Gordon Honeycombe, based on his own novel, who was familiar to me as one of Britain’s most popular newscasters when I was a kid in England, and the idea of this person writing a romantic horror novel seemed incongruous. But the movie never played in a theatre near me and I don’t think it ever showed up on television. The fact that it had a very low critical reputation might have had something to do with that. That poor reputation made it seem like an odd choice for a 2K restoration supplemented with a commentary and a handful of interview featurettes, but I’m a sucker for fringe oddities so I ordered a copy.

Is it a good movie? I wouldn’t say that, but it didn’t bore me despite a very languid pace and rather vague handling of its supernatural elements. A woman named Anna Robinson (Susan Hampshire, who the previous year had been in the more ambitious and artful Malpertuis [Harry Kümel, 1971]) meets a man named Hugh Dabernon (Michael Petrovich) while on vacation in Jersey; they hike together and ride bikes and walk on the beach and end up in bed. But romance is cut short when he apparently has a heart attack while running on the beach. Devastated, Anna wishes really hard that he was still with her and he shows up at the door, silent and obviously not himself.

Anna takes him in and keeps his presence secret, trying to continue the romance as he slowly begins to rot – which doesn’t actually put an end to the sex. While necrophilia is the most transgressive element in the story, director Burnley (whose only feature this was) manages to make almost nothing of it, instead just treating the continuation of the romance as something quite unremarkable. Hugh’s brother George (Frank Finlay) shows up, accusing Anna of witchcraft, but he’s quickly disposed of in a freak accident seemingly caused by zombie-Hugh. With her lover rotting, but unable to let go, Anna and Hugh walk into the sea and disappear.

While the central theme of unresolved grief has some resonance, Burnley fails to breathe much life into it. And yet, the somnolent pace and appealing landscapes (lots of landscapes, since much of the running time is devoted to the couple just wandering around Jersey and Scotland) are somehow appealing and maintained my interest. It almost achieves the same kind of dream-like ambience as John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), though script and director never quite get a grip on the narrative’s more disturbing implications. While definitely not a rediscovered masterpiece, I’m glad I finally got a chance to see it.

*

Sliver (Phillip Noyce, 1993)

If my records are accurate, I didn’t see Phillip Noyce’s Sliver (1993) when it came out. That was probably because the script was by Joe Eszterhas, who had parlayed an absurd payday for his Basic Instinct (1992) script into the kind of celebrity seldom afforded by Hollywood to writers. Despite being a fan of Paul Verhoeven, I didn’t much like Basic Instinct, and Sliver looked very much like an attempt to plow the same ground, an impression only reinforced by the casting of Sharon Stone in the lead role, her first since Basic Instinct’s succès de scandale launched her as a star.

Based on a novel by Ira Levin, whose Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives had been pop culture landmarks, Sliver seems more like a late-night-cable erotic thriller, a misstep in Noyce’s attempts to establish himself in Hollywood after an interesting early career in Australia (Backroads [1977], Newsfront [1978] and Heatwave [1982] are all significant contributions to Australian cinema’s rise to international prominence) culminating in the wide success of Dead Calm (1989), which also catapulted Nicole Kidman to international stardom. Sliver was Noyce’s third Hollywood feature after the initial stumble of Blind Fury (1989) and the box office success of Patriot Games (1992). Despite the social concerns of his Australian movies, it appeared that he was seeking a position as a director of thrillers – an aim which produced mixed results through the next decade, with a brief return in the early 2000s to his early concerns in Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American (both 2002), which together stand as his finest work.

Sliver definitely doesn’t qualify. Slick and sleazy, it tries to make up for its shallow treatment of modern urban alienation with long tedious stretches of nudity and dispiritingly mechanical sex. Apparently Stone and co-star Billy Baldwin couldn’t stand each other and it shows in the strangely impersonal naked coupling. Stone is high-powered editor Carly Norris, recently divorced, who spends most of her time at work complaining about how she’s not getting any sex and feels that time is running out … because of course, by Hollywood standards, at thirty-five even Sharon Stone is on the outer edges of sexual attraction. Looking for a new place to live, she lucks out when a woman who looks just like her plummets to her death from a balcony in an exclusive Manhattan highrise, creating a convenient vacancy.

Once she moves in, she runs into neighbours who are either really helpful or kind of creepy. There are some more “accidental deaths” and intimations that the building might harbour a serial killer. Meanwhile, Carly finds herself targeted by two very persistent men – an obnoxiously sexist best-selling author in the throes of writer’s block named Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger) and the boyish Zeke Hawkins (Baldwin). Despite Landsford’s persistence, Carly ends up in bed with Zeke in no time at all, because of course as an “older” woman she’s flattered by the attentions of a much younger man.

In time, she discovers Zeke’s secret: he’s the extremely wealthy owner of the building, which has been wired with numerous surveillance cameras and microphones. As the son of a soap opera star, he’s addicted to watching the day-to-day lives of his tenants, mixing voyeurism with occasional active interventions in their lives (the creepiness is slightly offset when he moves to protect a young girl from her sexually abusive stepfather). He also knows who killed the previous tenant in Carly’s apartment, but has said nothing because he doesn’t want to expose his unsavoury hobby.

The solution of the murder(s) underwent a radical change when Eszterhas’s original ending scored very low in previews and the whole thing was rewritten and re-shot. Neither ending is satisfactory, but the revision seems valid from a commercial point of view. As originally written, Zeke is revealed to be the killer, but Carly marries him anyway and on their honeymoon, as they fly around Hawaii in a small plane, he plunges them into a volcano. In the new ending, Landsford is the killer and, once he’s been exposed, Carly trashes Zeke’s high-tech surveillance centre and tells him to “get a life” before walking out, having apparently finally found a sense of inner strength and independence which frees her from the need for a man to validate her.

Synthetic corporate product that it is, Sliver is given visual polish by the great Vilmos Zsigmond working with slick production design from Paul Sylbert. The cast is filled out with recognizable faces – Polly Walker, Colleen Camp, Martin Landau, CCH Pounder, Nina Foch, Keene Curtis and Nicholas Pryor – but no one gets much to do, and the music is by Howard Shore (not one of his more memorable scores). That Vinegar Syndrome would devote their resources to a dual-format 4K/Blu-ray edition with several new interviews and some archival promo material, plus a low-res copy of the truly awful original ending, just reinforced my decision to abandon my subscription – this is not what I was looking for from the company.

*

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

That said, I was pleased to see them issuing a dual-format release of The Keep (1983), Michael Mann’s compromised second feature. Apparently, I wasn’t alone as the 8000 copy limited edition sold out in less than a day. The Keep is one of those movies I have a soft spot for even though I recognize that it’s deeply flawed and ultimately unsatisfying. Although online rumours that Mann initially had a four-hour cut seem absurd, the fact that it was taken away from him and cut to a brief ninety-six minutes by the producers isn’t in dispute. The narrative seems overly clipped, characters undeveloped, with scenes rushed and at times barely connected. But the concept – Nazis run into a very powerful supernatural force which their arrogance almost unleashes on the world – and the design by John Box and chilly cinematography by Alex Thomson are enough to suggest the impressive genre film it might have been. And let’s not forget the great, unconventional score by Tangerine Dream which suffuses the film with an otherwordly atmosphere.

Although I was disappointed by The Keep back in 1983, I’d been looking for a decent copy for years, so VS’s release is greatly appreciated. Their 4K restoration looks quite stunning, though all the pre-CGI optical effects will no doubt bother some people who believe everything should look like pristine hi-def – the combination of the film’s dark imagery and multi-layered effects emphasizes the film grain and occasionally results in softness, but this is inherent in the original material and contributes to the dream-like atmosphere.

Part of my original disappointment arose from Mann’s somewhat perfunctory adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s novel, which I’d read a year or so before the movie came out. A solid piece of pulp horror, it had an interesting concept which Wilson developed with some intelligence. At an ancient fortress in the Romanian mountains, a German unit inadvertently awakens a powerful supernatural entity which, for narrative purposes, might be called a vampire (this is Dracula’s neck of the woods after all), though it absorbs life force rather than sucking blood. When a brutal SS officer arrives to deal with what is presumed to be partisans killing German soldiers, he reluctantly has to accept the non-human nature of the threat and must make use of the knowledge of an ailing academic, who happens to be Jewish and is currently held in a concentration camp. Relying on a Jew is anathema, but the officer has no choice. The academic, on the other hand, quickly decides that the monster, once it has regained its full strength, can defeat the Nazis – and he allies himself with the creature despite it perhaps being as great, or greater, a danger to human survival. Meanwhile, another more-than-mortal figure has sensed the awakening of the monster and makes his way through Occupied lands to do final battle with his nemesis.

In outline, Mann’s script follows the book, but too much is merely sketched in. Scott Glenn’s Glaeken, in particular, is so underdeveloped that his nature and purpose is unclear until the final confrontation. His status as a supernatural mirror image of the monstrous Molasar (Michael Carter) isn’t apparent, so his mystical ability to cloud men’s minds seems like an odd, extraneous detail. Molasar himself, however, is visually impressive, his form gradually taking on flesh inside a swirling cloud of smoky tendrils which drift through the dank stone corridors of the Keep.

As for the cast, Jürgen Prochnow is effective as the weary Wehrmacht officer Woermann, trying to protect his men against an enemy he can’t comprehend, while Gabriel Byrne is suitably vicious as the SS officer Kaempffer, who is incredulous that there might be something here which is more powerful than the Reich. As the academic Theodore Cuza, Ian McKellan unfortunately gives one of the worst performances of his career, thanks to a decision to play the Romanian Jew with a gratingly distracting American accent.

Not surprisingly, given Mann’s distinctive style, the film’s greatest strength is its visuals, from the menacing title sequence of the Wehrmacht trucks emerging from the forest and arriving in the village to the austere, lightless interior of the Keep to the vast cavern inside the mountain where Molasar has been imprisoned for centuries. But, as with his Last of the Mohicans (1992), his slick style seems less appropriate here than in his more successful contemporary thrillers, creating an odd disconnect between the movie’s tone and the period subject. And yet, despite – or perhaps because of – these elements in conflict with one another, the film remains a fascinating viewing experience.

Given the nature of the source material, this is probably the best The Keep will ever look on disk. The set includes a new commentary from film historian Michael Dear, plus five cast-and-crew interviews and an interview with Wilson which focuses more on his novel than the adaptation. The most notable omission, not surprisingly, is the absence of Mann himself, who moved on after his unsatisfactory experience on the production and is probably uninterested in rehashing the problems which undermined his original intentions. It’s a pity that his original first cut, however long it might be, hasn’t resurfaced.