The Stone Tape

Cast: Michael Bryant, Jane Asher, and Iain Cuthbertson 

Director: Peter Sasdy 

90 minutes (12) 1972

101 Films Blu-ray   

Rating: 9/10

Review by Peter Schilling 

[Released 9th December]

Once a highly sought after item of genre telly from the pre-VHS era, The Stone Tape was eventually released on DVD by the British Film Institute, for their range of archive TV productions. Written by Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale, as a Christmas ghost story commission, it has long since passed into SF media legend as, perhaps, the most thought-provoking British TV drama about a scientific investigation into the supernatural.

It starts, unassumingly enough, as a research team from Ryan Electrics, led by the manipulative Brock (Michael Bryant), establish their workshop in Taskerlands, an old country house with a sinister history. When Brock learns that renovation of one particular end-room, intended for data storage, has stopped because of recalcitrant workmen, he becomes determined to analyse the reported cause of this dissent. The dark place seems to be haunted, and several members of the technical staff hear, feel, and see things that they cannot explain. Computer specialist Jill (Jane Asher) is highly sensitive to the room’s weird phenomena. Others hear uncanny screams and shiver at sudden chills, but only Jill becomes convinced that she has seen the ghost of a Victorian servant girl.

In a brain-storming session, Jill suggests the room itself is a recording medium, so Brock urges his scientists into action, hoping to prove the theory, and exploit this discovery as a shortcut to the revolutionary ‘digital crystal’ recording system that he imagines will soon replace videotape. Is such a thing as ‘stone tape’ possible? Is the ghost in the room simply a mass of data to be studied, offering access to vivid holographic history? Or is the room a gateway to the ‘spirit world’?

Kneale explored the sceptical  intersections of science and superstition in his earlier drama, Quatermass And The Pit. Here, similarly imaginative ideas are sharply focused upon something far less apocalyptic, but certainly a lot more personal. And yet, the ancient protean force is still lurking there in ambush.

Asher is excellent as Jill, the psychic who is rather more concerned about the ghost - preferably not - being self-aware than anyone else: “I couldn’t bear it if she knew!” The script uses SF jargon with care, and tends to foreground the relationship between Jill and Brock. This skilfully avoids all the ghost-busters clichés that might have sunk this drama in tragicomedy, presenting us instead with a play about solidly real people confronting the inexplicable. 

Peter Sasdy directs The Stone Tape with commendable sincerity, sustaining a controlled energy throughout, and drawing outstanding performances from the whole cast - relatively large for a one-off TV show - bringing all the scabbed-over conflicts between insightful characters to life. And, in the process, demonstrating with a pace and panache, rarely matched in genre TV of the 1970s, that, despite its many perceived wonders, human science does not have all the answers... yet.

Disc extras: 

• Commentary track with filmmakers Jon Dear and Sean Hogan
• Commentary (2001) with Nigel Kneale and Kim Newman
• Children Of The Stone Tape - documentary on the lasting legacy of The Stone Tape
• Out Of Darkness: A Visionary Manxman - short film on Nigel Kneale
• Art cards
• Script booklet
• Booklet including Placememory by Andy Murray, and Weird Science: The Stone Tape At Fifty by John Doran

Elvira's Haunted Hills

Cast: Elvira, Richard O’Brien, and Mary Scheer 

Director: Sam Irvin

90 minutes (12) 2001

101 Films Blu-ray 

Rating: 6/10

Review by J.C. Hartley      

[Released 2nd December]

In this review I will be abandoning all pretence of gentlemanly conduct when considering a lady’s age and her physical attributes. This is the second movie outing for Elvira, the sepulchral-coated creation of actress Cassandra Peterson, whose first big feature was Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark (1988). In that, the eponymous heroine and hostess of a TV horror show, hoping to hit the big-time, relocated to the suburbs in search of an inheritance where her larger than life liberated attitude came up against middle America. 

The thrust of the first movie was the situation of a weirdo in ‘straights-ville’, USA, and the contrast of two violently clashing lifestyles. Sequel (but narrative prequel), Elvira’s Haunted Hills has the same vampish creation, but located in the horror-heavy Carpathian mountains, where every snaggle-toothed yokel has a werewolf on his father’s side, and consequently the original gag is much diluted.

 

Elvira and her peckish maidservant Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith) are en route for Paris where they are mounting their touring can-can show, forced to escape from their boarding house when asked for rent, they hit the road and are picked up by the Vincent Price look-alike Dr Bradley Bradley (“So good she named you twice”) who, in between copping a feel and getting his nose trapped in Elvira’s cleavage, offers them the hospitality of Castle Hellsubus, where he will be making a house call. 

At the castle, Elvira and Zou Zou meet the tormented Lord Vladimere Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), his suspicious wife Lady Ema (Mary Scheer) and his swooning cataleptic (“fear of cats?”) daughter Roxanna (Heather Hopper). Elvira discovers that Vladimere’s first wife Elura became depressed on entering the castle and eventually committed suicide and, on encountering a portrait of the latter, it transpires that Elvira and Elura bear an uncanny resemblance. 

Here we are in Edgar Allen Poe country, and particularly that domain as realised by the great Roger Corman, and graced by the magnificent Vincent Price in the 1960s. The references abound... Castle Hellsubus has a great crack running through it like the cursed domain of The Fall Of The House Of Usher, a dinner is disrupted by a hypnotism demonstration, which suggests a spirit possession, as in The Tomb Of Ligeia, and Vladimere has some interesting accessories in the cellar, as in The Pit And The Pendulum.

 

Elvira minces and sways through the film scattering corny smut, and looking like a cross between Fenella Fielding in Carry On Screaming, and Anjelica Houston in The Addams Family - if played by Cher impersonating Mae West - or vice versa. Elvira isn’t as sexy as Fenella Fielding, but doesn’t take herself as seriously as Houston, so that’s alright, but the film does bring to mind an old Johnny Carson special where a lot of sweating leering male dancers simulated lust while the walking blancmange that was Mae West sang a song. Peterson looks fantastic and has a terrific, if unlikely, figure, but by my calculations she’s was around 50 then, and the make-up gives her a plastic, if not waxy, aspect particularly in the region of her curiously static bosom, and given the choice of an erotic encounter with her or the ample Zou Zou I’d plump (ouch!) for the latter.

 

As the plot shudders to its inevitable climax, Elvira has a roll in the hay with Adrian the stable lad, whose chest is as impressive as her own, and attempts to rescue Roxanna from the grim fate of the family Hellsubus. The revelations of the rather grisly denouement are as expected, but the original PG-13 certificate still seems an over-reaction even for the ‘land of the free’. There’s a mucky song listing Elvira’s adventures in the sack but for all that she’s rather strait-laced, like your best mate’s flirtatious aunty who would come over all priggish if you ever suggested playing strip scrabble.

 

The reason I’ve rated the movie six out of ten is because it’s all good silly, dirty fun. As an affectionate tribute to Poe/ Price/ Corman, its heart is in the right place, and Ms Peterson ended up funding the thing herself. 

Blu-ray disc extras:

• Introduction by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
• Commentary with Peterson, Scheer, Smith, actor Scott Atkinson, and director Sam Irvin
• Making-of featurette
• Transylvania Or Bust featurette
• Elvira in Romania featurette
• Interview with Richard O’Brien
• Outtakes
• Photo gallery

The Hitcher

Cast: Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh

Director: Robert Harmon

97 minutes (15) 1986  

Second Sight 4K Ultra HD   

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary  

Driving from Chicago to California, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), picks up hitch-hiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). The road-trip is going well, until John threatens to kill Jim, and says “I want you to stop me.” Lucky Jim manages to get the psycho out of his car, but that’s not the end of it. The crazy hitcher pursues Halsey, murdering anyone that he meets, along the way. Police don’t accept Jim’s wild story, and only highway-cafe local girl Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in an early role) eventually believes him enough to accompany increasingly desperate Jim on his journey into hell. 

This is a subgenre thriller that moves quite briskly, but really accelerates to a lightning pace whenever Hauer is on-screen, and his scenes crackle with explosively violent energy, and dark humour. All the way through it, there are vague suggestions of supernatural forces around the intriguingly uncanny (seemingly allegorical?), spree-killer, which are thankfully never explained. Howell plays the persecuted innocent Halsey very well indeed, and Hauer was perfect casting as eerie antagonist Ryder. Even Leigh’s rather overly-studied role as Nash is likeable, although she’s just another victim of the lunatic’s mayhem. The Hitcher remains a quite stunning thriller, with plenty of witty dialogue in Eric Red’s knowing script, some tense direction by Robert Harmon, and terrifically arranged stunts action.

It’s a classic modern-day nightmare movie, where outrageous things get worse, dramatically, every time that Halsey wakes up. Mystery-man Ryder is a demonic monster, pretending to be merely human. He gets his kicks on Route 666, halfway between nowhere, USA, and ultimate damnation. The Hitcher is strictly business right from the start. Dark mythical resonance, emerging from existential terror, becomes the movie’s only sub-plot. There are also a few homo-erotic moments in this haunted tale about macho confrontations, with a seduction by charismatic evil. Shot, mostly, on locations, the movie’s grounded in reality, but it explores a fantastically dynamic situation, leading to many horrific events.

 

“What do you want?” asks Halsey, repeatedly. “That’s what the other guy said,” replies Ryder. Talking never helps in this movie. Language is simply mundane noise, or seemingly redundant in the twisty narrative of a moral dilemma. It was successful enough, on video at least, to warrant a sequel, Louis Morneau’s sadly flawed The HitcherII: I’ve Been Waiting (2003), which prompted a competent but uninspired remake, Dave Myers’ The Hitcher (2007). Both are worth seeing if you enjoy this original movie, fully restored for maximum impact in 4K UHD with HDR and Dolby Atmos.    

Disc extras: 

• Commentary track by Robert Harmon and Eric Red
• Commentary by critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Scene specific commentaries
• The Projection Booth podcast: Robert Harmon and Rutger Hauer
• Bullseye: new interview with Robert Harmon (42 minutes)
• Penning The Ripper: new interview with Eric Red
• Doomed To Live: new interview with C. Thomas Howell
• The Man From Oz: new interview with John Seale
• A Very Formative Score: new interview with Mark Isham
• Duel Runner: Leigh Singer on the evolution of The Hitcher and Rutger Hauer
• China Lake: newly restored short film by Robert Harmon
• The Calling Card: Robert Harmon on China Lake
• Telephone: short film by Eric Red
• The Hitcher: How do these movies get made?
• Trailers 

Bad Biology

Cast: Charlee Danielson and Anthony Sneed   

Director: Frank Henenlotter

84 minutes (18) 2008  

Severin 4K Ultra HD   

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary

[Released 26th February]

After 15 years away from creating horror movies, Frank Henenlotter made a welcome but outrageous comeback with Bad Biology. Like a drunken Cronenberg imitator, this OTT black comedy-of-errors about shockingly abnormal sexuality is often lurid and repeatedly crude, and yet really too deliriously silly to cause serious offence. Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) is a blonde ‘nymphomaniac’ photo–artist, who has seven clitorises. Her pregnancies seem to last about two hours, and then she disposes of any unwanted ‘babies’ in dustbins (perhaps that’s where early-Henenlotter's mutant Basket Case progeny originated?).

Batz (Antony Sneed) has a faulty penis, but he fixed it with regular steroid injections. Apart from inducing a non–stop hour–long orgasm in hookers, the troublesome side–effects of drugs and his self–abuse result in Batz’s monstrously unwieldy cock developing a mind of its own, detaching itself from his body, and tunnelling through skirting and floorboards, going on a sexual rampage (cue: farcical stop-motion animated penis–creature!). While Jen takes pictures of models wearing vagina–face masks, Batz has lonely ‘fun’ at home with a Heath Robinson-style vacuum apparatus. Of course, they are destined to meet.

What happens when an unstoppable foreskin meets an insatiable sex object is, perhaps, the ideal, most surrealistic expression of Henenlotter’s body–horror weirdness. In retrospect, maybe this ultimately peculiar flick is what the cult director was actually trying for all along? Obvious thematic predecessors include brain–fart ‘Elmer’ in Brain Damage (1988), and fiendish examples of twisted fetishism in Frankenhooker (1990).

Bad Biology features porn stars (Tina Krause, Jelena Jensen), and a main cast of novices, so don’t expect great acting, but its parody of rapture, a parade of rap studs and junkie whores, and the comically tacky serial–rape spree, make this knowingly unwholesome treat a nightmarishly bad–acid antidote to mediocre horror’s predictability and genre respectability.

4K disc extras:

• Commentary by Frank Henenlotter, DoP Nick Deeg, and Anthony Sneed
• Archival commentary with director Henenlotter and producer Thorburn

Bonus Blu-ray:

• Commentaries (as above)
• Spook House - interviews with Henenlotter, Thorburn, production coordinator Michael Shershenovich, DoP Deeg, retired detective David Henenlotter, and production manager Chaz Kangas
• In The Basement - interview with Charlee Danielson
• Deeg And Sneed – a conversation between Deeg and Sneed
• Swollen Agenda – interview with make-up effects artist Gabe Bartalos
• Beyond Bad – behind the scenes of BAD BIOLOGY
• F*ck Face – photographer Clay Patrick McBride
• SUCK – short film by Anthony Sneed
• Legendary Loser – music video by R.A. The Rugged Man
• Thorburn image gallery – publicity, behind-the-scenes, video covers, death pix 

Inside

Cast: Alysson Paradis, Beatrice Dalle, and Nathalie Roussel 

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury 

85 minutes (18) 2007

Second Sight Blu-ray    

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary 

[Released 5th February] 

Riding on its decade’s bloody new wave of French horrors - including such thrillers as Alexandre Aja’s hallucinatory High Tension (aka: Switchblade Romance), Xavier Gans’ splattery sci-fi masterwork Frontiers, and Pascal Laugier’s astonishing Martyrs - grisly shocker Inside (aka: A l’interieur), brings a gripping claustrophobic power. Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, this stars Alysson Paradis, as heavily pregnant widow Sarah, and the great Beatrice Dalle as a nameless ‘angel of death’ - or something quite like it. 

With diabolical sense of purpose, and an unhurried intensity of destructive envy, Dalle’s almost demonic seeming home-intruder turns Sarah’s lonely Christmas Eve into a night of mortal dread, locked in a gore drenched bathroom. Animation of the unborn baby adds a dimension of CSI styled graphics to the visual impact, and there is clever use of sound effects to build tension and suspense, accentuating an extraordinary violence, which skims along fuzzy borderlines between absolutely nightmarish fantasy and the brutality of a psychopathic reality. 

Although it’s a short 85–minute feature, action plays non–stop as visitors to Sarah’s residence only survive a few moments in the confrontations with Dalle’s antagonist. Cruel and gutsy with a disturbing savagery, very memorably using a large pair of scissors as multi–purpose household weaponry, Inside is a smartly constructed and fascinating thriller. Its agonies transform Sarah’s quiet suburbia into a veritable war-zone of wildly inhuman atrocities, without any hints of compromise or moral restraint. It’s a mesmerising hell of torments, but definitely not suitable viewing for any mum-to-be in a delicate emotional condition.

Extras:

• New commentary by Anna Bogutskaya
• New commentary by Elena Lazic
• First Born - new interview with co-writer/directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
• Labour Pains - new interview with Alysson Paradis
• A New Extreme - new interview with producer Franck Ribiere
• Womb Raider - new interview with cinematographer Laurent Bares
• Reel Action - new interview with stunt co-ordinator Emmanuel Lanzi
• The Birth Of A Mother - Jenn Adams on Inside 

High Tension

Cast: Cecile de France, Maiwenn, and Philippe Nahon 

Director: Alexandre Aja 

91 minutes (18) 2003

Second Sight 4K Ultra HD

Rating: 9/10

Review by Jonathan McCalmont

Cinema and literature are in a constant state of flux. Genre formulae and canons are not fixed, they are constantly challenged by new and innovative works that, invariably, invite not only imitation but also the re-examination of older works that were once considered little more than creative cul-de-sacs. Traditionally, horror films are made for very little money and with relatively inexperienced directors who make the most of lurid subject matters and formulaic storylines to secure high returns for their investors whilst learning their trade as directors. A glance at the history of French cinema will reveal Art house and mainstream traditions healthy enough to ensure that French film makers have never needed to pass through the crucible of genre filmmaking before maturing artistically. As a result, older French horror films tend to be either part of the Art-house tradition, or part of the trans-European exploitation films of 1960s and 1970s, centred not in France but in Italy.

Twenty years ago, High Tension (aka: Switchblade Romance) is the film that kick-started a wave of French horror cinema, and it is interesting to note how much of those genre films’ DNA is included in Alexandre Aja’s work. The story begins in a country house where Marie (Cecile de France) is staying with her friend Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco) and her family. Marie is masturbating in her room when she hears a sound downstairs. Going to investigate, she witnesses a large man with an obscured face brutally murdering Alex’s family before dragging Alex away and locking her in his van. Marie gives chase and sneaks into the van in the hope of freeing Alex. But who is the man with the obscured face? 

High Tension is notable not only for its levels of stress and incredible violence but also its no-nonsense approach to plot. Where many horror films spend an eternity introducing you to characters and delivering back-story, High Tension jumps almost straight into the action. However, this is not to say that the film is shallow. Aside from the genre conventions that the film plays with, it also through its use of imagery, and its plot development manages to say a number of interesting things about gender roles and how one perceives one-self. For example, is a willingness to use violence an inherently masculine trait and, as a result, are women who decide to use violence more masculine than those who don’t?

Most intriguingly, Aja adopts an Art house posture towards his audience. Rather than explicitly spelling out the film’s ideas and message through exposition, he allows the audience to draw its own conclusions and concoct its own ideas. This, along with the film’s awareness of the sexual politics of horror, has proved to be a hugely influential approach to the material.

Trailer: 

Bonus material:

• 4K UHD presented in HDR10+ approved by director Alexandre Aja
• New audio commentary by Dr Lindsay Hallam
• An Experiment In Suspense - new interview with Alexandre Aja
• The Man In The Shadows - new interview with writer Gregory Levasseur
• The Darker The Better - interview with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre
• The Great French Massacre - interview with special effects artist Giannetto De Rossi
• Only The Brave - Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on High Tension
• Archive ‘making of’ featurette
• Archive interview with Cecile De France
• Archive interview with Maiwenn
• Archive interview with Philippe Nahon