Schock (1977)

... aka: Al 33 di Via Orologio fa sempre freddo (It's Always Cold at 33 Clock Street)

... aka: Beyond the Door II

... aka: Beyond the Door #2

... aka: Les démons de la nuit (The Demons of the Night)

... aka: Schock (Transfert-Suspence-Hypnos)

... aka: Shock

... aka: Suspense

Directed by:

Mario Bava

Many years after her drug-addicted, "half-crazy" husband Carlo (Nicola Salerno) died by suicide, Dora (Daria Nicolodi), her 7-year-old son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and her (frequently absent) new husband Bruno (John Steiner) move back into her Dora's former home. It was the same home she had once shared with her late husband and has been unoccupied since his passing. Thanks to Bruno's busy job as a pilot and the home's close proximity to an airport, Dora has decided to move back in and try to adjust to all of the bad memories associated with the place as she goes. She almost immediately begins to regret that decision.

It doesn't take long for Marco to start behaving strangely. He frequently asks, "Are we going to stay here forever?" and is caught talking to himself... or perhaps an imaginary friend... or an invisible entity that no one else can see. He wakes up late at night and starts growling "Pig! Pig! Pig!" as Dora and her new husband make love downstairs. He spies on her in the shower, steals her panties, crawls on top of her and starts thrusting and grunting in a decidedly non-childlike fashion. And let us not forget the unnerving casual asides like "I have to kill you mommy." All rather disturbing changes in the young boy, I'd say! And it only gets worse from there.

After a series of minor "accidents," which find Dora falling and bruising her arm when the lights suddenly go out, slicing her finger with a razor blade hidden between piano keys, cutting open her hand on an exploding pill bottle and slicing her leg open with a strategically placed rake, she begins to fear that she's going crazy. Again. She'd already spent six months in an asylum after the death of her first husband in what we can assume was an abusive, tumultuous relationship. If that's not bad enough, she's haunted by terrifying nightmares involving someone trying to break into her bedroom late at night and a floating utility knife slicing at her, plus flashbacks to her terrible first marriage. And if that's not enough, she also has daytime hallucinations like a bloody hand emerging from the ground to claw at her ankle. New husband Bruno, who ignores her frequent pleas to move out, resorts to secretly drugging his increasingly more hysterical wife.

Shock falls into a number of different popular horror subgenres. We get a haunted house film (complete with doors opening by themselves, furniture moving, creaking floorboards, etc.), an evil kid movie (complete with lots of shots of the boy glaring at his once-beloved mama and gleefully laughing at his various evil deeds), a ghostly revenge / possession flick and a psychological horror all wrapped into one. Hell, this even incorporates a little voodoo black magic into the proceedings, including the little boy using a voodoo doll, plus a photo fastened to a swing that almost brings an airplane down!

The multi-layered plot offers up a few distinct possibilities. Is Marco really possessed or just showing signs of psychosis himself due to having been raised by mentally-imbalanced parents? Is his late birth father using his child to try to return to life? Is Dora simply going insane? Is the ghost of the former husband out for revenge and, if so, why is he out for revenge? Bava manages to neatly tie it all together by the surprisingly downbeat finale whilst leaving a trace of ambiguity behind.

I completely disagree with those who've claimed this is "lesser" Bava or a disappointing final feature for the director, and anyone out there who claims this is less stylish than Bava's previous films doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. While it may be less colorful, less elaborate in regards to production design and lower-budgeted, there's more than enough visual style, great camerawork and directorial cleverness (especially good use is made of image distortion and out of focus shots) on display to satisfy, plus a highly effective score, great use of sound, some genuinely creepy moments and one of the best-executed jump scares you'll see in any film.

The camera swoops into a hole in a wall and then rises back up looking out the other side, the son uses a flashlight and a cutout from a photo to cast a spectral figure on a brick wall that may or may not house a corpse and ghostly hands made of light strip sheets off a bed. Those are just a few of the cool little touches found herein and the movie is filled to the rafters with other such moments.

Nicolodi is almost entirely known for her work with director Dario Argento, whom she dated on-and-off for years and had a child (actress Asia Argento) with, but was never technically married to. That relationship worked as something of a double-edged sword for her career. While it got her involved with some of the most famous Italian horror films of the period (notably SUSPIRIA, which she also wrote), Argento barely ever gave her a decent acting role in any of the films, with PHENOMENA perhaps being the lone notable exception. Here, however, she's given a central role and an actual character to play with some dynamics (not to mention hysterics!) and this is clearly the best role she ever got to play in a horror film. Annoying dub aside, little Colin Jr. is also very effective as the son. Genre regular Ivan Rassimov (MAN FROM DEEP RIVER) also shows up in a small role as a doctor friend, though he's not given anything interesting to do.

Shock was in pre-production stages as early as 1972, starting with a screenplay by BAY OF BLOOD writers Dardano Sacchetti and Gianfranco Barberi called Al 33 di via Orologio fa sempre freddo ("It's Always Cold at 33 Clock Street"), which was based very loosely on American mystery writer Hillary Waugh's 1971 novel The Shadow Guest. The script ended up sitting around for several years while Bava was working on other films but was later reworked by two new writers: Alessandro Parenzo, co-writer of Bava's great Rabid Dogs (1974), and the director's son, Lamberto (also the assistant director). The film finished up its five week shooting schedule at the end of June and was already playing in Italian theaters later that same summer.

Because there were no big bankable names to American audiences attached to the film, distributor Film Ventures International cooked up a new plan. Hey, since one of the actors was in another hit film, why not make this a bogus sequel to that film? The film in question was the Exorcist wanna-be BEYOND THE DOOR (1974), which became an international surprise hit despite being a piece of shit, so Schock then became Beyond the Door II. While I'm sure this did alright business under that title (there's also a bogus Beyond the Door III, after all), it didn't do nearly as well as the "original" despite being infinitely better. In the UK, it played (under its original title) on a double bill with The Blood-Spattered Bride (1971).

This title has always been much easier to find here in the States than most of Bava's other films. The initial VHS distributor was Media. It was then re-released on VHS by Video Treasures (who just recycled the Media poster art). DVD releases followed in the early 2000s from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground. Arrow (out of the UK) is going to handle the Blu-ray release, which is currently slated for a January 2022 release. My screen caps were taken from the Anchor Bay DVD and, as you can see, there's still a lot of room for visual improvement here.

★★★

Tenebrae (1982)

... aka: Der kalte Hauch des Todes (The Cold Breath of Death)
... aka: El placer del miedo (The Pleasure of Fear)
... aka: Pelkoa ei voi paeta (Fear Cannot be Escaped)
... aka: Shadow
... aka: Shadows
... aka: Sotto gli occhi dell'assassino (Under the Eyes of the Killer)
... aka: Tenebre
... aka: Unsane

Directed by:
Dario Argento

Having taken a break from the more traditionally-plotted murder mysteries he initially made his name with to concentrate on the supernatural-themed SUSPIRIA (1977) and INFERNO (1980), Argento makes a return here to the style he's now most associated with. The film was only moderately successful in Europe (it performed better than Inferno though not as well as many of Argento's previous films) but was very poorly-received here in America when it was given a limited theatrical release in 1984 under the new title Unsane. As was customary at the time, the U.S. distributor (Bedford Entertainment Film Gallery) decided to remove most of the violence / gore, neutering the murder scenes in the process, and even took it upon themselves to shorten some of the more elaborate camera shots (which is unconscionable for an Argento film!). Around ten minutes in total were removed. This same cut of the film was re-released in 1987 to theaters and issued on VHS (by Fox Hills Video) to little fanfare. It would take well over a decade for the film to start to repair its reputation when it was finally made available uncut on VHS and DVD by Anchor Bay (it has since been released on Blu-ray by Arrow, Synapse and other companies). But rebound it has! Out of the 20+ features Argento has directed since 1970, it's currently his fourth highest-rated on IMDb and his third highest-rated on Letterboxd.

Popular American mystery writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) arrives in Rome for a book signing / press tour for his best-selling latest release Tenebrae, leaving behind mentally imbalanced former lover Jane (Veronica Lario), who he's been avoiding for six weeks, in the process. Peter is greeted at the airport by his agent Bullmer (John Saxon), secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi), young personal assistant Gianni (Christian Borromeo) and a slew of reporters / photographers. And then the trouble starts. First off, his formerly pleasant friend Tilde (Mirella D'Angelo) has turned into a (gasp!) angry lesbian feminist magazine writer who attacks Tenebrae as being "sexist" for featuring "women as victims" and "men with their hairy macho bullshit." Second, someone back at the airport in New York has destroyed all of his belongings in his carry-on bag. Third, once Peter arrives at the hotel suite he'll be staying while in Rome, he's greeted by Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stagnaro), a pair of police detectives who relay something even more startling...

Just three hours before Peter arrived in Italy, shoplifter Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) was attacked by a black-gloved assailant who stuffed pages of Tenebrae in her mouth before slashing her to death with an old-fashioned open razor... the same murder weapon of choice for Tenebrae's fictional killer. The killer has also somehow managed to locate Peter's suite before his arrival to slip a note under his door quoting a passage from his book. And if that's not enough for one day, the killer makes a creepy, threatening phone call from a pay phone right outside the window. Time for new accommodations? Nope! For better or worse (read: worse), Peter and his entourage decide to just stay put where they are despite the fact a psycho killer knows their exact location!

The stalking and string of grisly murders continues as the suspect list, also including Peter's ex Jane (who comes all the way to Rome just to spy on him) and Cristiano (John Steiner), a TV reporter a little too into the psycho-sexual content of Tenebrae (the killer is also obsessed with the "degenerates" and "filthy, slimy perverts" in Neal's book), is trimmed down. During the film's most memorable (and celebrated) sequence, Tilde and her promiscuous bisexual girlfriend are killed by the psycho, which not only features Argento's trademark woman's-head-goes-through-glass bit but also includes an unbroken 2 ½ minute shot prowling outside the home, which goes from the window, up the side of the house, over the roof and around to the other side. This impressive shot was achieved with a special Louma Crane that had to be imported in from France.

Many of the other horror set pieces are also very well-done and photographed by Luciano Tovoli, especially one involving the hotel porter's teenage daughter (Lara Wendel) being pursued by a rabid, fence-scaling Doberman Pinscher before (whatta coincidence!) running afoul of the murderer. On a side note, Wendel deserves special credit for running around the woods, repeatedly falling down, wrestling with the dog and scaling (and jumping off of!) numerous high fences all while barefoot and wearing a miniskirt! The hectic ending, featuring several axe murders, an amazingly bloody (and oddly beautiful) bit where a severed arm stump paints a white wall red and an impalement with a piece of abstract sculpture is pretty memorable, too.

On the down side, the scenes where people aren't being slaughtered are far less successful. The plot is contrived, frequently silly and filled with implausible cheat scenes to try to throw you off, much of the dialogue is poor and unintentionally funny and most of the supporting performances suffer from poor English dubbing. There's a self-reflective element to the proceedings when it comes to contrasting Tenebrae's fictional author with the real-life Argento (both are criticized for essentially making careers out of depictions of violently killing beautiful women) that provides slight additional interest. It's also worth noting that while the film is stylish in its own way, it has more of a consistent steely / stone / cold / blue-grey color pallet than the eye-catching full color spectrum used on Argento's previous two films. It's also much brighter, with well-lit night scenes and even a number of the horror scenes taking place in broad daylight. Not that the visual presentation necessarily means everything. While Inferno is one of Argento's best-looking and most colorful films, it is also, narratively-speaking, perhaps his weakest up until the 90s.

Transgender actress Eva Robins (born Roberto Coatti) was interestingly cast in a small role as a red shoed temptress in some brief, though evocative, beach flashbacks. Marino Masé (ALIEN CONTAMINATION) and Fulvio Mingozzi (who had small roles in every Argento film up until 1985's Phenomena) also show up briefly and Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi (both assistant directors) appear in uncredited bit parts. The score, which is more polarizing than in most of the director's other films (personally I really like it), is from Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli and Claudio Simonetti.

I haven't seen this one in well over a decade but it was interesting on a re-watch, especially in regards to how my rankings for Argento films have changed over time and how well some of them have held up over the years and through repeat viewings. When I was a teenage horror fan obsessed with Argento films and collecting everything Argento I could get my hands on, this was among my Top 3 favorites. Now, not so much, though I do still like this one.

★★★