Somehow
it seems oddly fitting that it was an Italian, Jonathan Zarantonello, that,
after years if not almost decades, finally gave the great Barbara Steele a lead
role in another horror film. After all, it was an Italian, the great Mario Bava
(31 July 1914 – 27 April 1980), that gave Steele her breakthrough double-whammy
as the duel lead females of his 1960 masterpiece, Black Sunday (trailer). What is less fitting and far less satisfying is
that the movie Ms. Steele so effectively carries on her shoulders — a film far
superior to her few film credits of the previous two decades, namely the
wannabe cult farce The Boneyard
Collection (2008 / trailer), Fred Olen Ray's The Prophet aka Fist of Doom
(1999), and the decidedly obscure Austrian fantasy Tief Oben aka Deep Above
(1994) — has not only remained relatively obscure and ignored, but also didn't
really lead to all that many further roles. (Kudos to Ryan Gosling for at least
giving her a small part two years later in his arty directorial debut, Lost River [2014 / trailer].)
Spoiler-heavy Trailer to
The
Butterfly Room:
TheButterfly Room'sopening credit sequence already speaks
a lot about what is to come: aesthetic but with a sudden shock, it indicates a
directorial eye aiming towards art as well as horror. And while the movie
seldom achieves the same level of visual aesthetics as the in the opening credit
sequence, The Butterfly Room is well
shot, never gratuitously gory, and ingenuously constructed.
During
the credit sequence, one is not initially sure whether one is being witness to
a suicide attempt or an unexpected menstrual flow, but over the course of a
narrative that interlaces multiple times lines to tell it story, the viewer
learns which it is — indeed, throughout the movie, the viewer is often given
clarification only in retrospect. Zarantonello's interweaving of different
temporalities does on occasion leave one slightly unsettled, as one is often
not 100% sure where one is within the tale, but it proves to be a stimulating
narrative trick that not only ends up working, but is, in the final scenes,
tied into a tight and neat bow.
Set
in Los Angeles, the story could work in any larger city. Barbara Steele is Ann,
a reclusive and butterfly-obsessed lady of the later years (Ms. Steele was 75
at the time) who is, without doubt, a psychopath. And like so many crazy
egoists, her id and person are not immediately apparent to those around her.
But the viewer knows her screws are loose from the start, as unlike anyone in
the movie we see her as she apparently for no reason kicks the ladder out from
beneath an Afro-American workman (Joseph H. Johnson Jr. as Chris) chain-sawing
tree branches.
Not
that we know it when she does it, but not only is kicking away the ladder not
the worst act that she has already committed, but there is also a method to her
actions. Before we learn what the method is, however, and all that she has
already done, we witness how she comes to befriend the young Julie (Ellery
Sprayberry), the daughter of Claudia (Erica
Lei Leerhsen of the unjustly maligned Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 [2000 / trailer], The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2003 / trailer] and Wrong Turn
2: Dead End [2007 / trailer]), a young and not particularly capable single mother...
The Butterfly Room is rare in that it is movie dominated by females.
True, men that function to advance the narrative do pop up here and there —
e.g., the ill-fated Chris or the taxidermist from whom Ann busy supplies (the
great character actor James Karen [28 Nov 1923 – 23 Oct 2018]) — but with the exception of Nick, the contemptible
building handyman played by Ray Wise (of Swamp Thing [1982 / trailer] and so much more), the men are all fleeting appearances
of little consequence. Females are the focus of the movie, and all but two —
the previously mentioned young Julie, and the equally young grifter Alice
(Julia Putnam of House of Bad [2013
/ trailer]) — are adult, carry emotional baggage, and are or
were mothers. And with the exception of some of the more-fleetingly seen
mothers when Ann is out uncovering Alice's secrets, all are noticeably emotionally
and/or psychologically damaged and hardly "perfect" mothers. Indeed,
Alice's mother, Monika (Elea Oberon), a one-legged prostitute that obviously
enough made Alice what she is (a conniving, thieving con artist who literally
sells herself to play the daughter of lonely women), is definitely a horrible
mother — but then, so is/was Ann. (When reviewing all the mothers of the movie,
it could be feasibly argued that The
Butterfly Room has a definite anti-mother undertone. For a perfect
anti-mother double feature, watch this movie with Sonata
[2004].)
In
many ways, The Butterfly Room feels
like a classic Italian giallo film, only that no black gloves ever appear and
there is very little mystery to who the killer is, even if you don't always
initially know who the victim was. Indeed, since one knows that Ann is rather
unhinged, there is little true mystery to the movie; instead, the tension lies
in when and how the snake is going to bite again. And thus the body count
rises, unnoticed by the other characters of the movie, until the final orgy of
violence is ignited and Barbara Steele goes full Tallulah Bankhead (Die!
Die! My Darling! aka Fanatic [1965 / trailer]) / Gloria Swanson (Sunset Blvd. [1950 / trailer]) / Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962 /
trailer]) / Shelley Winters (What's the Matter with Helen? [1971 /
trailer]) / add the name of your
favorite former cinema beauty* and a late-career horror movie in which she plays a lady who
loses it. But even before Ann finally reaches for the sledgehammer and Alice's
final fate is revealed, The Butterfly
Room delivers some shockingly violent deaths.
*Yes, even Shelley Winters didn't look that bad
once upon a time.
Barbara
Steele rules the roost in the film, moving smoothly between ice queen to needy,
friendly to hateful, seemingly normal to total nutso — sometimes within a
single scene. Fellow cult fav Ray Wise does another one of his seemingly easy
turns as a smiling but morally corrupt house janitor. Special note should also
be given to the young actress Julia Putnam, who does a well-tuned performance
as the duplicitous Alice.
For those who like to play "Spot the
Faces", a variety of genre cult names also pop up throughout The Butterfly Room for a single scene
or two, including Joe Dante, P.J. Soles (Halloween
[1978 / trailer], Uncle Sam [1996 / trailer] and so much more), Adrienne King (Friday the 13th [1980/
trailer]), Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984 / trailer], A Nightmare
on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987 / trailer], and The
Demolitionist [1995 / trailer, with Susan Tyrrell]), Camille Keaton* (What Have You Done to Solange? [1972 / trailer, with Joachim Fuchsberger], Sex of the
Witch [1973 / music], and — most famously — the original I Spit on Your Grave [1978 /
trailer]), and the previously mentioned James Karen (Hercules in New York [1970 / trailer], Return of
the Living Dead [1985 / trailer], and so much more), but with the exception of
Langenkamp and possibly the almost unrecognizable Camille Keaton, they come and
go too quickly to truly make a "Hey! That's…" impression and thus are
simply functionally effective as tertiary or minor characters.
*What?
No Tisa Farrow?Catriona MacColl? [Add your favorite still-living cult horror actress's name here: _______________.]
For all the bodies, The Butterfly Room is hardly a gratuitously violent film in the
typical bodycount/slasher tradition. Zarantonello
is very much interested in the psyche of his characters, and the emotional and
psychological scars that drive them and their actions. The final scene also
infers that the flaws (for a lack of a better word) of our progenitors can very
well become our own, as the psychological scars left behind can be a slow but
inescapable formative element that unavoidably shape and create.
Well made, engrossing and often shocking, The Butterfly Room is well worth
checking out, and not just for the added attraction of the great Barbara
Steele. It works as a horror film and a
suspense film, not to mention as a tragedy, and will easily also appeal to
those not particularly enamored by the modern gore-laden horror genre in
general.
So, once again t'is the season to be pretend to be jolly and
feel brotherly love, support crass commercialism and gain weight and argue with
the family and generally repeat the same shit as last year and every year before.
And as we are always in awe of Christmas commercialism, this year's Christmas-themed
Short Film of the Month is actually a
commercial that we stumbled upon via our DuckDuckGo search "christmas
horror animation". What can we say… other than, "Cool!"
But we also don't have a lot of
time to verbosify today, so let's just look at what Movieweb says:
"Christmas
horror may in fact be one the the greatest subgenres of all time. Alan
Robert's The Beauty of Horror: Ghosts of Christmas
coloring book gets treated to its own NSFW claymation video. Santa has been
possessed in Robert's Ghosts of
Christmas coloring book by the popular undead Ghouliana from the author's
previous installments in the series. Santa goes on a crazy killing spree,
murdering all of his friends and it's truly disturbing. Everything is so well
done, and it's so graphic. It's hard to un-see, so if you're squeamish about
watching the Elf on the Shelf get ripped apart, stay away from this video and
coloring book."
Alan Robert worked together with
the claymation dude Trent Shy, whose great page at YouTube
is just waiting for your visit.
In any event, here at a wasted life we wish you a Hairy Christ Pissed Day and a Flabby
Boo Year! And after you've enjoyed the short above, check out some of the past Christmas Short Films of the Month listed and linked directly below for easy access.
(Spoilers.) The introduction of HD
can only be seen as an event to rue. Since the advent of the HD DVD, one no
longer knows for sure whether a film just looks like a TV movie because it was truly
filmed on video or whether it was bestowed its cheap, flat and overly sharp TV
look despite its original film stock. Book
of Blood, in any event, has too much nipple and blood (not to mention
discretely side-shot penis) and non-US accents to truly look like a Big Three*
movie, but for all its neo-noir cinematography and inconsistently timed dollops
of stale chills and effective grue and gratuitous nudity, this slow-moving and
relatively uninvolving horror movie often feels like a Halloween night TV
flick.
*ABC,
CBS and NBC, the traditional "big three" commercial broadcasters that
held sway in the US until FOX and cable circumcised them down to size. FOX News
then totally circumcised the intelligence of the US public, and now we have
Trump and a nation doomed to be the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards. Reverse evolution takes many forms, baby. (Now buy me a jet. Jesus wouldn't have wanted for me not to have one, either.)
But no, Book of Blood is a "real" movie, based on two tales — "The
Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street (A Postscript)" — found
in Clive Barker's book of the same name, and directed by John Harrison (a former
friend and colleague of George Romero who functioned as executive producer for
Romero's didactic and disappointing Diary of the Dead
[2007]). Book of Blood is also a not-very-scary
movie and a mess, but at least it features the beautiful Sophie Ward and… and…
and… a lot of nice non-US accents and some pleasant shots of the Edinburgh
skyline. Other than that, well, the movie did, obviously enough, supply
employment for a lot of people, and employment is a very good thing. (People without employment are the spawn of Satan.)
For the most part Book of Blood is a haunted house movie,
though a lot of extraneous stuff happens elsewhere. And as a haunted house
flick, at times it brings to mind earlier such films like The Haunting (1963 / trailer)
or The Changeling (1980 / trailer)
or The Others (2001 / trailer),
while never coming anywhere close to being half as involving or chilling or
surprising as any of them. (It does, however, have an early scene in which a
girl gets her face ripped off — fun stuff like that ain't found in any of the
older films just listed.)
Book of the Dead opens with Sophie Ward's somber recital of the
"fact" that drives the movie: "The dead have highways, running
through the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed
souls. They can be heard in the broken places of our world, through cracks made
out of cruelty, violence, and depravity. They have sign posts, these highways,
and crossroads and intersections. And it is at these intersections where the
dead mingle, and sometimes spill over into our world."
Yep: when you die, you go to the
great highway in the sky where you walk round forever yearning to talk about
yourself with the living world. And if you're lucky, you stumble upon a place
like the house in the movie, a place that is an inter-realm intersection, where
if you're even luckier you can tell your story by cutting it into the skin of
some uninteresting milquetoast like Simon (Jonas Armstrong) before you continue
on down the highway. Of course, one wonders why such intersections are even
needed, when elsewhere in the movie ghosts of the dead show up and do things
far from the house, like playing ring around the rosy on a lawn or drowning a
hired killer in an isolated cabin.
Though the supernatural
crossroads of a house is the core setting of the movie, the Book of Blood opens elsewhere, in a
diner where a hooded Simon is having a cup of java under the watchful eye of
Wyburd (Clive Russell of Outpost: Black
Sun [2012 / trailer]).
Simon ends up strapped to a table in an isolated cabin — so guess what Wyburd
is — the setting whence the movie moves into the dreaded flashback mode, one
that even involves flashbacks within flashbacks.
The entire framing sequence, in
all truth, reeks and feels of padding: were the film to simply tell its story,
it would be too short and even more dialogue-heavy, and thus all the more
turgid. Solution? The framework situation, which fattens the film and allows it
to end with two more deaths… regrettably, the final death of Wyburd, an
absolutely idiotic supernatural event coming from the far left field,
instigates guffaws and seriously undermines an already seriously undermined
movie. One must assume it is the dead masses that kill Wyburd, probably just
because they can, for were Simon at all vengeful he would surely have rather waited
until the person who hired Wyburd shows up. (To a clean, dry cabin and mildly
moist dead body. Ghosts can really clean house if they want to.)
Book of the Dead is one of those kinds of movie that not only makes
use of idiotic plot devices to drive the plot, but has a plot that is best
fully understood only after one has read a synopsis somewhere. Top Idiotic Plot
Device Award go to the idiotic plot device of Simon convincing Mary (Sophie
Ward of Waxworks II: Lost in Time
[1992 / trailer]
and A Demon in My View [1991 /
trailer]*)
that he's psychic by fixing her car tire to pop while she's driving — it's not
like he would actually have to be clairvoyant to know that on that specific rainy
night: 1. She would drive down the same street he's trudging at the very same
time he's trudging; 2. She would see and recognize him through the rain; 3. She
would stop and offer him a lift, thus giving him a chance to look at her car's
tire and say "No thank you but drive carefully"; and 4. She wouldn't
have a major accident or die when the tire pops. (Oh, wait a minute! He is clairvoyant…
but didn't he say he lost the ability while still young lad?)
*Both
being way better movies than this one here — which says a lot about the quality
of this one.
As for top plot point that needs
synopsis clarification: that Simon stops aging after he becomes a "book of
the dead" is so ineffectually communicated in the movie that the viewer
seriously scratches their head at Mary's sudden head of white hair — especially
since her face is still so wrinkle-free and young. (Please: tell us the brand
of skin moisturizer she uses — we'll take a crate.)
Found nowhere, neither in the
movie nor in a synopsis, is why, if the dead can write all over the walls of
the haunted bedroom, they even need or want to carve their stories into Simon's
skin. Give 'em a ton of pencils and their stories could be told more quickly
and effectively and fully on the walls of the room than epigrammatic and one-by-one
on Simon's body. In turn, considering how boring most people's lives are while alive,
it is hard to believe that the tales the dead tell are so intriguing as to make
Mary rich after she starts writing them down — but then, much of Book of Blood is hard to believe.
We'll totally skip talking about
— no we won't — the whole bit about how quickly Simon gets into Mary's pants by
first standing naked in front of her and, later, telling her that he
masturbates when he can't sleep and then pulling her hand down between his
legs… OK, admittedly: the latter scene turns out to be a dream sequence, but
into her pants he does eventually get because, basically, as so many porno
movies realistically reveal and any man who isn't an incel already knows, all a man really needs to do to get a woman to
spread her legs for him is to show her his cock. Fact: sooner or later, guys,
if she sees it she'll crave it. (See: Lasse Braun's serious 1986 study of the
phenomena, The Flasher, featuring
Harry Reems
and Billy Dee.)
Speaking of what women crave, can
someone clarify the what and the why of whatever cravings Mary had that she
would go through the unconvincing evolution from serious scholar to
disappointed lover to cold and heartless scrivener of the dead?
Much of Book of the Blood is shot to look as if it is a darkly colored film
noir, and this dour look is perhaps the best things about the movie. To say
that the acting is variable is an understatement, and the movie is never
engrossing enough to allow the viewer to truly get involved in or care about
any of the characters, much less care about the narrative or plot developments.
And what's with the dragonflies? (Like, they're even less scary than
cockroaches.) And, sorry, but just because one character calls Simon a hunk
doesn't make him a hunk — from start to finish, he remains what he truly is: an
ineffectual milquetoast of an actor who looks more like he wants to hold onto
Mama's apron strings than have Mary sit on top.
All in all the Book of Blood is a drudge and a snore
and a total disappointment that is 100% instantly forgettable. You want a haunted
house film? Then go for something better, like The Haunting (1963) or The
Changeling (1980) or The Innocents
(1961 / trailer)
or Haunting of Hell House (1973 /
trailer)
or Crimson Peak (2015 / trailer)
or Stir of Echoes (1999 / trailer)
or Housebound (2014 / trailer)
or The Woman in Black (2012 /
trailer)
or even House (1986 / trailer)
or House (1977 / trailer).
During
the credit sequence, one is not initially sure whether one is being witness to
a suicide attempt or an unexpected menstrual flow, but over the course of a
narrative that interlaces multiple times lines to tell it story, the viewer
learns which it is — indeed, throughout the movie, the viewer is often given
clarification only in retrospect. Zarantonello's interweaving of different
temporalities does on occasion leave one slightly unsettled, as one is often
not 100% sure where one is within the tale, but it proves to be a stimulating
narrative trick that not only ends up working, but is, in the final scenes,
tied into a tight and neat bow.
