The Furies (Australia, 2019)

One would be hard-pressed to claim that the this relatively obscure (at least in Europe and possibly stateside) Australian horror flick in any way brims with true creativity or new ideas, but as proverbial as the basic plot cum narrative is, the movie itself goes a long way on familiar fumes and gets a lot of mileage without being boring. Aided by a great location, scary killers, good sun-bleached cinematography, more than passable acting by most of the female cast (who, in all truth, are the only ones required to act), a solid music score that substantially underscores the tension and suspense, and some absolutely mind-blowing practical gore effects, The Furies keeps the gore-friendly viewer pretty much riveted to the blood-drenched screen until the final scene. New, it isn't; well-made, it is — it's a shame, however, that the first time feature film director Tony D'Aquino, who also wrote the movie, did not have the cahones to try to at least slightly dilute the movie's innate and obvious misogynist slant by, say, making the hunt bisexual instead of so heterosexual. (In this polysexual day and age of the millennials, not that absurd of a concept — although things might be different Down Under.)

Trailer to

The Furies:

Set in an oddly surreal-looking outback forest somewhere in Australia, The Furies opens like so many women-in-danger flicks with an attractive and unarmed woman, obviously worse for the wear and not dressed for having fun in the countryside, being chased by a filthy, masked man who, going by the size of his murderous weapon (in his hand; the one in his trousers we never see), is definitely not out to pleasantly ask for a date. Finding herself injured and up-against-a-tree, it looks like our unnamed beauty is about to meet her maker when suddenly another equally soiled masked man appears from nowhere and, after a short fight, kills the first would-be woman-killer, gathers the screaming beauty into his arms, and carries her off to a fate [not really] unknown....

And thus we first see the situation that is later clarified: a modernized twist of the basic Most Dangerous Game (1932 / "new" trailer) and its numerous ilk — think Turkey Shoot (1982 / trailer), The Woman Hunt (1972 / full film), Antebellum (2020 / trailer) or even Bloodlust! (1961). Only, this time the hunters are soiled-looking, masked wackos with axes/scythes/machetes/etc., and the hunted are all unarmed women — and, also, the hunters are just as ready to kill each other as they are to kill the women. The big difference in the game played here is the "beauty and the beast" aspect: the "beasts" (as in "masked killers") are trying to find their "beauty" (as in that special, unwilling female participant) with whom they can walk off into the sunset, but should that special woman be killed before they can enter less-than-consensual bliss, the hunters themselves also die. (And how the blood and brain splatter when those heads explode!)

Of course, the description alone already reveals a big flaw in the narrative. That the women are part of the game is not a matter of choice: they are simply taken, as in disappear from the streets or home, so their participation cannot really be questioned. But the masked killers, on the other hand, are all apparently there by choice, as evident in their outfits (some of which indicate the collection of trophies from past kills) and the consequentiality with which they approach the hunt — but what man, psycho killer or Proud Boy or Republican or incel or none of the named, is really going to dress and play the part in a game that they know guarantees their own bloody demise should they fail? In a game in which failure looms inordinately large as only one surviving couple is allowed? And further, would the game organizers, who watch the game via cameras implanted in the eyes of the players and killers, really be so budget-conscious as to place exploding devices only in the heads of the killers and not in the women? (Doubtful, even if the female is considered by many — as in, the average psycho killer or Proud Boy or Republican or incel — as the "weaker" sex, but that's how it is in the movie.) Lastly, though possibly open for argument, the concept that the lead woman's epilepsy somehow allows her to occasionally "see" through the cameras implanted in her head and those of others seems more expedient than logical or plausible.

Okay, so the plot has holes in it. It's also, inarguably, deeply misogynistic, despite a "Fuck the Patriarchy" on a wall early on in the movie, and the misogyny is in no way overcome by the eventual resourcefulness and grit of main woman (an excellent Airlie Dodds, of Killing Ground [2016 / trailer], as Kayla), the kill-to-survive readiness of some of the other women, the warped "emotional growth" of the somewhat autistic character Rose (a believable Linda Ngo of Parfum Fatale [2015 / trailer]), or the I Spit on Your Grave (1978 / trailer & 2010 / trailer)-tinged ending. But, damn, the film does grab you tightly by the gonads and keep you watching until the end, particularly since the kills (like the "thrill" of the chase) come often and are constant.

It's been a long, long time since we here at a wasted life have seen a movie with practical effects as realistic and effective as those in The Furies — there is a "defacing" scene that is truly painful to watch, and not just because it's happening to a defenseless woman at the hands of a huge masked white man. But as convincing and constant as the gore is, gore alone won't make a movie "work", especially a movie that follows a template as old as the one in The Furies. Much of the success is owed to the women: with the possible exception of Kayla's best friend Maddie (Ebony Vagulans), whom Kayla is so fixated on saving, they are universally convincing for the generally short screen time they almost all have, and do a lot to make the movie watchable.

To that, as mentioned earlier in passing, the setting is also effective, and the narrative seldom lags: Tony D'Aquino keeps the action at top speed and amplified by a score that always (but oddly unobtrusively) kicks in a double force whenever things start going south again. The unexpected "shock" semi-resolution is gut-kicker, but the final scene doesn't really work, although one wishes it did. (It is doubtful that anyone involved in the game would be sloppy enough to leave a clue to their identity as large as the one found.) 

All in all, however, The Furies is a truly decent and well-made old-school exploitation film (minus breasts, of course, because breasts, unlike violence, corrupt and simply don't belong in the films of today), and Tony D'Aquino is obviously a talent to watch. There are busy professionals out there that have yet to make a movie as good as this one, though many have made one less bloody and less violent.

That said, heed our final warning: if you are not in any way a gorehound, this will definitely not be your cup of tea.

First Spaceship on Venus (GDR/Poland/USA, 1960)

Poster by Ernst Litter (5 June 1918 – 27 Dec. 2006)

 

 "In 1985, during the course of the work undertaken to irrigate the Gobi Desert, a strange fragment of rock was discovered. Several remarkable features of this rock attracted the attention of the scientists engaged on the project. Research revealed it contained a spool. Further analysis showed the material to be extra-terrestrial in origin and not of human manufacture; where did it come from?"

 

Poster by Heinz Handschick (21 Sept. 1931 – 22 Jan. 2022)

 

(Nothing but Spoilers!) While from today's viewpoint it might be hard to imagine, First Spaceship on Venus was actually a prestige product once upon a time, if one from behind the Iron Curtain. 

When originally made and released under the German title Der schweigende Stern ["The Silent Star"] — a misnomer, seeing that film concerns a trip to Venus, a planet, and not to a star — the East German/Polish production, with an "international" cast, was the first East German science-fiction film ever (some sources also list it as the first Polish science-fiction film as well). Likewise "the most expensive DEFA film ever made" [Springer], Der schweigende Stern became one of the most financially successful DEFA films, with about 4.3 million tickets sold [Inside Kino].

That version, the original East European one, was 93 minutes long, as compared to the 79-minute English dub version that eventually made it to the US in 1962 when low-budget genre specialists Crown International Pictures — one of their first releases was Bloodlust! (1961), and they later foisted such fine stuff as The Creeping Terror (1964 / trailer), Orgy of the Dead (1965 / trailer), Nightmare in Wax (1969), The Pink Angels (1971 / trailer) and so much more onto the American public — released First Spaceship on Venus stateside on a highly financially lucrative double bill with the far more worked-over Japanese film Varan the Unbelievable (1962 / trailer / original poster below), which retains only around 15 minutes of the original film.

Later re-releases saw First Spaceship on Venus gain other names, such as the oddly familiar Planet of the Dead and the oddly dull Spaceship Venus Does Not Reply.

Trailer to

First Spaceship on Venus:

Der schweigende Stern, and thus First Spaceship on Venus as well, is based on Astronauci ("The Astronauts"), the first published novel by the internationally recognized Polish author Stanisław Herman Lem (12 Sept. 1921 – 27 Mar. 2006), possibly best known as the author of Solaris (1960), which eventually became "one of the greatest science fiction films in the history of cinema", Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972 / trailer), and the George Clooney dud, Steven Soderbergh's already mostly forgotten Solaris (2002 / trailer). Lem is not known to have ever said anything about First Spaceship on Venus, but in regards to the original film, Der schweigende Stern, when asked he always tried to distance himself from the "trashy" film and supposedly even tried at one point to have his name removed from the credits.

DEFA Trailer to

Der schweigende Stern:

Shorn as it is of over 13 minutes, there is probably no justification of passing judgment here at a wasted life on Der schweigende Stern, so the opinions that follow are only applied to the English-language version, First Spaceship on Venus, which, aside from the change in length, also includes some changes in characterizations in what was already an international crew: in First Spaceship on Venus, probably to make the film more palatable to western audiences, the character Brinkman (Günther Simon [11 May 1925 – 25 June 1972]) is American instead of East German, and Sołtyk (Ignacy Machowski [5 July 1920 – 11 Jan. 2001] of Night Train [1959 / full film]), the Polish chief engineer, is now Durand and from France.* And in its reworked and shortened English-language version, First Spaceship on Venus has long since entered (at least in the US of A) the sphere known as "the public domain", which means you can find it everywhere. In our case, it was one of two films on a DVD we picked up somewhere along the way, the other film being the similarly set reworking of a Russian movie, Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet (1965), likewise of the PD.

* Of special note in both versions, the unknown Julius Ongewe, at the time a Leipzig medical student possibly from Kenya [Cambridge] and who plays the technician named Talua, in his only screen appearance ever: by dint of the Der schweigende Stern's original release date (East Germany, 26 Feb. 1960), he is the first Black man in film to go into space, beating out the Afro-American dancer & actor Archie Savage (19 Apr. 1914 – 4 Feb. 2003), seen below from the blogspot Arts & Foolish Grandeur, who followed soon after (Italy, 25 August 1960), looking groovy with blonde hair, in Antonio Margheriti's Italian sci-fi outer Assignment: Outer Space (1960 / trailer). Interesting but possibly expected: both men, the only Black characters of their respective films, die by the end of their movies. (See: "heroic sacrifice".)

Like so many films, usually not very good ones, First Spaceship on Venus requires an inordinate amount of expository and time to finally get going, in this case, to get going on its trip to the titular Venus. Set in the future of 1985 — at least one online source claims that the original DEFA release was set in the future of 1970 — the movie begins with the revelation that a mysterious artifact, a "spool", has been discovered that proves to be an alien recording; then we learn that the famed Tunguska Event of 1908 was not caused by a meteor, but by a crashed alien spaceship. A lot of time is spent on the linguistic deciphering of the spool before the source is finally discovered to be Venus, and since Venus doesn't answer our calls an international team of mostly not-very-fit-looking men (plus one woman, the attractive Japanese medical officer Dr. Sumiko Ogimura [Yoko Tani*]) board a groovy-looking rocket and take off for Venus — after which, the more interesting (if only mildly and mostly familiar) stuff happens.

* Yoko Tani (2 Aug 1928 – 3 Jul 1999), alongside Ongewe, is one of the few people on the flight that looks as if they would pass a physical. Obviously included in a socialist attempt to show advanced gender attitudes (much as Ongewe and she are there to show advanced racial attitudes), her character nevertheless spends a lot of time serving food and looking maternally concerned — although she does save one life requiring an emergency operation. Tani, a mostly forgotten name today, was a nightclub entertainer in Paris of limited thespian ability who had a brief flourish in film before marrying into wealth and retirement. Among her films of note and non-note: Fire in the Flesh (1958 / German poster below), The Savage Innocents (1960 / Italian trailer), Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (1961 / trailer), Tartar Invasion (1961 / full film), and Invasion (1965 / trailer).

Yoko Tani in London:

The directorial chores for First Spaceship on Venus, as perhaps to be expected in a prestige product, were handed over to one of DEFA's most respected directors, Kurt Maetzig (25 Jan 1911 – 8 Aug 2012), whose melodrama Ehe im Schatten a.k.a. Marriage in the Shadows] (1947 / original German trailer) is not only considered a minor post-war classic but is also the second most financially successful DEFA film ever made [Inside Kino].

But Maetzig, while well-versed in the inclusion of subtle to not-subtle propaganda messages, was never exactly what one would call a particularly exciting director. It is truly noteworthy that in what should be one of the film's big thrill scenes — a group of the astronauts trying to escape a deadly sludge by running up the ramp of what looks like a building inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's Tower of Babylon — is shot in manner that is decidedly not thrilling.* Maetzig's somewhat staid if clear visuals are simply wrong for the genre, and do little to add any excitement to the film, which already suffers from a slow start and a narrative full of mostly stock plot points and situations.

* "According to director Kurt Maetzig, creating the radioactively contaminated sludge on Venus depleted the entire annual [East German] output of glue in 1959, making it impossible to find glue anywhere in East Germany. [Springer]"

 

Full PD film –

First Spaceship on Venus:

In regard to the "stock plot points and situations", for example: a possible former romance between two characters is inferred but remains a pointless addendum that is in no way relevant to a narrative that includes such chestnuts as the loss of radio contact with homebase, some fun with weightlessness (during which it is obvious that at least one ["healthy"] guy is on a harness), an endangering meteor shower and corresponding spacewalk to fix the damage, giving AI a "heart", the ability to land and take off from the planet only once, and, finally, the looming doom of being unable to take off from the planet. (Likewise, actually, going by the blackened soot remains on the walls of some ruins, the Venusians were very much biped and two-armed humanoids, a trope that still hasn't left the stage.) Lastly, while it was perhaps not a rote plot point in 1960, the film's only Black character dies — if perhaps more tragically than in most films.

The big kicker of the plot, of course, is that while the "first spaceship" is underway to Venus in space, the Indian mathematician Prof. Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann [21 Apr 1910 – 31 Mar 1973]) and Chinese linguist Dr. Lao Tsu (an unknown and forgotten Tang Hua-Ta) finally translate the spool only to find out it is a recording of the Venusian plot to wipe out mankind and take over the Earth. Deciding to nevertheless continue their journey, when our group of dedicated astronauts reaches the planet, which obviously once housed an advanced civilization, it proves to be completely dead: the entire civilization (and all life on the planet) has been wiped out by a nuclear accident.

As for that plot "twist", one can only wonder if Stanisław Herman Lem, or whoever came up with the "they killed themselves" plot, hadn't somewhere along the way seen the 10-year-older B&W American science fiction film Rocketship X-M (1950 / trailer), which alongside a much more downer ending — spoiler: everyone dies! — concerns the discovery of a formerly civilized race on Mars reduced to a new stone age thanks to a nuclear war.

On the whole, like so many science fiction films First Spaceship on Venus has not aged well. It is slow and cheesy and overly preachy flick that manages, at best, to be a fascinating yawner liberally spiced with an obvious wariness of the future possibility of a nuclear war between the two superpowers (and their respective blocs) of the time. For all its slowness, the movie is also visually interesting on occasion and displays a nice production design when it comes to the spaceship and planet, the latter of which, especially with all the fog floating around, for some odd reason made us think of Mario Bava's Hercules and the Haunted World (1961 / trailer), if not his Planet of the Vampires (1965 / trailer). Also interesting is that, unlike in so many science fiction films, the dangers the crew faces are not some monster or race or evil thing: the dangers are simply the unknown and the unexpected of an unknown environment.

Hardly imperative viewing, First Spaceship on Venus is nevertheless fun for what it is — ripened cheese — and it does offer more than enough unintentional, if not age-induced laughs. There is a major event on Venus just before the closing scenes on Earth that is truly a winner, when what looks to be an exciting, last-minute, big save-the-day interlude (of the kind that Will Smith or Tom Cruise always succeed at) results, rather unexpectedly, in people dying and/or suffering certain future death. Unluckily, but as befitting the anti-nuclear theme and didactic nature of the film, First Spaceship on Venus sort of ruins the punch of the deaths by sticking around for a lackluster preachy ending. The tragic thus becomes the comic.

Fun trivia that you probably don't even care about: the [uncredited] woman playing Intervision reporter is no less than "the Brigitte Bardot of East Germany" Eva-Maria Hagen, the mother of Nina Hagen.

Nina Hagen sings

New York New York:

Misc. Film Fun: Music from Movies – Happy Birthday to Me (USA, 1981)

Happy Birthday to Me is a late-career directorial project of the prolific British film director John Lee Thompson (1 Aug 1914 – 30 Aug 2002), whose final western film, The White Buffalo (1977), we took a look at some time ago. Although he was a director prone to genre-hopping, it is nevertheless sometimes difficult to compute that Thompson, the man behind films like The Guns of Navarone (1961 / trailer), the original Cape Fear (1962 / trailer) and What a Way to Go (1964 / trailer), ever went on to do some of the trash he eventually made — re: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972 / trailer), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973 / trailer) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987 / trailer), among others. Luckily, however, he was a genre specialist who was never above pulp, so he left behind a remarkable oeuvre of entertaining cinematic sludge, including Happy Birthday to Me, his only body-counter slasher cum teen psychological thriller. (His only other two full-on horror films, if one does not count The White Buffalo, are more traditionally adult: The Reincarnation of Peter Proud [1975 / trailer] and Eye of the Devil [1966 / trailer].)

Trailer to

Happy Birthday to Me:

Filmed in Canada and New York State, Happy Birthday to Me was produced by the same team, John Dunning and André Link, of the far-more successful slasher My Bloody Valentine (1981 / trailer), which got remade in 2009 (review here). Happy Birthday to Me, the feature-film debut of former TV good girl Melissa Sue Anderson (of Little Gag Me House on the Prairie [1974-83], below from Happy Birthday to Me), received mostly scathing reviews and, despite doing well enough at the box office, quickly faded from most people's memories — only to gain a second life as a popular cult horror flick on video and DVD. In the UK, it was even a victim of the video nasty panic. Oddly enough, despite the film's original mild success and subsequent cult popularity, a remake never made it out of development hell during the slasher remake trend that hit during the first decade of this century.

Minor point of trivia: while the shish-kebab killing featured on the movie's instantly familiar poster does indeed occur in the movie, neither that dead teenager nor any of the other five murdered characters is named "John". (Don't you feel more fulfilled in life now that you know that factoid?) The character who gets shish-kebabed is Steve Maxwell (Matt Craven) — that's him directly below.

The plot, as found at The Abominable Dr. Welsh: "At the Crawford Academy high school, they are the 'Top 10' — the social elite of the student body. After surviving a car accident that took her mother's (Sharon Acker) life, Virginia Wainwright (Melissa Sue Anderson) still struggles to find some normalcy with her friends. With no memories of what happened during the accident, Virginia's road to recovery only grows more difficult. Her psychiatrist, Dr Faraday (Glenn Ford), performed experimental brain surgery on her. Now she's suffering blackouts and slowly recovering pieces of the accident. And one by one, her friends in the 'Top 10' start disappearing. Someone is hunting down Crawford's finest, and Virginia slowly questions whether she may be the killer."

But what interests us right now about the movie is, of course, the movie's music. Contrary to what some might claim, Happy Birthday to Me did indeed have an original score when first released in 1981. Why Sony dumped it on their 2004 DVD release is a mystery to us, but at least all subsequent releases (including the cheap-shit Mill Creek version) went back to the original music by Bo Harwood and Lance Rubin. Prior and subsequent to Happy Birthday to Me, Harwood did mostly "serious" independent movies like Cassavettes's Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, with Haji). Rubin, on the other hand, came to Happy Birthday fresh on the heels of his soundtrack for the idiosyncratic trash classic Motel Hell (1980) — and, for Happy Birthday, wrote the song that is the reason why we're even looking at this film: Syreeta's closing track to the movie, which plays over the final credits, entitled Happy Birthday to Me. What a song!

Syreeta's

Happy Birthday to Me:

Big Gay Horror Fan is likewise a fan of the song, and was moved over three years ago (March 2020) to write: "Known for the celestial soar of her range, the singular Syreeta (Wright) was often regarded in terms of her associations with other musicians. She was briefly married to Stevie Wonder, who produced her second album, and her work with Billy Preston resulted in her best known recording, With You I'm Born Again. But she was much more than a muse to great men, often writing her own material and holding her own in the often unscrupulous dealings of the entertainment industry. Horror fans, meanwhile, are in eternal thrall of her distinctive vocals from the theme of Happy Birthday to Me. Wright, chillingly, captures the haunting dynamics of this classic slasher [...]. Dying from complications from cancer at far too young an age, Syreeta is rightfully held in high regard not only by lovers of the Motown Sound, but by appreciative music lovers of all varieties."

Sing along with Syreeta:
(First Verse)
I'll have my party alone today. Who cares anyway?
I don't need them now
(Second Verse)
Who wants presents with pretty bows? Who likes party clothes?
I don't need them now
(Bridge)
Can't I turn the lights? Can't I cut the cake?
A wish is just a wish; what difference does it make?
(Third Verse)
Now that everyone's gathered here, sing out loud and clear
Cheerful as can be: "Happy birthday" to me!