Trailer Park Tuesdays - The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

This week at Trailer Park Tuesdays we got a freshie.  No holiday leftovers here.  Oooo, and it's French!







The movie trailer this week is a brand new spot for The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, following a teaser trailer that debuted earlier this year.  Strange Colour is an arthouse/mystery/horror film about a man who is searching his apartment building for his missing wife but at every turn finds violence and sex instead. (I hate when that happens)


Those familiar with filmmaking duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Fazani's previous film Amer (2009) or their segment O is for Orgasm from anthology film The ABCs of Death (2012) should be looking forward to this and know what to expect.

If you're not familiar, what you can expect is a strongly visual film with a vivid color palette, meticulous art direction, and a camera that probes endlessly.  Also, it will have a carefully constructed soundtrack, as the aural aspects of their work is just as important as the visual.  Also-also, it'll have stylized bits of violence, orchestrated to the nth degree.  Here's the trailer:

This looks sharp.  I like the escalation it presents while remaining vague.  Personally, I'm sold on this one; I'll be checking it out as soon as it is made available to me.

Apparently The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears will see release in France in the spring of 2014, so lord knows when it will be available over here in the States.  Not soon enough, whenever it is.

A Bay of Blood

This entry is part of the Final Girl Film Club.  Head over there to read all about it (and by "it" I mean multiple reviews of this movie, but read mine first.  Thanks).






Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) is an Italian giallo (murder mystery) film that is both incredibly fun and considered to be widely influential.  The movie contains a total of 13 murders, and since it is currently the year 2013, and seeing as how 13x2 equals 26, and today happens to be the 26th, and since numbers have been proven to mathematically exist, here's a list of 13 REASONS YOU SHOULD WATCH A BAY OF BLOOD:

1. - The Murders:

Like I said, there's 13 of them.  This is definitely a bodycount film, as the violence spread throughout A Bay of Blood is an array of stabbing, slashing, hanging, beheading, shooting, and strangling.  There's plenty of stalking too, and even a couple good shock moments.  It's all pretty great, as there is no shying away from the carnage.

The special effects were done by Carlo Rambaldi, and they're quite effective, especially the machete to the face.  The blood is that sick, candy red color that was popular in Italian (and other) movies of the era, such as A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), Deep Red (1975), and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973), all of which Rambaldi worked on.  Carlo would hit the big time working on iconic films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; realization of the "extraterrestrial"), Alien (1979; 'Alien' head effects), and E.T. (1982), but I personally think some of his best work is on the intensely batshit Possession (1981), which means that, yes, the same guy that made and designed the lovable E.T. also made the fuck-monster in Possession.

A Bay of Blood is almost in your face with its carnage, as it comes quite often and is, indeed, bloody, but it is the slow revelations of the motivations for these murders, and the identities of the murderers (plural), that gives the movie its twist of mystery and intrigue, making it more than just a bodycount film.

2. - The Mystery:

The basic plot of A Bay of Blood is this:  after the death of the wealthy, wheelchair-bound Countess Federica (Isa Miranda), multiple people and groups are vying (and dying) to take possession of her property and mansion.  There's a real estate agent and his lover, some creepy locals and neighbors, and the Countess's daughter and her husband... and with all of these multiple players plotting and scheming against one another, it's hard to identify exactly who you should be rooting for, as nobody is actually trying to solve any of the murders, something that is somewhat of a defining characteristic of the protagonists found within the giallo genre.

The mystery of this move is, admittedly, not that complicated or maybe even that thrilling, but I appreciate the novelty of a movie where everyone is a killer (more or less) and how that drives the plot forward instead of a search for a killer.  Granted, it is a whisper-thin plot, but watching the movie play out (and all those murders play out) reveals clues and further insight as to why all these various people want or feel the need to kill.  Basically I like that it's not just a slash and stab picture, even though there is plenty of both.

3. - The Cinematography:

Mario Bava worked as his own cinematographer on this film (as he often did) and there is some nice camerawork.  The camera seems to be in constant motion, with numerous pans, tracking, and dolly shots.  The most noticeable thing is the amount of zooms and the variety of them; slow zooms, fast zooms, in, out, zooms during pans or dollys, Bava is constantly pushing the camera in (focusing on the details) and pulling it back (showing the bigger picture).  Combined with the amount of close-ups used, all this zooming and camera movement gives the film a disorienting feeling and keeps you off balance, something that must be intentional, given the sort of mystery that is at play here.

4. - Mario Bava, the godfather of Italian horror cinema:

In case you're unaware, Bava is considered to be a legend and one of the most important figures in Italian genre cinema, having created some of the special effects for and worked as the cinematographer on Italy's very first horror film (I vampiri [1956]), sword-and-sandal epic (Hercules [1957]), and science fiction film (The Day the Sky Exploded [1958]), before going on to direct films of his own and introducing the world to Barbara Steele with his solo directorial debut Black Sunday (1960) and also helping to create the giallo subgenre of horror films with his one-two punch of The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964).  His films are gothic, occasionally psychedelic, innovative, influential, and incredibly fun, with even his lesser efforts offering memorable or standout sequences.  He is a master of the genre and while I wouldn't say A Bay of Blood is representative of his work as a whole, it's a good gateway into his films.

5. - That gross ass Octopus, crawling all over that Corpse Face:

That shit is nasty.

6. - The Influence on Friday the 13th and other slasher films:

If you're into American 80s slasher films, then you definitely need to check out A Bay of Blood.  It is not only a precursor to those films, but it is also a direct influence on the Friday the 13th films, specifically Part 2 (1981).  In general, the secluded wooded setting around a body of water brings to mind the F13th films and other summer camp slasher films, but F13thPart 2 wholesale lifts two murders directly from A Bay of Blood, the machete to the face and the two-lovers/one-spear kill, not to mention that both films feature the death of a character in a wheelchair.  Jason Voorhees: thief?

Of all the giallo films I've seen, I would say that A Bay of Blood is the one that feels most similar to a slasher film, as it is basically a movie populated with characters that are lined up to die.  Good thing most of them are good looking or interesting to look at...

7. - The Cast, full of good looking Ladies and Weirdos:

Like a lot of Italian giallo films, this one has a cast full of lovely ladies and interesting looking weirdos.  Claudine Auger puts in a good performance as Renata and her dynamic with her husband Albert (Luigi Pistilli) is interesting; they would be the protagonists of the story if it weren't for the lengths they go to get what they want (also, they're negligent parents...).  Auger was the Bond girl in Thunderball (1965) and Pistilli was in For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)





The lovely Brunhilda (Brigitte Skay) certainly gives the film its requisite amount of nudity during the scenes she bounces around in, and Laura (Anna Maria Rosati), the real estate agent's lover, plays only a minor part, but she looks good doing it.

My favorite character might be Paolo Fassati (Leopoldo Trieste), a weirdo entomologist who lives along the bay with his weirdo, tarot reading wife Anna (Laura Betti).  Paolo is first seen running around with a net trying to catch some bugs, his enthusiasm childlike.  He seems to associate more with insects than he does with people, making him a great off-kilter side character.  Trieste also has small supporting roles in Don't Look Now (1973) and The Godfather: Part II (1974).
Laura Betti worked with Mario Bava on Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) and the two of them came up with the basic story for A Bay of Blood simply as a means of working together again (she gets no final credit in the film, even though there are six screenplay credits[!]).

8. - The Soundtrack:

Dig the groove, man.

9. - This Guy's Hair!  And both of their Turtlenecks:  

ha!

10. - All the Alternate Titles:

Check out these 13 different titles for this movie:

original pre-production screenplay title:  Odore di came (The Odor of the Flesh)
shooting screenplay title:  Cosi imparano a fare i cattivi (Thus do we live to be evil)
after production title:  Antefatto (Before the Fact)
first release title:  Ecologia del delitto (The Ecology of Crime)
pulled from theaters and retitled and re-released as:  Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction)
again, pulled from theaters and retitled and re-released as:  Bahia di Sangre (Bay of Blood)
first US release title:  Carnage
second US release title:  Twitch of the Death Nerve
UK titles include:  A Bay of Blood, Blood Bath, and Bloodbath Bay of Death
strangest re-titlings:  Last House on the Left - Part 2 and The New House on the Left (?!)

11. - That Buggy Car:

Look at this thing?  That color of yellow!  Could it have ever existed outside of Europe during the early 70s?

12. - That fucking Ending. . . :

I won't spoil it.  (The above photo doesn't represent the ending).  The final scene of A Bay of Blood is one of those, "waitareyouseriousdidthatjusthappenohmygodyesitdidtotallyjusthappen" kind of endings.  It's unbelievable and puts the movie over the top.  It's a serious WTF moment, causing you to either throw your hands up in frustration or in total applause.  I fall into the latter group.

13. - This Theatrical Trailer:

Should a trailer be a reason to watch a movie?  In this case, yes.

There you have it.  Your 13 Reasons to Check Out Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (or whatever you want to call it).  Most versions available today are uncut, so feel free to watch it under whatever title you can find it under.  Like I said, it's incredibly fun and, c'mon. . .there's 13 murders!

Isa Miranda, who played the wheelchair-bound Countess, also co-starred in David Lean's Summertime (1955) and the controversial and sadomasochistic The Night Porter (1974).

Barely in the movie, except for a couple scenes, Renata's red-headed daughter is played Nicoletta Elmi, who would go on to play the Baron's daughter in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973), the weird lizard girl in Deep Red (1975), and Ingrid, the usherette in Demons (1985).

Pieces

"You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!"

Pieces (1982) is an incredibly fun and extremely trashy film, soaked in gore and teaming with sleaze.  It's the very definition of a crowd pleaser and I absolutely love it.  Sure, it doesn't make sense half the time, it has awkward overdubbing and weird dialogue, but when it rips and roars, it never fails to entertain.

Hailing from Spain, Pieces was made to cash in on the American slasher craze of the 1980s, but owes a lot of its style and mystery elements to the Italian giallo films of the 60s and 70s, which in turn themselves were part of the inspiration for their American slasher cousins.  Pieces, I guess then, would be the strange ouroboros of slasher films.  (I considered going into deeper detail and explanation on slasher and giallo films for those that aren't familiar, but I'm feeling lazy, so just go HERE and HERE for more information.  We'll meet back up here later).

Pieces opens in Boston, 1942, as a young boy named Timmy is alone in his room playing with an erotic puzzle.  When his mother finds him, she go ballistic, smacking him, smashing his mirror, and yelling for him to "go get a bag for all this trash."  Instead, Timmy comes back with an axe and proceeds to smash her skull in.  He then grabs a saw and cuts her head off.  Timmy is seriously disturbed, but he knows to play the "some big guy did it" game when the police and a concerned family friend show up.

Flash-forward 40 years later and a deranged psycho is slicing up co-eds with a chainsaw on a college campus.  The lead detectives on the case, Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña), have their work cut out for them, as almost everybody seems to be a suspect, and bodies keep piling up all over campus (minus a few parts).

They decide to bring in a young policewoman (and former tennis pro), Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George), to go undercover on campus, posing as (naturally) the new tennis instructor.  There are plenty of suspects and red herrings alike, including brutish groundsman Willard (Paul L. Smith), fey and wormy Professor Brown (Jack Taylor), the fastidious Dean (Edmund Purdom), and Kendall (Ian Sera), a student at the school who is also quite the ladies man.

Ladies and gentlemen...your suspects!

Most of the time things happen and it's not made very clear why.  After the 1942 opening, we get a comical scene of a girl named Ginnie riding her skateboard down the city street, oblivious to the pair of movers carrying a giant mirror right in front of her on the sidewalk.  She smashes into the mirror, but in the very next scene she is totally okay.  She's hanging out, laying in the grass and studying, before the killer shows up and cuts her head off with a chainsaw (complete with a perfect gush of blood from the neck). Apparently, the mirror smashing is the event that incites the killer's rampage and he kills Ginnie some days after the incident, but the way the scenes are cut together it is almost impossible to interpret that any time has elapsed between them.  Pieces main plan of attack on viewers seems to be a dual effort to both confuse and shock.

The most (in)famous WTF-scene in Pieces is later in the movie, when tennis prolicewoman Mary is out walking around by herself at night and is suddenly attacked by a Bruce Lee impersonator (actual Bruce Lee impersonator, Bruce Le) doing all these kung fu moves on her.  It's of course a misunderstanding, as Kendall shows up on his motorbike, explaining "it's my kung-fu professor.  What's the story, Chow?"  Chow's response is both amazing and confusing:  "I am out jogging and next thing I know, I am on ground.  ...Something I eat, bad chop suey.  So long!"

That is but one example of the weird dialogue exchanged in this film.  One sultry student is heard bragging to her classmates, "the most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed...at the same time."  Lt. Bracken has a detailed theory that "the killer is either someone on or near the campus," while Sgt. Holden makes this attempt at a hard boiled analogy: "We're just out buying clothes without labels and trying them on for size."

The most memorable and best line delivered in the movie is actually a single word screamed three times by Mary in a moment of ultimate frustration, after discovering yet another of the killer's victims.  I'll just let Mrs. Lynda Day George speak her mind:

The original Spanish language title of the film is Mil Gritos Tiene la Noche (translates as "One Thousand Cries has the Night"), which, while being a cool title, doesn't really describe the film very well.  As is, Pieces definitely lives up to its name and reputation and it's easy to allow the film's technical issues to be forgiven, as the pace and sheer intensity of the film never let up and doesn't give you time to consider some of the absurdities (how did he get that chainsaw on the elevator unnoticed?).

The stalking and chase scenes are fairly well done, with excellent cat-and-mouse pacing.  The stalking that leads to the murder on the waterbed is one of the best in the movie, taking some obvious visual cues from the Italian giallos, such as the high contrast and colored lighting and by using slo-mo.  Also, the violence is more operatic in this scene than, say, in the elevator or bathroom stall murders, which, while shockingly violent and gory, don't approach any sort of aesthetic artfulness in their execution.

The killer's outfit is also very giallo inspired, with black gloves, long trench coat, and a brimmed hat that obscures the face.  It's quite the stylish look, one that invokes mystery and menace, and can be directly traced to back to the killers in Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Deep Red (1975).

The special effects are rather accomplished, especially for a low budget film.  All the stops were pulled and seemingly no ounce of blood was spared.  In the previously mentioned bathroom stall murder, a pig carcass was used for a closeup shot of the saw tearing through flesh.  It's remarkably effective.  The violence in this film has been accused of being misogynist, but there isn't any underlying hatefulness going on in any of the murder scenes, just over the top excess.  The lack of hateful feeling is what keeps Pieces an enjoyable viewing experience.

The moody synth score adds a lot to the enjoyment of Pieces as well.  It was included for the US and Italian release of the film and was performed by Carlo Maria Cordio, who also scored Aenigma (1987), Touch of Death (1988), Sonny Boy (1989), and cult-classic Troll 2 (1990).  The original score (which is available on the Grindhouse Releasing DVD) was taken from the Italian CAM (Creazoni Artistiche Musicali) music library (credited to Librado Pastor).  Comparatively, it is a fairly boring score, with a repetitious piano melody.  It's a good thing they switched it up for the international release.  (There's also this disco gem used during a very '80s aerobics scene).

Pretty much everyone who worked behind the camera on Pieces would work with director Juan Piquer Simón on many of his other (lesser) films, which include The Fabulous Journey to the Center of the Earth (1977), Mystery on Monster Island (1980), Slugs: The Movie (1988), The Rift (1990), and Cthulhu Mansion (1992).  His 1983 movie, The Pod People, would be featured in a classic Season 3 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

One of the writers of the film, Joe D'Amato (going under the alias John W. Shadow), was a prolific Italian filmmaker who directed 200 films, many of those explotiation-stlyle pornography (soft and hardcore).  His non-porno credits include Beyond the Darkness (1979) and Anthropophagous (1980).

Christopher George is a B-movie icon, with his deadpan manner and macho attitude.  He would star in William Girdler's Grizzly (1976) and Day of the Animals (1977), Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (1980), as well as The Exterminator (1980), Graduation Day (1981), Enter the Ninja (1981), and Mortuary (1983), which would be his last film.  He would die of a heart attack (complicated by his smoking habit) shortly after completing that film.  Interesting fact: his niece is Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White.

Lynda Day George was married to Christopher George for 14 years.  She would star alongside him in Day of the Animals and Mortuary (amongst others) and would also star in the possession film Beyond Evil (1980) with John Saxon.  She also had an extensive career in television, most notably as Lisa Casey on Mission: Impossible.  In Pieces, her character of Mary Riggs is supposed to be a modern multi-talented woman, but Lynda Day George isn't very convincing as a policewoman, and she's even less convincing as a tennis player (there's one very stiff and awkward scene where she plays a round of tennis, the actress playing her opponent not knowing how to play either).

Edmund Purdom was a classically trained actor who never broke through in Hollywood, so he moved to Italy in the 1960s and started a long career in television, voice dubbing work, and in B-movies.  He would star in such films as Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974), Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982, directed by Pieces writer, Joe D'Amato), 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983), and the Santa-slasher, Don't Open Till Christmas (1984), which would also be his sole directorial credit.

The big and burly Paul L. Smith is best known as portraying Bluto in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980), but he's also been in genre fare like Dune (1984), Crimewave and Red Sonja (both 1985), Haunted Honeymoon (1986), Gor (1987), and Sonny Boy (1989).  There's an extensive and entertaining interview with him on the previosuly mentioned DVD release, where he talks about everything from Otto Preminger and the Six-Days War in Israel to David Lynch and Dom DeLuise.  In Pieces, it seems he is constantly making this face:

Like a lot of directors, Juan Piquer Simón had his repertoire of actors (i.e. buddies that would be in his movies) that he would regularly use.  Frank Braña was his DeNiro; they collaborated on a total of 9 films.  Jack Taylor worked with Simón a couple times and has an dense filmography that extends from Jess Franco (Eugenie [1970], Female Vampire [1974]) to Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate [1999]).  Ian Sera doesn't have much of a filmography outside of his films with Simón and if he's known at all today, he's known as either the-guy-who-gets-the-raw-deal-at-the-end-of-Pieces or the "It stinks!" guy from The Pod People.

Speaking of the ending to Pieces, it is something that can only be described as bat-shit crazy.  It's a jawdropper that comes completely out of left-field and has to be seen to be believed.  It will grab you.

Final Thought:  "Pieces.  It's exactly what you think it is!"  So see it already.