RETRO REVIEW: try not to snore on THE STAY AWAKE

THE STAY AWAKE (John Bernard, 1989) 

In the fifties, American serial killer William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon, DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH) is executed for multiple rapes and murders of young women. He claims to be the Angel of Darkness and will have his revenge from beyond the grave. Thirty years later at St. Mary's private girls' school somewhere in Europe after the term, a roving Steadicam POV starts wandering the corridors on the night that the remaining girls and their teacher Miss Walton (Shirley Jane Harris, THE RETURN OF THE FAMILY MAN) schedule a stay awake in the gym to raise charity funds. 

The evil presence breaks a beakers in classrooms and makes just enough noise for Miss Walton to alert groundskeeper Mr. Stark (Ken Marshall, THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY II) to the presence of a prowler, but the girls remain largely oblivious as do aerobics – the throwaway reference to Jamie Lee Curtis seeming to have more to do with her eighties fitness image than as a HALLOWEEN final girl – play lame pranks, shower, and run off to meet boys who have snuck onto the grounds. Eventually the evil presence tires of wandering around and shows itself as a Halloween store demon that starts killing the cast through telekinetic means until only one remains.

An early Avi Lerner/Nu Image credit from the South Africa tax shelter days when a few local films were also able to take advantage of free government money raked in by foreign productions like the various Cannon Films, 21st Century Film Corporation, Allied Vision, and Breton Film Productions, Ltd. productions like the back-to-back AMERICAN NINJA 2 and AMERICAN NINJA 3, RIVER OF DEATH, PLATOON LEADER, TEN LITTLE INDIANS, HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE, THE HOUSE OF USHER, BURIED ALIVE, and THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (from which this film's Christobel D'Orthez is the only recognizable cast member among the students). Unlike the equally budget-deprived by ambitious and transgressive South African contemporary THE SHADOWED MIND – which was actually banned – THE STAY AWAKE is almost feeble in its plotting and execution (probably the closest modern equivalent might be the Paris Hilton Scottish-set/England-lensed horror NINE LIVES); had it been made these days on this level with state funds, one would wonder if most of the money had been laundered. 

The William John Brown scene appears to have been tacked on, not only because it is more visually-stylish than the rest of the film – intercutting the killer's walk to the gas chamber with slow-motion cutaways to his crime scenes under investigation to the tune of a fifties-style ballad – but there seems to be nothing to connect the killer to the students of a European private Catholic girls' school and the actual onscreen monster is a lame puppet demon (additional cutaways to Brown with poorly-aligned optical red eyes could just as easily have been added in post). The rest of the film is interminable banter between the catty girls, wandering around corridor sets, and endless Steadicam shots – alleviated by a couple crane shots of the exterior of the Gothic campus of which only the gymnasium seems to truly belong – to groaning synth music and demonic laughter. The in-camera effects are modest – as is the cheesecake shower sequence – the gore is minimal, and the whole thing ends with a freeze frame and a warbly pop song. As bad as THE STAY AWAKE is, I would probably still snap it up on Blu-ray if only to see how the film looks stripped of its dark and hazy video mastered defects. 

The film was released on VHS by Nelson Entertainment and on DVD by Image Entertainment (out of print and ridiculously expensive when it pops up). The most economic physical media option is importing the German DVD which has remained affordable since it has been re-pressed a number of times with different covers (the French DVD only includes the French-language dub). I would avoid the unauthorized Cheezy Flicks DVD on principle. For the curious, THE STAY AWAKE is currently streaming on Tubi via current rights owner Filmrise (although not from their own streaming service). 

RETRO REVIEW: Enter THE BLACK ROOM

THE BLACK ROOM
(Elly Kenner and Norman Thaddeus Vane, 1984)
USA

The original text of this review appeared on the now-defunct film website EsotikaFilm in 2008.  It has been slightly revised here while the original can be accessed via the above Wayback link.

 
Larry (HOSPITAL MASSACRE's Jimmy Stathis) is a thirty-something husband and father looking for a place to cheat. He finds an ad in the newspaper for a room for rent in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills owned by a mysterious photographer Jason (Stephen Knight) and his ethereal sister Bridget (NIGHT SHIFT's Cassandra Gaviola). The room for rent is the titular "black room" with mirrored walls, dark furnishings, and black walls with the only light sources being candles and a glowing glass table. Larry starts taking girls there and having sex, not knowing that Jason and Bridget are watching and photographing them through one of the room's two-way mirrors.

When Larry goes home to his wife and kids, he uses the details of his supposedly imaginary encounters to spice up him and his wife's sex life.  The girls, however, unbeknownst to Larry, are unwillingly providing blood transfusions to keep Jason's blood disease under control. Thinking that Larry could be a lucrative source for fresh blood, Bridget seduces him in the black room and Jason photographs it for blackmail purposes. When Larry's wife Robin (Clara Perryman) finds the newspaper ad about the room for rent in Larry's car, she visits the mansion and discovers the room is real, that Larry must really be cheating on her, and things take an unusual turn…

Ostensibly a horror film, THE BLACK ROOM is more concerned with the ambiguous nature of human relationships than the subplot of busty gals having sex and being killed in a remote horror house. Our protagonist is a husband and father with a cheerful home-life that becomes complicated in the bedroom with children who will not go to sleep, having to be quiet to not wake them when they do, and the general staleness of his marriage. He uses his encounters with other women in the black room to heat up his sex life with his wife; referring to them as "word pictures."

The encounters with various women in the black room are not excuses for T&A as the chiaroscuro lighting does not allow for that nor does the editing. The focus within the room is on Larry exploring himself psychologically with character-probing small-talk as foreplay.  The voyeuristic brother and sister are depicted in the act of looking rather than showing us what they are looking at. Even Bridget's nudity during her encounter with Larry is obscured by the artful body paint with which she coats herself and Larry.

Robin's discovery of the black room does not lead to a stalk-and-kill scene. A sinister-looking Jason finds Robin sitting in the garden and they speak frankly about Larry's activities and Jason's and Bridget's roles in the arrangement. He even shows Robin the two-way mirror and snaps photographs while Larry has sex with another woman and Robin cries on the sofa. Jason's suggestion that Robin turn the tables on Larry and make use of the black room as well for her pleasure seems less motivated by the opportunity to procure fresh victims than as an erotic diversion; making the bloodthirsty sibling set seem less single-minded than they would be in a more straightforward horror film. The black room itself is an enclosed setting that allows for interior exploration, experimentation, and improvisation – signified by the camerawork which glides back and forth between the onscreen light sources and complete blackness only to come across more candles or indistinct bodies writhing either in passion or in terror as the syringe and chloroform-wielding brother and sister approach – where Larry and Bridget can step outside themselves even as afternoon partners try to deduct their personalities.

Extraordinarily for an American independent film, neither the staging of long sequences in the black room or the mansion and its grounds nor the rushed and cramped nature of the exterior shooting make the film feel stage- or set-bound precisely because of the film's Pinter-like association of interior lives with interior spaces and the threats of intrusion from without and the greater one from within. Of course, it does eventually lead to the obligatory stalk-and-kill sequence with HALLOWEEN shadings involving butcher knives, closets, a coat-hanger impaling, and "he's not dead yet!" surprises – featuring an atypically clothed and non-screaming Linnea Quigley (RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) – and a circular ending. What we have here is a low-budget, independent arthouse picture masquerading as a horror film.  Had this film been made in Europe in the seventies it would be a piece of prime Eurocult with added nudity. Had it been made more recently in Europe, it would be an edgy art film. Had it been made in the nineties in the states, it would have been an DTV "erotic thriller" bogged down by lingering, slow-motion, scored with somnambulant sax and keyboard with an added horror tinge not unlike Fred Olen Ray's usually diverting twists on the genre.  Christopher MacDonald (THE EIGHTEENTH ANGEL) also has a supporting role in the film and merits an "and – as" screen credit in the opening titles.

RETRO REVIEW: Alain Robbe-Grillet visits THE BLUE VILLA

THE BLUE VILLA aka UN BRUIT QUI REND FOU
(Dimitri de Clercq and Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1995)
France/Belgium/Switzerland

The original text of this review appeared on the now-defunct film website EsotikaFilm in 2008 and was published shortly before Alain Robbe-Grillet's death in February of that year.  It has been slightly revised here while the original can be accessed via the above Wayback link.

"But debts to the dead are sacred here."

A year to the day of the mysterious death of his stepdaughter Santa (Sandrine Le Berre) at the hands of her lover Frank (Fred Ward), screenwriter Eduoard Nordmann (Charles Tordjman) begins a screenplay framing the crime in the context of a local myth about a mariner destined to return every year to the place of his crime in search of redemption. He is subsequently informed by Inspector Thieu (Dimitris Koulikakos) that Frank – thought to have drowned during his flight from the crime scene by boat – or his ghost, has been seen all over town by the locals. Although Thieu identified an unidentifiable body found at the time as that of Frank, he never truly believed the story behind Santa's death and intimates his suspicion of Nordmann's involvement since he would benefit from her death by inheriting the money left to Santa by her late mother.

Little do either of them know that Santa is in fact alive and being cloistered in the island's local gambling house/bordello, The Blue Villa, under the care of Madame-smuggler-extortionist-pimp Sarah-Le-Blonde (Arielle Dombasle who later appeared in Robbe-Grillet's GRADIVA). Thieu informs Nordmann that Santa's real father (Christian Maillet, the film is dedicated to the late actor) has had his daughter's case reopened and is told not to leave the island until the investigation is completed. Nordmann endures ghostly appearances by both Santa, who reproaches him for his molestation of her, and Frank who tells Nordmann that he has come back from the grave to collect his debt. Is he really being haunted or is he the victim of a plot?

THE BLUE VILLA is the popular English title of the film. The French title actually translates as "A Noise That Drives One Mad" referring to the clattering of shuffling ivory mah-jong tiles that Nordmann claims can drive a man to madness. Co-directed by Dimitri De Clerq (and produced by Jacques De Clerq) – who later produced the unsubtle Georges Bataille adaptation MA MÈRE – this is perhaps Robbe-Grillet's most accessible film (even more so than the even more mainstream PLAYING WITH FIRE in which the tension between father and daughter was more overtly incestuous).

There is the Robbe-Grillet trademark use of disorienting sound effects but here they are oddly complementary to the action in an unconventional manner. Sounds of helicopters and gunfire that sound like the soundtrack of another film bleeding into this film's soundtrack actually underline Thieu's comment on the death of Nordmann's wife who was killed in Indonesia by revolutionaries. The sounds of a typewriter underline an expository scene between Sarah and Thieu at which the writer is not present suggesting these scenes may be imagined by Nordmann's paranoid creative mind.

The imposition of competing narrative structures upon a series of events is the focus of this film. Nordmann first superimposes the local legend of the pale mariner on the crime ("Last year a driller calling himself Frank fit the part…") to suggest the inevitability of his stepdaughter's demise. He also attempts to revise facts in the dialogue, claiming to have loved "his only child" only to be corrected by Thieu that not only was she not his biological child but he was known to have hated her. As suspicious falls upon him, Nordmann not only possibly imagines aspects of Thieu's investigation and the machinations of Sarah and Santa's real father, he also revises the possible series of events leading to his daughter's death while skirting the details of his own involvement. He even conjectures an accidental death version after encountering Frank's apparition as if to placate the vengeful spirit.

In the form of police reports, Thieu narrates possible theories and picks them apart trying to fit Nordmann's involvement into the series of events. Added onto all of this is another layer in which Santa's real father appears to be narrating Eduoard's haunting and paranoia. Regardless of whether Frank and Santa are truly alive or not, they are specters of a sort as they both (literally on Frank's part) stroll through the narrative which is shaped and reshaped around them (neither Ward nor Le Berre have much dialogue until the final third of the film). They are, however, given the privilege of erasing Nordmann's story.

Although the plot is film noir, the film's visual style emulates that genre but reaches back to its German Expressionist forbears. Frank is followed around wherever he goes by three musicians. In later scenes, their presence suggests Frank's ghostly presence even when he does not appear. In one such scene, Nordmann encounters their VAMPYR-like disembodied shadows. Throughout the film, Sarah teaches a song about the island's legend of the pale mariner to Santa. Sarah is later seen performing the song at the Blue Villa's salon to the accompaniment of the same three musicians. Menacing shadows suggest supernatural vengeance even though Nordmann believes he has just as much to fear from the police and Blue Villa owner Mars' thugs. The apparitions of Santa that appear to Nordmann are theatrically staged – appropriately since we know she's really alive, even if the conspiracy is a figment of Nordmann's paranoid imagination – with lighting effects (in one, she simply steps in front of a window as a spotlight comes up to reveal her to Nordmann).

Ward seems an odd choice for the role of Frank. Although he has proven to be one of those ageless actors, he is still obviously a few decades older than the seventeen-year-old Santa. As effective as Ward is, he also seems more like a commercial concession – possibly on the part of the De Clerq's – and most of his non-dialogue scenes almost have a second-unit location photography feel to them. An unknown probably would've been a better match for Le Barre's cipher. Dombasle is a striking and charismatic presence but, like similarly arresting LA BELLE CAPTIVE's Sarah Zeitgeist (Cyrielle Clare), she is given little depth. While it is not surprising that even the principle female (Le Barre) in a Robbe-Grillet film is only rendered in superficial shades, what one finds lacking here is the sort of bewitching, bewildering eternal female figure one expects from a Robbe-Grillet work like L'IMMORTELLE. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that the story that Nordmann and Thieu are attempting to contain within a narrative leans more heavily towards - quite literally - a plot than the supernatural.

The island setting and the shabby environs are effectively realized; an early scene of a fainted prostitute surrounded by superstitious patrons in the Blue Villa's bar recalls the tense tavern scenes of Jean Rollin's LES DEMONIAQUES as much as LA BELLE CAPTIVE's mansion scene recalls the look and feel of a similar scene in Rollin's LE VAMPIRE NUE (there is a tenuous link there worth exploring by someone). The Blue Villa, which Nordmann describes the name as possibly "in memory of a famous bordello for well-heeled degenerates in Hong Kong" recalls Robbe-Grillet's "La Maison De Rendez-Vous" ("probably imaginary, that too," Nordmann adds). Santa's bordello cell – along with the rest of the Blue Villa – also recall the environs of PLAYING WITH FIRE while her pure white bedroom in Nordmann's house recalls the cell of SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE. Some of the island imagery, including a shot of a man sitting in a chair along the waterfront directly references L'IMMORTELLE.

The Jacqueline Pierreux credited as one of the coproducers is not the actress mother of Jean-Pierre Leaud. Cinematography, production design, and costumes are typically top-notch; perhaps too perfect as they lack the distantiating rough edges of Robbe-Grillet's earlier work. Nikos Kypourgos' score is exotic but, once again, seems a bit too refined for a Robbe-Grillet film. Sound was recorded by Francois Musy (Godard's PASSION, HAIL MARY, DETECTIVE, etc). The film was shot in Panavision (2.35:1) – a lot of the setups are static but well-composed and effectively framed with gels, shadows, and Oriental set dressing. The Dolby Stereo soundtrack is thunderous when it needs to be and stereo could perhaps provide Robbe-Grillet with an interesting medium for his use of sound effects as counterpoint to onscreen action should he write and direct another film.