One church you don't want to visit

Last week I talked about Stagefright by Michele Soavi, and today we're talking about The Church also by Michele Soavi.

The Church (1989) is a beautiful mess of a film. The plot in a nutshell is this:

Back in medieval days, a force of Teutonic Knights are called to cleanse a village of evil. They do this by indiscriminately slaughtering every living thing around and burying all the corpses in a pit which is sealed with a big stone cross. A priest instructs them to erect a great church on the site to trap the evil in the pit forever. Cut to 1989. The evil is released and everything goes pear-shaped.

The actors aren't bad, some like Hugh Quarshie (Father Gus) went on to play the Captain of the Guard for Queen Amidala in Star Wars Phantom Menace. The bishop is played by Feodor Chaliapin Jr. who essentially reprises his role from The Name of the Rose. Young Lotte is played by Asia Argento.

To be perfectly honest, this movie is a great example of style over substance. The shots are great and the sound and music are topnotch.

The biggest problems are the script and the cutting. Several smaller scenes make no sense and the dialogue is almost pointless. The pacing is also a bit odd, but not so much as to really make a difference. It feels like as if a group of people sat around and pitched cool scenes with the script built around those scenes as an excuse to make a film. In most cases this would be catastrophic, but Soavi pulls it off nicely. The movie is mostly like a dream with soft shots and muted lighting that never goes too dark to be watchable. Many modern directors could take note here. After all, what's the point of watching a movie if it's too dark to see what's happening?

Most of the special effects are good and still hold up quite well. Whether you like the rubber demons that pop up here and there is up to you, but the final monster, that is built of squirming human bodies is still quite impressive.

Interestingly, they wanted to shoot the movie in and around the Nuremberg cathedral but the city decided they didn't want a horror movie filmed there. The church is actually The Matthias Church in Budapest, or the The Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle (Hungarian: Nagyboldogasszony-templom) to use it's full name.

Although the real church is not a cathedral, the one in the movie is. My question is; how did they build a great cathedral, which requires a substantial foundation to be dug out, without unearthing the pit of evil underneath?

A silly little nitpick to be sure, and considering that this rather cool horror movie is all about style over substance, it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day, The Church is a movie I would recommend to horror fans but not really to casual horror watchers. It's not a masterpiece but it is a fun curiosity.

That's that an all that. Join me again next time and have yourself a great week!

Bloody Italian mayhem

I've been happily reading about old school horror movies on Wikipedia and IMDb. Yeah, that's the subject of the week.

So, whilst reading, it is fun to try to remember if I've seen a particular film or not. In this vein I ran across Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) and vaguely remembered watching I ages ago. The synopsis seemed okay and I found it on Youtube so why not? I'll tell you why not. The script and pacing is awful. And the acting is sadly subpar.

I can deal with the dubbing and the lack of lip sync, but it was atrocious enough for me to turn the movie off, and instead watch a vastly superior movie:

Stagefright (1987).

I had seen this ages ago during my late teens or early 20's. I remembered it vaguely, but boy, was I pleasantly surprised.

Stagefright is directed by Michele Soavi and was in fact his first full length film, and what a home-run! He cut his teeth under Italian Giallo master Dario Argento, and this debut shows he was paying attention.

In a nutshell, the story is this: A group of dancers are rehearsing for a show that's supposed to open in a week. One of the dancers (Alicia) has injured her ankle sneaks off with the wardrobe mistress during a break to see a doctor. The closest hospital happens to be a psychiatric facility, where a murderous madman, Irving Wallace sees Alicia. Unbeknownst to them he escapes and hides in their car. In no time at all, the wardrobe mistress is killed and the police is called. The director, Peter, colludes with the financier Ferrari (not the car) to retool the show to be about Wallace instead of a generic killer in an owl mask. In order to get the changes made, Peter arranges for most of the cast to be locked in the theater to rehearse the new script, and they are all trapped inside with the killer. Bloody mayhem ensues.

What we have here is a very intelligent horror movie. Everything that happens is setup right, nothing is left to chance. Plot devices that become important later are properly shown earlier. The actors do a credible job, even with the above mentioned dubbing. The music is aggressively 80's synth, which in my opinion works nicely, but hasn't aged terribly well.

For being an “80's slasher” Stagefright avoids most cliches or at least subverts them. There is no nudity just for the sake of it. One short flash in a scene where a dancer changes her costume is it, and it makes sense within the narrative. The killer kills because he wants to and that's it. No pointless moralizing. Soavi even plays with slasher tropes a bit just for fun but not so that it gets in the way.

In the way of nitpicks, a couple of the corpses are breathing if you look carefully, and I have no idea where he gets the pickaxe for the first murder from, but the biggest flaw is when,

SPOILER WARNING

a dancer is pulled through the floor. Her boyfriend and the director are both pulling on her arms for all they're worth while the killer somehow holds her down and manages to cut her in half. A chainsaw sound effect was accidentally left out, but still it's an impossible feat. Wallace is big but the two guys should have pulled him up with the girl.

SPOILER ENDS

Bottom line, Stagefright is a really good slasher style horror movie. If these films are your cup of tea, and you haven't seen it, you need to. It's as simple as that!

That's that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

The Butcher of Lyons

So, it has been a while since I did a book review, but today it's time.

Last week I finished; Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons by Tom Bower.

Klaus Barbie (1913 – 1991) was a Hauptsturmführer (captain) in the SD, subsection IV, better know as the Gestapo. This probably tells you quite a lot already.

After a short intro, the book sketches out his childhood and how he came to join the SS. This is followed by his early service culminating in Barbie being posted to Lyons. This section is a hard read as the details of the interrogation techniques he used are pretty stomach churning. But it would have been a mistake to gloss over it too much, as it's important to be aware of what these people did.

This section also details the French Resistance groups and Barbie's intelligence work to find and break them.

As the war ends, the book goes through Barbie's struggles to evade the Allies and how he in 1946-47 starts to work for the US CIC, or Counter Intelligence Corps. As relations between the Soviet Union and the rest of the Allies rapidly fell apart, and paranoia over Stalin's plans for Europe explodes, Barbie found himself invaluable to the American effort to spy on and suppress German communist parties.

Finally when pressure from the French became too much, and the CIC could no longer convincingly lie to cover for Barbie, they spirited him away to South America through Italy.

Barbie sets himself up as a businessman and intelligence officer/adviser for right wing governments in South America, particularly Bolivia. Since Bolivia's founding in 1825 they have had 190 changes of government, ususally through coups, so Barbie had no shortage of work.
Finally, thanks to the untiring efforts of the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was extradited to France to stand trial for all the people he tortured and sent to their deaths.

This is where the book ends, as it was published in 1984 before his sentencing to life in prison in 1987. The kindle version I read is a reissue, and it would have been nice to have an addendum of post '84 events, but that is why we have Wikipedia.

As history books go, this one was a very easy read. It never got bogged down but it never loses the important details. It also manages to keep a good sense of a neutral perspective, reporting but never editorializing. This is of course not an entirely easy thing to do with this subject matter.

Finally this book gives an interesting insight in the unwillingness the Allies had in actually running down and punishing Nazi criminals. A speech by Roosevelt and later Churchill made it an unavoidable issue, but officials on both sides of the Atlantic really didn't want to meddle in that. Sure, the big-wigs had to go, but beyond that, many were content with leaving things as they were. This attitude coupled with the communist fueled paranoia really explains why and how the US came to protect a man like Barbie.

If the subject matter interests you, I absolutely recommend this book, both for the quality of research but also for being well written.

That's that. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and have yourself a great week!

Has Blizzard completely lost its mind?

Well, Activision-Blizzard has gone and done it again. You'd think they would, after all the trouble they had last year, try to stay calm and keep quiet...

Back in 2018, during the ill-received Blizzcon where they announced Diablo Immortal on mobile, which by the way still hasn't been released, Blizzard also announced a remaster of one of their all time best selling and beloved games: Warcraft III.

With all the scorn heaped upon them for their misguided way of announcing Diablo Immortal and their flippant comments of “don't you guys have phones”, this remaster announcement went a bit under the radar.

Until this last week when Warcraft III: Reforged released. The shock and outrage was immense as stunned players saw what they had received. The previews and teasers had been good, with new fully animated cut-scenes and updated graphics and UI, but what they ultimately got was not good.

Apparently, in several cases, the graphics look worse, and the beautifully rendered cut-scenes are now in game models just standing there with animated portraits talking in the corner of the screen. The UI is apparently just the old one.

Old and beloved custom maps and mods no longer function in Reforged, and the new EULA is rewritten to allow Blizzard to claim ownership of any and all mods and maps created for it. To make it even more ludicrous, a map maker tried to make a battle map based on the goblin run pirate town of Booty Bay only to be informed by Battlenet that the word booty is not allowed as it is considered dirty. Keep in mind that Blizzard themselves have created Booty Bay...

Angry gamers immediately tried to refund the game only to be met with considerable difficulties. Most have been denied refunds altogether, with Blizzard even lying to keep the money. One player reports that he hadn't even started the game when he heard how bad it was, only to be told by Blizzard Customer Service that he was ineligible for refund because he had played too long.

And all of this isn't even the worst part. The most ridiculous part is that Blizzard has nuked the old version of Warcraft III! So if you owned the old version, with no interest in Reforged , they have auto-updated it so that Reforged is the only one that works.

As if that wasn't enough, strong rumors are swirling around that players who are too vocal about refunds or helping others to get one, are being banned from the official forums. Yes, this is a rumor, but several news outlets have picked up the banning story so it may well be true.

As of writing this, Warcraft III: Reforged has a Metacritic score of 63 for official critics (incredibly bad for a Blizzard game) and 0.5 for Fans with 18353 players leaving feedback. This makes it the lowest rated game in Metacritic's history. It's no wonder the Internet has redubbed the game Warcraft III: Refunded.

That's that. Until next time, have a really good week!