FRAMED BY W. DART

Rip It Up, Issue 25, 1 August 1979, Page 14

FRAMED BY W. DART

HALLOWEEN Director: John Carpenter Cinema is an art of the genre the western, the musical, the horror film, all exist for a new director to come along and transform them by dint of his skill and vision. And of all three genres it is probably the horror film which allows the most scope for cinema's ‘bag of magic tricks’. Yet, New Zealand gets so few of the interesting horror films being made these days, and it is only through the Auckland Film Festival that we got a film like George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead. And it is thanks to the AFF that Halloween made its first appearance here. John Carpenter is the current darling of the overseas cineastes and his career has been a rather quizzical one, his first film being the the 1974 Dark Star, a quirky sci-fi effort which started as a University film exercise and eventually extended into a $60,000 project (still nowhere near the Star Wars budget). And from over yonder comes those tantalising reports of his Assault on Precinct 13, which we will see God knows when. Halloween is a classic exercise in the ‘edge of the seat’ subgenre. A psycho killer escapes from the asylum and proceeds to systematically terminate a succession of teenagers as they unwittingly wander into his territory. So the film is a series of vicious' knifings growing ever more and more graphic until there is the final harrowing showdown between killer and heroine, Jamie Lee Curtis (the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh). If I describe it as elegant, there are those who will think this encroaches on its power to t-e-r-r-i-f-y. No way, says yours truly who screamed at one point in the movie. But there is a balletic grace to Carpenter’s prowling camera work, as there is in his constant shifts of focus, allowing the audience to see tantalising glimpses'of the ‘bogey man’ lurking and waiting. Elegant too are the incorporation of extracts from The Thing and Forbidden Planet on the television which Curtis and her babysitting charges are watching unaware that, over the road, her friends are being systematically slaughtered. Nice ironies too like the choice of Halloween for this Walpurgisnacht creating characters who unwittingly think that the gurgling victim on the phone is just someone pranking or a lurking presence in a closet is just a practical joke. And best of all when Curtis escapes and screams for assistance the neighbours ignore her pleas thinking that she, too, is just in the traditional trick or treat mood. And so for a movie which is both trick and treat try Halloween ... with a friend.

IT LIVES AGAIN Director: Larry Cohen A nice little exercise in sci-fi horror with three mutant flesh-eating babies threatening the life and security of us poor earthly mortals. Political overtones (the new master-race) and religious undertones (thd new Messiahs) make for effective reverberations beyond the surface of the film. Larry Cohen; a director we have yet to see much of in this country, gives us a cool and dispassionate view of middle class America threatened by something outside of its own terms of reference. The progressively horrifying attacks of the monster are stunningly staged and all in all, a most thoughtful film. Of

course, you will probably end up catching it in the local fleapit at a midnight endurance session .. but then that is about the only way you will see Jeff Liebermann’s Squirm.

PRETTY BABY Director: Louis Malle A friend once said to me that what appealed most to him about the works of Jean Genet was the absolute absence of sentimentality, and the same could apply to this elegant view of life in a New Orleans brothel, circa 1910. To make a frank film about a 12 year old girl’s initiation into whoredom without transcending the bounds of taste’is a feat indeed, but then Malle handled the tricky subject of incest in Murmur of the Heart with infinite tact and sympathy. The film is not without its flamboyance, mainly in Frances Faye's raddled old madam, looking more and more hideous with each new wig. Brooke Shields is lovely, and Good God, even Keith Carradine registers as a person. And with the lashings of the Scott Joplin-Louis Chauvin Heliotrope Bouquet on the soundtrack who could want for more?

THE SHOUT Director: Jerzy Skolimowski With its origins in a Robert Graves' short story, The Shout is Skolimowski’s first film for a number of years and with a fairly namestudded cast (Alan Bates, John Midnight Express Hurt, Susannah York) he offers a quiet study of the ambiguity of sanity. Is Alan Bates indeed an over-the-top-loony or can he really perpetrate an aboriginal death-shout? What we have is an edgy film, with interesting portrayals of various english types the whole film as it were, is framed with, a cricket match at the local asylum. Add to this a central painting by Francis Bacon and a character who -seems to be something of the village Mike Oldfield, it certainly doesn’t lack colour. Skolimowski deserves a success, if nothing else for the, opportunities, he gave Diana Dors in Deep End, and who knows this •could be it.