Le Bal du vaudou

A masterpiece of early 70's Euro rip-off madness. It's got Sue Lyon wearing too much greasy make-up and the always underwhelming Chris Mitchum...excited, I am. This is great nonsense of the highest order, if your taste in movies stretches to the more mondo end of the bracket, Jess Franco, bad Italian biker movies, Umberto Lenzi etc you're gonna dig this. Sleeper style futuristic art direction, gay looking hoodlums in shiny red helmets, and Sue Lyons killing hardbodied young men for no explicable reason, aside from the director wanting her to...Genius. This film also contains two superb faux adverts which are hysterical, one for an msg free blue drink, called Blue Drink the other extolling the virtues of masculine leopard spot sex pants. Two heavy handed references to Sue Lyon's previous role as Lolita, why????? because the director wanted to, good enough for me. Plot - some Italian producers saw Clockwork Orange and thought they could do the same, they couldn't...but it's bonza all the same. I picked it up at a market for a £1 and aside from 'Tuxedo Warrior' it is thus far my greatest find. The cover itself is as camp as fairy dust...if you ever are lucky enough to come in contact with this slice of mondo-trasho check it out.

If there's one thing Spanish and Italian filmmakers in the seventies loved, it was making their own versions of popular American classics. Rip-offs of films such as Jaws, Dirty Harry and The Exorcist almost became genres in their own rights as so many films were made. Perhaps a less obvious to rip-off is Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 'A Clockwork Orange', but director Eloy de la Iglesia obviously thought it was a good idea. It wasn't though as this exploitation/sci-fi garbage has little in the way of interest and doesn't manage to create anything worthy of the great ideas brought forward in the superior Kubrick film. The film appears to be trying to make some sort of social commentary and although similar ideas worked well in the 1971 film, here they're portrayed with the use of a daft looking biker gang and it doesn't really have the same impact. I was surprised to see Jean Sorel among the cast members; as one of the better known European actors at the time, I'd have expected him to have a bit more sense. God knows what the scriptwriters were thinking; sometimes you can see glimmers of a good idea in there somewhere but clearly the film is just a load of nonsense and I wouldn't recommend anyone sees it.

The third De La Iglesia film I am watching in a row – and the best (though the "Cult Films" website rates this a measly *1/2) – that, while it touches on the same theme of a serial-killer on the loose, is the most ambitious (numbering no fewer than 5 scriptwriters!) because it is set in a dystopian future and employs international actors. Since I have made it a point to discard Sci-Fi titles for this year's "Halloween Challenge", I was a little wary of adding this but, thankfully, it proved a continuation of De La Iglesia's preoccupations.

The film wears its obvious inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) proudly on its sleeve because, not only is there a Droog-like band of violent criminals marauding at night (wielding whips at leisure), but they also assault an upper-class household that is very much decorated in the ultra-modern fashion seen in CLOCKWORK and, as if this was not enough, a screening of that very Kubrickian adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel is about to start on TV when their doorbell rings! Likewise, a subplot revolves around an experimental program which is supposed to render hardened criminals into acceptable society members (but, predictably, the last scene demonstrates that the scheme has failed horribly), while peppering the soundtrack with classical music pieces (albeit being otherwise scored as if it were a Spaghetti Western!). Interestingly, whether deliberately or not, Kubrick returned the favor by utilizing music by the composer of this one (Georges Garvarentz) for his own swan-song EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)! Indeed, while the original Spanish title translates to the poetic A DROP OF BLOOD TO DIE LOVING and that the film was released on R2 DVD as MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD (for the record, the widescreen copy I acquired, albeit VHS quality, was fairly good and did not noticeably detract from my enjoyment of the striking visual look of the décor and costumes), the film was apparently known in the U.S. under the rather condescending moniker of CLOCKWORK TERROR.

Moreover, Sue Lyon – as it happens, the young star of Kubrick's LOLITA (1962) – has the leading role here and, at one point, is even seen leafing through Vladimir Nabokov's eponymous novel while lounging in a gay bar! The rest of the cast is made up of Christopher Mitchum (who would later appear in another foul-play-in-a-hospital movie, FACELESS {1987}) and Jean Sorel (who had already played a doctor in his most famous film, Luis Bunuel's BELLE DE JOUR {1967}: incidentally, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE itself was Bunuel's own favorite movie!). For being the younger son of Hollywood legend Robert Mitchum, Chris worked with some far-out directors: in fact, apart from De La Iglesia, he also made films for Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jess Franco! Lyon, while ostensibly renowned psychiatrist Sorel's girl, moonlights as a serial-killer of males between the ages of 17 and 25 (though her reasons for running amok are attributed to the traumatic death of the girl's parents in childhood, it is never quite clear why she targets that particular age group, one of whom she ensnares by outbidding him at an auction for the very first edition of the "Flash Gordon" comic-strip!) and, therefore, according to news reports, the murderer must be a homosexual! Conversely, Mitchum is one of the four members of the afore-mentioned "Droog"-like anarchists who falls foul of his team-mates and, to earn some cash on the side, takes to blackmailing Lyon (whom he had unwittingly spied while disposing of a body: she often affects disguises herself – as a mature woman or a man! – to lure her victims, who include a macho publicity guy modeling underwear on TV, linking the film, as do the entire lady-killing scenario and the overriding influence of TV, to the recently-viewed THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA {1976}). Eventually, Mitchum's former friends beat him up and he is hospitalized and, ironically enough, put in Lyon's care…but, in eliminating him there, she also gives herself away – to Sorel's obvious horror.

Given my rewarding experience so far with the filmography of Eloy De La Iglesia (on a side-note, that of Alex, who is not a relation, is no less intriguing but somewhat less consistent), I opted to acquire yet one more effort i.e. his adaptation of Henry James' classic – and much-filmed – ghost story THE TURN OF THE SCREW (1985), but which I was unable to include in the "Halloween Challenge" that has just come to an end.

This movie is OBVIOUSLY (and quite blatantly) inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange". In fact early in the movie, right before a family is attacked by a group of "droog"-like bikers with bull-whips, they are actually settling down to watch "A Clockwork Orange" on TV!(it's hard to imagine even in a futuristic film like this THAT movie showing on television in what was still Franco's Spain at the time). There's also other blatant references to other Kubrick movies. The female protagonist has a copy of the infamous Vladimir Nabokov novel "Lolita" on her nightstand, and the film adaptation of that was also directed by Stanley Kubrick--and Kubrick's "Lolita", of course, was played by Sue Lyon, who plays the female protagonist of this movie! So pat yourself on the back if you notice all this and then move on.

I kind of have a problem with people that simply dismiss Italian and Spanish films like this as "rip-offs". First they seem to assume that bigger-budgeted Anglo-American/Hollywood films are all completely original (nowadays Hollywood "remakes" a lot more Spanish films than vice versa). Moreover, they don't seem to realize that a lot of these movies were blatantly aping popular Hollywood films on the surface, but were often doing something quite interesting and even subversive underneath. The most interesting part of this movie, for instance, isn't Chris Mitchum and his "droog"-like gang, nor is it Lyon's boyfriend (played by Jean Sorel) who works at a "Clockwork Orange"-type behavior modification institute. The most interesting part is Sue Lyon's character, a respectable nurse and "pop" art collector, who likes to pick up beautiful young men, take them home to bed, listen to the post-coital beating of their hearts, and then stab them to death with a surgical scalpel! The director of this Eloy Inglesias was a famous gay Spanish director. The bizarre scene where Lyon dresses up as a man and picks up an effeminate (but closeted) homosexual, or the scene where she picks up a narcissistic and (even more closeted)male model give a very noirish psychosexual--and decidedly homoerotic--ambiance to this film that has little to do with "A Clockwork Orange" and a LOT to do with the rest of the director's oeuvre like his most famous film, "Cannibal Man" (aka "Week of the Killer"). Inglesias didn't make a whole lot of films, but I would advise anyone to check out some of the ones he did before dismissing him as some kind of rip-off artist. He was, in fact, one of Spain's most interesting and courageous directors.

The English-language title of this, "Murder in a Blue World". is interesting, but even more interesting is the Spanish title which loosely translates to something like "A Drop of Blood for Dying while Making Love" . This colorful title serves to connect this film (despite its futuristic sci-fi elements)to the Italian/Spanish giallo genre. This is basically a homoerotically-charged, futuristic dystopian, psychosexual giallo, which makes it pretty damn interesting--and original--in my book.

Very watchable and stylish if somewhat lacking of a coherent plot. But hey, French Spanish co-production this may be but there is just a whiff of giallo about it, so be prepared for anything. At first this looks as if it is going to be a rip off of the Kubrick classic. A bunch of orange helmeted youths invade a chic dwelling and start to smash it up whilst one of their number asks the lady of the house to lead him to the bedroom. Then just as soon as we reckon we know where this is going, another of their number takes hold of hubby and without so much a lisp asks him to similarly accompany him to the same room. Stylish, as I say, some humour, a rather wasted Jean Sorel and a much over used Sue Lyon. Nevertheless the director does not miss the opportunity of alluding to another Kubrick classic with the aforementioned lass. Fun and frolics with some precise violence and a delirious ending.