HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD

a film by Mario Bava

starring 

Reg Park as Hercules

and

Christopher Lee as King Lico

(co-)story and screenplay

Mario Bava

cinematography

Mario Bava

the sequel to

HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN

is

HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD

HERCULES JOURNEYS TO HADES ON A QUEST TO SAVE THE MIND OF PRINCESS DEIANIRA, HIS TRUE LOVE

"Come on, let's get out of here. Our first visit to Hades has lasted long enough." - Hercules

"Look there. Now do you think I shouldn't have thrown the golden apple into the sea?" -Theseus

THESEUS FALLS IN LOVE, LOSES HIS LOVE, BUT GAINS ANOTHER LOVE!

"You're going to have to kill me, or I'll kill you. You're my enemy" - Theseus

"This is no duel Theseus. You're only trying to kill yourself!" - Hercules

"The nightmare is over and we are together again. Nothing can harm you. Now let me see you smile!" - Hercules

"As long as Theseus steals other men's girls, I have nothing to worry about." - Hercules

The Sleeping Beauty (Breillat)

Anastasia: Can't you mix a potion to enable me to break the spell?
Vieille mégère: I can't give you stronger powers than those you possess. Can't you see that animals and people succumb to you? You left barefoot, and without mishap wandered throughout the universe. I can't give you more strength than that.

Anastasia wants so badly to have the perfect life of a princess. Her princess wishes warp her sense of self and contort her view of reality. The people around her encourage this view, treating her like a princess at a young age, and filling her with the promise of a princess' life.

Catherine Breillat treats seriously the fairy tale side of Sleeping Beauty, but is wise to the differences between dream and reality, or rather, the differences between our dreams as they exist purely in our dreams, and our dreams as they take shape in our lives.

Like with Bluebeard, Breillat uses the dramatics and structure of a classic tale to explore how clear and solid desires become unreliable and dangerous once human emotions are introduced. She often concentrates on sexual politics; in both Bluebeard and The Sleeping Beauty, Breillat contrasts the motives and goals of a male with the motives and goals of a female in order to depict the spoiling of a female's sexual innocence, and also to depict the female's discovery of inner strength.

The crumbling of her princess fantasies doesn't destroy Anastasia, she's made stronger by having suffered and learned and grown. Her journey to maturity, which is different from the male's, gives her wisdom which he lacks.

Johan: You love me as before?
Anastasia: As before. Except now it's after. You see, I went alone into your world.

Destiny (1921)

In a way I travel time and trot the globe when I watch movies, but, in reality, of course, I remain fixed in my time and place. Although the way in which I do travel when I watch movies is sometimes stranger, sometimes more interesting.

When I watch Destiny I place parts of my mind in Berlin in 1921, where and when the film was seen for the first time. We, the audience, are uprooted from the ordinary; in a way, to travel back to Berlin in 1921 to watch Destiny would be to immediately leave again, but through the screen. Destiny, written and directed by Fritz Lang (and based on a dream he had), motivates willing hearts and minds to contemplate the wonders of physical and spiritual existence, and always present is a sense of expansive realities and surrealities. Its story provokes one to consider oneself as a unit within a tremendously vast and exciting network of people and places, lives and moments.

Death visits a town. He buys, with gold coins, some land intended to be used as the cemetery's annex. Around the land he builds a massive, towering wall, with no entrances that anyone can see.

Death takes, from the world of the living, a woman's husband. The woman confronts Death. She tells Death that love is stronger than death, and she asks for her husband's resurrection.

Death has his woes, too - the German title's literal translation is Weary Death - and he tells the woman that it's hard for him to carry the burden of hate for obeying the commands of god. He explains that he can't bring someone back, it's simply impossible, irreversible. But the woman is persistent, will not believe what she is being told, and forces Death to demonstrate the truth of his words. He offers to resurrect her husband if she can prevent the flames of three others from going out.

Three trials begin, staged in separate places, outside the barriers of time, and as fantastic experiences. In the above, a hookah is smoked from on a rooftop rug during a starry night.

Then, just as quickly and as easily, and for no apparent reason, we, the audience, are in Renaissance Venetia, experiencing a cock fight. The fantastic, the imaginative, and the romantic are framed within this quest by a woman that's a battle with death over the corporeality of her husband. Each of the three Stories of the Light is about wanting to defeat death, explicitly about this; and for me it's also about the death of time, and the impossibility of re-experiencing a moment.

Because time moves forward in movies as in reality. Running its natural course, as in a theater, and not at home with a remote control, movie time is fleeting, the gasp of a white light, sent through a lens, to give life to a celluloid image, that spans the room's length, where it dies, instantly, in a gorgeous collision with the screen, twenty-four temporal deaths a second.

If you're not still with me, I'm in China. Supposedly. I do not believe that this China ever existed, in reality or even in the imaginations of anyone else. The above image is the descent of a flying carpet into a royal court. The event's purpose is explained in a letter that's so perfect I have to quote it in its entirety:

Oh, Highly Venerable One,
Oh, thousand-year-old One,
Oh, leading light of wisdom,
Oh, precious jewel!

Tomorrow is my birthday and I have
ordered that there should be great
rejoicings throughout the Empire of
China. And for my birthday I ask
that you, oh pearl of all magicians,
should drive away my imperial boredom
with magical tricks such as were never
seen before, from the treasure-chamber
of your illustrious spirit!

With amiable greeting
Djin Schuean Wang,
Emperoror

P.S. If you should also bore me,
contrary to expectation, Oh Highly
Venerable One, I shall be forced, with
my deepest regret, to have you
beheaded!

The Above

For me there's the magic in the screen and the magic of the screen, and watching Destiny bridges them together.

Mystics in Bali!

Old Leák Queen: What is her name, and where does she come from?
Catherine: Catherine Kean from the USA.
Old Leák Queen: Hmm. And where is that?
Mahendra: Very far away.

"Here there is even a western actress playing a key role. In fact, the elusive Ilona Agathe Bastian was not an actress at all, but a German tourist holidaying in Bali. She was spotted by the wife of one of the film's producers and it didn't take much to persuade her to stay on for a few months free holiday." -production notes.

H. Tjut Djalil is a new hero of mine. This, Mystics in Bali, is the second film of his I've seen, following Lady Terminator. He is a director of keen imagination and sharp cinematic wit. Roughly a year ago I didn't even know Eastern black magic horror films existed. Which is appropriate: here I was in the house of film, and black magic was being practiced in the back yard. Of course! The ones that I've seen, including a recent theatrical screening of Boxer's Omen, are among the craziest, most enjoyable movies I've ever seen. They lack the tiresome earnestness and rectitude of Christian horror films, and their potential for engaging supernatural phenomenon is greater.

"I'm surprised that a pretty girl like you would be interested in learning black magic."
- the first line of Mystics in Bali

H. Tjut Djalil is a genre surrealist. Neutral, monotonic voice dubs and plastic-faced actors engender a strange impassiveness as the protagonists journey to learn the intricacies of Leak Bali, a black magic which could be the church of Lynch. The roots of its power seem to be joyless high-pitched laughter. The laughter is one aspect of black magic taught by the face-shifting Old Leák Queen, who takes on Catherine as an apprentice. Of the things the Old Leák Queen teaches Catherine, the most important is drinking newborn blood by way of disembodied, floating head.

Blood has a restorative power for the Leaks, and infant blood is best. Like other exploitation movies, kicks are to be had, intentional and not. Some of the dialogue exits in this movie are extraordinary. When Catherine vomits green goo and live mice, Mahendra blames the prior evening's meal! Absurd on the one hand, but true on the other: does Mahendra know of the prior evening's metamorphosis, the transformation of Catherine from human to pig (Leaks can do this[!])?

Mahendra starts Catherine down the dark path of black magic. She asks him to; she's learned about African Voodooism already, and now wants introduction to Leak Bali, the strongest black magic in the world. It ends badly, unfortunately for Catherine and Mahendra, but fortunately for the audience, and really Mahendra is a great guy who cared about Catherine and meant best.

Lady Terminator!

"The role of Nyai Loro Kidul as a Javanese Spirit-Queen became a popular motif in traditional Javanese folklore and palace mythologies, as well as being tied in with the beauty of Sundanese and Javanese princesses. Another aspect of her mythology was her ability to change shape several times a day."

Lady Terminator is an Indonesian action myth-fi, based loosely on stories of the South Sea Queen, reinterpreted with central images borrowed from James Cameron's Terminator. It shares the action spectacle excess of outrageous Hollywood action films and the sloppy short-hand dramatics of a poorly written b-film. It was my first Indonesian genre film. My understanding is that there was a wave of these types of productions in Indonesia, and seeing this movie and later learning this feels like discovering treasure chests on the seabed of cinema.

The riches of this film are found in the execution of the material, its performance as a film narrative. It's written for an audience, by a filmmaker who thinks as an audience member, particularly an audience member seeing the movie in a mall or multiplex, the populist, consumerist audience member. It's written and directed to be this kind of mainstream formulaic movie, but the filmmaker fucks it up in a thousand exciting and different ways that make the film a thousand times more interesting than those movies usually are. For me the idea of a Hollywood style film from a non-Hollywood location is richly compelling, as with genre films from the southern United States, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, France, etc., because parts of the filmmaker's outsider personality will inherently corrode the mechanization of material that's such an annoying and artless feature of many Hollywood films themselves. The filmmakers who attempt to curb this natural tendency are the bad ones, the ones as bad as the Hollywood filmmakers. The filmmakers who make movies like Lady Terminator are gems, treasures of the film world, unconscious documentarians of the human soul in flight from reality.

The movie wisely steals several attractive features from the Terminator series: the tech noir vibe, the unstoppable murdering machine (with compelling backstory), and key scenes, including the downtown car chase (!), are directly imitated.

Most of the heavy-duty action material is performed by an actress named Barbara Anne Constable, who apparently acted in several other regional films and never expected Lady Terminator to be seen overseas. Lady Terminator is her sole credit listed on IMDb.

Constable is badass in Lady Terminator, in presence and performance. She does things no other human being will likely ever do, with a gusto and brazenness that only a skilled and daring actress could bring to a role. It's impossible to imagine her character existing in the real world, and yet simultaneously easy to sense the presence of a personality and distinct acting choices beneath her performance - qualities that bring the unreal to life! Her character is a spirit-possessed human, and this allows acting space for a role previously played, in the Terminator series, as emotionally barren by consequence of robotics.

Like many other action b-films the dialogue is dramatically perfunctory and bridges together action scenes. Unlike many other action b-films the action is frequent and engaging. Its successes are easy to calculate: play the film before an audience and listen to them. I saw it at the end of a triple-feature that began with Master of the Flying Guillotine and Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead and this one was my favorite - and I really like the first two - because most of the components that contribute to the perception of this film as a failure are for me very entertaining, interesting, and human, and all the little blemishes are simply stimulators for my imagination and curiosity, as with the best of films.