HAZEL COURT - horror heroine nevermore

I'd been waiting for the publication of this autobiography for many months now. Sadly, just days before it's release, the author passed away.

Hazel Court was Hammer Horror's first female star. The winning combination of 'Hammer glamour' and acting ability in their leading ladies often proved elusive, but Hazel ably and amply provided both. She starred opposite Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), setting herself up as a 'horror heroine' for the next decade.

Her subsequent horror films, including three in the Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe series, are all recommended. For Hammer, she also appeared in The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) opposite Anton Diffring (Circus of Horrors), in which she famously appeared topless for the saucier 'continental' version. Neither version of the film has appeared on DVD yet.

Roger Corman's adaption of The Premature Burial (1962) cast her opposite Ray Milland. The resulting film makes me claustrophobic just thinking about it. In 1963, she starred with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and a young Jack Nicholson in the comedy-horror The Raven. But her greatest role was in The Masque of the Red Death (1964), where her character is practically Lady Macbeth. Her satanic villainy and masochistic nightmares rival Vincent Price's evildoing in the story. Her altercation with a frenzied falcon is as fierce and frightening as anything in Hitchcock's The Birds.

The book talks about all of her films, even the silly Devil Girl From Mars, and is available online from Tomahawk Press. Beautifully illustrated with rare photos, some in colour, this is a book I've been wanting to read for years, but not with such sad timing.

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EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) no longer the worst sequel

EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC

(1977, USA)

You’d be mad if you didn’t make a sequel to one of the hugest movie hits ever, but a disastrous critical reaction, and even laughter during the premiere, buried its reputation almost immediately, despite high credentials.

It's not a film I'd heartily recommend, but it's interesting as a direct sequel to the classic, with many of the original cast reappearing. It’s no more misjudged than the recent prequel Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). After years of being the worst of the Exorcist movies, (Exorcist III: Legion was definitely the best sequel), Exorcist II: The Heretic can finally move out of last place.

It takes place four years after the events of The Exorcist. Hardly surprisingly, young Regan (Linda Blair) is still in therapy. A priest (Richard Burton), sent to investigate Father Merrin's conduct during that exorcism, is interested in the psychiatrist’s results. As the Dr (Louise Fletcher) uses an experimental hypnotic device to help Regan remember, it reignites the battle for her soul. Father Merrin's very first exorcism of a possessed boy in Africa, might hold the key to a new demon that starts attacking her…


While Linda Blair returns as Regan, she’s now more of a stroppy teenager than an innocent little girl. Father Merrin is played once more by Max Von sydow. His old age make-up was so convincing in the first film, that it was a shock for many to see him in the flashbacks as a younger man in Africa. Ellen Burstyn, as Regan’s mother, is notably missing from the cast, with her housekeeper Kitty, effectively gets her role.

To bolster the cast, Louise Fletcher plays Regan’s therapist, but she’s miscast here if we’re supposed to trust her. Fletcher is hardly reassuring as a medical professional after her turn as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! Her character uses a silly hypnotic device that looked low-tech in 1978, (two flashing lights nailed to a stick), but this electronic approach to metaphysics heavily influenced the climax of the Japanese sequel Ring 2, one of the many interesting revelations in Dennis Meikle’s book, The Ring Companion. Richard Burton is also miscast, with a one-note performance that lends little light to his character's motivations, crucial to understanding the story.

In the story, the combined efforts of both religion and science trigger a vision of the original exorcism. But the scene is flawed in reimagining the world-famous scene by using a different actress and a different voice. Nothing about this ‘replay’ reminds us of the original. It’s a great pity, because technically it's an imaginative special effects scene, inter-connecting the past and the present in a spectacularly lined-up stage effect.


There are further mis-steps throughout the film. Having a demon attack via African locusts seems more to do with director John Boorman's love of ecological subtexts than cinematic logic. They don't appear at all demonic looking, more like clouds of tea leaves, or as a single locust glued in front of a back-projection screen. Boorman’s most successful visual rant against civilisation’s rape of the land is still Deliverance (1972), though that message was similarly buried under a confusing storyline. In fact, several of his films start off exceedingly well and go completely ga-ga by the end. Zardoz, I’ll say no more.

The film isn’t helped by unrealistic studio-bound locations and even more disorientating plotting, mixing up ESP with hypnotism. The far-fetched storyline is completely at odds with the painstaking efforts of the first film, to make supernatural events seem possible, by rooting them firmly in reality. In The Heretic, nothing seems real or realistic. Add to this a supposedly dramatic disaster at a tap-dancing contest and the damage is done - unintentional laughs in a horror film.

And James Earl Jones in a locust hat!



The Making of Exorcist II: The Heretic
The reasons behind many of these shortcomings are partly explained in the 'making of' paperback. It details the optical special effects used – whereas the original made an effort not to use optical effects in order to appear real. The overuse of back-projection in the sequel is nasty and noticeable, with silly model shots, insect close-ups and studio sets representing all of the African scenes. Everything is intricately mounted, but still unconvincing.

The technical process of producing a huge studio film is described and supplemented by minor showbiz gossip. Richard Burton was completing one of his many divorces during his time on the film. His role was nearly played by a pre Deer Hunter Christopher Walken. Actress Ellen Burstyn didn't return to the sequel because she definitely didn’t want to be in it. The director also had to talk round Max Von Sydow to get him to return.

The spectacular rooftop apartment where Regan lives was actually purpose-built on top of a Manhattan skyscraper. Linda Blair even does a dangerous stunt on the roof edge with no safety harness. But New York was the only location outside of Hollywood, not for the want of trying. The African locations they wanted were either inaccessible or a war zone. Even a return to the original house in Washington D.C. was nixed by the owner. So the house, inside and out, also had to be constructed as sets, right down to the iconic stone steps.

Effects make-up genius Dick Smith returned to the crew, but apart from one spectacularly nasty effect, basically just recreates his make-ups from the original. His skills would have been better used in the originally envisaged climax, (supposedly never filmed, rather than scrapped and reshot). Originally the ending was to be another intimate exorcism, with a multitude of make-up effects to represent the demons identities. The book mentions a locust mask, a kabuki mask and an effect of flesh falling away from a skull. But unfortunately we get a flashy, stunt-heavy disaster-movie ending.

The book wisely ends with the night of the US premiere – the precise point at which a happy ending didn’t happen. Since then The Heretic has had the usual rough ride enjoyed by studio embarassments – they are lucky to get to home video at all, and certainly don’t get love lavished on them as special editions. My VHS of the UK release has almost every scene in a completely different order to the US DVD - each scene is cut differently and there are many additional scenes, plus a longer climax. So, like the recent prequel, there are two versions out there. If either one was markedly better, I might list the differences, but it’s not really worth the effort. Like many last-minute re-edits, it rarely improves the mistakes of the original.

Lastly, several elements reminded me of Holocaust 2000 (1977), which also has a glass-walled asylum and a beautiful Ennio Morricone score.


Exorcist II: The Heretic was released in the US and UK as a single DVD several years ago, that may be hard to find now. I don't know which version was released in the UK, but I presume it's the same as the US release, rather than the alternate UK cut. It's also currently part of an anthology DVD boxset of all the Exorcist films, available in the UK and US.

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GHOST STORY (1974) a haunting tale of madness

GHOST STORY
(1974, UK, aka Madhouse Mansion)

A bizarre British chiller, from the director of I, Monster

News Update, November 2009
- a marvellous 2-disc Special Edition of Ghost Story has been released in the UK

Please note: all the following screengrabs are from an old VHS, NOT the new DVD!!!

One of several films with this name, this may strike a chord with those who caught it on late-night TV in the UK in the early 1980s. The cast is unique and there’s enough atmosphere emanating from the quirky music and parallel plotting to make this noteworthy. I keep revisiting it, mainly for Ron Geesin’s soundtrack. Stephen Weeks earlier directed the Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I, Monster, for Amicus Films, partly filmed in an experimental 3-D process.

As Ghost Story begins, the period setting is hard to place, further unsettling viewers trying to gain their bearings. It opens with a young man, travelling on the London Underground, but everyone is in turn of the century outfits. This takes advantage of the fact that the oldest branches of ‘The Tube’ are over 140 years old. The man is met at a station and driven deep into the countryside.


The rather dapper MacFayden has invited two school friends, Talbot and Duller, to a huge country mansion on the pretence of a shooting weekend. But when Talbot gets spooked by a Victorian doll in his room and starts to dream of dirty deeds at a local derelict asylum, he realises that his school chums haven't told him everything, as his dreams keep getting more and more real...


The scenes on the Underground were of course shot in London, or rather under it. But the mansion and asylum are supposed to be in the middle of the British countryside, except that there is exceptionally bright sunshine. I’d always assumed that this was because it was shot in Australia, though the architecture and gardens looked too grand. Only an article about the director’s films published in 2000, in Video Watchdog issue 59, revealed that Ghost Story was mostly shot in India, doubling for rural Southern England!


The British cast further conceals this audacious deceit. In the 'present' scenes are Ken Russell favourite Murray Melvin (The Boyfriend, The Devils) and a snide Vivian MacKerrell (pictured here) who was the original inspiration for the character Withnail of Bruce Robinson’s legendary Withnail and I, see more here.


In the flashback/dreams are singer and occasional actress Marianne Faithfull (Girl on a Motorbike), sitcom queen Penelope Keith, typecast bounder Leigh Lawson, and one of Hammer Film’s shining stars Barbara Shelley (Quatermass and the Pit, Dracula - Prince of Darkness and Village of the Damned) in her last horror role to date.


Their ‘past’ scenes in Borden's asylum are far more tense than the three friends rattling around in an old dark house. The madhouse, and the way the inmates are treated, feels all too real. But when the tables are turned, the lunatics really do take over the asylum.


The film is slightly let down by the basic lighting and camerawork, and some clumsy comedy at the expense of sensitive twit, Talbot (Larry Dann). But the slack opening builds slowly and steadily as the parallel stories develop, and it’s cleverly unclear as to where reality starts and second-sight begins.


This a real curio, worth wider exposure, and only hitherto available on an eighties NTSC VHS, released in the US under the unsubtle title of Madhouse Mansion. (November 2009, the film finally got a DVD release in the UK, with a whole second disc of extras).

SAKEBI (2006) Kiyoshi Kurosawa's RETRIBUTION

RETRIBUTION
(2006, Japan, SAKEBI)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a notable director of J-horror. His unique visions mean I simply have to see his every film! His The Guard from the Underground, Cure, Charisma, Séance and more recently Loft are all genre movies. They sometimes feel like they’re not just about the story, but the successful shocks and scares are never to be forgotten. Kairo (2001) particularly creeped me out, dropped my jaw wide open, then completely confused me with the climax.

Kairo (or Pulse) is a good reference to compare his latest film with. Retribution (Sakebi) also uses mirrors, translucent curtains, stains and shadows, to deceive the eye and tell the story. In it, the background is as important as what’s upfront.


Detective Yoshioki is working on a series of apparently motiveless murders. As the 18th victim is found, forcibly drowned in a puddle of saltwater, the stress of the case seems to be getting to him. There are even clues that implicate him. Worse than that, he thinks the latest victim, a woman in a red coat, is taking revenge by haunting him. Or is he dreaming? As the murders continue, he starts doubting his sanity and his memory...

Watching this, I was reminded of another story of mental deterioration, Roman Polanski’s classic Repulsion (1965), which Sakebi seems to visually quote when ghostly hands emerge from a fractured wall. The metropolitan backdrop of industrial dockside locations provides a theme of city-wide demolition and reconstruction, as well as the precarious reclamation of land from the sea.


While the visions of the ghost aren't as spine-tinglingly creepy as in Kairo, they are traditionally Japanese. They float along, sometimes with arms outstretched in front – characteristics of the oldest drawings of vengeful spirits. But this sometimes makes her look alternately beautiful, scary or unintentionally comical. She's much more intrusive than the spectres of Kairo, and her red coat reminding me of the child in Don't Look Now (1973, notably set in the waterlogged city of Venice).

Kurosawa is very preoccupied here with reflections, cleverly using mirrors to create very complex scenes. He also challenges the viewer with increasingly intricate possibilities, as each clue shifts suspicion around the suspects, both living and dead. Flashbacks and visions can’t be trusted because they might each have been dreamt or imagined. There's also a growing degree of the surreal as the story unfolds, even the back projection used in the driving scenes gets less and less realistic, as do some of the ghostly antics…


Kurosawa favourite, Koji Yakusho anchors the film as the desperate detective - you might also have seen him in Babel and Memoirs of a Geisha. Joe Odagiri (Mushishi, Shinobi) plays his worried therapist.

Plotwise, I enjoyed this as a complex murder mystery, and a ghost story. Of course I didn't understand everything in it, and like Kairo the ending lost me. But it’s a hypnotic, disorientating, dreamlike and rewarding tale.


The Hong Kong DVD I watched (from Asia Video) only has stereo audio, and the original 1.85 aspect has been slightly zoomed and cropped to fit 16:9. This is only a small change in the framing, but Kurosawa has carefully composed the whole frame, and the change was very noticeable. Hopefully the upcoming region 1 US DVD release will be better presented.

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Not on DVD: PHOENIX FIVE (1970) - an Aussie Star Trek!

PHOENIX FIVE
(1969, Australia)

TV series - 26 x 25 minutes

Since mentioning this obscure Australian sci-fi show two years ago, I've been trying to track down more information. I was a little disappointed to discover that it’s aimed more at children. But here's an updated, expanded article anyway...

(Original 03/08/06 entry)

Wanting to be Star Trek, but with a budget closer to Star Maidens, was this Australian sci-fi adventure that brought us the intrepid interstellar explorers of the spaceship 'Phoenix Five'. The above picture of the crew of three and their computeroid robot (check out its legs) is from the website of Classic Australian TV - it's the first time I've seen anything from the show for nearly thirty years!

I was scouring the web for years until this site turned up a brief history of the show (and its predecessors), an episode guide and some great publicity stills, including images from the theme tune. To help jog your memory and maybe tantalise you further, get on over to Classic Australian TV.

My own vague memories of Phoenix Five are of it running on ITV in the mid-seventies on Sunday mornings. I loved the theme tune (a groovy cyclical instrumental) and an alien planet surface looking like the Australian desert, but remembered little else - except that I wanted to see it again!

When even the frankly shoddy Star Maidens is out on DVD, with even a soundtrack CD release, I fully expect other gems like this to resurface... eventually.


(Update - more about the series)
It's not a classic, but it's watchable in a Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, Double Deckers sort of way. That is to say, this could still be of interest, if you're nostalgic for TV from the seventies, or can have fun watching low budget TV.

That said, it's not nearly as low budget as a lot of children’s TV today – it’s still got costumes, sets, location filming and is shot on film. It would be kinder to say it's over-ambitious - making an interplanetary adventure with three sets and one model. it also lacks logic, scientific accuracy, realistic characters and aims for the sort of fantasy adventure provided by early Doctor Who. If all that isn't a problem (I know that's a lot of ifs) you might still want to see it.

The opening title sequence (currently here on YouTube) may very well be the highlight of the entire series. Tightly edited scenes to a fantastic sixties track (see below for CD news). I noticed that the background music includes ‘library’ tracks (ready made music that has to be edited to fit your action - cheaper than getting a composer to write music to fit your action). Stranger still, it also uses tracks composed by Peter Thomas for the German TV sci-fi Raumpatrouille (1966, yet another show called Space Patrol).


The crew of the Phoenix Five consists of the unbearably smug Captain Roke and his crew of two cadets and a robot. The control room looks like the bridge of the USS Enterprise crammed into a broom cupboard. Ensign Adam and Cadet Tina sometimes act more like naughty kids, and are forever being scolded or patronised by the Captain.

They spend much of their time flying around in space trying to thwart an evil opponent, usually a guy in fancy dress talking to an unfunny computer. Bizarrely, the baddie's computer is the only one with an Australian accent, everyone else sounds very English.


Even more British is the commander at Space Control, only glimpsed on the viewscreen, notably lampooned in MTV's short-lived X-rated puppet series, the Super Adventure Team.

Despite the Star Trek uniforms, ther's very little space to be seen. Most of the action is described rather than shown. Even if anything happens on their viewscreens, we hardly ever see it – we just see the actors in their little sets describing what’s going on.

The modelwork is very basic but the spaceship sets are more interesting. The better episodes are the ones out on location, on outback desert planets.


Not essential, but not available either. Thanks very much to Peter for some invaluable material in learning more about the elusive Phoenix Five.


New update 02/02/09
There's now a whole episode of Phoenix Five on YouTube, with links to other 1960s Australian sci-fi shows.

New update 26/03/09
Thanks to Joe McIntyre's comment (below), I've finally (after thirty years of yearning) got the full track used for the theme tune on CD. It's called 'Strange Galaxy' and is on this Jack Arel CD, celebrating this French master of lounge music (another of his tracks was used in the final episode of The Prisoner!), with remixes of 'Strange Galaxy' on the bonus CD! It's available from Amazon, but I got mine from MovieGrooves. Result!

SURVIVE! (1976) - an exploitation nightmare

SURVIVE!
(1976, Mexico, Supervivientes de los Andes)

A true story more famous than the films

There’s always been an appetite for movies based on real events, especially gruesome ones. It’s now common to see reconstructions of fresh, shocking crimes in TV documentaries, like the Columbine shootings, but it used to be more of a taboo, usually out of respect for the families of the deceased. In the 1970's it was usually exploitation movies that moved in too soon, despite protests. TV movies were only beginning to gain spectacular ratings with dramatisations such as Helter Skelter (1976), that focused on the Charles Manson family killings. But the events in Survive! were too strong for TV.

Other seventies horror movies that tried to gain attention by announcing they were based on truth were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Amityville Horror (1979), and even The Exorcist (1973), though their connection with facts were all found to be extremely tenuous.

Survive! told a story that I knew to be true. I’d read the story in the Sunday supplements and seen colour photographs of the survivors trapped high in the Andes, after a small commercial flight crashed, way off course. When all hope of rescue seemed lost, they faced months of being snowbound, without any food. The only way they could survive was to eat the dead…


I ventured to the cinema to see what couldn’t be shown in the papers, even though I was too young to see an X certificate at the time (over 18’s only). Before home video, it was much easier to prevent the under-aged from accessing adult movies. It felt like a much bigger deal than it is now.

I saw Survive! at the end of 1976, on an unsuitable double-bill with an Alistair MacLean thriller, Fear is the Key. The posters and publicity were mercilessly playing up the cannibalism angle. Survive! played in my local 'grindhouse' cinema, Studio 7, which always had the dodgiest films and the lowest-budget horrors. I steeled myself – I was new to gore on the big screen…

But what I got was a low-budget Mexican film that had been dubbed into English. Little did I know, Robert Stigwood and Alan Carr had picked this up cheap and marketed it for a wider English-speaking audience, making themselves millions of dollars in the process. Perhaps Survive! helped finance their movie blockbuster Grease? Strangely, Survive! is missing from both Stigwood and Carr’s resumes on IMDB.

Mid-1970’s, this story was a timely gift to cinema – it fitted both the disaster movie and horror genre. Instead of Hollywood having to brave the protests against making a bad taste movie, they simply had to revoice the Mexican film to make a pile of money, one of Paramount Studio’s biggest hits of 1976. Though the news stories had already sold it for them, the marketing didn’t pull its punches. The posters showing the scene of a naked body being pulled through the snow, the trailers freeze-framing on the shot where flesh is cut from a corpse. Tasteful. (…and also on youTube).


I haven’t seen many Mexican movies, but I’m impressed with Survive! The plane crash is well-mounted for the time, and the snow-bound set looks just about convincing. But because they’re sticking fairly closely to the facts (despite changing the names of all the characters), the camera keeps its distance and you never get to know any of the characters very well. The rescue mission is similarly covered almost like a news story, in a very dry, uninvolving manner. For such an emotional story, there’s only ever real feeling when someone loses a relative.

For most of the time, it's a straightforward telling of real events in an unambitious TV movie style, but things suddenly get gruesome for the initial scenes of cannibalism. Flesh being flayed and a couple of half-eaten corpses are both shock effects more suited to Italian horror. Although the scenes are intact in the UK home video, I certainly didn’t see them like that in the cinema (they were mostly censored out). Seeing these brief scenes for the first time on video, I was shocked at how far they went at the time.

The Mexican version is 26 minutes longer than the English version that played in the UK and US, much more of the attempted rescue mission is shown. It was directed by veteran Rene Cardona, who was 70 at the time! Cardona was no stranger to Santo wrestling movies or Mexican horror, such as the infamous Night of the Bloody Apes.

The English version adds a photographic montage at the start and end, and lays on even more documentary-style voiceover. Obviously all the actors are dubbed, fairly loosely, into English, but this was a standard practice for foreign films in the seventies.

Besides cutting out large chunks of the story and tightening up many scenes, the order of events is changed in the English cut, like the timing of the discovery of the tail-section of the plane. A re-ordering of the facts to suit the flow of the narrative. But the most noticeable change is the addition of almost wall-to-wall music, a score by TV composer Gerald Fried. The Mexican version hardly has any music in it, giving it a more realistic feel, but the English version sounds like a TV movie, with many musical themes sounding far too upbeat. When the rescuers are out looking for the missing plane, they get a jaunty adventure theme, despite the fact that they are about to give up all hope.

Some credit is due though. The moment when the survivors decide to eat their dead colleagues and go out to their frozen graves, has a suitably nightmarish accompaniment, that reminded me of a cue from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Poltergeist II.

I can’t imagine what the relatives thought of this film coming out so soon after the crash ordeal. The publicity from the news stories must have been upsetting enough. The story never really went away either. Hollywood eventually filmed their own version of the story as Alive (1993), a respectful twenty years after the crash. But despite the bigger budget and location filming, it’s hardly any different from Survive! It's the same story, but this time with English-speaking actors. The film peaks very early with the horrifying plane crash. But the cannibalism is only slightly less exploitative, the bodies in the snow now barely recognisable as human. There’s a bit more action as the survivor's attempt to reach the outside world, to tilt it towards the adventure genre. Alive felt less gritty than Survive! and concentrates more on melodrama, which the young cast barely carries off.


The best way to learn about these events is through a documentary. Both movies end with their rescue, but the story was really only half over - the survivors then had to face the press as the world learned that they had eaten human flesh. Joy at their survival was replaced with angrier reactions, opinions divided by moral and religious concerns.

Only recently have all the survivors felt comfortable talking about their ordeal in front of cameras, and they even revisit the crash site in a new feature-length documentary, Stranded! The Andes Plane Crash Survivors (2007), also called Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. Besides recalling their experiences, a camera found in the wreckage documented some of their story. Then the final moment when they were rescued was of course filmed by a news crew - a wonderful moment to see.

Watching the new documentary, hearing what they were thinking at the time is a completely different experience to seeing recreations of what they were driven to do. The various versions of this story through the years demonstrate how perceptions change.

Of course, if you still want to see it, there are only two ways to see the original Survive! at the moment. The Mexican version is on DVD as Survive: Supervivientes de los Andes and runs at 111 mins - there's a Mexican trailer included, and good English subtitles. (Available here from CD Universe.)

The shorter English version is rarer, on a long out-of-print VHS. But they still sell for low prices on eBay. Strangely the VHS (released by Thorn-EMI) was from a far better-looking print than the current DVD. The colours are more vibrant and the grading brighter. The VHS runs just under 82 minutes and is uncensored. The end credits cheekily list everyone who helped redub the film, but only mentions six members of the original cast!

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INNOCENCE (2004) a beautiful mystery

INNOCENCE

(2004, France/Belgium, L'Ecole)

One of several films called Innocence, this was rather fascinating.

Iris, an infant, gradually learns the rules of her new school when she arrives in a beautiful walled garden. As she is let out of a coffin and greeted by the other girls, she’s given a specifically coded colour ribbon for her hair, which means she is one of the youngest pupils. Inside the huge garden is a schoolhouse and five dormitories – this is now her new home.

Confused, I paid close attention to every comment from the older girls, and the reactions of the two teachers, as I tried to work out was going on in this elaborate, enclosed community of very young girls. Paying strict attention, I was slowly fed clues about the possible fate of these children, and largely left in the dark so as to fear the worst…


Film students well-versed in unravelling elaborate sub-texts may make completely different conclusions than me, but I took the story at face value and found it intriguing. When is it set? What is outside the garden walls? Have they been kidnapped? What’s going to happen to them all? Why are the adults worried? Where does Bianca go in the middle of the night? Teased by views of mysterious rooms and a stone cellar, I was ready for this to turn into gothic horror at any moment.

The idyllic location in the huge walled forest is beautifully observed, and portrayed as full of vivid colour and alive with nature. But there are rules and warnings about going into the woods at night, straying off the garden path or ever trying to escape.

Not until the end did I realise that this was intended as more of an allegory than a coherent mystery. The oblique ending isn't really a climax, and the mystery-riddled story reminded me of Hotel (2004, Germany), also a beautiful and gloomy film, with more questions than answers.

Seeing innocent young children playing together in a protected environment is rather unusual in cinema. Often schools are only shown when there’s danger or mischief. The girls appear to be carefree and protected from the worries of the world, totally unlike children in Hollywood comedies, where 'kids' are wise before their time, interested in growing up too fast, violent, cynical, greedy or prematurely obsessed with sex.

Because of the idyllic lifestyle inside the school garden, the girls are carefree and unbothered about occasionally being half-naked. While the camera and the direction is unexploitative of the situation, some critics have been overly concerned about these scenes. This hasn’t been diffused by the rather coy poster focussing on a girl’s legs in a very short skirt. The poster is unrepresentative of the tone, themes and imagery in the film. Though the viewer is certainly lead to worry that some dark reality is going to interrupt at any moment.


A far clumsier take on the story came the following year with a film using the author’s more ungainly original title, The Fine Art Of Love - Mine Ha-Ha. This raised the schoolgirls’ ages and added a lesbian storyline, but is apparently a less subtle, far less successful film.

Director Lucile Hadzihalilovic has cleverly adapted this story by Frank Wedekind, better known for writing Pandora’s Box, which was made into one of the finest silent films in 1927. She’s presented innocence as a fascinating all-woman society of mostly young girls, all years away from impending puberty. I was also reminded of Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), which also used fantasy to explore the interests and behaviour of young girls in a simplified world.

Marion Cotillard plays one of the few adults in the school, a rather sensitive teacher. She has since become world-famous as an Oscar winner (for La Vie en Rose), though you might also have seen her in Luc Besson’s Taxi, Taxi 2, Taxi 3 or Tim Burton’s Big Fish.

Innocence is available on DVD in the UK.

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