Has anyone ever told you you have the most beautiful eyes? Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome) flies to Italy to visit her blind sister Mary Ann (Sherry Buchanan) but arrives in Rome to discover she has apparently disappeared, last seen three weeks earlier, putting a concert at the music academy where she trains in jeopardy. Barbara approaches the British Consul for help in this uncharacteristic and worrying situation and Martin Foster(Nicky Henson) assists her. People don’t just disappear. He’s reluctant at first but then thinks a rather louche Italian Enzo Lombardi (Gabriele Tinti) might know of Mary Ann’s whereabouts but Lombardi denies all knowledge and Barbara doesn’t believe him, getting into a scrap on his boat which might turn into something much worse when Martin turns up and rescues her. Local police believe they might have found Mary Ann’s body with eyes gouged out and then when it’s not her, link Mary Ann with another blind woman who is in hospital after a marine accident, found adrift in a dinghy – that’s not her either. It’s suggested that a reclusive rich man called David Malcolm (Jeremy Brett) the owner of a private island between Corsica and Sardinia might hold the answer to the mysterious murder of a series of blind women. When Barbara visits the blind woman in hospital a weird high pitched recording of birds is played in her room and the woman throws herself out of the window while Barbara is hit on the head. She now is apparently blind and introduces herself to Malcolm who has a thing for blind women. Then she visits his island where his disfigured son makes her acquaintance despite the fact that along with Malcolm’s first wife he’s supposedly dead. Malcolm’s wife Carol (Pamela Salem) isn’t too happy at the new arrival on her patch … I don’t know what it is about you but ever since we met I’ve been behaving like James Bond. Once upon a time, the Summer of 1981 to be precise, ITV showed a compelling British-Italian drama miniseries at teatime on Saturday called Seagull Island. And we wanted to see it again. It has cropped up all these years later thanks to the Talking Pictures channel, but in an entirely different form, a feature film, meaning that a couple of hours of drama (actually somewhere in the region of 200 minutes) have been lost to editing antiquity. Barbara is constantly in jeopardy and physically attacked and her situation pivots on Malcolm’s storytelling and behaviour with Brett turning into an expansive and thrillingly evil bad guy and Henson rolling up now and again to save the day. The plot is a lot less clear in this version than in the original series but the generic ancestry is happily in the suspenseful giallo tradition where American actress Buchanan originally made her name with What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974). It’s satisfyingly glamorous, delighting in the setting and the trophies of wealth – speedboats, lovely production design and costuming. There are some very good underwater scenes but there’s also a deal of gore and violence. We know it’s more than forty years since this was made but it’s still rather sad that the four leads (Ransome, Brett, Henson, Tinti) are long departed this earthly realm. Directed by Nestore Ungaro who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeremy Burnham and Augusto Caminito. The score is by Tony Hatch. The island isn’t large enough to make one feel lonely
We’re all brainwashed. All of us. Kindergarten teacher Emily (Stefanie Estes) organises the first-time meeting of the Daughters for Aryan Unity,’ an organisation of white supremacist Caucasian women, which includes ex-con Leslie (Olivia Luccardi), grocery store owner Kim (Dana Millican) and disgruntled single girl retail worker Marjorie (Eleanore Pienta). The members present have various grievances against immigrants, Jews, feminists, diversity quotas, and organisations like Black Lives Matter. The meeting, held in a church building, is cut short when the church pastor (Josh Peters, the film’s producer) uncomfortable with the topic of the group insists Emily leave. To save face, Emily decides to invite the others to her home; Leslie, Kim, and Marjorie accept. The four travel to Kim’s store for food and drink. While Emily is selecting wine, Asian-American sisters Anne (Melissa Paulo) and Lily (Cissy Ly) arrive. Unaware that the shop was closed, they try to purchase wine but are refused service by Kim. Lily confronts Kim refusing service, causing Emily to intervene. Anne attempts to defuse the situation, only to be intimidated by Emily into purchasing the most expensive wine on the shelf. As the two sisters leave, Marjorie initiates a verbal confrontation with Anne which degenerates into violence. Kim arms herself with a pistol and forces the sisters out at gunpoint; while leaving Lily taunts Emily about her brother, who is currently in a county prison serving time for raping Anne. Emily’s husband Craig (Jon Beavers) arrives and attempts to defuse the situation but Leslie is incensed and suggests going to Anne’s home to vandalise the property and steal her passport Craig initially refuses but is embarrassed by Emily into going along. Emily mentions certain details about the house, such as Anne’s living there alone and that she inherited it when her mother died. Craig tells Emily he is disturbed that she’s been keeping track of Anne like this. The four women and Craig arrive at the lakeside home and perform acts of petty vandalism before Kim finds Anne’s passport. Before they can leave, Anne and Lily suddenly arrive home and discover the intruders. They weren’t supposed to be fucking home! Confused and unsure of what to do, the home invaders bind and gag Anne and Lily at gunpoint and discuss their options. Unable to condone the situation, Craig leaves. Leslie suggests cleaning up the property to remove physical evidence of their presence and intimidating the sisters to keep them quiet. While drinking, Leslie and Marjorie beat Anne and Lily and force-feed Lily various food and drink. Then Lily begins to choke … The first thing you’ve got to do is take the media back from the Jews. This audacious and disturbing debut written, produced and directed by Beth de Araujo shocks and disturbs from the get go: when Emily arrives at the mixer she gets the first piece of the cherry pie she’s brought. It has a swastika cut into it. The camera lingers on that pie for an awfully long time. Our minds think, Nice as pie. American Pie. This is a meeting of Daughters for Aryan Unity. That’s just the first jaw drop: this isn’t some allegory, this is about actual American Nazis. And they’re all women. When they’re booted out of the church the solution for Emily is to get some wine and make an evening of it but then a girl surfaces who reminds the jittery Emily of what happened to her brother. She instigates a vile prank that goes horribly wrong and results in torture, rape and murder. Her husband exits early as the marital differences that were manifest in a failure to get pregnant now reflect on his masculinity – he’s just concerned that he’s being embroiled in a felony and doesn’t want to go to jail. He’s already participated in kidnapping. It’s the escalation to extreme violence at warp speed that’s so compelling. It’s paralleled and to an extent driven by envy: those apparently mixed race girls (Leslie accuses them of having had a wetback father) have a piano. They have a lot of cash. They live in a really nice house. They can afford a $300 bottle of wine. But Ann is a waitress. So what gives? The screenplay pulls no punches about the older women’s class and financial positions – they’re cheap people with dodgy records, their politics are on the nose and directly confrontational. The aesthetic choice to shoot this entire film in one take (kudos to cinematographer Greta Zozula) gives this a striking urgency. We just can’t look away as we are immersed in awfulness. The media loves to portray us as big scary monsters. Am I really that scary? The rape and murder occur literally just under the camera. The contrast between how Emily looks – she moves like a ballerina, she could be a model with those symmetrical features, lean body and long straight blonde hair – and what she says and how Leslie carries out what Emily really wants to happen couldn’t be starker. And it seems like she’s doing it as a quid pro quo to get Emily to pose in her vintage clothes online. The stakes are high for everyone concerned – Kim is freaking out about losing her kids – but they each just go along with the unfolding horror. White people are the worst! As a comment about the state of race relations in the US this presents a spectrum in terms of representation. One woman is the daughter of a KKK member, another is a housewife stuck at home with her kids, one is a baby boomer, another can’t have babies – and she’s the protagonist, the kindergarten teacher telling a little boy to have a go at an immigrant cleaning lady at the school. The politics they espouse are ‘soft and quiet’ and other than punky crim Leslie they look like butter wouldn’t melt but they’re participating in a gendered race war. It slides straight into genre action territory for the last half hour and there’s even a twist. It’s horrible but like we said – this is made from the perspective of racists and you just can’t take your eyes off it because the viewer is implicated from the off. A Blumhouse production. We all have great genes
Houses don’t have memories. Amityville, New York. In the early morning hours on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murders his entire family with a rifle at their home at 112 Ocean Avenue. One year later, newlyweds George Lutz (James Brolin) and his wife Kathy (Margot Kidder) move into the house with Kathy’s three children from a prior marriage: Greg (K.C. Martel) , Matt (Meeno Peluce) and Amy (Natasha Ryan). It’s a big deal for Kathy, who comes from a family of renters. Despite George’s lack of religion, Kathy, a nominal Catholic, requests Jesuit priest Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) to bless their new family home. Delaney arrives while the family is out boating on Long Island Sound. Upon entering the house, Delaney is swarmed by flies in an upstairs room and hears a hostile voice ordering him to get out causing him to flee. The next day, Kathy’s aunt Helena (Irene Dailey) a nun visits the house but immediately senses evil within, becomes violently ill and leaves abruptly, confounding Kathy. The Lutzes’ domestic life begins a sharp decline over the ensuing weeks: George becomes uncharacteristically volatile and abusive, and obsesses over keeping the home warm with firewood, despite Kathy’s insistence that it is not cold. George recurrently awakens at 3:15 a.m. – when the DeFeos were murdered – while Kathy suffers disturbing nightmares. Before Kathy’s brother Jimmy’s (Marc Vahanian) engagement party one night, $1,500 cash to be paid to the caterer inexplicably goes missing in the house. Meanwhile, the babysitter Jackie (Amy Wright) watching Amy for the evening is locked inside a bedroom closet by an unseen force. Amy simply says her invisible friend ‘Jody’ told her not to let her out. Further unexplained incidents occur – Greg suffers a crushed hand when a sash window falls on it. Kathy realises that Amy’s imaginary friend has a malevolent nature. One night, Kathy glimpses two red, pig-like eyes outside Amy’s second-storey bedroom window. Delaney makes several attempts to intervene that seem to be thwarted by unusual accidents and occurrences: His phone calls to the home are frequently experienced by Kathy as static noise and on one occasion his car malfunctions en-route to the house, nearly causing a fatal crash. Convinced there are demonic forces at work, Delaney grows frustrated by the lack of support from his superiors in the diocese. Meanwhile, George’s land surveying business begins to suffer due to his lack of attendance, concerning his business partner, Jeff (Michael Sacks). Jeff’s wife, Carolyn (Helen Shaver) who has psychic abilities is both repulsed by and drawn to the things she feels when at the house. In the home’s basement, Carolyn notices a brick wall that the family dog, Harry, has repeatedly scratched at and she begins dismantling it with a hammer. Discovering the damage, George takes down the rest of the wall, uncovering a small room with red walls. Carolyn, in terror, shrieks that they have found the passage… to Hell!, her voice resembling Father Delaney’s. Later that night, Delaney prays passionately at his pulpit for God to save the Lutz family before he inexplicably loses his sight and becomes catatonic. Kathy visits the library to research the property’s history, where she finds county records suggesting that the house is built atop a Shinnecock burial ground and a Satanic worshipper had once lived on the land. She also discovers newspaper clippings about the DeFeo murders and notices Ronald DeFeo’s astonishing resemblance to George … Jody doesn’t like George. Adapted from Jay Anson’s true-ish fact-based 1977 bestseller this is really the tale of a money pit – what happens when a blended family moves into a fixer-upper and sinks under the weight of impending debt, personal dislikes and the little issue of the previous owners being murdered en masse by their own son. The screenplay by Sandor Stern was originally proposed as a TVM written by Anson himself to be produced by American International under Samuel Z. Arkoff, presumably sniffing at the box office from The Exorcist, which had so many films follow in its wake. Brolin’s portrayal of a man dissipating under pressure, incessantly chopping logs, regularly losing his rag and exhibiting signs of psychosis could be straight out of The Shining (the film adaptation was still a year from release). I believe we create our own demons in our own minds. Kidder has to cope with an intuitive grasp of the problems within the house in a more physically obvious fashion and we infer that this might be due to her Catholicism ie a deeper spiritual connection to the ineffable. Steiger’s entire performance is separate from the leads, many of his scenes being in the company of his curate Fr Bolen (Don Stroud) and his hamminess earned criticism at the time. The structure over twenty days lends credence to the premise that this is a document of real incidents, establishing a timeline in which day to day actuality is recorded with no particular buildup to any terror, day or night. This failure to unite the storylines might be true to life as it is proposed here but it presents a screenwriting problem. The experience of the house is quite separate depending on the personality and there is no big moment with the priest which includes the family. The entirety of the communication is static on the phone line. The other issue is that the scares aren’t particularly scary – it seems so much more obvious that the mortgage repayments are the biggest terror and only the flashbacks to the DeFeo rampage are unpleasant. That and the rocking chair that moves with invisible Jody in the seat. And the eyes outside the window. And … ! It’s also odd that with the change of location (this was shot in New Jersey) that more wasn’t made of the waterside situation. With a lilting score for strings by Lalo Schifrin, a house that in no way resembles the original at 112 Ocean Avenue (which had a terrifying Alsatian guarding the gates when we visited) and no mention of Ronnie DeFeo’s likely acid trip motivation for massacring his own family, this is probably more about financial than supernatural horrors and was allegedly mostly a hoax dreamt up over a few bottles of wine. Many lawsuits ensued concerning the original story and the several publications and film sequels. Like most domestic trouble, the answer is simple – move. We’re still packing a crucifix, however. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. I checked into the murders. And I checked into the twenty year old boy who killed his parents, and his four brothers and sisters. And when he was at trial, he testified that he heard voices in the house. He heard voices in the house and the voices told him to do it! Now, I was in the house and I heard the voices, too! And I also felt their presence in the house! I’m telling you, there was a presence in that house!
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