Boardinghouse (Johnn Wintergate, 1982)

This movie is craaaaaazy! Boardinghouse is possibly the most insane thing I've ever seen, and part of me is convinced it was made by aliens who took human form but didn't get enough intel about our species before rolling the camera. Is it good? Several more tests must be conducted in the lab before anyone even comes close to an answer. Did I love it? Yes, I did. Every moment seems completely improvised on the spot. Every scene is insane. Every character is a total weirdo. Is it the first telekinetic haunted house slasher hypnosis New Age self-help T&A bikini party rock 'n' roll film with an extended pie-fight sequence? Probably. Is it the first shot-on-video horror film to be blown up to 35mm and play in theaters? Yes (despite the claims from the makers of Blood Cult, another film I've reviewed on this site, who didn't make their shot-on-video horror film until 1985).

Boardinghouse is the brainchild of still-married musician couple John Wintergate aka Johnn Wintergate aka Hawk Adly aka Hawk Adley aka Jonema aka Johnima and Kalassu aka Kalassu Kay aka Kalassu Wintergate. The Wintergates are musicians who make New Age music and "spiritual rock" together, and they've also, together or separately, written and performed folk music, '80s new wave pop, and '70s guitar rock. The Wintergates were at a party where everyone was watching a print of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they got the idea to make a cheap horror film with comedic moments and sex appeal that would also incorporate some of their spiritual beliefs. Boardinghouse is the delightfully bonkers result. John wrote and directed, Kalassu was the assistant director, and they both played leading roles and performed the music.

So, what is this thing all about? I'll try to describe the indescribable. John aka Hawk plays Jim Royce. He inherits a 10-bedroom house in the Mulholland area of Los Angeles from his late uncle. Jim has an office downtown, and his job vaguely involves blueprints and printouts of "business plans," but mostly we just see him meditating on his desk in skimpy underwear as he practices his telekinesis. Jim has mild telekinetic powers, you see. Unfortunately, he doesn't have psychic powers, because he would have known that the house he inherited is haunted by a malevolent entity that causes people to do terrible things. Instead, Jim decides to rent nine of the 10 bedrooms to a bevy of bikini babes who are single, between the ages of 18 and 25, and ready to mingle. A 10th babe shows up out of the blue, Debbie (Lindsay Freeman), and she rents the storage room. Debbie is a little mysterious, but she doesn't stick out as too strange in this bunch of eccentric characters.

Jim and his babes have a lot of fun around the pool, the house, the boudoir, the shower, and the local pizza parlor, and Jim gets especially close to Victoria (Kalassu), who becomes an instant convert to self-actualization through telekinesis. Soon, she's harnessing her own telekinetic powers. But Debbie's got some telekinetic powers of her own, with her own designs on Jim, and wild accidents and nightmarish hallucinations keep happening to the women. 

Into this maelstrom of sexy, poolside eccentricity comes a private eye hired by an angry fiance of one of the women, the angry fiance himself, a couple of police detectives who are old friends of Jim's, Victoria's new wave band 33 1/3 to play the bitchin' housewarming party (a real band of the same name fronted by Kalassu), a magician also performing at the party, an alcoholic client of Jim's, Victoria's hilariously sleazy party-loving agent, and the gardener who "came with the house" (also played by John aka Hawk). The gardener, a Vietnam vet who saved Jim's uncle in 'Nam but lost part of his mind in the process, looks like a cross between GG Allin, every member of LA Guns, every member of Motorhead besides Lemmy, and John Heard's character from Cutter's Way.

Boardinghouse is a wild, freaky ride that amps up the freakitude right at the point where the film starts to drag a little. It is a strange, unique thing, and I love that it exists. It's also super cute that the Wintergates are still married and still performing music as Lightstorm, though they left Hollywood for the Idaho mountains several years ago to raise their two children. Drag City even put out a compilation of their music a couple years ago.   

The Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda, 1972)

An art-horror oddity from Spain, The Blood Spattered Bride is a loose adaptation of Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu's famous vampire novella Carmilla. A work that predated Stoker's Dracula by 26 years, Carmilla has inspired several stories, novels, films, songs, and television episodes. Aranda's 1972 take on the source material is fascinating, weird, and full of memorable images, but it can also be pretentious and silly, and Aranda sends a lot of mixed messages by bouncing back and forth between morality tale, leering exploitation film, and atmospheric mood piece. It's a confused but potent mix, and I ended up liking it more than I disliked it.

About those mixed messages. Aranda's film shares with Le Fanu's source material a simultaneous erotic fascination with lesbianism and a "moral" aversion to it. The film rebukes Spanish machismo and the stupid and grotesque parts of masculinity in several sharp, funny scenes, but Aranda's camera also lingers on and leers up and down his actresses' bodies. And he interrupts his atmospheric approach to horror a few times to drown the frame in buckets of blood. This is a criticism, in part, but it's also an interested observation. Human lives are filled with contradictions and hypocrisies and confusions and the particular strains of ignorance prevalent in whichever historical and cultural moment we find ourselves in, and so are the movies.

The Blood Spattered Bride opens with newlyweds Susan (Maribel Martin) and her never-named husband (Simon Andreu) arriving at a fancy hotel for their first night of marriage. Susan is a virgin, and she convinces Husband to leave the hotel after a vivid nightmare/hallucination of a man who looks exactly like him jumping out of a closet and strangling her and molesting her corpse. Husband, who is a jobless wealthy heir to an aristocratic family, moves her into the family home, currently occupied by a pair of married servants (Angel Lombarte and Montserrat Julio) and their twelve-year-old daughter Carol (Rosa Rodriguez). Carol is mostly silent and mysterious, with a demeanor that seems both older and younger than twelve.

Husband doesn't waste any time being a jerk, tearing Susan's wedding dress off  her and constantly wanting sex and pulling her hair and treating her like a child when she tries to talk to him about her vivid nightmares, but she soon starts standing up for herself and finding ways to pierce his unearned confidence. The nightmares increase in power and intensity, though, and much is made of a gnarly looking dagger that keeps appearing and reappearing, even after Husband repeatedly hides it. He thinks his wife is hysterical and childish, and he enlists a doctor friend to inject her with sedatives and generally double the sexism and condescension around the house.

There's also the matter of the family portraits. Only the men's portraits are hanging in the house, with the women's chucked in the cellar, including a strange portrait missing its face that shows a blood-streaked woman's body in a wedding dress holding a dagger. You know, normal shit. Could it be the woman who keeps appearing to Susan in both her dreams and strange, fleeting moments while she's awake? And what happens when Husband finds a nude woman buried in sand, wearing a snorkel, on the beach and brings her back to the house to recuperate when she refuses help from the police, in a bonkers scene? Possible spoiler alert: maybe she's a vampire and the one from the dreams and the faceless portrait.

As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this movie, and Aranda finds so many great ways to tell this story visually, even when the screenplay and dialogue lag behind. There's a dreamy, hypnotic quality to the images, and Aranda finds a poetic way to frame shots about women having to deal with stupid, overbearing, and controlling men. (Though he also throws in a ton of gratuitous nudity.) The slow emergence of the vampire part of the story helped to ever so gradually increase the feeling of dread. My wife pointed out, though, that the film's first half mostly places us within Susan's point of view, while the second half detaches that perspective to focus on the plot, which is a little jarring. The images remain powerful, however, especially a too-brief shot of Susan and the mystery woman walking into the woods at night. The Blood Spattered Bride is a mixed bag, for sure, but one worth seeing. It's easy to understand why this became a cult film.