THE VIKINGS (1958)

From 2008.

WARNING: This film is so manly, your eyeballs may explode.

Hollywood from roughly 1949 through the early 1960's was for some reason overrun with historical/religious epics, grand-scale entertainments featuring casts of thousands running around with fake swords and whatnot, getting into all kinds of carnage and daring-do, and usually somehow sandwiching a romantic angle into the whole shebang. Among the most notable examples of this genre are SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949), the unintentionally hilarious THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956), BEN-HUR (1959) and the film that some consider the manliest movie ever made, Stanley Kubrick's SPARTACUS (1960), each foaming at the mouth with lashings of sex and/or violence that could be gotten away with in such a repressive era by being presented in an "historical" context. All are very entertaining and all have carved out well-deserved places in cinema history, but there is one such movie that seems to have been glossed over in favor its more lavishly-appointed brethren. That film is Richard Fleischer's THE VIKINGS, and after years of hearing many glowing reviews I have finally seen it for myself. (Hey, it was only eight bucks on DVD thanks to the Virgin Megastore's "Virgin Sacrifice" sale, so I figured why the hell not?)

The funny thing is I thought I had seen this flick on TV during my growing up years, but I definitely had it confused with some other rape-and-pillage opus that wasn't even one fifth as fun (I think I had it confused with 1964's THE LONG SHIPS, which isn't bad and showcases an unforgettable torture scene featuring "the Mare of Steel"). Believe me, if I'd seen THE VIKINGS as a kid I would have remembered it vividly, because while other films in the historical epic genre may have featured sex and violence, none of them did it with the sheer zeal and love of mayhem displayed here. In fact if you try to think about it as a film being released today, THE VIKINGS would definitely get a strong PG-13 for content alone as is, and if made today the amount of fake blood would probably have been upped a tad, likely garnering the end result an R rating. No bullshit, for its time this is some pretty harsh stuff, and since the rating system did not yet exist, kids could pay their matinee money, sit down in the indoor twilight, and revel in the joyous brutality that unspooled. 

The story opens with an animated bit that swiftly explains the Viking raids on England — and looks to me like the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's illuminated manuscript cutout bits in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) — and wastes no time on such irrelevance as credits, dropping us smack dab into a violent massacre of the English led by Viking king Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine). 

Ragnar's high school year book photo, ca. 837 AD. Voted "Most likely to rape, pillage and vandalize." 

As his men lay waste to dozens of innocent people, Ragnar stops off for a refreshing bit of rape, an act that, unbeknownst to him, sires a son. The woman he violated conveniently turns out to be the Queen of England, and since her union to the now tits-up king was famously fruitless, she births the baby in secret and sends him off to Italy where he'll never be discovered. In the meantime the throne is taken over by Aelle, a ruler-type common to stories such as this insomuch as he's a fey asshole with a bad hairdo who treats everybody like shit and has people executed for the slightest of infractions. Years later he discovers one of his advisors is the guy who's funneled the Vikings info on the easiest spots along the coast to ravage, and once discovered he hightails it to the north and moves in with Ragnar's rowdy band. We then meet Ragnar's over-the-top anti-hero of a son, Einar (Kirk Douglas in full-on testosterone mode), a violent, boozing rakehell who's so in love with his own beauty that he refuses to spoil his looks by growing a beard.

Kirk Douglas (and chin) as Einar.

  

Then Tony Curtis shows up as Eric, a much-put-upon slave who spends his time either looking wistful or glowering like he was about to turn into the Wolf Man. 

 

Tony Curtis as Eric, looking manly (for once).

In no time flat we realize Eric's actually the baby who was sent to Italy, but those wacky Vikings raided the ship he was on and instantly enslaved his ass. There's no love lost between Einar and Eric — especially after Eric orders his pet falcon to rip Einar's face off, resulting in scars and the loss of an eye — a situation made more poignant by them having no idea that they share a father. But what kind of Viking saga would this be if they concentrated on emotions and family dysfunction and stuff when they should rightly be dishing out heaping helpings of drunkenness, carnality, and (for the time) graphic violence? Thankfully we get lots of scenes taking place in Ragnar's mead hall, a place where it seems like the party is simply incapable of stopping, no matter how drunk and violent the revelers get. I mean, really, in what better setting could you plan out profitable raids and kidnap plots? 

The romance angle enters the story when King Asshole, er, Aelle arranges to marry the Welsh Princess Morgana (Janet Leigh, just one year away from the screen's most memorable death scene, namely the shower stabbing in PSYCHO) for political reasons, so Ragnar decides to abduct the girl just for shits and giggles. If you've ever seen an epic that has to do with ancient warriors and some chick, you can see the triangle in this one coming a mile away as Einar makes plain his desire to take Morgana as his queen and rape the living shit out of her (he likes it when his women put up a fight, particularly if it involves scratching). Eric stands around looking doe-eyed while treating her with kindness and helping her escape, and Morgana instantly falls in love with Eric, who's definitely a step up from that douchey king. Anyway, one thing leads to another as Morgana ends up back in Aelle's clutches, Eric loses his hand for pissing off the king, Ragnar gets torn apart by a pit full of starving wolves, and the Vikings sail down from Norway to kick some castle ass like you've never seen (Eric and Einar form a truce until they rescue Morgana). The final battle is totally badassed and must have knocked people out when it first showed up on the big screen. 

THE VIKINGS is a lot of fun and is definitely a good way to pass nearly two hours on a rainy weekend afternoon, so if you enjoy manliness, historical epics, and wish-fulfillment stories of endless heavy-metal partying, wenching, and engaging in exactly the opposite of the kind of behavior your parents would approve of, this is the flick for you. Oh, and director Richard Fleischer's also responsible for the big-screen adaptation of MANDINGO (1975), so make of that what you will. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!! 

The 1958 theatrical poster.All this balls-out machismo can be yours for a mere eight bucks at your local Virgin Megastore! Free chest hair with every purchase!

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022-Day 5: THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

Hospitality... NOT.

I finally got around to watching  THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), one of the Universal classics that I had somehow missed during my formative years, and I have ti say that I do not think it has aged well. That's a shame, because it had a great director in James Whale and a game cast featuring Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger — immortalized as Dr. Pretorius in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, a mad scientist so mad that he comes off as quite sane — and Charles Laughton, while the whole look and feel of the film fairly drips with eerie gothic atmosphere. Unfortunately it suffers from the staginess of many films made just out of the silent era, and in fact the film looks and feels like a silent and plays about the same with the sound off and subtitles on.

It's an early attempt at blending horror and comedy in which five innocents are forced to take shelter for the night in the titular location due to impassable rains, the roads flooding, and collapsing hillsides blocking the roads. Once within the old dark house, our travelers meet a creepy family that is quite obviously insane, and the rest of the running time features the quintet being menaced in assorted uninteresting ways. I expected more edgy material from a pre-Code James Whale film, but the only items of such note were Karloff's mute and hulking alcoholic butler's clearly "ungentlemanly" intentions toward the heroine, and sugar daddy Laughton's character's relationship with his platonic chorus girl girlfriend letting those in the audience with a knowledge of such things read their arrangement as likely being a beard for his homosexuality.

For a horror comedy, the film is neither all that funny or all that scary. It's just atmosphere with little else to recommend it. Or at least that is how I absorbed it. Your mileage may vary, especially if you are a fellow classic Universal enthusiast. And to be 100% blunt, I fell asleep on it halfway through, eventually returning ti it a few hours later. I could have skipped it altogether.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022- Day 4: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022)

 Here we go again...

After the success of the most recent HALLOWEEN sequels comes this latest unnecessary attempt at reviving the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise. All it is is more of the same in the guise of a quasi-sequel, which makes little sense because if it follows fifty years after the original, which is the stated case, Leatherface would be well into his seventies. But whatever...

 

The setup is that this is a direct sequel to the 1974 masterpiece, retconning all of the subsequent sequels out of existence. The original film happened, and now Leatherface (Mark Burnham) lives in seclusion with an ancient lady who serves as his surrogate mother. This iteration of Leatherface bears little behavioral resemblance to the original, in that he is no longer a terrified, infantile man-child who mostly acted out of childlike fear. Now he's an indestructible murderous juggernaut of the Jason Voorhees stripe, a creative decision that reduces the once-unique bogeyman to another in the immeasurably long line of cookie cutter slashers.

Anyway, a group of incredibly annoying internet social influencers breeze into an abandoned Texas town with the intent to sell its properties to wealthy young city-slickers. One of the houses they want to sell is where Leatherface and his mama, the sole residents of the ghost town, reside, with Leatherface basically being a mentally-challenged senior citizen whom no one knows savagely decimated a van full of 20-something half a century ago. The influencers discover the pair while snooping around their house, which was presumed deserted, and tell the old lady that she and her special needs charge have to leave, no ifs, ands, or buts, unless the old lady can produce a deed of ownership. When she cannot produce a deed, the old lady works herself into a state that triggers a heart attack, and she soon dies in the ambulance on the way to a hospital. Leatherface is next to her when she expires, and once she's gone the monster within him awakens. What follows is super-graphic charnel house cinema with nothing on its mind other than placing chainsaw fodder in Leatherface's path. Oh, and Sally Hardesty, the ultra-traumatized final girl from the 1974 film is back (recast due to Marilyn Burns having passed away in 2014), and she has spent the last 48 years searching for the killer of her brother and her friends. A final reckoning is imminent.

Other than delivering on the gore and violence (which unfortunately relies more on CGI than practical effects), this new TEXAS CHAINSAW is about as by-the-numbers as a slasher film can be, and if it had come out during the '80's heyday of the sub-genre, it would only be distinguished from the legion of like films by its famous title. The characters are nearly all annoying, so we have a cast that I actively wanted to see die horribly from the moment they arrived in town, and in that I was not disappointed. Leatherface fucking goes to town on all and sundry, and if that is all that you came for, you will be satisfied. It just would have been nice if all of the carnage had been a part of a narrative that was in any way scary or suspenseful. The only thing of note is a great bit where Leatherface kills about a score of people who are trapped on a charter bus. If I had seen this in a theater, I guarantee you that the audience would have gone apeshit berserk during that sequence. (Too bad Brooklyn's Court Street Stadium 12 recently went under. The audiences there were hilarious during films of this ilk.)

 

When you live in New York City and regularly take the MTA buses, this sort of this is just another day. In a deserted town in bumfuck Texas, not so much.

 

If you come to it with low expectations, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022 a passable way to kill 83 minutes and it is gory as fuck, but there is zero suspense and at no point is it actually scary. It also clearly sets itself up for a sequel, despite Leatherface somehow surviving two back-to-back shotgun blasts to the chest at point blank range. Leatherface is a normal human, not Jason Vorhees, so that was just idiotic. 

 

Lastly, it also rips off elements of the HALLOWEEN reboot from a couple of years back, namely having Sally Hardesty still be alive and seeking vengeance/closure, just like Jamie Lee Curtis in the last two HALLOWEEN flicks. I’ve certainly seen worse, but this is basically just another rote bloodbath in a series that should have been put out to pasture after the second installment.

 

Promotional image for the Netflix release

THE LONG SHIPS (1964)

Ever wanted to see a movie where a pack of horny Vikings unexpectedly find themselves on the loose in a Moorish harem? Well, here's the movie for you! Opening with a portentous back story about a gigantic bell — "The Mother of Voices" — being crafted from the melted-down solid gold spoils of the Crusades, THE LONG SHIPS is the rollicking tale of Rolfe (Richard Widmark, chewing the scenery like nobody's business), a Viking whose ship and crew were lost in a crash-landing near Byzantium, where he spent two years recovering in the care of some monks. 

Richard Widmark, in the midst of an all-scenery diet as Viking scallywag Rolfe. 

 Learning of the legend of the bell, Rolfe makes a meager living in the Muslim streets as a storyteller and makes the mistake of recounting said legend within earshot of some sword-wielding toughs in the employ of Sheik Aly Mansuh (Sidney Poiter, rockin' a James Brown "process"). In no time he's hauled off for torture in hope of extracting the bell's location since Mansuh wants to claim the bell in the name of the Muslim ancestors who got raped, pillaged and murdered to obtain all the gold that went into its manufacture, but the simple truth is that Mansuh's a greedy, sadistic fuck who just wants to add to his already-Croesus-like riches. Rolfe escapes and makes it back to his homeland, where he's not exactly greeted with open arms. The loss of his ship, coupled with some dirty dealing by the local king, has bankrupted his ship-builder dad, and Rolfe is revealed to be considered a lifelong and notoriously towering liar, so when he suggests trying to go after the bell he's greeted with derision. But the necessity to bail himself out — to say nothing of simple human avarice — convinces his dad to aid in the theft of the asshole king's newly-crafted death ship, so in no time at all Rolfe and his little brother, Orm (Russ Tamblyn, aka Riff in WEST SIDE STORY), have rounded up an equally-greedy crew and stolen the king's daughter, Gerda (Beba Loncar) as a hostage (and convenient love interest for Orm). Thus are the seeds for manly pillaging adventure sown.

Cue Yngwie Malmsteen: "I am a Vikiiiiiiiiiing...

 

 From that point on it's one scrape after another for Rolfe and the gang, and while the film feels a bit overlong it's still a lot of fun due to THE LONG SHIPS being a lot more intentionally humorous than just about any other swashbuckling/manly epic I can recall. Widmark looks to me like he understood just how hoary and cheesy his role is, so he performs Rolfe like a smarmy 20th century douchebag and the results are at times jaw-dropping, predating David Carradine's quite similar turn as the titular character in KILL BILL Vol. 2 (2004), only with laughs. Rolfe is impossible not to enjoy and in no time I found myself saying aloud, "This guy's a complete ass-munch!" as he lied without shame or fear of consequence and fucked-up nearly everything he set out to do (although he inevitably comes out on top of things, otherwise the film would have been over about ten minutes in). Other than the powerful motivating factor of sheer greed, there is no reason why any Viking in his right mind would follow him, something his crew (and the kidnapped princess) find out the hard way. 

 

Rolfe bravely (?) awaits his ride on "the Mare of Steel."

 

Also of note is Sidney Poitier's played-so-straight-it's-hilarious villainous role as Mansuh, a Moorish asshole with a mean streak as long as the wall around Byzantium. Nearly every interaction he has with other characters involves some form of torture or violence or the threat thereof, and that treatment even extends to the hot wife (Rosanna Schiaffino) he honestly loves (when she gets out of line he threatens her with a variety of nasty indignities, including being sold off as a slave). I can't recall ever seeing Poitier in a bad guy role, but he's fantastic here and is a joy to watch. Mansuh is one of that rare breed of villains that you totally root for just because you want to see what kind of douchey move he'll pull next, and in that respect he more than does his job. Case in point: after capturing Rolfe and his men for a second time — right after they've had a bit of fun with the ladies in the harem —Mansuh decides to kill Rolfe and enslave his men, ordering them to build him a sturdy Viking-style ship in which to navigate the dangerous seas in search of the Mother of Voices, and his method for Rolfe's execution is both inspired and unspeakably vile. Rolfe is sentenced to "ride the Mare of Steel," in other words he's to be sent on a crotch-first trip down an evil-looking thirty-foot, steeply-inclined razor's edge, which is demonstrated by a poor bastard from Mansuh's own troops who is volunteered for the purpose so Rolfe and company can witness how a true Muslim dies (this is after much bragging of Viking bravery by Rolfe and his men). 

 

The Mare of Steel. Kids, do not try this at home.

 

Too bad this came out in 1964, because that would have made for one hell of a gore effects showcase in the seventies or eighties! 

 

Other than its slight overlength and a theme tune that's repeated so often that it will annoy the shit out of you because of its ubiquity — however it gets played so often your annoyance with it will eventually be worn down to a state of amusement — , THE LONG SHIPS is a lot of fun that would make for an ultra-butch double-feature with 1958's THE VIKINGS. However I would warn women from partaking of that testosterone overload because they just might end up with beards and chest hair as a result of such a concentrated blast of manliness. 

 

The DVD edition: if it looks like Widmark's character just shit his pants, that assessment's not too far off the mark.