Scanners

 Scanners is the first movie in a prequel trilogy to the Scanner Cop movies. For this one, the producer behind all the movies in the series, Pierre David, tapped relatively well-known fellow Canadian David Cronenberg to write and direct.

 Of course, Cronenberg had little idea that his producer would run a decent streak of B-movies (most of them terrible) out of the back of his tight, mostly serious-minded little thriller. It's based on a couple different scripts Cronenberg had been thinking about pitching to Roger Corman for a while... influenced more than a little by Stephen King's Firestarter and Carrie, going by the finished product.

 To claim government subsidies (those Canadian commies) the film was hurried into production way before it was ready - Cronenberg has commented that he was writing the script the morning for scenes that he would shoot later in the day. Not that you can tell that much - the film is a bit strangely paced and structured, but not more than you'd expect from the director of Rabid and The Brood.

Headsplosion!

 The plot follows one Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a weirdo who walks into a mall driven to distraction by the voices in his head - which are quickly revealed to be the thoughts of people around him. 

  He's chased down by a couple of shady characters, who shoot him with tranquilizer darts and put him under the care of Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, having a lot of fun chewing the scenery). The good doctor informs Cameron that he's a scanner - a person born with telepathic and psychokinetic powers. After a little training, he conscripts Vale as a sort of superpowered spy to infiltrate a sort of underground terrorist cell led by rogue scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside).

 Revok is -by far- the best thing in the movie, an amoral badass played with unhinged ferocity by Ironside. He's introduced assassinating a rival scanner in one of the most iconic gore moments of the '80s, a messy headsplosion (achieved by someone shooting a prop with a shotgun!) that's still a beauty to behold. That's immediately followed by a great escape scene as he gets a bunch of guards to kill each other off using his scanner powers. Cronenberg is always great when he indulges his more basic genre leanings; And here we even get from him that most eighties of action conventions, the car that is immediately engulfed by a fireball upon crashing. It's glorious.

 Unfortunately -and this is always the bit I forget when rewatching this- we're stuck with Cameron for most of the running time, and he's a complete bore of a character, a bland leading man with absolutely nothing going for him except good looks and a killer action hero name. Lack is pretty wooden in the role, but there's not that much anyone could have done in his place; It's about as generic a thriller protagonist as you could come up with.

 All this is brought into sharp relief later when, while searching for Revok he runs into Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) -  the leader of a new-agey cell of scanners who reject the people trying to manipulate them and use their powers for self-enlightenment. Even though she -in true '80s genre movie fashion- barely gets anything to do besides watching from the sidelines, she's immediately a much more human, interesting character than the protagonist's robotic plot pawn.

 The story beats are fairly standard - Vale and Obrist unravel a shady, barely-developed conspiracy as he tracks down Revok, all the while dodging or killing assassins sent to hinder them. Many of the plot's particulars remain elusive, and the pacing -while brisk- feels a bit off. Given the circumstances behind the film, though, it's amazing it works half as well as it does. 

 There are multiple action scenes, all pretty well done and fairly exciting even when the shotgun-toting bad guys' hilariously awful marksmanship would make a Star Wars Stormtrooper tut-tut disapprovingly. The suspense is really well handled, too - I love a sequence where a bunch of gunpeople approach a barn where our hero is investigating - and there are a few neat visual ideas peppered throughout. The barn above, for example, belongs to an avant-garde artist, and he has a conversation with Vale inside a giant hollow head. 

 Not so successful: the mind battles between scanners, which look like two of the world's most constipated people trying to take a dump in front of the camera.

 Everything else is pretty top-notch. The cinematography (by Mark Irwin*) is chilly, and Howard Shore's atonal synth-based score complements the action well. And the effects, of course, are spectacular. Watching this on a big screen from a new transfer, the fidelity is high enough that you can easily spot the latex fake skin patches used for some of the F/X. This, not that the planet is soon heading for an environmental disaster, is the hideous cost of modern technology.

Zombie Lake (Le Lac des Morts Vivants)

 A pretty girl arrives at a lake in the countryside, with music that can only be described as porn-like. She almost immediately confirms that, yeah, this is an Eurosmut film by quickly disrobing and posing naked for the camera as she prances around and sunbathes a little. Soon she's taking down a hilariously amateurish warning sign and goes for a swim while the camera ogles her from every possible angle.

 But wouldn't you know it, there are zombies in this lake. Nazi zombies.

 The fittingly titled Zombie Lake is a 1981 French film by cult legend Jean Rollin. It is an absolute piece of shit, borderline unwatchable; the only reason I managed to make it all the way to the end was that the Arrow player thoughtfully offers a handy time acceleration widget, so those excruciating eighty-six minutes were cut by half. 

 The unnamed skinny dipper is only the first victim of undead fascists; Soon the zombies start shuffling out of the lake like a gang of unruly lads on a night in town, looking for people to nuzzle to death (that's how they seem to kill people; they either rub their faces on others until they die, or quickly bop them from behind.

 The film is a combination of hoary zombie horror tropes (and I use the term horror in the loosest possible sense here), continuity errors, crappy makeup effects, wooden acting, terrible dialog, ridiculous developments and, like on all these sort of movies, time wasting; so much time wasting. There are boobs, of course, and full frontal nudity - but it never edges anywhere near actual porn the way some other stuff (like Jess Franco) does. And sorry girls, the only hunky dude is a nazi and he doesn't even remove his pants for his sex scene. It's exploitative as hell, with lots of scenes of zombies pawing at scantily clad or naked women, but things are kept fairly tame- the attacks only evoke the phantom of sexual assault, and never cross over into actual unpleasantness the way these movies often do; The copious gratuitous nudity, meanwhile, suffers from some inept staging that makes it funnier than sexy.

 The bloodletting and other horror trappings are about as much a letdown as any of the other aspects of the film. You get a few blood dribbles, but almost nothing in the way of gore. That does lead to some fun, at least: the budget is small enough that they couldn't afford squibs, so a pivotal scene where a squad of nazis gets gunned down in an ambush features a lot of people grimacing and pretending to be shot without any visible blood or wounds, and there's an instance of the classic "let me clap my hand to my face so I can burst a blood bag" trick.

 The most memorable aspect is that movie features a sort of romantic subplot where one of the nazi soldiers had fallen in love with one of the local girls before dying; When he comes back as a member of the undead, he reconnects with their daughter, complete with a whimsical theme tune and everything. The movie as a whole is... surprisingly unjudgmental towards the German soldiers, and shows them in a lot better light than the native villagers. None of this is memorable for the right reasons, but at least it's something.

 There's also what looks like a home-made flamethrower used in the 'climax'. That's pretty cool, and, filming those scenes had to be dangerous.
 Other than that the film is a near-complete waste of time, depending on how starved you are for boob-based content. It's a turgid, amateurish mess that feels made by people with no idea of what they're doing making it up as they go along. It's bad enough to be funny in a few parts, and I can imagine in the right frame of mind or with similarly inclined friends it might be a riot; This is, after all, a movie that stops dead in its tracks for a five minute scene where a whole female volleyball team arrives at the lake, take their clothes off, and immediately get dragged off by zombies. But I watched it wanting to get into Jean Rollin's work and found it (for the most part) a fucking chore to get through even on fast forward.

 The excellent documentary Orchestrator of Storms about the director and his movies barely mentions Zombie Lake, calling it one of his lowest points - And he was clearly embarrassed, as Rollin used a pseudonym for the credits. Wish I'd seen that before watching this.

 The film had been abandoned by fellow Eurosmut purveyor Jess Franco, and Rollin agreed to film it because money was tight. So it turns out I was extremely unlucky in choosing an entry point to his filmography; I'll probably give him another chance someday. But seriously, learn from my example and do not bother with this one..