Sometimes there are more pleasures to be held in a good fashioned exploitation thriller than meets the eye.
"See No Evil" is best known as a blunt, very effective highly tactile and physically brutal example of the venerable tradition of "blind person in peril films", a subgenre that plays on our fear of being deprived of our greatest tool of defense: our ability to see, our very awareness. And "See No Evil" uses the discrepancy - what the camera sees…
"The Edge of Hell" tells the story of a once revered actor who finds himself a beggar, and it is told by a man who was once the king of his national theater, who now was in a strange land, eking together meagre resources to make personal statements that were mocked when they were not forgotten. The cliche is that Haas was the Czech Ed Wood (patently false) - what we often forget is that he was once the Czech…
"It was a miracle this film was made, and a miracle it survived."
If you are privileged enough to ever see a screening of this masterpiece, which has been restored to such clarity that I almost wondered if they bamboozled me and switched the film with one that had just been shot yesterday, you will find the above message attached at the beginning. This is a movie with massive crowd scenes, a teeming sense of life and an uninhibited anger…
Anything designed as sci-fi based wartime socialist propaganda is bound to be a wee bit schematic, but Priestley's brilliance is that the types are indeed true to life and relatable-symbols, yes, but the human grounding and solid performances work against the abstraction. And on abstraction: what amazing visuals! Elegantly minimalist, fog shrouded, with potent metaphorical images (the door that opens when it wills), while keeping the actual society to our imagination. In building the fantasy and moral arguments around reactions, it anticipates Stalker. thought-provoking and extremely moving
