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Posted on 09.02.05 by David @ 8:51 am
AKA: La Campana del Infierno, The Bells, La Cloche de l’enfer Review By: David Austin
A Bell From Hell comes with an interesting pedigree. It’s a subversive horror film about societal repression that was shot in Franco’s fascist Spain. Claudio Guerin Hill, the director, infamously plunged to his death from the titular bell tower before the completion of the movie. Given its notoriety, and the style-over-substance tradition of Italian horror and its similar but generally inferior Spanish cousin, I was pleasantly surprised to find that A Bell From Hell, while disjointed, actually has a head on its shoulders, and a good one.
The best thing about Bell is the way it plays with the audience’s expectations. The film is set up as a straightforward revenge story. Juan (Renaud Verley) is let out of the insane asylum where was confined by his Aunt Marta (Viveca Lindfors) for a number of years. Returning to the town where his mother lived, he sets the wheels of a plan for revenge in motion, and engineers an increasingly nasty series of practical jokes against his aunt, his three beautiful cousins, local grandee Don Pedro (Alfredo Mayo), and Pedro’s wife. His training at a local slaughterhouse, his booby-trapped house, and his preparation of an in-house abattoir quickly indicates that more unpleasant things are still to come. Yet A Bell From Hell chooses not to take its cliched psychotic revenge setup in the directions you might expect. From the first scene, where Juan mixes and applies a pink, disgusting latex goop to his yet-unseen face, only to pull it off and reveal a handsome young man, the film confounds the audience’s expectations at every turn.
Juan’s relations with the townspeople are actually quite nuanced. It’s suggested throughout the movie that he was institutionalized, and that his free spirit mother was driven to suicide, because neither could fit into society. Both Aunt Marta and Pedro react violently to Juan’s odd behavior, and neither of his two older cousins, the angry Teresa (Nuria Gimeno) and the gorgeous but vapid Maria (Christine Betzner) understand him. The local leading citizens are shown to be vicious hypocrites.
However, Juan is not entirely alone – in fact, he has a surprising amount of allies. While the atmosphere of the town is clearly poisonous, its citizens do not form a monolithic entity. Pedro’s wife, with whom Juan had a prior relationship the details of which are never made clear, has settled into bourgeois frustration, but clearly still cares for Juan though he makes her the target of several mean-spirited pranks. Juan is also on good terms with the parish priest, who is portrayed in a light that is surprisingly positive for those familiar with the often vitriolic attacks of Spain’s most famous cinematic surrealist, Luis Bunuel – Juan even notes that the Church has forgiven him, though his friends and family have not. Among Juan’s cousins, young Esther (Maribel Martin) is wholly on board with Juan’s free love ideology, and even his vicious aunt has a little moment of humanity when she and Juan enjoy a stroll through the grounds of his estate. His other two cousins are attracted to him. Juan also befriends a local tramp, who functions as a sort of soothsayer, and his mute daughter.
Most importantly for the film, despite his apparent homicidal intent towards his cousins, and his asylum past, Juan is no horror movie bogeyman. His sanity is uncertain, but in a reasonable and realistic way – he’s not a gibbering madman but rather a deeply damaged individual. His capacity for violence is far from clear. At several points during the film, Juan questions his own plans and judgment. It is easier to identify with Juan than with most of the other characters – and I don’t mean in a back row seats of a horror movie, “go get ‘em” way. Juan’s hurt is always just below his bohemian surface - during a talk with his aunt he tells her that she punished him too hard. Verley plays the character well, channeling a less vicious, sensitive version of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
The biggest surprise, as I said earlier, is the approach to the material. While Bell does strive to achieve the much-vaunted “dreamlike state” common to euro-horror, it lacks the compulsion to throw away all logic and character in pursuit of atmosphere and style. With a few exceptions, characters do not behave like complete nitwits, and recognizable human motivations underlie their actions. Guerin also has the ability to combine wit with horror, as in the masterful scene where Juan frightens Pedro with a ghost story about his cousins. Not to knock the atmosphere, of course - it is quite impressive. Guerin got some amazing photography of medieval architecture and ruins, the Spanish countryside and the coast near Juan’s house. Shots of the medieval bell tower and of Juan riding his motorcycle on the foggy beach are breathtaking.
The sound design is also noteworthy. The movie is unscored for the first ten minutes, relying on exaggerated sound effects and noises in a similar fashion to Lee Marvin’s famous footsteps in Point Blank, a thematically somewhat related film. After that, Bell relies heavily on two themes – a frenetic electric organ played by Juan that externalizes the churning in his mind, and an eerie rendition of “Frere Jacques” by a chorus of young girls which, along with pictures and home movies, evokes the lost, happy days of Juan’s childhood with his cousins and mother. Even though the death of the director and the subsequent completion of the film by Juan Antonio Bardem (uncle of the actor Javier Bardem) resulted in a completed film that feels a little choppy at times, the film works both as a whole and as a series of scenes. Bell is not just a gruesome fright fest, but instead is a film with a message,– and even authentic, stomach-turning scenes of Juan working in the slaughterhouse (with the ghastly cries of the dying cows in the background) serve a purpose. It’s a shame that after Bell the world never got to see anything more from Claudio Guerin Hill.
Recommended? Yes, to fans of euro-horror, and to those who usually avoid it. It’s a thinking man’s horror film - the Easy Rider of Spanish horror, if you will, complete with motorcycle-riding counter-culture protagonist. If you like this, you might like: Dellamore Dellamorte, Point Blank, Suspiria, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh DVD DETAILS DVD Production Company: Pathfinder (www.pathfinderpictures.com)
Pathfinder has treated this release with a lot of respect, including the provision of a fair amount of extras. The anamorphic widescreen 16×9 transfer looks fantastic, with only a bit of the grain and roughness common to films of this era. The still gallery and filmographies are also welcome and thorough, though the alternative Spanish scenes add little to one’s appreciation of the film, except to make one appreciate the less modest version of a scene featuring Maria. While in the main presentation of the film, her nudity is artfully disguised with the sort of techniques mocked in Austin Powers, in the Spanish version she is fully clothed, and we are all the worse for it. American Cinematheque’s Chris D. contributes both notes on the film and a full-length audio commentary. The notes are useful, discussing the unusual circumstances of the film’s production, and detailing the histories of the main cast and crew, including screenwriter Santiago Moncada who also wrote Hatchet for the Honeymoon and All the Colors of the Dark. The commentary is a little less interesting, as it recapitulates much of what is in the notes, and has a tendency towards long pauses and surface analysis of what is occurring on screen. Still, the track is a worthy addition, as Chris D. does fill in some backstory and discusses the film in the broader context of the European surrealist tradition.
I only have two problems with the DVD. First, there are apparently a few minutes missing from the US release. Second, the film was shot English, and dubbed into Spanish. Pathfinder has included both Spanish and French tracks, as well as a dubbed English track (the original apparently never having been released). The problem is that Pathfinder has not included an English subtitle option, so that English-speaking viewers don’t have the option of watching the Spanish dub with English subtitles. I generally prefer to watch foreign tracks with subtitles as often the poor quality of English dubs makes it hard to take foreign horror films seriously. However, the dub here is better than average, and neither the English nor the Spanish are the original language, which does alleviate the problem somewhat. Still, I encourage Pathfinder (and Anchor Bay and many others) to follow the path of NoShame in including a subtitle option.
Overall, Pathfinder’s DVD is a great little package for an interesting film. © David Austin Filed under: Movie Reviews and DVD Reviews and Contributors: David and Movie Reviews: Europe and Rating: Good ★★★ and Movie Reviews: Spain Comments:
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