In addition to new releases, Fantastic Fest also presented a selection of largely forgotten oddities from the past.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Although Fantastic Fest is the place to see the latest in genre films running the gamut from expensive blockbusters like The Creator to any number of micro-budget oddities, it also allows attendees the chance to see revivals of older films that also range from the famous (or at least notorious) to titles so obscure that many viewers may not have even heard of them before.

Of this year’s crop of revival screenings, the best-known title was clearly Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, a massive reconstruction of the infamous Bob Guccione-financed historical epic to something closer to what original screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass had envisioned before the Penthouse publisher enhanced it in his inimitable fashion. Meanwhile, those old enough to recall stalking video store aisles back in the day could get a chance to see such titles as Messiah of Evil and Blood Diner on the big screen at last. On the other hand, a trio of revivals less familiar to most attendees proved to be just as wild and wooly as the more recent titles in the lineup.

Perhaps the strangest of the bunch was The Strangler, a 1970 project from French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali that essentially asks the question “What would it look like if Robert Bresson had been inexplicably hired to direct a Dario Argento-style Giallo thriller?” and proceeds to answer it in a manner both hypnotic and baffling. In the opening, we follow a young boy named Emile who, while out wandering in the streets, witnesses a man strangling a sad-looking woman with a white knitted scarf. A couple of decades later, the now-adult Emile (Jacques Perrin) has himself become a serial killer (albeit a kind and thoughtful one) who, as a way of trying to recreate that first killing, goes around finding unhappy-looking women and strangling them with scarves that, in a nice bespoke touch, he has knitted himself.

Although he racks up the highest body count while searching for appropriately despondent women to kill, Emile is not the only oddball on display here. There is Simon (Julien Guiomar), the police detective in charge of the case who poses as a journalist to further his investigation. Then we have Anna (Eva Simonet), a young woman who recognizes that Simon is a cop and all but insists that she be used as bait to trap Emile, possibly because she has fallen for him. Finally, there’s a thief (Paul Barge) who ends up shadowing Emile on his nocturnal journeys and robs the corpses after he has fled the scene and before the police arrive.

This sounds like it has all the makings of a typical cat & mouse-style thriller but the end result could not be further from such things if it tried. Vecchiali is clearly not interested in presenting viewers with either a gripping mystery (we discover very early on in the proceedings who the killer is) or a series of intricately staged De Palma-style set pieces. Instead, he elects to go for a quieter and more cerebral approach that is more concerned with what the characters are feeling than in the machinations of the plot. Meanwhile, the kills themselves are presented in an almost dreamlike manner that is further accentuated by the lyrical editing and visual style.

Of course, those going to see The Strangler expecting a typical sleazy Euro-thriller of the era are probably going to come away from it feeling confused and frustrated with its oblique nature, but those sticking with it may find it more intriguing. The style Vecchiali employs may be strange but it is an undeniably distinct one. The same goes for the performances from a cast that has taken seemingly stereotypical characters and made them into something unusual and compelling. What is most interesting about the film (and no doubt the reason why it is being revived) is how Vecchiali took what could have been an ordinary procedural and turned it into an odd psychosexual meditation on violence and the inability of people to connect that uncannily prefigures any number of psycho-killer films that would emerge in the subsequent decades. In fact, with the exception of a couple of fashion choices here and there, The Strangler has a contemporary feel to it that is both interesting and a bit unnerving.

Originally produced in 1988, Banmei Takahashi’s J-horror obscurity Door also plays with some of the same themes found in The Strangler, though presented in a far more visceral and wince-inducing manner. Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) is a woman living in a modern and impersonal apartment building with her young son and a husband who is always away on business. She’s harassed by salesmen (emphasis on “men”) who seem to be constantly on the phone or at her door pushing their wares, leaving her to double lock her door every time she comes home, while jumping with fear at every ring of the phone.

One day, she only puts the chain lock on the door and when an especially aggressive salesman (Daijiro Tsutsumi) manages to get a hand in to force a pamphlet upon her, she smashes it closed and crushes a couple of his fingers. Angered by his injury, the salesman begins a reign of terror and harassment that Yasuko cannot do anything about, as her husband continues to stay away at work and she can’t quite identify the man to the police, only knowing him only by his voice. In the final act, the salesman does manage to get inside and the film shifts gears into a home invasion thriller of sorts, building up to the moment when Yasuko finally fights back with memorably gruesome results.

Unlike The Strangler, Door is a far more straightforward take on the thriller narrative and while J-horror is a sub-genre that has never done much for me in the past, this take on it is undeniably effective, so much so that the film’s relative obscurity is a bit of a mystery. Right from the start, Takahashi does an impressive job of establishing and maintaining an atmosphere of tension, giving an uneasy edge to even the most seemingly benign of elements. As we take in Yasuko’s ostensibly safe and secure apartment building, he quietly emphasizes the fact that there is only one way in or out, making it more claustrophobic than cozy. The two lead performances are quite strong as well: Takahashi is effective as the seemingly meek woman who slowly reveals that she is no one to trifle with, while Tsutsumi is equally good as the salesman who can switch from glib unctuousness to viciousness in the blink of an eye. As for the finale, I won’t give any details but suffice it to say, even the hardiest of gore fans are going to find themselves squirming at some of the stuff on display here.

Easily the most obscure of the revivals in this year’s lineup is Blonde Death, a 1984 shot-on-VHS epic made on a budget reported to have been a mere $2,000 by writer-director James Robert Baker (credited here as James Dillinger). This was his second film after Mouse Klub Konfidential, a film so wild (it apparently tells the story of a former Mouseketeer who becomes a gay bondage pornographer) that it’s rumored to have driven Michael Medved to become a cultural critic.

As it opens, teen sexpot-in-training Tammy (Sara Lee Wade) has just moved from Mississippi to L.A. with her creepy dad Vern (who enjoys spanking his daughter just a little too much) and monstrous Baptist stepmother Clorette (Linda Miller). With her hormones in high gear and a head filled with the words of Marcel Proust and Harold Robbins, Tammy is primed to explode. That fuse is finally lit when she meets escaped convict Link (Jack Catalano) and the two fall instantly in lust. As they prepare to leave town forever, they encounter a number of people who get in their way, including a one-eyed lesbian whose eye is definitely on Tammy, Link’s prison boyfriend, and the increasingly unhinged Clorette, and they all wind up getting dispatched in gruesome ways.

If you ever wondered what Badlands would have looked like if it had been directed by a pre-Polyester John Waters, Blonde Death is the answer to that question and then some. It’s unrelentingly crude in both its narrative conception and ultra-low-budget execution, and while it deserves points for its sheer audacity (such as how Baker was able to surreptitiously shoot an entire sequence that culminates in mass death at Disneyland), it soon becomes a chore to sit through. This is partly because of the monotony of the screenplay and the performances (if there is a line of dialogue that isn’t practically shouted, I must have missed it) and partly because the smeary visuals and muffled audio make the simple act of viewing it nearly impossible.

Baker (who committed suicide in 1997 via carbon monoxide poisoning, an act that is eerily prefigured in one sequence here) was a man with a unique vision and sense of humor, but based on the evidence here, it was a vision better expressed on the page than on the screen. For fans of his books (and I still yearn for a screen version of Boy Wonder, even though a faithful take would cost zillions to make and be banned practically everywhere), Blonde Death is a curious but ultimately crudely ineffective early draft of ideas that he would develop more fruitfully in his later work.