TITLE: Road House
GENRE: Drama
RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes
RATING: R
FORMAT: DVD
SCRIPT: David Lee Henry
DIRECTOR: Rowdy Herrington
STARRING: Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, and Sam Elliot



I've been thinking about Road House.

TITLE:   Haxan                                             
GENRE: Horror
RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes
RATING: not rated
FORMAT: DVD
SCRIPT: Benjamin Christensen
DIRECTOR: Benjamin Christensen
STARRING: Benjamin Christensen, Elisabeth Christensen, Maren Pederson

In the mid-twenties a Swedish director named Victor Sjostrom , who directed in America as Victor Seastrom, convinced Louis B. Mayer to watch a print of the movie Haxan .  Impressed but slightly shaken, Mayer remarked that the director was either a genius or a madman.  Watching it today, you still find yourself asking the same question.
   Haxan was a Swedish film directed by a Dane, Benjamin Christensen, who stumbled across a copy of the book Malleus Maleficarum in a German bookstore while selling his first hit film the Mysterious X.  Malleus Maleficarum, published in the late 1400's, was the handbook for witch-hunters that sent forth proof that witches existed and gave instructions on how to conduct a witch trial.  This book, which at the time was as wide read as the Bible, was the main thrust that started the witch hunts of Europe.  Reading this horrified Christensen to the point he began reading anything he could find on witchcraft.  Disgusted, he decided to make a film showing how superstition caused the torture and deaths of countless women.  After being unable to find financing in his native country, he turned to Sweden where a producer named Charles Magnusson decided to take a chance.
   Thus the strangest silent film ever was born.
   But enough history.
   Haxan, which is Swedish for The Witch, is a weird mixture of docu-drama and lecture that is broken up into seven parts.  The first is almost entirely a series of woodcuts with Christensen using a pointer to highlight the various sections of interests.  After an interlude in a witch's lair in which a extremely graphic shot of a finger being broken off a severed hand in thrown in a witch's brew, the main story begins.  Lasting most of the sections, it details how the arrest of a broken old woman who is arrested for causing the illness of a man causes a series of events that incarceration and death of most of the household.
    In is in the middle of this section where most of the infamy of the film comes.  Under torture, the old woman (a flower seller Christensen found on the street and cast in the film) recalls a witches Sabbath she attended that Christensen recreates with such relish that you wonder if his intentions were as honorable as stated.  Semi nude witches cavort with demons and devils and all the accusations of cannibalism and sexual deviance laid forth in the Malleus Maleficarum are shown or implied.  There are even shots of the witches kissing the Devil's ass in allegiance and stomping on the cross.  Shocking stuff for 1921.  Hell, I am sure most would be shocked today.
    Only in the last section does the movie disappoint.  By stating that the witches were most likely suffering from the then trendy neurosis then showing how the modern women of the time such as kleptomaniacs are the same as witches then does the movie falter and become dated.
    Overall, though, it is an amazing piece of work.  Technically it is amazing, using movie tricks such as stop motion animation and double exposure that I did not realize had been used as early as 1921.  The make-up on the demons and devils are also impressive.  Christensen himself plays Satan in a make-up that would best many devil movies made until latex ruled the world in the Eighties.  (In a hilariously perverse touch, Christensen also cameos as Christ.)
    Haxan was banned and censored at release.  Eight thousand Catholic women turned out in mass to protest in Paris where it was playing.  It later found a cult audience when, in the late sixties, it was released cut down with a free jazz soundtrack and narration by celebrity junkie William Burroughs.  Christensen brought out to Hollywood by the aforementioned Mayer never found his place and returned to Denmark during the Germany occupation.  Never really finding success again, he bought and ran a movie theater in his waning days.
    He never played Haxan or any of his films.
   
                                                      R.R. Moore