Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

RESERVED for an index (assuming I figure out how to make one).

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

Gonna get the ball rolling by dropping in a few recent reviews I hammered out. (For the record, I am not above digging up old write-ups I've done on Letterboxd or my blog. If you happen to follow either of those, there will be a lot of overlap, haha.)

For all the possibilities opened by computer-generated imagery, it’s hard not to feel as if we’ve lost something along the way. When blockbuster cinema regularly conjures images of world-or-universe defining stakes, scale starts to lose all meaning. I think back to seeing Avengers: Endgame in theatres and, despite enjoying most of the film preceding the climax, finding myself totally unmoved when it produced that splash page image of all the heroes joining forces, as flat and shapeless composition as I’ve seen in these things. (Rarely have I felt so out of step with the reaction of the surrounding audience, so I realize I’m in the minority on this one.) There’s a certain thrill in seeing something physically real on a giant scale that a CG facsimile just can’t replicate. For recent movies I can think of that feel truly grandiose, I’d have to go back to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even then shortcuts were used in the way of special effects and stand-ins.

In this respect, Sergey Bondarchuk’s War and Peace represents some kind of pinnacle of this lost art, a work that feels truly colossal in ways few films have approached. One way to grasp the film’s scale is in terms of hard numbers. It runs a total of seven hours (released initially in four different parts). At the time of production, it cost reportedly $100 million, estimated by the New York Times to be $700 million in modern times when adjusted for inflation. The cast totaled approximately 120,000, many of whom were extras supplied by the Soviet Army. Thousands of costumes, sixty cannons and 120 wagons were made, and over forty museums donated artifacts to the production. This would all be moot were the movie a mess, but the production is a masterwork of controlled chaos. The sheer scale of the battles is captured with clarity by the expected crane and helicopter shots, but Bondarchuk’s style is spontaneous and constantly evolving. Handheld camerawork hurtles us through the combat, while the liberal use of filters, splitscreens, superimpositions and jagged editing give the proceedings a heightened, hallucinatory quality. There’s an exhilarating documentary quality to seeing anything of this scale, but the stylistic abandon with which the proceedings are captured render them almost a fever dream. There’s a tendency to treat important novels like homework (I’m sure everyone has at least one example from their high school English class), and truth be told, I haven’t actually read War and Peace (because it’s like 1200 pages, c'mon), but Bondarchuk injects a spontaneity into his adaptation that should lay those fears to rest.

Bondarchuk produces some truly remarkable images, like a sequence where the composition of shot of a battlefield full of soldiers morphs real time as clouds of gunsmoke erupt with orchestral precision. Given the scale and scope of the movie, it’s hard not to compare it with that famous American epic Gone with the Wind, and War and Peace contains certain moments that feel like direct responses to some of the former’s most memorable images and scenes, outdoing the burning of Atlanta and the landscape full of wounded soldiers with even more vivid, forceful images. In the face of the sheer size of the spectacle, the human element can seem underwhelming at first, and that seems intentional in the first part, Andrei Bolkonsky, where a joke about an illiterate messenger seems completely limp after a horrific battle. It’s in the second part, Natasha Rostova, where the human element comes into focus, carried by a trio of lead characters, a fallible but good hearted noble played by Bondarchuk himself, an innocent young woman played by ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva, who is lit and shot to look as achingly beautiful as possible, and a prince played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov who goes off to war against the invading Napoleonic army. (On a side note, the actors resemble Thomas Mitchell, Anna Karina and Christopher Plummer, respectively. Should your attention happen to drift, as is possible during a great yet somewhat unwieldy seven-hour epic, you can amuse yourself by pretending they’re in the movie.)

Bondarchuk’s character is deployed as an audience surrogate during the third part, The Year 1812 (where he views the excitement and madness of the truly astounding battle scene firsthand), and develops a capacity for every day heroism in the fourth and final part, Pierre Bezukhov. As such, his arc is most closely tied to the film’s nationalist viewpoint, but because Bondarchuk understands human weakness (in this character and others, like the half-blind general who mistakes his pyrrhic victory for a real one), it’s also the most moving in the film. If anything, Bondarchuk, despite allegedly being an enthusiastic party supporter, renders the nationalistic fervour transparent, like when he slaps on a patriotic coda to the carnage at Borodino and immediately follows it with a retreat from Moscow. This moment is further subverted when he applied Napoleon’s stentorian narration over the sight of a weakened French army retreating in the thick of winter. Napoleon himself is more of a figurehead in this movie than a real character, and is denied any real interiority, yet I suspect Bondarchuk identified with him at least a little. Near the end of the battle at Borodino, there’s an image of Napoleon sitting down on a chair not unlike one used by a director during filming as he observes a vast formation of his men moving across the landscape, and in this moment he comes as much a stand-in for Bondarchuk as the character the director actually played.

I needed an Antonioni for the Criterion Challenge (original link; my list), and as I’d recently filled two other categories with Alain Delon films, I figured I’d give this a rewatch. My original thoughts still hold, but with two other Delons in my recent viewing history (Purple Noon with his marvelously sexy vacation wear and The Leopard with his terrible mustache) and the fact that one of my pandemic copes has been reading menswear blogs (and making the occasional questionable purchase accordingly), I couldn’t help but pay more attention to his wardrobe this time around. As his profession is that of a stockbroker, his suits are expectedly conservative and business-like, mostly in dark colours and flattering cuts that are trim but not restrictive. (Given the influence of Mad Men on recent men’s fashion, it’s not surprising that the suits he wears wouldn’t be at all incongruous with modern office wear.)

This was before finance held the flashy, sinister stature in the public sphere that it does today (which can be traced back to financial innovations in the ‘70s and the subsequent market boom in the '80s) and the suits Delon wears are a far cry from the broad-shouldered power suits of Gordon Gekko and the like, although I’d hesitate to call them bland. (Close-ups reveal subtle stripes and cross-hatching on his suits as well as a herringbone texture on some of his shirts.) Yet even when he wears more approachable outfits in lighter colours, there’s something undeniably cold and business-like about them, suggesting perhaps that he carries some reservations about his amorous intentions and that his relationship with Monica Vitti holds limited promise as a result. Other actors have looked comparatively good in tailoring onscreen, but I’d argue none have looked better than Delon, nor have they been better vehicles than him for storytelling via wardrobe. (I maintain that the fashions in Purple Noon are integral to the film’s dramatic arc, as it’s suggested that one of the reasons Tom Ripley commits his crimes is to get his grubby, disreputable hands on Greenleaf’s sweet boating blazer. This film also share’s that one’s casting strategy, placing the transcendently attractive Delon and Vitti against the significantly less cool and handsome Francisco Rabal.)

It also might be hard to discuss things people wear in this movie without bringing up the scene of Vitti in blackface. Antonioni presents the scene with a certain matter-of-fact quality, but even with the arguable stylistic ambivalence, it would be hard to read the scene as anything other than an across the board indictment. Vitti’s character is glib enough to find the act anything other than ill-advised, and her friend, aside from her unapologetic racism, fails to interrogate her own colonialist mentality when remarking on her privileged upbringing. The fact that the movie was released during the Congo Crisis (which is briefly and dismissively referred to in the dialogue) only sharpens the indictment. I read a piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum that suggests that the movie presents this scene without judgment, but I’d argue that the very presentation of this material is the judgment. Antonioni trusts that viewers can reach the appropriate conclusion.

And of course, as I’m musing on the film’s visuals, I must comment on the overall style, where I still stand by my original take. The reason this clicked for me while L'Avventura and La Notte did not (although I do owe those movies a rewatch, in fairness) is how this one plays with its experiential and visceral qualities. I think not just of the stock exchange and plane scenes, but even brief moments where Vitti follows a stockbroker to a drug store and cafe and where she contemplates going into a bar. These are moments where the movie almost plays in the first person, although in the exchange scene, Antonioni contrasts that with an overarching view of the strange, insane dance that transpires during a market crash. And of course, he builds that tension as he juxtaposes the characters against wider and wider shots of cold, unfeeling architecture and negative space (in a way that reminded me of Jean Rollin’s Night of the Hunted, of all things) until the striking final minutes (foolishly excised by some American distributors when initially released) when they’ve disintegrated into nothing.

This movie has so many elements that I should love, but the end product left me inexplicably cold. Ostensibly an American-set giallo, White of the Eye opens with a brilliant murder sequence where a combination of bracing camera moves, high class decor and everyday objects are used to suggest the horrific violence that's barely past the edges of the screen. You see, there's a serial killer loose, but rather than the gritty urban or backwoods milieus we associate with such characters on film, the action is set in a small mining town in the Arizona desert. Our protagonist is David Keith, a sound system technician of Native American descent who becomes the chief suspect thanks to his unusual tire tracks and his inability to keep it in his pants. The movie attempts some kind of comment on Native American identity, but I'm not sure I found it entirely coherent and it probably went over my head. In an case, making literal sense is not the movie's priority.

At this point the movie becomes an unwieldy soap opera about the hero cheating on his wife and the strain on his marriage. The movie remains as visually aggressive and hallucinatory as before, yet in ways that feel entirely out of sync with the story. Perhaps this is my fault for not being as attentive as I should have been, but the combination was so disorienting that I mistook a flashback explaining how he met his wife as a "present day" scene with a character who just happened to resemble his wife. When the movie seems this drug-addled with its roving camera moves, dissolves and whatever other flourishes cross its mind, the latter felt entirely plausible. This flashback scene also shows him bonding (sort of) with another male character and hinting ever so slightly at his capacity for violence. And of course, in the third act we learn its true extent, snapping the movie back into overly horrific territory, using certain imagery that seems to subvert Cannon Films' more popular output. (Yes, this was a Cannon release.)

The problem is, the movie never really builds in a way to give that last section an appropriate tension. We supposedly get a sense of the main characters' domestic situation, but the psychedelic style has already undermined it to such an extent that the third act's reveal doesn't really feel like subversion. Perhaps I am more amenable to this kind of material in actual giallo as those movies tend to run shorter (this is nearly two hours) and manage to find the right rhythms for their kooky narratives. In contrast, this never builds the necessary momentum in its pacing and feels both too feverish and too languid at the same time. I will concede that this is perhaps intentional on the movie's part, and I did find it got good mileage out of its Arizona setting.

The desert feels almost primeval and utterly incongruous with the ultra-modern nouveau riche mansions that jut out of the landscape, and one character's reference to hunting with handguns mines a similar contrast. (Of Donald Cammell's work I'd previously seen Performance, the Mick Jagger film he co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, which has similar druggy vibes and echoes of this kind of tension in juxtaposing decadent rock star life with ruthless criminals.) The film's visual character feels at war with itself, and produces no shortage of great images. Maybe the problem is I'm too hopelessly square, but I just wish they accumulated to something more enjoyable.

With a title like China De Sade, you can expect at least two things. Based on the first part of the title, you can guess the movie won't be all that culturally sensitive. Hollywood does not have the greatest track record in depicting Asian characters (or onscreen representation for that matter), and this is even without getting into pornography's relationship with race. So if you're planning to watch a movie with this title, you better brace yourself for a lotta yikes content. Based on the second half of the title, you can guess that the movie will probably will be pretty kinky. For you see, the Marquis de Sade....*regurgitates Wikipedia article on the subject* So if you're planning to watch a movie with this title, you better brace yourself for a lot of not so vanilla content. What you likely won't expect from a title like China De Sade however, is a pornographic riff on Apocalypse Now, which is exactly what the movie is.

Now if you're wondering how the hell a movie can rip off another movie which came after, there are two possible explanations. One, it pulled from Conrad's source novel and happened to also update it to a Vietnam setting and in extremely similar (if lower rent) ways. The other, the correct answer, is similar to how Missing in Action ripped off Rambo: First Blood Part II despite coming out a year earlier. Director Charles Webb (credited here and elsewhere as Charles DeSantos) admits he got ahold of an early draft of Apocalypse Now's screenplay and lifted a number of story elements, and a lot of the fun comes from seeing it's lower rent renditions of scenes from the better known movie. Like in Apocalypse Now, the hero's mission here is to assassinate an insane special forces officer who was operating on his own authority. Unlike that movie, the colonel was captured by the army, brought back to the US, institutionalized and busted out, residing in a secluded compound not beyond the Cambodian border but in sunny California, home of many a porn production. Indeed, aside from a prologue ("Saigon, 1968") with footage of a boat going upriver and a darkly intriguing sex scene (which features a snake and fake blood), this movie is set entirely in the US. And unlike that movie, the hero here has an additional mission of extracting a Chinese intelligence agent played by Linda Wong. (The movie basically splits the Kurtz figure here into two, and Wong's charisma makes up for having to look at the weird looking creepy balding dude who plays the main villain.)

That movie offers a briefing scene where the hero's hungover discomfort from the humidity and exotic looking food is palpable. This one finds a different kind of visceral reaction in cutting to a sex scene between the villain's neighbours upon which he spies. China De Sade trades the horrors of war for the horrors of coerced sex, which places it firmly in the roughie genre. One of the challenges with rape scenes in porn is that they're there for titillation, and unless they're directed with the necessary edge (and even then in a lot of cases), that's essentially the effect they'll have. (I think of the moral challenge posed by the one in Gerard Damiano's Skin Flicks and the ugly integrity of Phil Prince's movies, where the rape scenes are genuinely upsetting.) This is a roundabout way of shamefully admitting that I found a decent chunk of what transpires in this movie pretty hot. Webb assembles the sex scenes with a nice rhythm, pairing the relatively stylish cinematography and editing with drumbeats on the soundtrack. It also helps that Wong, who features in the dialogue-free prologue but makes her entrance proper with a frighteningly large marital aid dangling between her legs, is a fairly magnetic performer and throws herself into these scenes quite nicely. Between how Martin Sheen is taunted by Marlon Brando and annoyed by a drug-addled Dennis Hopper in his cage in the Coppola film and how Wong taunts the hero in his cage here, I won't deny the latter scene has its, uh, cinematic qualities.

Aside from its more prurient scenes, the movie holds together quite nicely, as Webb seems to actually care about the story. (I suspect a morally queasy tale about a clandestine intelligence operation appealed to his leftist politics. There's also a scene where a villainous character wears a riding uniform and helmet, which I suspect is a dig at the upper class.) San Francisco is no Saigon, but there are enough plants and interesting decor to make the villain's compound a credibly atmospheric setting, even if the effect is sometimes more decadent than truly ominous. And true to its roughie subgenre, the movie has an effectively violent and upsetting climax that follows through on its premise, finding an appropriately sleazy equivalent to the bloodletting that caps Coppola's movie and even echoing its themes. Now, there's a really dumb twist ending that upends the interpretation of the preceding movie, as if to comfort the raincoat brigade who just wanted to jerk off to a Linda Wong porno in peace and didn't need it to go full-on morally ambiguous exploitation at the end. Hey look, if you watched it only for those reasons, I'm not here to judge, the movie is good at that stuff, but for the rest of us, if you can tune out the last two minutes or so, this comes recommended.

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was released in recent years by the Criterion Collection, that great home video company that's probably the OG of boutique labels, known for putting out acclaimed, significant or otherwise interesting films in really nice packages. (For some reason I had been thinking they put this out only last year until I actually looked it up. I guess my sense of time has been a little warped as of late, and as much as I'd like to tie this review into pandemic-era life, the fact is other labels have captured my attention lately, as can be evidenced by my embarrassingly large and extremely shameful Vinegar Syndrome haul from their Halfway to Black Friday sale from a few months ago.) Now, nobody in 2021 is going into this movie truly blind, but if I happened to pick up the Criterion cover and perused the back, aside from the list of special features and disc specs, you'd see the below (which I grabbed off their website):

Now, this is a tough movie to evoke with only a blurb, but I'd say that does a pretty respectable job. I however do not own this release. What I do own is the barebones Universal DVD that was released a few months after the movie, back when going into the movie blind would have been far more likely. This is the description on the back:

Now, the previous description probably couldn't fully capture the movie's essence, but this one makes it sound like an erotic thriller. (Could you imagine somebody going into this thinking this was like a Gregory Dark joint? I say this having seen none of his thrillers and only his hardcore movies, although I must admit an MTV-influenced Mulholland Drive starring, say, Lois Ayres is something I find extremely intriguing.) But you know what? Good for them. Among other things, this movie, with its two all-timer sex scenes, feels like one of the last hurrahs from an era when mainstream American movies could be unabashedly horny, before we were sentenced to an endless barrage of immaculately muscular bodies in spandex (stupid sexy Flanders) somehow drained of all sex appeal (god forbid somebody pop a boner...or ladyboner, let's be egalitarian here). I apologize if I'm coming off as a little gross, but having been able to barely leave the house for practically a year and a half, watching sexy movies like this is one of the few remaining thrills at my disposal. Please, this is all I have.

Now I suppose I should say something about the movie itself, but it might be a challenge given how elusive it is in certain respects (Lynch is notoriously cagey about offering interpretations of his movies) and, as a result, how heavily it's been scrutinized over the years. No doubt any analysis I offer as to the movie's overarching meaning will come off extremely dumbassed. What I will note however, is that for whatever reason, the scene I remembered most vividly is where Justin Theroux walks in on his wife with Billy Ray Cyrus, particularly the candy pink paint he dumps on her jewellery as revenge. We've been following Theroux, a movie director, as he's been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, having had control over casting his lead actress taken from him, which he proceeds to process by taking a golf club to a windshield of his producers' car and then reacting as above when he finds his wife with the singer of "Achy Breaky Heart".

With his Dune having been notoriously tampered with by producers, I suspect there's a bit of Lynch's own experience in the scene with the producers, which plays like an entirely arbitrary set of rituals deciding the fate of his movie with no regard for his opinion or even basic logic. While I don't know how particular Dino DeLaurentiis was about his espresso, I did laugh. Now, taking the reading that the first two acts of the movie are a fantasy of Naomi Watts' character, who is revealed to be miserable and ridden with jealousy in the third act, the amount of time we spend with Theroux is maybe hard to justify. Is this perhaps her "revenge" on him, his romantic and professional success having been flushed away while he flounders in search of greater meaning to his arc? Aside from possible autobiographical interest, these scenes do play like a riff on the idea that everyone is the main character in their own story, and if the Watts and Laura Harring characters can be thought of as having merged or swap identities, then perhaps Theroux's arc is the remainder of that quotient. (Now, it's worth noting that aside from being insecure and arrogant, Theroux in this movie is a less stylish than the real Lynch. If Watts conjures the best version of herself in her dream, Lynch maybe doesn't want his dream avatar outshining him.)

Now why did the Cyrus scene stick with me all these years when other details had slipped? Mostly because I'd found it amusing, partly because of the extra specific image Lynch produces, and somewhat because of the casting of Billy Ray Cyrus. Now, I don't have any special relationship to the Cyrus' body of work, but Lynch's casting of him, with his distinct mix of bozo, dudebro and hunk, results in a very specific comedic effect. This is something Lynch does elsewhere in the movie, like when he has Robert Forster show up as a detective for a single scene. The Forster role is likely in part a leftover from the movie's origins as a TV pilot, but the effect is similar (albeit less comedic). Melissa George appears as a woman who may or may not be a replacement for Watts in some realm of reality. Other directors obviously cast actors for their screen presence and the audience's relationship to their career, but the way Lynch does it feels particularly pointed, as if he's reshaping them entirely into iconography. The effect is particularly sinister with the presence of Michael J. Anderson, with whom he worked previously on Twin Peaks, and Monty Montgomery as a mysterious cowboy who dangles the secret of the movie over Theroux's character.

Cowboys in movies are frequently heroic presences (see any number of westerns) and are otherwise innocuously stylish (I confess I've come dangerously close to ordering a Stetson hat and a pair of cowboy boots), but the presence of one here feels like a ripple in the movie's reality. A dreamy, brightly lit mystery set in Los Angeles should have no place for a cowboy. It ain't right. (It's worth noting that Lynch at one point copped to admiring Ronald Reagan for reminding him of a cowboy. Is this his expression of a changed opinion? I have no idea, but Lynch has never struck me as all that politically minded.) Neither is the hobo that appears behind the diner. Certainly hobos have made their homes behind diners, but this one's presence and the way Lynch produces him feel again like a ripple in the the movie's narrative. Jump scares are frequently knocked for being lazy and cheap devices to generate shocks, but the one here gets under your skin.

Now about the movie's look. This starts off like a noir, and the mystery plot on paper would lead you to think that's how the whole movie plays, but the cinematography is a lot brighter, with almost confection-like colours, than that would lead you to believe, at least during the daytime scenes. This is another element that likely comes from its TV origins, but it does give the movie a distinctly dreamlike, fantastical quality that a more overtly cinematic look, like the one Lynch used in Lost Highway a few years earlier, might not capture. This is one of the reasons I think this movie works better than that one, and there's also the fact that the amateur sleuthing that drives the bulk of the plot here serves as a more pleasing audience vantage point than the male anxieties that fuel the other film. I also would much rather hang out with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring than a charisma void like Balthazar Getty.

The manufactured warmth of the daytime scenes also results, like in Blue Velvet, in the nighttime scenes feeling like they're in a completely different setting, one which perhaps offers the key to unlocking the mystery, or at least revealing the phoniness of the movie's surfaces. I think of the evocative Club Silencio sequence, which comes as close as anything in the movie to laying its illusions bare. ("No hay banda.") But at times Lynch will throw in disarmingly childlike, inexplicable imagery, like the dancing couples against a purple screen in the opening, something that would seem tacky and amateurish elsewhere but feels oddly cohesive here. There are a number of directors whose work I admire for being "dreamlike", and putting them side by side they all feel quite distinct (you would never mistake a Lucio Fulci film for a Lynch), but they have the unifying idea of imbuing the tactile qualities of film with the truly irrational to really burrow into your subconscious. Other directors have made movies with some of the same elements as Mulholland Drive, but none have put them together in quite the same way.

I think when you're portraying a famous public figure, you already have your work cut out for you in making the character your own rather than just dressing up as them. And the challenge is especially great when you're playing someone like Katharine Hepburn, one of cinema's most instantly recognizable screen presences, the challenge is even more pronounced, even if you're an actress the calibre of Cate Blanchett. Credit to her, she makes this tension essential to her performance, particularly in her breakup scene, which is the movie's best moment. ("Ha. I'm not acting.") For all the (extremely wrongheaded) criticism Martin Scorsese gets for the lack of female perspective in his movies, scenes like this prove he gets women, even if he's directing from a male vantage point.

Unfortunately, I think she's mostly an exception in this movie, which suffers from the flaws that seem to plague biopics. I've read about the amount of research that Leonardo DiCaprio did to prepare for his role as Howard Hughes, and while I think in later movies he's disappeared into distinct, magnetic characters (The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), the level of calculation that goes into all his choices is a bit too obvious here. There are times when his work rises above that level, usually depending on the strength of his co-star. One particularly good scene has him spar with a rival airline mogul played by Alec Baldwin, who uses his smugness to goad DiCaprio into spilling his secrets in an almost parodic display of dick-measuring (that their business is airplanes makes the metaphor that much more appropriate). But elsewhere, as when he argues with Kate Beckinsale's Ava Gardner, the movie devolves into two actors shouting under period-appropriate make-up, costumes and accents. As with many period movies of this scope, there are a great many cameos, and a number of them here are by actors who look distractingly modern, for lack of a better word.

To be honest, I'm no great fan of biopics (I struggle to think of many recent ones I've had any serious fondness for) and I think this movie's need to fit its material into that template hurts it significantly. I suspect Scorsese identified more than a little with Hughes as a creator and filmmaker (and like Hughes, he apparently sank his own money into the project to finish it), but based on a few of his movies, I suspect he has no great love for free enterprise, and the senate committee hearing scene in the third act, a sort of last hurrah to appease the genre's demands, comes off as a little obvious, as does the way Hughes' growing OCD lines up with the overall arc of the plot. (I'm sure many have pointed out how the pandemic has made Hughes much easier to empathize with in the latter respect, but I'm not sure that helped me enjoy this much more.) I understand Scorsese battled with producers heavily on this film and I wonder to what extent these narrative decisions were forced on him. Compare this to The Irishman and you can see how a sense of sprawl and langour in the narrative helped that movie immeasurably. Perhaps a less neat structure would have helped this one better evoke its subject's idiosyncrasies. (As to what kind of structure would be a thematically appropriate match for Hughes' OCD, I think you can argue in either direction.)

Scorsese's cinephilia manifests in the technical choices, some of which I struggled with. Visually the movie is supposed to evoke early Technicolor, with the first act in particular having the gaudy red and cyan look of the two-strip Technicolor process. I can't fault him for making use of technical innovations (perhaps in the spirit of the cinematic era he's evoking), but the CGI-enhanced colour scheme has an ugly digital veneer that I found extremely unpleasant to look at. Perhaps if this were achieved through more traditional methods, it might have had the tactility necessary to ground its artificiality. His cinematographic choices also make the CGI in the flight sequences look a little too obvious, although the scene where Hughes' plane crashes looks appropriately bruising, and otherwise look like something out of retro science fiction. I hate to come down too hard on this as it moves along quite nicely despite running almost three hours and usually has something halfway interesting going on in the meantime, but this is also close to my least favourite thing I've seen from Scorsese. But because he's a master filmmaker (and likely incapable of turning out something truly boring), this still muscles its way into a slight recommendation.

If Martin Scorsese's The Irishman offers a corrective of sorts to audience misreadings of Goodfellas and Casino, Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way serves a similar function in relation to Scarface. The earlier film, with its decadent surfaces and fever pitch, was embraced or derided (depending on who you talk to) for endorsing the very excesses it was meant to indict. I happen to love that movie and think that it would be pretty useless satirically if it didn't go all the way in that respect. But here comes De Palma, reuniting with an older, wiser Al Pacino, clearing the air and assuring us that no, crime actually does not pay (a lesson which should have been clear to anyone who paid attention to the other movie's ending.) Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, a former drug dealer with a formidable reputation who vows to go straight after being released from prison five years into a thirty-year sentence. You see, he's got a plan to go to the Bahamas and manage a car rental business for a friend he met in prison. Problem is, nobody around him can believe it.

Had Scarface ended a little differently, you could argue this would have been Tony Montana a few years down the line. Tony burned too brightly and flamed out before he became capable of reflecting on his ways. Carlito is haunted by the spectre of past violence, suggesting that he was at one time was capable of similar savagery, and the movie offers John Leguizamo's upstart gangster ("Benny Blanco from the Bronx") as an avatar of his worst qualities. Yet when Tony managed to look himself in the mirror, he found that he was a lowlife to the core with nary any principles to speak of. Carlito in contrast seems a bit more grounded and human, which makes his inevitable downfall all the more tragic. Here's a man who can see all the mistakes he's making, and makes them anyway. Carlito's Way is a portrait of men trapped by a culture of machismo, forced into bad decisions and cycles of violence because they can't comprehend any other way. (A scene where Carlito spares Benny after being disrespected in his club leaves his henchmen baffled.)

Carlito stands by his lawyer friend David Kleinfeld, played by Sean Penn, even when Kleinfeld's visibly coke-addled decision making and penchant for treachery actively undoes him, and the movie highlights how a seemingly noble trait can become downright stupid under these circumstances. I've found Penn's reliance on tics distracting elsewhere, but saddled with makeup this unflattering, he's forced to actually get into character and provides the movie with one of its most memorable lowlifes. (Interestingly, at one point Marlon Brando was considered for the Penn role, which would have been, uh, interesting, considering Brando's career and stature at this time. Viewers of a certain generation will also recognize the character as the inspiration for the hero's sleazy, incompetent lawyer in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.) The other central relationship is between Carlito and Gail, his dancer girlfriend played by Penelope Ann Miller. Like the Michelle Pfeiffer character in Scarface, she's white, conspicuously WASP-coded, and the movie is astute about how she represents a certain respectability to the ethnic hero. It's also aware of how loyalties and conflicts will form almost arbitrarily along racial lines, and the exceptions of Carlito's relationships with Kleinfeld and Gail and his past dealings with Italian gangsters stand out as a result.

The production design here isn't much less meticulous than in Scarface, but the flashy period fashions and glamorous coke-fueled parties aren't quite as intoxicating here, as Carlito no longer feels their allure. (He's also seen frequently in dark colours, looking austere, almost monk-like, in contrast to the colourful suits worn by his cohorts.) Perhaps due to the period setting, the appeal of these things lacks the present tense urgency of the symbols of wealth in Scarface, and with Carlito's relative wisdom they rarely feel divorced from the realities of the street, whereas the earlier film got more and more insular as its protagonist ascended the criminal ladder. Where De Palma does dial up the flash is with the set pieces, with his fluid camera moves, dancerly sense of movement, acute spatial awareness and hair-trigger timing evident in a pool hall ambush, an ill-advised prison escape scheme and the climactic pursuit through a train station. The sequence is less bloody but just as suspenseful as I'd remembered from my initial viewing years ago (funny how your memory fills in the gaps). Compared to Scarface's gun battle climax, this scene feels like the other half of De Palma's take on a John Woo shootout. Scarface brings the body count and firepower, Carlito's Way has the balletic motion. (John Woo's classics, released between the two films, are similarly concerned with the gangster lifestyle but exist in different, if no less compelling, emotional landscapes.)

Now, with all the Scarface talk, it's worth pondering which is the better film, and I think it really comes down to personal preference. This is a slower, more contemplative film, closer to superficial notions of quality and respectability. Yet, perhaps by design, it can't match the brute force impact and lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the other film. But really, these are movies in completely different registers and it's nice that they're as good as they are in their own way.

After my lukewarm reaction to The Aviator and the fact that I hadn't seen this in about a decade, I was a little worried about revisiting this after all these years. The fact that certain lines and images (*cough* the closing shot *cough*) had become something of a running joke in the internet circles I'd frequented and the fact that I hadn't seen it since maybe my high school days had me primed for an embarrassing relic of the 2000s. Thankfully, the movie held up extremely nicely when I revisited it this past weekend. (It's almost like teenage me had good taste, a quality I've managed to shed over the years.) Is it obvious at times? Of course, but I feel that's intentional on Scorsese's part. The way The Irishman seems intended to correct audience misreadings of his work, The Departed also seems to spell out his recurring concerns as bluntly as possible, possibly for the dum-dums in the audience. (It even flirts with self parody at times, dropping "Gimme Shelter" multiple times during the movie.) It's no surprise that this was the movie that finally won him Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.

Did you know that Scorsese is interested in how Catholicism burrows into its believers' psyches? Well, with the extremely on the nose closing shot and other moments (a certain character's arms splayed out in Christ-like formation, hellish red lighting, crude dialogue regarding sexual abuse), now you know. Did you know that loyalties founded on ethnic lines can actually be toxic? In switching perspectives from his usual Italian gangsters to Irish ones (and with Italians and Chinese criminals at the fringes), the meaninglessness of these alliances becomes more obvious. Did you know that a life of crime actually doesn't pay? With enough scenes of low level criminals performing demeaning work or otherwise sitting on their ass, you get the hint. He's also not blind to the economic motivations of the characters in their pursuit of a life of crime. Both main characters are born into seemingly destitute circumstances. One of them (Matt Damon) sees a local criminal as a rare exception to the squalor around him and immediately falls into his orbit, leveraging the support of his criminal benefactors into a genteel, almost white collar version of success. The other (Leonardo DiCaprio) keeps toiling away, his undercover work as a low level criminal proving just as his experience growing up. Modern technology figures into the plot in the form of stolen microprocessors and high-tech surveillance (a character excitedly shouts "Patriot Act! Patriot Act!" during a sting), something that might seem cool or flashy in another director's hands but highlights the fundamental banality of the enterprise here.

None of these elements are especially subtle, but what makes them resonate is their forceful assembly, in particular thanks to the aggressive cross-cutting. (The Scorsese-Schoonmaker team is one of the most formidable in cinema in this respect.) There's an appreciation for the harsh morality and rigid arcs of classic gangster films, the DNA of which mixes strikingly with grittier modern crime cinema. When the movie reaches its bloody denouement, the Rube-Goldberg-like intricacy with which it plays out gives it a thunderous impact. It's been a while since I've seen Infernal Affairs, of which this is a remake, but I don't remember it hitting quite as hard in this regard. And if I recall correctly, it has two love interests for the protagonists instead of the one major female character here, meaning there's no last minute realization by the villain that he's been cuckolded the whole time by the man whose funeral he's attending. Both characters struggle with their identities and the increasingly tense web they've spun throughout the film, but DiCaprio has the last laugh from beyond the grave.

The film is also a masterclass in casting, which lends it additional power. DiCaprio can sometimes be a bit obvious or strained, something I struggled with in The Aviator, but I think that quality serves him exceedingly well here as an undercover cop. If we can see the calculation in his performance, can the criminals around him see through him as well? Damon seems chosen in part for his slight resemblance to DiCaprio, but his natural pomposity is appropriate for his character's aspirations towards respectability, and is a great match by the smugness exuded by his colleague Alec Baldwin. (Here and in The Aviator, Scorsese makes great use of Baldwin's distinct mix of of genteel machismo. At different points in both movies, he practically whips it out.) Jack Nicholson's "Cool Jack" shtick has always struck me as a little sleazy, and he takes that to sickening extremes here, a man without a filter, shoving his appetites in your face relentlessly. (In one of his first scenes, he makes untoward comments towards an underage girl who he later grooms to be his girlfriend.) If this is supposed to be an aspirational figure, it only drives home how dismal a life of crime really is. (It's worth noting that one element likely intended to make him seem unctuous, his ownership of a porno house, makes him seem like a heroic proprietor of an independent theatre these days. I bet they don't play superhero movies at this joint. I also remember an amusing anecdote about Nicholson trying to ad lib setting another character on fire, only to realize his glass was filled with a soft drink.)

As DiCaprio's handlers, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg serve as each other's foils. The former is warm and paternal (perhaps the only such character in the movie, which perhaps telegraphs his fate), the latter is a source of unmitigated douchebaggery. Wahlberg is not someone I'd consider a great actor normally, but in the hands of the right director and placed (usually) out of his element, he can be extremely effective. (I'd cite Boogie Nights, Three Kings and Pain and Gain as the other high points of his career. And maybe The Happening, although unintentionally in that case.) Here, surrounded by obviously better actors, he channels that insecurity into foul-mouthed indignation, serving as a tenuous moral pillar in a world hellbent on doing away with them. (He's also the clearest source of comic relief in this grim movie. Every line, snarled in his nigh impenetrable Boston accent, is a howler.) Is Marky Mark the key to holding this movie together? Probably not, but he's an essential piece of the intricate, thrilling puzzle that is The Departed.

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Ok, that's all for now...

Wow, posting reviews here which are longer than one sentence? F#ck right off.

https://img.favpng.com/6/23/19/off-t...NswUAtBJv8.jpg




Give me the tickets!!!!

Donald Cammell's Demon Seed with Julie Christie is definitely worth checking out.


For me, Gangs of New York is Scorsese's studio-compromised disappointment of the aughts. Not sure the last time you caught that one, but it did take a few minutes in Aviator before I stopped seeing DiCaprio in a Howard Hughes costume and started seeing Howard Hughes. The film is messy, and historically all over the place, but I like the script's central arc ("quarantine" through the "way of the future") and, like in Departed, I like that Scorsese still seems like he's experimenting with his techniques.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

Gangs of New York has been staring at me on Netflix lately, so I intend to get to it soon. I tried watching it a couple of years ago, found some of the slow motion off-putting (and the U2 didn't help) and never finished it.

You're probably familiar with some of the recent Paul Verhoeven interviews from Cannes where he was ridiculing what he sees as a neo-puritanism in the sexuality of recent films. I was amused that Shailene Woodley (of all people, not one I'd guess to speak out about this) agreed with him and pointed out the artificiality of actresses who have sex on screen while keeping their tops on.

I did rewatch Lost Highway somawhat recently (couple months ago), and while I think it fruitless to directly compare the two, I do like that film quite a bit as well.

This is all a trick to convince more people to watch Nightbeast, isn’t it?

Also, Gangs of NY is a big mess of a film, but man is it a fun mess. I slightly prefer it to The Aviator.

I haven’t watched that since HS. When I first started watching films more seriously. I wonder how it’ll hold up over 20 years later?
Reminds me that I should rewatch Mulholland Drive as well.

Hey!


I watch other movies too.


Like China De Sade.


:shifty:

Can't wait for his new one. He still had it with Elle (although it helps when you're working with a Queen of Cinema like Isabelle Huppert), hoping that's a sign of things to come.

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Also I might dig up my Lost Highway write-up later. It's late here now (read: too lazy to do it at the moment).

Antonioni is generally a mixed bag for me and can leave me cold more often than not and L'Eclisse was no exception to this, but I did enjoy some of its experimental qualities. The final scene, in particular, might just be my favorite thing I've seen from Antonioni. Overall though, I've responded better to his output from the mid-60's and onwards (Red Desert, Blow-Up, The Passenger) than his earlier films (Le Amiche and his Trilogy of Decadence).

Mulholland Drive is my favorite of Lynch's films, tailing right behind Eraserhead. Despite having watched it 2-3 times, I'm still not sure I understand what it all means, but since I had such a strong emotional connection to the film, part of me feels changed every time I watch it. The Club Silencio scene, in particular, is one of the most emotionally powerful movie scenes ever.

I've seen The Departed once and enjoyed it quite a bit, but that was several years ago so my memory of it is really fuzzy. The fair share of backlash I've seen it get on RT/Corrie over the years though hasn't motivated me to revisit it. And that I don't care for most of what I've seen from DiCaprio doesn't help much in this regard (to be fair though, he has improved a decent bit throughout the 2010's).

Dude, that was me last week.*But it just started playing in the Netflix, and voila, I'm back to thinking it rules. Even the Marky Mark bits. You can do it, Popcorn.*


On a side note, there's a thread in the general discussion section framing it as reductively as possible, but I do think there's a fair bit of tribalism around how certain films are received.*A lot of the Departed backlash seemed partially motivated by the fact that it was embraced by "film bros", for lack of a better word.*

I suppose I could give it another shot. I just need to get in the right mood for it. We'll see.

One must be in the right mood for peak Marky Mark.

Ulli Lommel's The Boogeyman is not a great horror movie but it is one I think of often. It's marred by a clumsy, effects-laden climax, but the bulk of the movie has a strangely artificial tone. The gruesome slasher-esque kills (which earned it a spot on the Video Nasty list) and supernatural elements seem at odds with the picturesque, almost postcard-like veneer of the overall film. It's as if the reality of the film is at war with itself, echoing the tension in the horror plot. A primary driver of its tonal discord is the extremely uncomfortable opening scene, where the partner of the protagonists' (possible sex worker) mother physically abuses them and is then killed by one of the children, who subsequently goes mute from the trauma. The scene is shot in hot, saturated colours (a quality perhaps inspired by the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom Lommel collaborated earlier in his career), giving it an especially rancid quality, as if it's corroding through the screen.

Olivia has a version of this scene. Here, the heroine witnesses her prostitute mother being killed by a violent john as a child, the scene this time being shot in moody dark blue lighting. We cut to fifteen years later, and now the protagonist, played by Suzanna Love (star of The Boogeyman and Lommel's wife at the time), is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a controlling, abusive husband. (I watched this the same weekend as Sudden Fury, a Canadian thriller about a man who schemes to kill his wife in the backwoods of Ontario, and it was startling to see two strong candidates for the Cinematic Bad Husband Awards almost back to back.) As she spends her days looking out the window towards London Bridge (where they live), she begins to envy the freedom enjoyed by the nearby prostitutes and tries going out to do likewise during one of her husband's night shifts. However, when she picks up a john, it turns out she'd internalized her childhood trauma more than we'd realized, and murders him at the behest of the voice of her mother who speaks to her. (It's worth noting that the man has mannequins in lingerie in his flat, which adds to the scene's weirdness.) She also falls in love with an American engineer hired to provide estimates for restoring the bridge, but when her husband finds out, things meet an abrupt, violent end. Years later, the engineer is visiting Lake Havasu, where the old London Bridge was relocated, and spies a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Love. Could this be the same person?

The plot has elements that were obviously inspired by Psycho and Vertigo. Compared to Brian De Palma and Dario Argento, two other directors who were channeling Alfred Hitchcock's influence to exhilarating results at around the same time, Lommel's film lacks the same technical sophistication, but that adds to its distinct atmosphere. A lot of films can be described as dreamlike and it can mean an awful lot of different things. Compare the films of David Lynch and Lucio Fulci (the latter of whom I will always bring up given the opportunity), which are very different yet the word applies to both. In Olivia, the film's tone and rhythms make its sense of reality feel strangely tenuous, even if there's nothing in the narrative to suggest what we're seeing isn't actually happening. In describing Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, Roger Ebert cites its "sleepy/wide-awake style", which are words that came to mind. The visual style, which features a lot of strong blue lighting, is not as precise as the work of those other directors, putting the film in a state of slight stylistic flux. Production details add to this quality, with the bridge in Lake Havasu and the faking of London locations through well chosen props, as well as crew members cosplaying as Londoners during a crowd scene (which features some not terribly convincing British accents). That the murders (one of which makes similar use of an electric toothbrush as a scene in Boogeyman II) in the version I watched had their audio sourced from a video version instead of the original elements helps them ripple the film's fabric even further.

Speaking of Demme, the film also brings to mind Something Wild, in the sense that the night isn't just a time of day but a different state of mind and perhaps a different place altogether, which emphasizes the somnambulist qualities of the daytime scenes. Are these even in the same reality? Is night real and day just a dream through which the heroine sleepwalks? There's also the relationship between wardrobe, self and storytelling. (As I've spent too much of the last year and a half perusing menswear blogs and then trying to talk myself out of ill-advised purchases, this is an idea that's been on my mind a lot lately.) When Love dresses up as a hooker, she puts on a nice purple floral dress, which on one hand doesn't strike me as a particularly slutty outfit, but is also likely the most sexy item this character, who we understand doesn't get out much and is married to an unkind husband, would reasonably have. Yet with her sunglasses and golden hair, she suggests a Hitchcock blonde and balances the same aura with her kitchen sink daytime existence. (Lommel grew up in postwar Germany and would likely have been sensitive to the economic realities that drive people to that line of work, something he explored in Tenderness of the Wolves. Interviews with Love and assistant director John P. Marsh also suggest that the prostitution elements and opening scene were Lommel's way of processing traumatic events from his childhood. Lommel himself shows up to play a detective, while Love's brother Nicholas, who also appeared in The Boogeyman, plays the client who murders the mother, making this a family affair.)

If like me you own the Vinegar Syndrome blu-ray, you have up to three covers. The slipcover, which features a shrieking woman plunging a knife into her mate (and a grimacing face on the moon over London Bridge) suggest something more blood curdling than the finished product, while the reversible cover brings to mind a Playboy centerfold, accurate to brief sections of the movie (like really brief, before the movie snaps back to horror) in terms of the proceedings but certainly not the tone. The "actual" cover, with the heroine's face hidden by her large sunglasses and the deep blues of surrounding her, better capture the movie's distinct look and feel. And of course, much of the film's power comes from Love's performance, who brings an innate sympathy and low key nerviness to the role. (Love admits to having been uncomfortable with the sexual content in the movie.) Like the movie around her, the different sides of her character seem to be wrestling with each other, the resulting offness and inner tension making her performance, and the film as a whole, extremely compelling.

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Related: Tim Krog's score for The Boogeyman is a low key great horror movie soundtrack.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDma43wVNi4

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This right here is something that separates Lynch from so many other filmmakers. I have had this thought while watching quite a few of his movies. Most recently in pretty well every episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. I think it's the (often ominous) tone he always manages to create so expertly. I just love it so much.

Also sweet thread.

Thanks!


I still need to see The Return.* I'd gone through the original series a few years ago but only watched Fire Walk With Me last year.*


I remember an episode of the VFX Artists React YouTube series where they where picking apart a pretty tacky looking effect from The Return.*All I could think of was how only Lynch could get away with something like that.*

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I think that Devonsville Terror might still be the superior Love/Lommel collaboration.

I did enjoy that one, but aside from the effects-laden climax (Lommel sure loves those crappy optical effects), I don't remember it matching the sheer weirdness of Olivia or The Boogeyman.


TBH it would be nice to see all of them get fancy Blu-ray releases. And while we're at it, the original cut of Boogeyman II (not the ****ty edit Lommel did in the 2000s with fast-forwarded kills and the atrocious fake interview... there had to have been a rights issue).

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Great writeup on Mulholland Drive. Love it.

Huh, so The Boogeyman and The Devonsville Terror both have blu-ray releases from 88 Films.*Looks like they might be region-free as well.*


You're welcome, everybody.*

I think that label has a bunch of Hong Kong movies in their catalogue, but those look to be region-locked.

I thought the 'weirdness' of Boogyman was due to his more amateur approach to the crappy optical effects. Devonsville looks a little more professional.

Tempted to revisit both to verify the relative polish eventually, but the copy of Terror I watched did it no favours. I do think there's plenty weird about The Boogeyman even aside from the climax.

Forbidden World has an aesthetic that's a mix between Star Wars and Alien and a story with a little bit of the former and a lot of the latter. The movie opens with a modest bit of spectacle, a space battle in the vein of the former movie but on a fraction of the budget. At this time we're introduced to a droid, who awakens its master so they can fend off their aggressors. The droid, whose personality brings to mind a less bumbling C-3PO but whose appearance resembles that of a stormtrooper, is not an unpleasing presence but lacks the charm of the robot with a Southern drawl from Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash. Director Allan Holzman was thrust into directing the opening sequence with no script and the barest minimum of instructions from Roger Corman (something about a robot, an astronaut, four days and... Lawrence of Arabia, if he needed inspiration). What he turned out is a passable approximation of the thrills offered by Star Wars, but not much of the personality. Had the movie stayed at this level, it may have been reasonably enjoyable, but this being an '80s Corman production, the proceedings must be spiced up.

By which I mean blatantly ripping off Alien in as trashy a way as possible. The hero, some kind of space military problem solver dude, gets assigned to investigate a violent incident at a research station at a remote desert planet. It turns out that the scientists there are researching experimental food sources and ended up developing a dangerous new organism that ended up killing all the other test animals. The hero wisely suggests killing it ASAP, but the scientists prevent him from doing so, only for the organism to escape, mutate and proceed to kill off the inhabitants one by one in a series of reliably gruesome gore scenes. The organism, referred to as a metamorph (not a xenomorph, it's completely different, what are you talking about, please don't sue), starts off as a goopy black shape and evolves into a final form that equally resembles the monster from Alien and the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. (Be warned that it looks nothing like the monster on the poster.) It's worth noting that while this lifts the plot from the Ridley Scott movie, it lacks the satirical bite of that movie and its sequel, as the motivation for preserving the lifeform is much more altruistic rather than the nakedly capitalist reasons in those other movies. It's also worth noting that like those movies, the protagonists eventually realize that the creature can't be reasoned with, but not before trying to communicate with it through a computer. (The screen flashes "Please stand by" in the movie's funniest scene.) At one point they try to stake out the creature in its cocoon, and the movie again brings Star Wars to mind with the atrocious accuracy of their blaster fire.

The 80s were the decade where Corman apparently became a full on cheapskate (rather than an astute but artistically nurturing pennypincher in previous decades), a quality I'd found visibly detrimental in Jack Hill's Sorceress from the same year. Corman's frugality here manifests mostly in the recycling of sets from Galaxy of Terror, shot here in cramped setups and bathed in garish lighting. Some may find it striking; I found it rather ugly, but at least not blatantly squalid. The cast also lacks any notable names, although those with similar tastes as mine may recognize June Chadwick, David St. Hubbins' lady friend in This is Spinal Tap, and Fox Harris, who played a mad scientist of sorts in both Repo Man and Dr. Caligari. (This appears to be better liked in my Letterboxd circle than Galaxy of Terror, but I'm afraid I can't agree. That movie has a much better cast, including a delightfully off-kilter performance by Grace Zabriskie as a hotshot pilot with PTSD, moodier cinematography and many more monsters. It does however mislead its audience less as it's actually set on a single planet like it says in the title, while the other movie suggests a galaxy-wide saga that never materializes.)

It compensates for the aforementioned lack of star power and accompanying forgettable characterizations with a greater emphasis on schlock, especially in terms of sexual content. Now, as a straight male, I won't pretend I don't find the sight of good looking ladies in the buff at least somewhat pleasing, but I would also like a movie to maintain some level of dignity in delivering the goods, and this movie definitely strains in that regard. Despite the presence of a murderous, continuously-evolving creature on the ship, both female characters make time to jump the hero's bones and later shower together while plotting how to defeat the monster (one of them rubs the other's shoulders as she suggests a new line of attack). Of course, given that the hero is supposed to be hunting this monster, it's a little disappointing that spends his time with them thusly, but in his defense, his vacation got canceled. It won't be a surprise that the screenplay was written by Jim Wynorski, whose Sorority House Massacre II is even more gratuitous in this respect and contains another great text-based gag. (The one in that movie concerns Elvis.)

The wardrobe of the female characters is also suspect, featuring at one point robes that suggest a spa rather than a research facility (although it's nice that this workplace has amenities like a sauna and a glowing space shower featured in the aforementioned scene), and a pink jumpsuit sported by Chadwick's friend. (The colour is a shade or two away from Nantucket Red, leading me to wonder if Murray's Toggery Shop delivers to that part of the galaxy.) The movie's dogged pursuit of prurient thrills does manifest in one great moment, powered largely by its weird editing style: a montage of the hero and Chadwick in a bout of vigorous lovemaking, spied on by a creepy security guy playing with what I assume is a space yo-yo, while another character regaling them with the sounds of what I assume is a space kazoo. And while I didn't find the movie all that nice to look at, the soundtrack of what I assume is space prog makes it reasonably pleasurable to listen to. Look, this isn't a very good movie on the whole, but it gets together enough scraps of enjoyment to justify its meager runtime of 77 minutes. A good enough timekiller on Tubi, perhaps paired with the superior Galaxy of Terror.

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Looks like it has an 82-minute "Director's Cut". Do those five additional minutes contain the secret sauce to turn this into a great film? By which I mean another space prog f_ck montage.

I didn't even see this thread percolating away here

I figured I'd finally start posting some reviews here instead of making constant illusions to my shameful viewing habits like a weirdo.

Is it a spoiler just to take a look at the guy?


https://mostlyfilm.files.wordpress.c.../01/mutant.jpg

Because JJ has been saying very mean things about QT's mother, let me dig up a pair of write-ups I hashed out a few months ago (there are a few references to "recent" viewings in there that are actually from the end of last year or beginning of this one).

For the past few years, I didn’t spend a lot of time rewatching movies. Quite frankly, the thrill of discovering something new (and the risk that it might not be all that good) outweighed the pleasures of the familiar ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Yet this year, perhaps because it’s been so miserable on the whole, I’ve spent a bit more time revisiting films I’d already seen. In some cases, it was to relive the joy of seeing something I already liked or loved. But in other cases, perhaps because I’d been easier to please on average, I would go back to things I’d felt somewhat at a distance to in the hopes that I would finally be won over. Full Metal Jacket finally clicked with me (seeing it in a different aspect ratio did the trick) and I’ve warmed up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as much as I probably ever will. With that in mind, and prompted by a bizarre dream in which I watched it on Netflix in the wee hours of the morning, I ended up waking up stupid early and giving Reservoir Dogs another viewing. (The dream wasn’t terribly interesting, although it did involve me watching the new Scream, which had magically already been completed and was available on Netflix. There was a lot of yellowish, Fincher-esque lighting and Alison Brie got thrown over a railing at one point. As someone who enjoyed the fourth, I was upset by that turn of events, but dreams can be upsetting. In the words of the Shogun Assassin in Shogun Assassin, “bad dreams are only dreams.”)

I don’t think my opinion changed all that much with this viewing. I still feel that it’s one of Tarantino’s weaker films, lacking the confidence and depth of his next few films. I think Tarantino’s career is generally discussed as being split into his earlier, more story-oriented or reality-grounded films and his later, more indulgent genre pastiches, but I think this one lacks the focus that kind of discourse implies. The characters are barely fleshed out and the directorial touches aren’t as purposeful or effective as they would become in his later work. But at the same time, it’s still a stylish and highly entertaining affair, with a great cast giving some very good performances and delivering some punchy, very funny dialogue. It’s pleasures and limitations are obvious and have been better discussed by those more eloquent than me, so I don’t know how deeply I’ll delve into them. (On a side note, I felt a strange pang of nostalgia revisiting this despite it never having been a favourite of mine. It was very big among the internet crowd I first started discussing film with as I first got into the subject, so it’s hard for me to separate those feelings from the actual movie. I got the same feeling watching Boogie Nights a few weeks ago, despite never having seen that film until now.)

But what I did chew over a bit more this time around is how the movie positions the characters’ morality. We know that Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange is the “good guy”, the undercover cop who kills the psychopathic Mr. Blonde played by Michael Madsen. But at the same time he betrays the trust of Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White. Mr. White is sort of a “good guy” too, but foolishly risks his own fate and those of his associates as he bonds with someone who sets him up. Mr. Blonde is a sadistic psychopath but also extremely loyal, having refused to rat out his friends while serving a tough prison term. Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink is entirely business-minded and self-interested, but is that really any less honourable than the intentions of those around him? Chris Penn’s Nice Guy Eddie loves his father, Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot, who is the closest thing to a paternal, authoritative presence in the movie, but both are also extremely ruthless, not to mention racist. Tarantino’s relationship with race is complicated (he’s been criticized for his use of the n-word, particularly in a certain scene in Pulp Fiction, and while I do enjoy his performance in that movie, I’m not sure I can defend a certain line of dialogue), but here the characters’ rampant use of racial slurs seems like a clear indicator of their (lack of) character. (These characters also freely use homophobic slurs, but such language was unfortunately a mainstay of macho dialogue at the time and doesn’t seem as pointed a comment on their natures.) Even when Mr. Orange praises the connection he used to get in with the criminals, another character is quick to point out that the connection is ratting out his friends. There’s some moral relativism in my argument here, but the movie invites that line of thought. Reservoir Dogs is about a bunch of lowlife crooks and despite the extent to which we may identify with them, it never lets us forget that.

In that sense, it’s in clear contrast to some of its influences. Ringo Lam’s City on Fire features the same plot but emphasizes the value of brotherhood between the criminals, so that the betrayal there stings extra hard. Tarantino highlights the meaninglessness of such appeals to solidarity. (Bizarrely, Tarantino has denied having seen that other film despite the hard to ignore story similarities. He even dedicated the screenplay to Chow Yun Fat and pulls the image of a dual wielding gunman in sunglasses from that actor’s oeuvre and has made a brand of pulling from his influences, so I’m baffled why he’d deny this one instance.) Jean-Pierre Melville’s work features gangsters in tailoring adhering to strict codes and conducting themselves with honour in dire situations. Tarantino points out the futility of such codes. His next film handles these dynamics even more elegantly. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character is a villain in one segment and a hero in another, while Samuel L. Jackson’s character reflects on the dishonourable nature of their work and decides to walk away at the end.

Where I think Pulp Fiction succeeds in handling that theme is that it gives us a sense of Jackson and Travolta contemplating (or failing to do so, respectively) their choices and having something resembling actual worldviews (however limited, as in the case of the latter). The characters in Reservoir Dogs in contrast are drawn in shorthand from gangster cliches so that our identification with them is limited. Mr. Orange should be our audience vantage point, but Tarantino fumbles a key scene in which he relates a made-up story to ingratiate himself with the other criminals. It should be about how Mr. Orange wins their trust, which would help make later speculation on his loyalty more dramatically potent, but in choosing to actually depict the proceedings in the story onscreen, Tarantino makes it about the cuts and shot choices he energetically deploys. It’s not a badly directed scene on its own, but the wrong one for the movie. Yet in other scenes, like the opening in the diner, he’s able to elegantly paint character detail while letting us enjoy the surface pleasure of the dialogue. Mr. Pink refuses to tip as an extension of his business-minded nature. Mr. Blonde volunteers to shoot Mr. White, jokingly revealing his bloodthirst. Mr. White takes things too personally (”You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize”). Joe Cabot struggles to remember a name, implying that his criminal instincts are slipping. The movie shuffles its timeline in the vein of The Killing to draw out these contrasts between the characters and to build to a tense and memorable climax, yet had more of the individual character moments been as deftly handled as this first scene, the film might have landed with me more strongly. That being said, there’s a nonzero chance I’ll come back to this in a few years, hoping it will finally click.

I recently watched a Taiwanese exploitation movie called The Lady Avenger. It’s a rape revenge movie that isn’t overtly artful by any means, but plays with a real urgency (likely helped by the production circumstances, which I’m guessing were pretty marginal). But in between the punchier moments we associate with exploitation, it finds room for notes that catch us off guard, lingering on images and emotional beats that seem at odds with the uglier content that preceded it. It’s a dynamic not entirely impossible in respectable cinema but seems endemic to exploitation, where the exploitative, outrageous content that gets asses in seats creates the contrast necessary for the moments of depth to land. I bring this movie up because seeing it so soon after a rewatch of Kill Bill brought my thoughts on that film into focus. Kill Bill seems more clearly now than ever to me an exploration of that very idea, founded by a belief that the movies it’s pulling from are in fact good movies and not just sources of cheap thrills.

Of course, thrills are in ample supply, particularly in the first half, which threatens to overwhelm us with the surface pleasures of genre cinema. We get the glimpse of the inciting incident, the heroine’s (Uma Thurman) wedding shot up by her former comrades, and then a lightning fast two hours of high style and splatter (the movie doesn’t even slow down enough to give her a name; she’s known only as the Bride), culminating in an epically violent fight scene in which the heroine takes on dozens of henchmen, systematically chopping them to pieces, and then facing their leader (Lucy Liu) in a one-on-one showdown in a snowy garden. The reference points are numerous and on full display: Shaw Brothers, Lady Snowblood, the Lone Wolf and Cub series, but Tarantino treats this set piece like a plaything, scoping out the location as if it were a dollhouse with roving overhead shots that move to the rhythm of the music of the 5.6.7.8′s. The music changes to Morricone, and soon he begins gleefully smashing his toys together to wreak havoc. (I assume Tarantino had a few Kung Fu Grip G.I. Joes, or at least a Snake Eyes.) His love for these influences doesn’t overwhelm the sheer thrill of the combat itself, which he depicts in a mix of lush colour, black-and-white and silhouettes, shifting from one technique to another as if the heroine is leveling up through a video game and keeping the audience guessing as to both what flourish and what giddily violent act he’ll serve up next. The film on the whole isn’t the most authentic exercise in grindhouse style he’s made (that would be Death Proof), but this sequence does offer his most full-bodied interpretation of said pleasures.

The second half decelerates from this manic pace and begins to unpack what transpired. We revisit the opening massacre and learn that the heroine actually has a name. She’s moved from archetype into actual character, and we get a sense of the wounds that led to and came out of that fateful event. There’s a training sequence, where Gordon Liu (who previously appeared as a commander of the henchmen the heroine slaughtered in the first half) plays the Pai Mei character he once battled in Executioners of Shaolin, and aside from being enjoyably stylish, this scene really buys into Lau Kar-Leung’s idea of kung fu as self improvement, marrying martial arts with character development. Throughout this, Tarantino challenges us to identify with the characters’ motivations, both the heroine and her nemeses, and to question the extent to which we derive mindless enjoyment from the proceedings. The Bride’s killing of the Vivica A. Fox character in the first half is juxtaposed uneasily with that character’s daughter walking in on them. Yes, Fox wronged her, but she too has loved ones and a life not without value. She meets a smooth-talking pimp (Michael Parks, in another neat bit of double-casting), but his capacity for cruelty quickly comes into focus when we glimpse the mutilated face of one of his prostitutes.

In probably the most affecting passage of the film, we spend time with Bud (Michael Madsen), Bill’s brother who has now retired as an assassin and works a demeaning job as a bouncer for a strip club. This formidable killer is now reduced to haggling for shifts and cleaning up overflowing toilets. There’s something poignant seeing him so defeated, even when Tarantino makes no excuses for his failings (he’s the only one in the film to use a racial slur, which like in Reservoir Dogs is used as shorthand for a character’s flawed nature), and his confrontation with the Bride finds him re-energized, if not necessarily more likable. There’s little warmth however in the character of Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), the eyepatch-wearing assassin who may be most unapologetically cruel of the film’s characters. (Lucy Liu’s character in the first half is similarly vicious, but the film shows it to be at least in part out of necessity.) Yet her disgust at Bud’s unceremonious method of trying to kill the Bride rings true to the movie’s heart. These characters may hate each other, but there is a twisted sense of honour between them and a respect for each other’s true natures. The confrontation between the Bride and Elle Driver also features a gruesome shot of a bare foot squashing an eyeball, which suggests Tarantino, a notable foot fetishist, challenging even himself on his mindless enjoyment of this kind of thing. (Either that it’s doing a lot for him.)

When the Bride finally reunites with the eponymous Bill (David Carradine, bringing his entire history in genre movies to imbue his character with a certain depth), she finds him to be loving father to her daughter, who survived the opening massacre, and to be full of remorse. How much should we really cheering for her to kill him? This movie doesn’t have the political conviction of Tarantino’s subsequent films, but it does share with them a sense of morality so severe that it can’t help but draw out the discomfort in carrying out a quest for revenge. Tarantino has frequently mined pop culture to add meaning (my favourite example is a fairly succinct one: Bruce Willis finding courage and honour through a samurai sword in Pulp Fiction), and here he has the Bride bond with her daughter over Shogun Assassin, another film about a parent-child relationship in a world of great violence and cruelty. Bill gives a speech about Superman that summarizes the themes of the film in one monologue.

“Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman….You would’ve worn the costume of Arlene Plympton, but you were born Beatrix Kiddo, and every morning when you woke up, you’d still be Beatrix Kiddo. I’m calling you a killer. A natural born killer. Always have been, and always will be.”

Ultimately Kill Bill is about grappling with one’s true nature, both the characters, ruthless killers despite how they rationalize it, and the film, an exhilarating exercise in and shrewd deconstruction of exploitation.

Eh, let me do this now.

This movie at first seems defined by negative space. Both visually, in the sparseness of the protagonist’s home, and narratively, in the deliberate, isolating treatment of its characters and the elemental way it cycles through film noir tropes. This is an approach that results occasionally in great atmosphere, but rarely has an effect that sustains beyond individual sections. I think one reason is that the story, which is enigmatic in ways that are to be expected of David Lynch’s work, rarely translates to actual dream logic. Without getting too muddled in specifics or giving away anything too juicy, it starts with a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) who receives mysterious videotapes and gets locked away for supposedly killing his wife (Patricia Arquette). The movie then pulls a surrealist switcheroo and shifts the action to a teenage ex-con (Balthazar Getty) who gets involved with a gangster (Robert Loggia) and his mistress (also Patricia Arquette). Could both of Arquette’s characters be the same person? Could Pullman and Getty be the same person? And who is the strange creepy man (Robert Blake) and is he really in two places at once?

Lynch pulls a similar narrative switch later in Mulholland Drive, but it works much better there as he seems much more invested in that other film in both stories, and Naomi Watts’ performances sufficiently ground them. Too much of this film plays at a distance, which becomes off putting as it gets less sparse and deploys genre cliches more readily. And simply put, the different stories here are not evenly matched in their lead performances. While the film fails to convince us that Pullman is “cool” (despite an energetic saxophone freakout early in the film), he’s a much stronger actor than Balthazar Getty, who I don’t find breathes much life into his minimally written character. (I wonder if the film would work better for me if our narrative viewpoint was aligned to Patricia Arquette instead of Pullman and Getty.) Late developments also allow the film to be read too easily as an expression of male jealousy, and it comes off as pat in ways that Lynch normally avoids when tapping into darker human impulses.

Still, there are things to enjoy. Lynch’s talent for building mood and disturbing the rhythms of individual scenes with disturbing imagery is readily evident, even if I don’t find the soundtrack choices here as cinematic. (I found the use of Rammstein to reek of a very ‘90s sense of edginess, but alternative music is not really my cup of tea.) The Robert Blake character unsettles and needles his way into our subconscious in ways the rest of the movie doesn’t. Robert Loggia’s portrayal of his mob boss as a cartoon character (who in his first scene roughs up another motorist for inconsiderate driving and offers the hero a porno tape as a tip) keeps the midsection of the film from becoming too one-note, and the cameos are frequently inspired. And the movie deserves some respect for trying to answer the age-old question: would Patricia Arquette still be hot if she had the face of Robert Blake?

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

Also, not sure if everybody else has seen this, but I stumbled across a proof of concept short QT did for Reservoir Dogs. Buscemi plays Mr. Pink, QT plays Mr. White. (I think we can all be thankful Keitel took the role in the actual movie.)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77rbAzLZUiw

I don't know if it's superior, but I got to give it credit for having a rape by a snail (or something).

Ugh, yeah, that scene is pretty disgusting. Good job, movie.

It was a Maggot.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

Maggot rape in Galaxy of Terror: No thanks

Maggot cannon in City of the Living Dead: Yes, please

Ha. I remember this movie

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

The Mystery Man's scene at the party is probably the scariest thing I've seen from Lynch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZowK0NAvig

Overall though, I was fairly mixed on Lost Highway as well. I'm willing to give it another shot though.

I agree with most of what you wrote about this one; it's a decent movie, but still one of style over substance (like the pointless use of slow-motion in Mr. Orange's bathroom story, which does little to add any tension to the scene, since we already know it didn't really happen, and mostly just seems there to make sure we pay more attention to Tarantino's direction), and unfulfilled potential. I'd only give it a "fresh" rating overall if I keep in mind that it was QT's first movie, and it sets up the trend that's continued through his filmography ever since that his movies are always at least good when he develops his characters (because he can be pretty great at that when he tries it), but the problem is that he doesn't always try, and I think Ebert & Siskel put it best when they said...

https://youtu.be/Jv2PRBvuvvc

there's a lot of memorable character "behavior", but very little insight into those characters (unlike with Max & Jackie in Jackie Brown). The ending also drives home how pointless the film feels as a whole, and the mixed-up chronology seems like a gimmick put in to gussy the movie up, and keep it from seeming more "boilerplate" (unlike with Pulp, where it was essential to the structure), since it really doesn't change a thing whether we see the robbery briefing in the warehouse at the point it actually occured in the timeline or not, you know?

The bathroom scene is one of my favorite parts of the film. The slo-mo isn't really about creating tension as much as reflecting the agonizing paranoia involved, which is relatable to certain audiences with experience dealing with po-po while holding.

I find the more we know about the characters in RD, the less effective it is. The more sweaty and inescapable the fate of these characters feels, the more I invest in it. Letting us see the prep of Oranges undercover work, the already mentioned folly of the drug dog story and even the scene of White being brought back into the family (as good a scene as that actually is) dampens the tension. I think normally this would be fine, but since Dogs only seems to crackle during its moments of violence and anxiety, it's half hearted attempts to flesh out it's characters seem like a diversion I don't particularly need.


Great write up of Kill Bill. You only missed the part where you mention it's his best (yes, I admit this is an easily refuted position, but critics need to be bold and brave and willing to say totally stupid things at all times)

Strange that this is the only review without a spoiler alert. *My response will contain spoilers*

I agree with the negative space atmospheric, but hard disagree that it 'rarely translates' to dream logic. Probably the dreamiest part of the film is when a (dreaming? sleepwalking?) zombie-like Bill Pullman disappears into the negative space of a shadow-vortex that seems to appear in one of the many dark recesses of his house. Like a lot of Lynch, the plot, like a dream, really only gels by trying to piece its moments together after the fact. And like a lot of Lynch, it's still nebulous enough to have some contentious interpretations.



My reading is that they are, which seems to be revealed when her picture with Dick Laurent, which previously showed both Arquettes, is finally shown with only one. My take is that it was Arquette who "invited" Blake for the purpose of killing Laurent, which he does using Pullman/Getty as useful idiots. There's enough backstory to show that Arquette had experienced significant sexual and psychological abuse, reflected in a similar manner as Muholland Dr by cleaving her into two dissociated persons, one a cold disaffected wife and the other still under Laurent's command and control. Pullman/Getty seem more like two men fused together. Getty kinda looks like he's had Bill Pullman shoved into that somewhat Frankensteinish head of his. The male jealousy aspect is a bit of a red herring, but Arquette is the film's true agent.



Typical of Lynch, there's going to be some unexplained things that we just have to go along with. Like the various dimensions and metaphysical spaces in Twin Peaks, Blake seems on par with the ethereal beings like Bob or the Arm.



I like the duplicity of not being obviously from Arquette's perspective even though we're really watching her story unfold. I like the distance aspect, both in our perspective and the emotional chill from Arquette's characters. It is a bit of a noir cliche that are male protagonists are basically used by being blinded by their own baser instincts, but I think it works here better than you did.



I also like a lot of the darker stuff that's only fleetingly referenced or alluded to. Laurent isn't just a smut-peddler, as it's strongly suggested there's a snuff element to these productions. Not just the Rammstein, we also see the Marilyn Manson figure killed and collapse in a brief shot, his blood spattered on one of the porn actresses. The air of cruelty and violence in the brief excerpts of films that we see adds a lot of potential to what Arquette may have endured and experienced which caused her to become psychologically dissociated. What exactly was the nature of Laurent and Andy's enterprise isn't entirely clear but there's a sense of something ritualistic, maybe sex/blood magick, possibly satanic. How Blake fits into this is obscure but intriguing. Perhaps he's the resident demon of all of this depravity.



Some of it works really well - Bowie's title track, Lou Reed's "This Magic Moment". I could do without the more gothy Manson and Pumpkins tracks.


It's an interesting take that Blake may be a manifestation of Arquette herself rather than something she's summoned to fulfill her desire. Maybe it doesn't really matter. One question that I have is whether or not Arquette was actually killed. I'm pretty sure that for Lynch she survived in some form, as however she's transcended from corporeal reality. But I've always been intrigued by the fact that the only time we see her dead corpse is through the grainy pixels of the CCTV camera. And in these magnified grainy pixels, she does somewhat resemble the pale bloodless face of Blake. Or Marilyn Manson? Maybe Manson had been sacrificed for this purpose, as a replacement in a similar manner that Getty and Pullman were interchanged?

TBH I don't see Pulp Fiction being replaced as my favourite QT (and I say this having loved most of his movies). I don't have any particular insights about it (aside from how the bolo tie completely changes Travolta's look), but I revisited it around the same time as I watched those two, and it was like seeing an old friend.


I'm also the weirdo who thinks his performance in that movie is hilarious. Am I laughing for completely intentional reasons? Who cares.

This is a totally not stupid thing to say :up:

I'm gonna need you to endorse the rest of my post.

Also, looks like Letterboxd is finally adding pornography.


Preemptive apologies to Captain Terror for ruining his feed.

The bolo tie completely changes Travolta's look. He is hilarious in the role. I care.

Thank you, JJ.


*puts away gun*

*adjusts SafeSearch settings*

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

He's just going to blow you away in the back seat of the car.

Is this about the porn post or the gun post?


We will never know.

God came down and stopped these mfing bullets.

Appreciate this response, and I'd be lying if I said a lot of this occurred to me. I don't have too much of a counterpoint, but during my Mulholland Drive rewatch, it became pretty clear to me that my primary issue was with Balthazar Getty's performance. You know how Crumbsroom says passively bad is more offensive than actively bad because the latter at least gives you enough to react to? Getty's performance here feels like a great example of the former. Just a complete void sucking up the screen.


As for the dream logic, I don't have too much of a counter-argument, but find these things often fall down to how things "feel". The narrative movements in Mulholland Drive "feel" more like a dream to me than

the ones in Lost Highway. It was easier to give myself up to the former, perhaps because of the lack of Getty.



Wouldn't mind revisiting this down the line though, especially with your points in mind. I'm one of the weirdos who like Dune (and enjoyed it even more on a rewatch), so it's only fair I give this another chance.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

As promised (or threatened), I will exhume my review of Necromania that I hammered out a few months ago. (I'll do more actual new reviews soon, I swear.)

I am not in the cult of Ed Wood. I’d seen exactly two of his films and did not gel to either one. I attempted many years ago to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space, called it quits a few minutes in, tried again last year and still found it a strangely unengaging experience. For lack of more a better word, its badness was too flat and dignified for my taste. (Give me the energetic good vibes of Miami Connection or Rock'n'Roll Nightmare any day.) I also watched Bride of the Monster, which I honestly didn’t think was that bad. Yes, it’s obviously cheap and technically inept, but is classed up enough by the Bela Lugosi performance that it almost takes the fun out of the experience. Some may find it endearing that Lugosi was still this committed at this stage of his career, but I found myself a bit depressed that a titan of cinema was reduced to such squalid work at the same time his health was failing. Yet, because of my interest in a certain genre and the fact that my curiosity sometimes gets the better of me, after discussing bad movies with my internet compatriots, I found myself compelled to check out Necromania, his hardcore porn feature.

The plot concerns a couple, pretending to be married, arriving at a creepy house in an effort to repair their love life with the help of a mysterious Madame Heles, who we learn is a necromancer (not a witch). We know the house is creepy as the boyfriend remarks upon entry “Any moment I expect Bela Lugosi as Dracula”. We know their love life is in trouble when, after a bout of coupling, they have an exchange like this:

The boyfriend spends the entire movie having his manhood attacked, in ways both bad (as above, or later being browbeaten by his girlfriend when he freaks out at the sight of two women having sex) and good (sexually speaking, finding itself in different orifices), or just flailing around as he struggles to put on a pair of pajames (which happens multiple times; don’t you hate pants?). Lest you think he’s having all the fun, his girlfriend, played by Rene Bond (the only recognizable face here; Maila Nurmi turned down the role Wood offered her) makes a new friend with a woman she bumps into when walking down the hallway, by which I mean they start ****ing in the middle of the hallway. The movie’s most stylistically sophisticated section cross-cuts between the girlfriend and boyfriend having sex with different partners, the sight of Rene Bond with her friend offering welcome but brief reprieves from the boyfriend’s pasty ass as he thrusts into his partner. Of course, with the sound of a gong, the fun stops, the hero and heroine are brought to a room with a coffin, and we finally meet the Madame Heles that everyone has been talking about.

It’s worth noting that this coffin owned by the Amazing Criswell (who wisely prophesized that “future events such as these will affect you in the future”) and was an antique that apparently dated back to the Lincoln presidency. I say it’s worth noting because it’s much funnier to think it was in fact Lincoln’s coffin that Madame Heles ends up fellating the hero in, although most viewers will be relieved that Lincoln is not actually in the coffin while they do the deed. Of course, this act wraps up the movie (which runs a brisk, merciful fifty-or-so minutes), but before then we’re not treated to just the above events, but plenty of being spied on by owl eyes on the walls, being startled by a stuffed wolf, the sight of an orgy through a kaleidoscopic lens, a weird sex ritual in front of the coffin, and numerous reminders that the leads are not married. (Apparently Wood adapted the story from a novel and changed the status of their relationship, with the only reason I can discern that he can repeatedly bring it up in the dialogue.)

And plenty of sluggish, low energy sex while out of sync moaning and loud music permeate the soundtrack. (Wood’s preference appears to be rockabilly, but he finds room for jazz and big band.) And plenty of the hero’s dangling penis while he struggles with the act of putting on pajamas. I describe the movie somewhat facetiously, but truth be told, it’s not unenjoyable. Plenty of the dialogue is intentionally humorous. (“Good lord.” “You can say that again.” “Good lord.”) And the mix of rough, spotty filmmaking and the idiosyncratic set design has the film settling into a pretty distinct rhythm during its brief runtime. Wood seems to almost mock the genre as he executes it in the most rudimentary manner possible (as with a lazily leering pan of Bond’s body as she argues with her boyfriend about his inability to please her) and often seems more interested in the decor he’s picked out or the stilted acting than in the sight of nude bodies in sexual congress. Those whose experience in Wood’s oeuvre runs deeper than mine can perhaps detect greater significance or traces of his personality in the work (this was made after his most famous films but before he started churning out loops), but I liked this, all things considered.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. is a good place for people to get more of an overview of Wood.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

*adds to watchlist*

No argument from me that Getty was the weakest part of the film, and his portion suffers for it. I'm not sure if Lynch cast him because of the Frankenstein-head thing (he does look like a wax Bill Pullman that's been left in the microwave too long), or if he felt he had just the right amount of stupid on his face at all times. Sometimes I wonder if Lynch casts the occasional actor just because he wants to make fun of them, Michael Cera in TP: The Return, for example. Did Lynch take the job of directing that Duran Duran concert because he likes their music or just for the opportunity to have Barbie dolls dance with "D"s on their breasts. We'll never know.


The dream atmosphere is definitely stronger in the early part of the film, so much so that although it isn't explicitly depicted, I've taken for granted that Pullman's saxophonist was a drug addict because of the barbiturate tone.

I do find the film enormously funny for these technical failings. It might help that my original VHS copy was a public domain dupe from a print that had about 20 cue dots per reel, in increasingly wild patterns and places. But I genuinely think that it is one of Bela's best performances, and the fact that he's so earnest and committed for a film that is such a waste of his talents adds a certain pathos that Wood's screenwriting couldn't possibly provide on its own. It also helps now that it's probably impossible not to see through the filter of Martin Landau's take which focuses on this precise aspect.


Ha, just like John Waters! It's one of the funnier parts of A Dirty Shame. I guess you have to be of a certain generation or cultural milieu to find rockabilly to be the most appropriate embodiment of dangerous sex, but it's so silly, like that scene in Walk Hard: "It's the Devil's music!"

Andrzej Zulawski's Possession is a movie I'd somewhat been dreading revisiting. When I'd seen it all those years back (on YouTube, split into two parts if I recall correctly, as the DVD had been hard to come by in those days), despite being greatly moved by the experience, I'd also found it an extremely exhausting film to sit through. It's a tortured divorce melodrama (among other things) that starts at 11 and only goes up from there. Lots of shouting and screaming, physical abuse, kicking around chairs and tables. The movie is not what I'd call an overtly pleasant experience. Watching it now (on a Blu-ray from Mondo Vision, a substantial upgrade from my original format), while I won't characterize my previous impressions as inaccurate, I was able to better appreciate how the movie modulates this tone, acclimatizing us to its fraught emotional space. The movie starts off in the realm of a normal, bitter breakup, with the husband having returned from a work trip only to learn that his wife is leaving him and struggling to make sense of it, his frustration and anger stemming as much from the fact of her dissolving their relationship as his inability to comprehend her motivations. It isn't really until the half hour mark that it asks us to dive off the deep end with it. The husband hits his wife in the middle of a fight, follows her onto the street as she tries to halfheartedly throw herself onto the path of a truck, which then drops its baggage in an almost comical bit of stuntwork, their squabble ended when the husband becomes surrounded by children playing soccer and joins in. Any one of these by itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but Zulawski assembles them into an off-kilter crescendo, and does away with any sense of normalcy for the rest of the runtime.

That this approach works as well as it does is largely thanks to Isabelle Adjani as Anna, the wife, who spends the aforementioned scene looking like a vampire in cat eye sunglasses and blood streaming down her grimacing mouth. She delivers perhaps the most bracingly physical performance I've seen in a movie, but again this is something I'd maybe underappreciated initially in terms of how finely tuned her choices are. An early scene where she fights with her husband has her manically cutting raw meat and shoving it into a grinder, as if to channel her frustrations into acceptable form of violence for women. When she takes an electric knife to her throat, she begins to spasm about like a farm animal during a botched slaughter, providing a further comment on her domestic situation. The film's most famous scene has her freak out in a subway tunnel, thrashing her limbs about chaotically but almost rhythmically, maybe like the contractions when goes into labour. Her character later describes this as a miscarriage, ejecting the side of her which is neat and orderly and "good". Adjani plays this other half as well, with a much more old fashioned hairdo (braided conservatively like a stereotypical schoolmarm), one which provides a much more tender maternal figure to the couple's son. Adjani is also well cast because of her emotive, saucer-like eyes, which she isn't afraid to point at the camera repeatedly, providing a genuine emotional grounding during both the quieter and more hysterical sections of the movie.

Her husband, Mark, is played by Sam Neill, who had been cast after the filmmakers had seen him in Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career. To understand why Neill works so well, it helps to know that Sam Waterston had previously expressed interest in the role. Waterston, while a good actor, would have come off too fogeyish as the husband. Neill brings the appropriate edge and even sex appeal necessary for the material. And like in Jurassic Park, his best known role, he brings an inquisitive quality that keeps him close enough to our vantage point to give the narrative arc some grounding. The other major human character here is Heinz Bennent as Heinrich, a new age guru who happens to be having an affair with the wife. One on hand, this character represents the counterculture from Zulawski's homeland, which he had left after trouble from the authorities when making his last movie. On the other hand, Zulawski was drawing heavily from the bitter divorce he had just gone through, and directs a sizable fraction of the movie's contempt at this character, leading me to believe that his wife in fact left him for some new age buffoon. In one of the movie's funnier scenes, he has Heinrich confront Mark over Anna's disappearance and then go into a dumbassed trance while spouting new age nonsense and basically calling Mark a Nazi. This is the guy his wife left him for? This jackass? Mark sets him up by sending him to Anna, knowing full well he could be killed, but the potency of Mark's rage (and Zulawski's, by extension), as well as the ludicrousness of the Heinrich character, keep us from sympathizing with the latter too much. Zulawski has Heinrich die with his head in a toilet, a final flush by Mark serving as one last hilariously mean-spirited gesture of contempt.

Zulawski originally conceived the movie as having another major character, Anna's ex-husband, to be played by veteran actor and director Bernard Wicki, but after the first day of shooting with Wicki, he decided to drop the character entirely. (I suppose it depends on the personalities, but I wonder how actors react to being let go early from a project. Is it worse if it's on the first day? How about if you lead the filmmakers to realize they should do away with the character altogether? I only hope Wicki got paid.) It's not hard to see what purpose this character would have served, particularly in the way that Anna "upgrades" her lovers, having traded a much older man for the younger, sexier Mark, and then trying to replace him with an evolving monstrous f_ck-squid (more on this later) that she was trying to nurture and reshape into the ideal partner. The only remnants of this character in the finished film is his young wife, who appears in the climax and his goaded by the "new" Mark (the final form of the f_ck-squid) to shoot into the corpses of the real Mark and Anna. The character's proposed thematic purpose might have spelled out this moment's significance more clearly, but I'm not always convinced thematic clarity is preferable to how things move and feel, and the end product does not feel incomplete or incoherent, or at least not detrimentally so. The emotions make sense, even if the events onscreen are outside the norm. (My condolences to those of you who've been dumped for a monstrous f_ck-squid.)

Having been conceived after his last project was quashed by authorities in Poland, there's undeniably a political element here, enhanced by the noticeable presence of the Berlin Wall, near which much of the film is situated. (At one point the camera looks out the window and sees the police from East Berlin staring back.) The realities of the Cold War figure heavily in the characters' lives, as it's suggested that Helen (the other Adjani) is from behind the Iron Curtain (she speak of readily identifiable evil, which could be interpreted as the visible presence of an authoritarian regime) and that Mark's work is in the field of intelligence, maybe even espionage. But the movie is less interested in pointing out political specifics than in the accompanying sense of repression and division, which plays heavily into the visual style. The movie often divides its frames to separate the characters, but rarely with any sense of symmetry, suggesting a sense of emotional chaos enhanced by the bruising mixture of wide angle lenses and handheld camerawork. When we're with Mark, the movie looks overcast, bluish grey, appropriately repressed at first, although Anna's presence throws his neat, fluorescently-lit apartment into disarray. Anna's love nest, situated in the Turkish district right beside the Wall is dilapidated and unkempt, which may have reflected the squalid realities of a hastily rented apartment in what I assume is a poorer part of town, but after having excised the orderly part of herself, it seems like an accurately messy reflection of her headspace.

Now back to the f_ck-squid. It's hard to go into Possession this day and age completely blind, and even back when I first saw it, it came on my radar as the movie where "Isabelle Adjani f_cks a squid". I have a lot of respect for Zulawski for delivering the goods on this front and for Adjani for throwing herself into this material, not because I'm some kind of sexual deviant who gets off on this stuff (although if you are, I'm not here to judge, it's a free country, just clear your browsing history after), but because modern arthouse cinema often defaults to a mode of cold, downplayed and too afraid to raise the audience's pulse (because apparently it's undignified to force a reaction out of the audience) and it's nice to see a movie serve what it says on the tin (this is one I'd have loved to see with an unsuspecting audience back in the day). Producer Marie Laure-Reyre notes that Zulawski was very hands on with the conception of the monster, drawing inspiration from gargoyles in Polish architecture, as if to further imbue political context into the proceedings. When seeing the end product, I can only assume Zulawski broke up with his wife at a seafood restaurant (I would hope he didn't react like Mark and throw around all the tables and chairs). Of course, the design of the monster means that the movie leans heavily into body horror, and its inclusion on the Video Nasty list in the UK and its release in the US in a heavily-trimmed 81-minute version emphasizing these elements likely contributed to its psychotronic reputation early on. (I am still interested in seeking out this cut, as I can't imagine the loss of 40 whole minutes wouldn't substantially alter the film's character.) It flirts with other genres as well. Certain scenes have a clear slapstick quality. Some of these involve Heinrich, the ever-reliable target of the film's ridicule, but there is also Margit Cartensen, playing Anna's friend and Mark-hater Marge, falling on her ass like a Three Stooges bit. And there's the climax, parodying action movies with its woozy cocktail of car chase, shootout and explosions, which leads a headlong rush into the film's apocalyptic final moments.

I'm pretty sure he did this with Billy Ray Cyrus. And judging by the fact that he was one of the things I remembered most clearly from my original viewing, it worked.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

The only other performance I can think of that manages to sustain the same level of emotional and physical mania as Adjani in this one is...(drum roll)...Falconetti in Passion of Joan of Arc. Another film which understands you can maintain a hysterical level of feeling for the entire runtime. You should check it out!

Never heard of it.*:)

I appreciate that, thank you. Zulawski's fascination with alien cuckolding is also evident in On The Silver Globe, with its telepathic f_ck falcons seducing our nimble heroines. I think he was divorced while shooting this film, so maybe that's when this obsession began, or maybe, you know, his wife just wasn't into it. The Polish authorities weren't either.


My first copy of the film (which I have in a box somewhere) was a VHS copy that was sold for $1.99 at a Blockbuster when they would occasionally sell off the films that no one rented. This was the 81 minute version. I assumed it was going to be more of a traditional demonic possession type of thing, but I really liked the weird frenzy, contrasted with the cold and sterile Euro-architechure, and Adjani is obviously a force unto herself here. But pretty much everyone else that I showed it to hated it. Really hated it. Like it became a joke about my taste in films after that. At least a couple refused to finish it. I imagine you'd see waves of walkouts before the squid even shows up. A small contingency of survivors would probably be laughing inexplicably (like me).


The edit definitely made the film less coherent, and rendered a lot of it messier and more rushed. This was also pan-and-scan and was already maybe a 15 year old copy at that point, so the squid wasn't even very clear in the grainy VHS shadows. It worked for me, but I'm glad that the film has been restored and rediscovered. I was right all along, bastards!!!!

Reading the IMDb description :rotfl:



I was looking on the Mondo Vision website and it sounded like they wanted to release the 81-minute cut but dropped it at the last minute. Maybe there was the threat of a lawsuit? There's a reference to making it available online for free, but this looks to be from a few years ago, so not sure it ever happened.

Roger Watkins' Midnight Heat opens with slow motion shots of Times Square in the winter. It's a drab, dismal sight, and the ominous music that plays over the footage sets the tone. A caption flashes onscreen. "Sex can become a weapon." It's a quote credited to Henry Miller. (Upon further Googling I suspect this might not be a real quote, but the movie had me fooled at the time.) We see Jamie Gillis, alone in a high rise apartment, looking contemplatively out the window. He receives a call about a job, which he accepts, albeit a little indignantly. There's a POV shot going down a corridor, bathed in atmospheric blue lighting, with occasional glimpses of a man in an office reading a newspaper. Gillis comes in through the door and pulls out of a gun. Freeze frame. The title flashes on the screen while a thunderous gunshot noise erupts on the soundtrack.

With these opening moments, Watkins introduces a level of violence and accompanying dread that hangs over the rest of the movie, wherein Gillis hides out in a seedy hotel, meditating over what led him to this moment. You see, Gillis is a hitman, and in his own image a pretty good one, but not one immune to making bad decisions. One of these bad decisions would be sleeping with the boss's wife. (In true mafia fashion, when the boss catches him, he plants a kiss firmly on his lips. "I'll be seeing you in the streets") Another bad decision would be porking the boss' daughter (with whom he was casually discussing T.S. Eliot) and then making a mid-coital phone call to let the boss know. But the OG of these bad decisions was what got him into his line of work in the first place, taking an ill-advised job after blowing a sizable amount of money at the track. You see, like the name of a certain Charles Bronson film series, Gillis both wishes death upon others (as part of his work) and has a death wish himself. "The more dangerous something is, the more we forget about everything else. Danger motivates people. Otherwise why bother."

But Gillis doesn't do this thinking all by himself. He has the company of a hooker, who perhaps is moved by Gillis, having encountered this form of professional violence in her personal life. And while there are genre expectations to be met, Gillis seems more interested in her company over anything else, perhaps to fill a void in his own life. They eventually reach a meeting of minds, even if it isn't terribly comforting to either one.

Watkins directed this the same year as Corruption, with which this shares Gillis in the starring role, cinematography by Larry Revene and a similarly fatalistic tone. I enjoyed the other movie quite a bit more, but I must admit at least some of that is due to the technical disparity of the versions I watched for each one. That one was on a snazzy Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray, this one was on a blurry video-sourced transfer. In the other film, Revene does very precise things with underlighting and other techniques to create an oppressively chilly tone. Here I could grasp the impact of certain lighting and framing choices, but the low quality video image had a flattening effect on any precise flourishes present in the work. (One unintentional boon however was the way the dilapidated grey walls of the hotel room looked almost like fog thanks to the blurry transfer.) Even worse was the fact that the audio was just a bit out of sync, meaning that Watkins' more aggressive editing choices (switching between classical and porno-funk as he cuts between the street scenes and the sex) were thoroughly undermined.

Putting aside viewing conditions, I do think the other film is structured more engagingly so that the dread builds, although this one's inertia seems intentional, with the final moments driving home the purgatorial nature of the story. I think the other movie also bounces Gillis more effectively off of other characters (in particular, an almost demonic Bobby Astyr), whereas he only really has one person to play off here (Champagne, who I believe only has a few other credits, and whose IMDb page helpfully notes is not the same person as Phil Prince regular Cheri Champagne), although I did find her to be an intriguing screen presence. As for the sex scenes, Watkins had been frustrated that the ones in his earlier movies, which he delegated to producer Dave Darby, were too enjoyable for the raincoat brigade (despite making some very good films in the genre, he apparently didn't like it very much). I believe at this point (and certainly in Corruption), he'd taken over directing these scenes himself, although the effect is less consistent overall compared to the other movie. The flashback scenes are what I'd call conventionally enjoyable, despite the attempts to subvert them with cross-cutting, but the ones in the present are more potent, framed to have an isolating effect on the performers so that the sense of fatalism overrides any erotic impact. As for the climactic image, with Gillis' face contorted mid-thrust while the frame is flooded with red lighting, I appreciate the intention more than the end result. Anyway, I liked this less than the other films I've seen from Watkins and would like to see it in a better copy eventually, but it still has plenty of the qualities I enjoy about Watkins' work and is worth checking out if the idea of a hardcore mood piece tickles your fancy. And at less than seventy minutes, you can't lose.

By the ‘80s, the nexus of porn filmmaking had shifted from New York to California, the sunny, warm weather vibes of the latter having replaced the grittier urban realities of the former. So when Throat… 12 Years After opens with images of New York City, it feels something like a statement. This isn’t going to be one of your trifles from the west coast. This is a real movie, about real people, dealing with real emotions. One of these real emotions is guilt, like what George Payne feels about cheating on his wife and visiting a hooker as he argues with his conscience on his drive home. (“There’s something between nine-to-five and meatloaf,” he tells himself.) Now, this conversation is played softly for laughs, but the movie does stack the deck in favour of one side by casting Sharon Mitchell as the bubblegum-chewing prostitute. In a room bathed in a pulsating red light that waxes and wanes in brightness, Mitchell asks him about his sex life as they prepare to do the deed.

As the scene progresses, Mitchell recounts a schoolyard sexual encounter, and the movie proceeds to cut between her scene with Payne and her flashback with Phil Prince regular Dan Stephens (one of the more presentable male performers in that director’s stock company), and you can see how the movie navigates the differences in erotic qualities between the immediacy of the Mitchell/Payne scene and the almost ethereal Mitchell/Stephens scene. But as much as the actual sex, the scene’s interest lies in the before and after, the characters trying to wring meaning from their actions.

The rest of the movie follows this pattern. There’s a housewife, who at first is browbeaten by her mother to make some grandkids already (“Cook a nice dinner. Put on something see-through. Kids are what you need.”) and later finds solace in the visiting repairman, who sees through her marital troubles. (“People drift apart by inches, day by day, an inch at a time.”) The wife is played by Michelle Maren, who doesn’t have a whole lot of other credits to her name (Damiano was known for sometimes casting relative unknowns in major roles; the high water mark of this strategy would be the great Georgina Spelvin in The Devil in Miss Jones) yet is quite effective in her role (and has a very distinct hairdo to boot). The repairman is played by Eric Edwards, who I’ve sometimes found a little bland but happens to be very good at playing nice here, so much so that you don’t really hold it against the wife for being unfaithful.

Then there’s Sharon Kane, an older woman employing the services of an inexperienced male prostitute played by Jerry Butler. Kane is an experienced patron of such services, providing Butler with very specific instructions for preparing martinis and then chiding him over his inexperience. (“What’s with you, you can’t listen and suck at the same time? You an actor or something?”) It’s probably not very nice of Kane to tell Butler to his face that he’s not as good as her first (who we see in a flashback), but she also gets through a tricky bit of dialogue while being orally pleasured, so much respect in any case. The climax of the film follows Joey Silvera and Joanna Storm on a trip to an underground sex club. Their cabbie is played by Damiano in one of his cameos (a Camiano? Cameo-no?), delivering a joke about why you can’t drink a cold beer after a hot bath. (I won’t reveal the punchline, but I did laugh.) Once there, naturally they join the orgy that’s in progress, and while such scenes aren’t ones I find inherently erotic, this one is well put together for what it is. After having struggled through the interminable, shapeless orgy footage in Jungle Blue, I appreciate that this one, with its mix of stark lighting, unusual angles and acrobatic positions has a pretty distinct impact compared to the previous sex scene. (It’s also set to a disco song with embarrassingly graphic lyrics.)

Once all of this is over, the main characters, who we learn are couples and friends, get together, their relationships apparently having been strengthened by their sexual escapades. Their choice of entertainment explains the title, and they all toast (“To practice”) as the credits kick in, with flashbacks in splitscreen to the preceding antics. Throat… 12 Years Later was directed by Gerard Damiano, who placed more importance than the average director at the time on the dramatic potency of his films. The tagline explains the mission statement (“A reflection, not a sequel”), which is about reflecting on the acts featured while it’s delivering the goods, using its episodic structure to create emotional resonance. Damiano has a certain conservative streak in some of his work, but this is fairly sex positive, arguing that sex strengthens all the characters’ relationships, and extends to a defense of the hardcore porn genre, offering an argument that these movies can actually be emotionally rewarding. That it works as well as it does is due to the relative naturalism on display, carried by consistently strong performances and a good ear for dialogue, and the elegant yet varied visual style (cinematography courtesy of Larry Revene), which finds a distinct and potent atmosphere for each of the encounters.

David DeCoteau's Nightmare Sisters opens with a pretty hideous racial caricature, where an actor playing a fortune teller does a terrible Indian accent. Now, this was made in the '80s, the same decade we got Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles and Takashi in Revenge of the Nerds, so this level of racism is nothing out of the ordinary. But in those cases, you could at least argue that the performers were putting enough effort into their performances to make there scenes at least watchable. The guy here is teeeeerrible and his scene goes on for sooooo long. Anyway, the scene features a widow asking about her probably dead husband, who when summoned has his dick bitten off by an evil spirit, who then kills the fortune teller, making it the hero of the movie, or at least this scene. Because this is a pretty low budget affair, most of this is thankfully implied.

Thankfully, the movie gets quite a bit better after this point, as we move to a group of extremely dorky sorority sisters who come into possession of the fortune teller's crystal ball. These sorority sisters are played by established scream queens Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer, who are specialists in these kinds of movies, and from whom I'd seen and enjoyed a few things. Quigley is one of the best parts of the great zombie movie Return of the Living Dead, which on top of being super entertaining and funny I've grown to find surprisingly moving with my last couple of viewings. (Great movies have a way of sneaking up on you like that.) Stevens is of course in the feminist slasher movie Slumber Party Massacre, which spells out the subtext of these movies by having the killer's weapon be an extremely phallic drill. And Bauer is in Cafe Flesh, which is not a horror movie but a porno, but likely a much more palatable one to normie viewers given its emphasis on mise-en-scene and elaborately choreographed stage performances over gynecology. I was happy to see all three present, is what I'm saying.

These girls, left with nothing to do over the weekend, decide to throw a party and invite the only guys they know, some real Robert Carradine Revenge of the Nerds mother****ers who are about as dorky as they are and similarly at the bottom rung of their fraternity. Of course once the party starts, they foolishly mess around with the crystal ball and the girls get possessed by the same spirit. Now, the girls were extremely dorky previously and had appearances that lined up with that image, with Quigley's buckteeth, Stevens' dangerously pointy glasses and Bauer's fatsuit. They seemed like perfectly nice people and might have had lots of inner beauty for all we know, but that doesn't photograph as well nor does it appeal to the horndogs in the audience, so once they get possessed they get a lot conventionally hotter and spend the rest of the movie in varying states of undress. This movie probably has more nudity than any non-porno I've watched in quite some time. Hell, right after their transformation, the immediately smear peach pie over their breasts and then spend what seems to be ten minutes bathing together while the Anthony Edwardsish heroes watch through a peephole. Apparently there's a TV-edit that excises all the nudity. I haven't watched it and can only assume it's ten minutes long.

It's worth noting at this point that DeCoteau is gay and this plays like a really broad attempt at pandering to the predominantly straight target male audience for these kinds of movies. As parodic as the results may be, I must shamefully admit that he has us dead to rights. Of course, given the title, something must be off, and as the homophobic meathead fraternity brothers who show up to give the male leads a hard time find out in the least pleasant way possible, it turns out that the girls have turned into succubi. Emphasis on the "suck", as the song that plays over the opening credits suggests. Or perhaps a more accurate name would be "bite-ubi". Given that they, you know, kill their victims by biting their dicks. Their "wing wangs", as one of the girls says while possessed. I think another uses the phrase "python of love", but I neglected to write down the complete line of dialogue so I could be wrong. DeCoteau is not a cruel man, so he spares us the sight of this act, but he taps into very real male anxieties in this movie.

Of course, to wrap this all up, the Curtis Armstrong, Lamar Lattrellish heroes enlist the help of an exorcist whose role is extremely self aware but not unamusing, and the situation is resolved with some pretty lo-fi special effects. (Okay, I lied, the heroes are a lot more presentable than Armstrong. Also Lamar Lattrell is actually the character's name and not the actor's, the heroes are all pasty white dudes and the only person with a musical number is Quigley. I ran out of Revenge of the Nerds references, I'm sorry.) This is an extremely unambitious affair, having been shot in four days as a challenge to use up short ends left over from the production of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama, but I had a good time. While I won't pretend that the shamelessly pandering nudity didn't have an effect on me, what really sells this movie is the presence of Quigley, Stevens and Bauer, who are extremely winning in playing their characters both pre- and post-possession. (I think the term "adorkable" applies to the former.) My technical knowledge is lacking here, but while I understand there were inconsistencies in the film stock used, I didn't find that to manifest in the film's (not particularly accomplished but also not unattractive) visual style. And the movie has a nice, laidback sense of humour, which (aside from the opening scene) sustains the good vibes over the brief runtime.

Going into Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst, I expected a somewhat straightforward docudrama, but the result is anything but. Right from the beginning it places us closely to the subject's POV and stays there for the entire running time, from which the movie derives much of its power. The first act is especially tricky as Hearst's kidnappers blindfold her and lock her up in a closer for the initial portion of her captivity. Schrader keeps the screen almost entirely dark, with only the silhouettes and voices of her captors for us and her to hang onto. He also evokes Hearst's imagination through a number of sparse, stylized sets, bringing to mind a more dour version of the strategy he employed in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. I owe that movie a rewatch, but I found this one quite a bit more effective, as it felt more closely tied to the protagonist's subjective experience here.

Perhaps acknowledging the change in Hearst's circumstances as well as the fact that a feature-length film in such a style might be a bit trying, Schrader eventually takes the blindfold off. Hearst becomes more integrated into the militant group which abducted her, and her role evolves from purely a captive to a member of the group. Yet our POV stays close to hers, even when Schrader moves the action to the better known events, staging the robberies and murders with an action-film-like kineticism that's a far cry from the cold, stripped down style of the earlier sections. A confrontation with the police, where most of the group is killed, is staged like something between an outsider and insider perspective, watching the events like Hearst on television and trying to reconcile her feelings with what it must have been like to see it on the news. Schrader even recreates the famous photograph, intentionally with little of the excitement it might have provoked when it hit the headlines. (I was not alive during the events chronicled in this movie, but among my generation, the photo has become a bit of a joke regarding political memes.)

The movie uses as the basis of its narrative Hearst's autobiography. I admit I only have a cursory knowledge of the subject, so I'm not going to fact-check the proceedings, but the directness of Schrader's style and the strength of Natasha Richardson's performance in the lead role render the events with great immediacy. Schrader is a noted admirer of Robert Bresson, and like him, is able to pile on the suffering and wring meaning from it without making it feel indulgent. Perhaps surprisingly, given Schrader's recent habit of making wildly inappropriate Facebook posts, this movie feels surprisingly resonant in light of the Me Too movement, given its attention to how Hearst is not only sexually assaulted by her captors but also conditioned to accept this abuse as they appropriate the language of political and sexual freedom. And as Hearst is captured and goes through the legal system, we get a sense of how victims in these situations can act in ways that don't always engender sympathy. When asked for her profession, she beams and replies "Guerilla".

And without being didactic, it gives us both a sense of the political fervour in such an environment and the accompanying hollowness. The robberies are shown to be driven as much by monetary desires and a desire to play cops and robbers as whatever political slant can be slapped onto them. The movie is astute about how, in certain spheres, race is fetishized and disingenuously substituted for authenticity and authority when convenient. Only the head of the militant group, played by Ving Rhames in a forceful performance, is black, and the remaining members, all white, seem to defer to him entirely on those grounds and derive their politics accordingly. One member, played by William Forsythe, is especially eager to slather on blackface ("F_ck, I wish I was black!"). In a later scene, this character steals a car from a group of Chicano at gunpoint, praises them on the grounds of their race and promptly curses them out when the engine gives out. (This is a grim movie, but there are a few chuckles to be had at the expense of the Forsythe character.) Only the Asian American militant played by Jodi Long, perhaps wizened by having a husband in jail, calls them out on their bullsh_t.

The militant group feels as much like a cult as a group of political terrorists, and as Hearst slowly deprograms after she's been captured, she becomes disillusioned with not just them, but the legal system and even those who have been trying to "help" by exerting control over her. Her final words, spoken almost directly to the camera, prove tremendously moving as a result. "F_ck them all."

Because I responded to it so strongly, I'm trying to wrap my head around and contextualize the poor initial reception to Sergey Bondarchuk's Waterloo, his depiction of the famous battle made around four years after his War and Peace adaptation. As a biopic of Napoleon, it doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into his subject. Early on, the movie halfheartedly posits the notion that Napoleon had to be defeated because he was offensive to the bourgeois officer class, something Christopher Plummer's Duke of Wellington, first seen slathered in ghoulish make-up, practically says out loud. "On the field of battle his hat is worth fifty thousand men, but he is not a gentleman." Indeed, the movie contrasts Napoleon's fierce, driven nature with the decadence implied by the girth of Orson Welles, in a brief but well cast role as Louis the XVIII. (This helps us grasp why the French army can be seen betraying their king and joining his side, even without showing him to be especially charismatic.) But then as we cut between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington as they spend time with their respective armies, seeing some of the rituals they both observe, and sense that they are perhaps not so different after all. Bondarchuk isn't terribly interested in mining his subject for psychological depth, but he does seem to identify with both Napoleon and Wellington as generals, orchestrators of vast logistical feats on a scale that his own films attempt to mirror. (It's worth pointing out that Rod Steiger, cast as Napoleon, strongly resembles Bondarchuk himself while Plummer resembles Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played one of the heroes in War and Peace.) When Napoleon has moments of self-doubt in his narration, we suspect it mirrors Bondarchuk's own in mounting this production.

There's also the fact that the movie covers similar territory as War and Peace, which had only been released a few years earlier and also includes recreations of Napoleonic warfare. I guess the novelty might have worn off, especially in an era when the market for such large-scale productions had begun to dwindle. But viewed now, when movies regularly cheat to exceed such a scale through special effects to the point that it loses meaning, seeing something real and tactile play out at this size offers an increasingly rare thrill. To get a sense of the film's maddening scale, we can look at the hard numbers of the production. 17,000 extras (borrowed from the Soviet Army, whose assistance he had again), two hills bulldozed away, five miles of road laid, five thousand trees planted, six miles of underground piping laid to create the muddy battlefield conditions depicted. But it's one thing to list out stats and another to see the results onscreen, and like War and Peace, this offers no shortage of images like masses of soldiers disappearing into the horizon where the scale is precisely the point. On the whole this is more formally conservative work than that film, lacking the sheer stylistic abandon offered by the filters, superimpositions and weird editing choices deployed in the former, but it shares its fluid sense of screen composition, with many shots where smoke erupting from gunfire or cannonballs or changing troop formations abruptly alter the character of the image.

This movie also reminded me of Zulu, which purposefully had a rote first half setting up a host of cliches to be torn down by the extended battle sequence of the second half, where warfare serves as storytelling. Perhaps unintentionally, the first half here sets up the historical events in question as remote and unfeeling and then tries to place us in the characters' shoes as directly as possible in bringing them to life in the second half. When one of Napoleon's officers makes a strategic blunder in sending an unassisted cavalry charge against the rectangular formations of Wellington's army, Bondarchuk lifts the camera to the sky to let us see from above the implications of that decision and perhaps grasp Napoleon's thinking. I understand there are historical inaccuracies, and that Bondarchuk's meticulousness in this respect is more artistically than historically driven, but as my knowledge of the events captured roughly extend to the first line of ABBA's "Waterloo", I have no interest in fact-checking. That song also captures the tenuous nature of victory which he attempts to evoke with how the events unfold. ("I feel like I win when I lose.") There's the sense that Bondarchuk is conducting this like a piece of music, where the individual strategic maneuvers accumulate into a kind of crescendo. (That might not be the best analogy, but as my meager musical knowledge has been lost to the ages, it'll have to do.)

Quite frankly, I think the battle is thrilling enough on its own to make the movie worth seeing, but while I don't think the movie offers a lot of insight into Napoleon directly, I do think it holds plenty of interest when framed as the relationship Bondarchuk has with the figures and events in question. But yes, the battle is tremendous and, if you can tolerate the film's weaknesses in other areas, pushes Waterloo into a kind of unwieldy greatness.

I was wondering why crumbs skipped Abba in his 1975 album list.


(If I don't 'like' a review, it's probably because I haven't see those films.)

I'd never listened to an actual ABBA album until the pandemic.



Turns out they had more than just their hits!

Urgh, these icy shiksas...

Purely Physical starts with some '60s-esque music playing over the soundtrack while Laura Lazare cycles through San Francisco. Over narration we hear her trying to fill out a job application, having to deal with inane questions like the following:

I thankfully haven't been forced to look for a job in a couple of years, but I appreciate the movie's frankness about how bull**** the entire process is. The job to which she is applying is for a concierge at a motel. When she enters the office, she's wearing a green beret and sweater, both of which match her eyes. The walls of the office happen to be a similar colour, as does the sportcoat worn by the manager who greets her and explains the conditions. There's some amazing colour coordination going on in this scene, is what I'm saying.

Now, some very lucky people are able to work in jobs they are passionate about and line up to their skills and interests. The rest of us, including the heroine, work purely to pay the bills. The heroine is a student who takes on the job to help pay for tuition, but hopes the job will give her the additional benefit of providing material for her writing. The rest of the movie consists of her pondering on what all the guests are up to, and using that speculation to work on her book. Because this is a porno, what the guests are up to happens to be a whole lot of ****ing and sucking. Along the way, there is intrigue concerning a handsome trucker with whom she has a mutual attraction. Where will this lead? The genre gives away the ending.

This is the part where I reveal that my interest in vintage hardcore isn't entirely high minded, and admit that I sought this one out for the presence of two performers. One is Tigr, who may not be the most polished actress but has a spontaneity that I find refreshing in such material. She brings a similar nervy energy to her scene here, which hits a little close to home as she jumps the bones of a portly film buff who spouts off classic movie trivia before they get down to business. Did you know that Elmo Muller, Johnny Weismuller and Buster Crabbe all played Tarzan? Or that Tom Tyler played the mummy in The Mummy's Hand? Spend enough time with this guy and you will. That he dresses like Lyle Lanley the monorail salesman (or Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man, which would have been the era-appropriate reference) provides additional interest.

The other actress I watched this for is Juliet Anderson, who played Kay Parker's extremely insensitive and horny friend in Taboo and I understand made a career out of playing hot older women who like to ****. Here she plays a world weary woman on a business trip who comes on to the heroine, extolling the virtues of being with another woman, but has to settle for a solo scene, turning up the radio really loud so nobody hears her. I won't go too much into the details because I am a gentleman (a hand mirror and a pillow figure interestingly into the action), but I admit I was not unmoved by this scene or her performance. The rest of the movie offers similar pleasures, if not quite at the same level. I must report that an early scene is a little too choreographed to work as the awkward teenage fumbling it is supposed to depict, but that the performers involved are appealing enough to let it slide. I must also report that the funniest moment in the movie involves the heroine being shocked, SHOCKED to find out that a guest is seeing prostitutes in the motel, which I assume is the establishment's primary business model.

This is the kind of movie that if you told me a few years ago I would enjoy as an actual movie, I wouldn't have believed you. Having seen enough pornos at this point, I've acquired a taste for the modest pleasures of an unambitious but well executed dirty movie, which is the case for Purely Physical. For a movie about people ****ing in a motel, it has an awful lot of wistful music, which gives it a nice, classy vibe. The cast is pretty respectable (Lazare, Anderson and Tigr being the highlights) and mostly nice to look at, and given the single location and episodic structure, the movie is handsomely shot and well paced. When I look up director Chris Warfield, I see most of his credits are as a TV actor. I don't know how this compares to the dozen other movies he directed (almost all of which look to be pornos, mostly under the pseudonym Billy Thornberg), but there is a kind of low key confidence in the execution here. This is modest, but quite enjoyable on its own terms.

Was the album ABBA's Greatest Hits?

I'm musically dumb so can't break down their greatness in any interesting way, but I think ABBA is one of those things that's so obviously great and accessible that it can be easy to overlook their greatness or take it for granted.

Re: Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned
 

I think the greatness of ABBA is pretty obvious and speaks for itself. When it comes to arrangements in pop music, I think there are very few who are better. Sure, they at times can verge on being almost maudlin show tunes, and a lot of their lyrics don't exactly rank as poetry. But if we overlook those occassional crimes, and get to the weird and sometimes sad heart of their songs, their peaks are pretty high.


I remember being a kid, who by default probably considered himself a fan of rock music, and because of this bands like ABBA and the Bee Gees were supposed to be my sworn enemies. And just always being baffled by the hostility. Like....why? What was wrong with them? Were people seriously not hearing what I was hearing?


In many ways, this would be the beginning of my indifference to the tastes of my peers because clearly, sometimes other people can't be trusted in such important matters.

I didn't really get into ABBA until a few years ago, but I do remember all the rockheads (for lack of a better term) I knew in high school hated them with a passion. I remember one kid, being a dumbass, said in front of a teacher, who was gay, that "ABBA is so gay". The teacher grumbled and said, "Yes, they do make very happy music" or something to that effect. I think the teacher won that round.