Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Googling that podcast, I see it under the helm of the Cinepunx podcasts. I've seen them in line over the years and talk about recording for the podcast (I don't remember if I saw Sam in line), but never listened to it.


The vibe I got off of one or two of them... Okay, I now don't have to imagine too hard what you found off-putting.


I'm a little confused about the branding now, because I always just heard, "Cinepunx," and looking at the episode names, it sounds like Twitch of the Death Nerve is a fairly young podcast.


I'll probably go back and listen to the Exhumed events recaps though. Particularly for anything I missed.

The subject, about Yugoslavian cameraman Stevan Labudovic and his involvement in the Algerian War, is interesting enough to make this reasonably engaging viewing. Like a lot of modern documentaries, there is a certain formal dryness, but I think the access Turajilic had to her interview subjects and the actual footage alleviates that. That being said, I found the film a little frustrating. It reveals towards the end that despite the Labudovic's hero status in Algeria, very few Algerians had actually been able to see his footage. During the Q&A, Turajilic expanded on this, referring to the Algerian government's tight control of messaging around the Algerian War, and her difficulty filming in Algeria until she used Labudovic's name as a way to get access. For a movie as concerned as it is about propaganda and the way media can be an extension of warfare, I would have liked to see it interrogate that last revelation further.

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Don’t you hate it when you stop at secluded chateau for some lesbian sex only to run afoul of a gang who thinks you’ve stolen their loot? This common and deeply relatable scenario provides the plot of Jean Rollin’s Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, where Joelle Coeur and Gilda Arancio find themselves in exactly that situation. (If they’re supposed to be schoolgirls, my guess is that they’ve been held back a few grades.) Now, this is not my first Rollin film, and I know the man likes to film really attractive ladies taking their clothes off and rubbing up against each other. And as a straight dude, I’m not normally one to complain. But there are a series of extremely low energy sex scenes, first between Coeur and Arancio, then between Coeur and a mustachioed gangster played by Willy Braque (who keeps his pants on), then eventually with all three of them, that, how you say, tested the limits of my enjoyment. In this eighty or so minute movie, these scenes take up somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes, and feel like they run for eight hours.

The momentary prurient enjoyment provided by these scenes quickly transforms into excruciating boredom, proving that you can have too much of a good thing. Imagine of instead of eating a delicious piece of cake as dessert, in the context of a complete meal, you make the entire meal nothing but cake. And it’s pound cake. And you don’t have any tea or coffee or milk or even water and are stuck eating it dry until you choke on the pound cake. That’s what these scenes feel like. It also didn’t help that due to a production malfunction, there’s a pretty persistent wobbling of the image during these scenes. I never thought I’d get a headache from les seins et les derrieres (hope I translated that correctly), but here we are. At this point I should note that this chateau looks like it’s been somewhat neglected, and I hope somebody gave it a thorough dusting before filming began, for the comfort of the actors.

Things pick up when the rest of the gang arrives and finds the loot from their robbery missing. Their leader is a forceful dominatrix type played by Marie Helene Regne who subjects Arancio to a number of kinky tortures in a gazebo (boob in a vise is the highlight), again filmed in the most low energy way possible. She also wears a shiny purple satin blouse and leather bellbottoms, so she is easily the most strikingly dressed in the movie. Yet Coeur proves resourceful, escaping from her captors by doing a weird dance wear she reveals her breast and unzips her pants without having them fall off in order to seduce one of the gangsters in what might be the least sexy sequence I’ve seen in a Rollin film. (Snake charmer music plays over the soundtrack, which I suppose is what she’s doing in this scene. *euphemistic elbow nudge*) She ends up enlisting the help of a private detective and his pigtailed assistant (who wears an outfit that feels like the female equivalent of Steve “How do you do, fellow kids?” Buscemi), at which point the satirical dimensions of the movie come into focus.

Rollin has a certain lightness of touch that can work really well in his horror movies, giving a certain delicate atmosphere to his tales of lesbian vampires and their surrounding textures of flowy (sometimes see-through) dresses, tomb-like chateaus and the scenic French countryside. To the extent that his work feels dreamlike, it’s that the atmosphere feels so delicate that it might fall apart if you reach out to touch it, which you’re inclined to do as those textures seem so inviting. It translates less obviously to the kind of sleazy thriller he’s making here, a genre that benefits from a certain forcefulness in delivery. It’s something I noticed when watching The Sidewalks of Bangkok (which similarly has some interminable softcore footage in its first half), but here he seems more aware of the limitations of his style in this context, and uses it for comedic effect. The most forceful his direction gets is a shootout set to jazzy drumming while Coeur and Regne wrestle on the floor. (Coeur’s top comes off right away, but the mechanics of this escaped me.) The construction of the shootout is so slapdash that the participants might as well be in three different continents. Yet that seems to be the point, as it does pretty much nothing to further the plot, and the movie settles into an amusing cycle of inconsequence, the tables turning each time a different character enters the room with a gun.

If this sounds like I’m being generous, I will only hint that the movie’s denouement, which I won’t spoil other than revealing that Rollin himself makes an appearance, seals the deal on the comedic intent. But you go back to Coeur’s dance. Rollin knows how to make a great seductive image (think of Brigitte Lahaie with the scythe in Fascination). This is him doing a piss-take on that idea. So yes, I enjoyed this, although it took until the second half to warm up to it. But in the grand scheme of things, the first half may not be such tough going. Coeur and Arancio rolling around in the nude? The (not) horror, the (not) horror. Enjoy your pound cake.

Ed Harris’ performance as William Walker in this movie might not be a “good” performance in the conventional sense, but it’s the kind of idiosyncratic performance that only a very good actor can give, making a number of deeply strange, possibly conflicting choices and committing to them 100%. (See also: John Travolta in The Fanatic, a movie that’s undeniably goofy but nowhere near as bad as its reputation. As stupid as the movie is, Travolta is undeniably compelling, and Devon Sawa’s role as a washed up celebrity has a certain authenticity to it. At the very least, Travolta, Sawa and director Fred Durst get what it feels like to be a washed up loser celebrity who nobody respects.) The result being a character whose belief in his own righteousness carries a certain religious fervour yet has no idea what his principles are.

In sketching out Walker as a character, this exchange is illuminating, showing him to be a man who speaks in grand declarations yet fails to connect them with any coherence. He feels less like a real person than an cartoonish, unstable collection of tics. Harris’ performance is a fork in the eye of every overly calculated lead performance in a prestige period piece. Other actors go for Oscar moments, Harris seems to be deliberately inviting Razzies.

That exchange is also illuminating in terms of the film’s satirical aims, in that it’s about the most subtle satirical jab in the entire movie. The movie uses Walker’s conquest of Nicaragua to attack America’s imperlialist, interventionist foreign policy, drawing parallels through speeches and sketch-like episodes that practically declare the movie’s themes. Walker’s speech, in the face of impending defeat, gives you an idea of the level of subtlety here:

The movie adds further spice to the satire with the use of anachronisms, with the covers of Time and Newsweek seen throughout, modern vehicles appearing in a movie set in the 1800s. Such devices bring to mind the presence of generic products (”Beer” brand beer) in Alex Cox’s earlier classic Repo Man, but that movie, while more scattershot in its satirical aims, captures how the ‘80s ****ing sucked shit in an almost ambient way. This has a narrower target, but the delivery is less sharp and more sledgehammer-like. And in case any of this went over your head, the movie drives the point home in an end credits montage cutting Ronald Reagan’s speeches with news footage of the conflict between the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the Honduran Contras, emphasizing the conspicuous presence of American troops to “send a message”.

So none of this is shrewd satire, but it is very funny. Sorry, you show Ed Harris frantically hammering on a piano while his troops are getting slaughtered, and I’m laughing. I’m also laughing when Gerrit Graham pronounces Granada like Canada. I’m even laughing when Harris is mourning the death of his wife Marlee Matlin by frantically signing, although there’s a good chance I’m going to hell for that one. You just need to get on the movie’s exact wavelength for this to work, and I imagine it would be deeply annoying if you don’t. Cox has speculated that his effective Hollywood blacklist was the result of the political views expressed in this movie, but I think it’s more likely that the movie bombed because nobody gelled to its distinct tone. Movies with similar politics had succeeded with critics and at the box office earlier in the decade, although I suppose there’s a difference between a movie like Under Fire expressing sympathies for the Sandinistas and this being made in Nicaragua with the cooperation of the country’s government. (Harris stars in the other movie as well, turning in a deliciously psychopathic performance as a CIA advisor.) I remember an interview with Harry Dean Stanton where the actor claimed that Cox made a good movie with Repo Man while being completely out of his element. That’s likely even more true here, as the likely chaos of a large production made in such circumstances seems to spill over into the narrative, as Walker’s mission goes astray and he loses his grip on power.

And it accumulates into a certain hallucinatory power, as Cox, despite his other shortcomings, knows how to craft images that make an impact. The movie is bathed in a reddish haze, the dusty locales coloured by the explosive bloodsprays in a way that evokes spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah, and Cox punctuates them with non sequiturs that almost rupture their reality. (As on the nose as the anachronisms might be from a satirical standpoint, they do prime us for this surreal atmosphere.) And the movie wheels out a murderer’s row of character actors, who might not be playing three-dimensional characters, but whose presences make a lingering impact, so that when things go south and they start dropping like flies, it stings more than you’d expect.

I actually did see this at some point, about a decade ago I think, I am suddenly caused to remember. I'll have to add this to my Rollin tally.

It's quite good as it espouses the Rollin touch well, but it's nowhere as good as Rollin's vampire films or his best film Perdues dans New York.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I think I’ve got Lost in New York sitting on my shelf, hope to get to that next month.

Moved to see this solidarity between the French director and one of the pioneers of gangsta rap.

“Look at me like a vampire boy!”

Jittery genre fun with an appealingly twitchy lead performance Maddie Hasson. I found her a bit much in We Summon the Darkness, and that’s probably true here as well, but it serves the material better this time around. This is a about trauma and whatnot like pretty much every modern horror movie is, but works better as it’s more concerned with translating the heroine’s experience into visceral terms than making sure all its themes tie out nicely. During the Q&A the director and cinematographer said they tried to work in a large number of references to their inspirations, but I appreciated that it wasn’t too distracting. I tend to be put off when movies are too studied in their homaging, as I’d usually prefer to watch the inspirations instead. Now, they didn’t cite any specific films in their answer, and I was too embarrassed to ask to confirm, but I’m 90% sure that between the premise and the inclusion of the line “I know you’re watching me” that the filmmakers have seen Nightdreams. I will say that I was less than enamoured by the ending, but I had a good time for most of this.

On a side note, this opens with a trigger warning indicating that the movie contains content some might find triggering, but provides no details as to what that content might be. I’m not inherently against content warnings (I’ll sometimes check the IMDb Parent’s Guide before putting on a movie), but what am I supposed to do with that warning? I imagine most people watching it in this setting bought tickets through the site, which gives more helpful descriptions of what’s in the movie, so it’s not exactly useful for them. And for people who got in from the rush line? The warning has no details. Are they just gonna get up and leave? Okay, rant over.

Were there spiders in the movie?
Scatological porn?
Unsimulated male-castration?
What?!?!

Also, I stumbled across this recently:


Zulawski getting some German Blu-ray transfers. Should happen early next year. (downside, no English subtitles).


https://www.reddit.com/r/boutiqueblu...Cu%C5%82awski/

None of the above.

The things that stick out the most to me about John Hyams' action movies are the unwavering clarity of the steadicam cinematography and the sheer physicality of the violence, in a way that almost flirts with body horror. Both of those qualities are present here, so Hyams fans will likely have a good time with this. The camerawork is quite a bit choppier, but never hard to follow, as it tends to follow the action in a pretty natural way. In the Q&A, Hyams mentions a reluctance to intentionally shake the camera, and the shakes here feel like a natural extension of the messiness of the action, with confrontations between the killer and their victims drawn out to be much longer and less one sided than is usual in the slasher genre. Which also means that the gnarliest acts of violence make quite an impact (the hooting and hollering by the audience during my screening was well justified).

Now, I'm going to flirt with spoiler territory in this paragraph, so hold off from reading if you'd like to go in completely blind, even though I'll do my best not to give away outright plot points. This is written by Kevin Williamson, whose credit is essentially a spoiler as he recycles elements from the Scream franchise, but applying it to a story set in the early stages of the pandemic (April 2020, to be precise). I've been interested in how movies have been influenced by the pandemic in their production methods and particularly their storytelling. The COVID element is pretty explicit here, with our two heroines heading up to a secluded cottage. The movie presents some of the preventative measures which in retrospect seem a bit excessive (outdoor masking, wiping down groceries, constant spraying of disinfectant), and plays these as punchlines. Some of this is inevitable given that we have more information about how COVID spreads now, and some of that is the Williamson touch. But in the Q&A he discussed wanting to capture the ambient sense of fear in those days into the story, and I don't know if Hyams or Williamson deserve the greater share of blame, but I never felt that the usual slasher sense of isolation ever translated to COVID paranoia.

I am diving into outright spoiler territory in this paragraph, so skip to the bottom if you don't want it ruined. The way the movie tied COVID into the killers' motivations didn't sit right with me, and I'm going to spill over into my personal views here for a second, so bear with me. In the Q&A, Hyams and Williamson spoke about wanting to capture the need to find a specific target to blame to find some catharsis when the threat is more ambient and the causes are arguably systemic. I guess this is where I differ from from them in that I think individual actions absolutely have played a part making the situation worse. It's not an either or situation. I don't think Hyams or Williamson intend to minimize the harm caused by COVID (otherwise they wouldn't have made this a major plot element), but I think of the way the killers in Scream are given time to develop as actual characters ("humanize" seems like the wrong word, but I got a sense of them as people outside the plot). I guess you can blame Hyams' narrow storytelling focus, which arguably enhances the suspense, but I don't think that happens here. Okay, major spoilers over.

In short, this is a pretty effective piece of slashering, even if certain storytelling decisions left me deeply frustrated.

There’s something quite poignant about the way Jean Rollin depicts characters with disabilities or mental illness. I think of the blind woman from The Grapes of Death or certain characters in The Night of the Hunted, and while the portrayals may not be up to the standards of real life accuracy or political correctness (I alluded in my review of Wait Until Dark to some occasional uneasiness I’ve had around how movies use disabilities in their storytelling), I think Rollin is able to depict these characters with a great deal of sensitivity. I think a large part of the credit goes to the actresses, who bring a certain dignity to their roles, so that they don’t just feel defined by their disabilities or mental illness, even if those conditions play into the plot. The lead characters are two girls who escape from a mental institution, go off to live with a traveling troupe of entertainers, and when they’re about to get busted by the police, sneak away with a kindly pickpocket with dreams of sailing away to a distant land. When we meet them, one of the girls is practically catatonic and the other is more prickly, but over the course of the movie, we see them both evolve, the former opening up and the latter becoming warmer and more nurturing.

I think a large part of why their arcs are so affecting is the experiential quality Rollin imbues into key sequences. There’s a pretty beautiful figure skating sequence (undeniably the movie’s highlight) where you can see the thrill and joy the character gets from the activity. Or look at the scene where the characters enter a bar, one of them likely for the first time in her life, and the way the movie captures the excitement of entering a lively new location. This feels in obvious ways like Rollin’s other movies, with a similarly delicate touch to the direction, and that half-awake atmosphere that doesn’t quite feel dreamlike. But here, stripped largely of genre elements (no vampires, not much bloodletting, not even much nudity), it ekes out a certain poetry by juxtaposing these essentially innocent heroines with their hardscrabble existence and unforgiving surroundings. There is temporary solace found as the characters take up with makeshift families of kindly outsiders, but that is shortlived.

Things go south when the girls fall into the orbit of a quartet of swingers (the great Brigitte Lahaie among them, lighting up the screen as she always does). One of the men shows off his collection of antique guns to one of the girls, while the two women invite the other girl into their softcore coupling. And here you see Rollin reintroducing those genre elements, but with a sinister edge. The stuff that arguably adds enjoyment to his other movies merits suspicion in this context. It reminds me of the way Gerard Damiano ends Skin Flicks on a particularly ugly scene, as if decrying the triumph of exploitation over art, and while I’m not as well versed in Rollin’s motivations, I wonder if he had similar feelings about his filmmaking. What I do know is that I had grown to care for the heroines quite a bit, and when the film ended in tragedy, I was quite moved.

I am used to absurd prices for out of print DVDs or blu-rays, but something about the out of print Blu-ray for The Velvet Vampire being ~$300 but the DVD going for only $10 is a wild difference.


Usually when the more recent media type is out of print the older media type is also very much out of print.


Also, I picked up Jess Franco's Exorcism and Borowzcyk's Behind Convent Walls. The latter also only available as a DVD. The box says "uncut, widescreen version." I'd hope it's uncut, it's European.

The Escapees and (one other movie about a girl escaping an institution) are two of the later Rollin films on kinonow I didn't buy (also Grapes of Death).


I'm debating if I should put forth the cash to add them to the collection.

Also listening to the Lesbian Vampire Series on the Daughters of Darkness podcast, well, caused to follow Crumb's recommendation and pick up Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, and then found out that David Lynch produced and cameo'd in a lesbian (bi-sexual?) vampire film, Nadja.


Ordered that one as well. Given my movie viewing pace, I might have hoarding tendencies that pop up when it comes to movie collections.


Financially, it was probably a good thing I didn't have a TV in my 20s.

IIRC Behind Convent Walls has some brief penetration, so you better hope it's uncut. I actually wasn't a fan, from what I remember, aside from Marina Pierro's performance. For nunsploitation to work for me, I need it to take the religious tension somewhat seriously (I wasn't raised a Christian, so whatever inherent charge nuns being naughty is supposed to have doesn't work for me). That didn't stop be from picking up the Severin Nunsploitation box set when I dropped by the video store this week, however.


I think I've seen Exorcism. Is it the one where the satanic sex fiends are actually the good guys? I remember finding it amusing when I saw it way back, not sure how it would play now that I'm an amateur Franco auteurist.




I remember enjoying Grapes of Death, would probably put that in the upper end of the Rollins' I've seen, if not necessarily a favourite. At the very least it has a great Lahaie appearance.




IIRC Nadja was a favourite of JJ's as well. Probably should give it a gander at some point.