Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

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I need to see more Kumel. Daughters of Darkness is so good.



9 Sparkling Delphine Seyrigs out of 10
Don't sleep on Andrea Rau. I've only seen Malpertuis in addition to that. More dreamy than horror.



Rollin is a much more sensual filmmaker than any of the other noted Eurotrash directors of the time, even though each of them have some favorites (Franco - Count Dracula; Margheriti - Castle of Blood; D'Amato - Devil's Wedding Night) they all seem to peeter out into crass apathy.


I would place Rollin more alongside Harry Kumel or Borowczyk on firmer art-film ground.
Are you implying Rollin has made anything half as sensual as Yor, the Hunter from the Future.



The file digging continues. Another old write up I'm bringing back to life. It's definitely better than I remember, because I used to think of this as one of the worst.





There are good reasons why I am inclined to think of movies in terms of what libation they most remind me of. How else to decide what from my fridge will be the most appropriate to drink in their company? For those films that are so light to the touch they seem to be filled with bubbles, it’s likely the popping of champagne corks will soon frighten my cat as I put on L’Atalante. As for films inclined to show lives that amount to little more than a five dollar bottle of wine, for these a spell of Thunderbird inspired gut rot is most helpful. How else can one calibrate their Barfly headspace properly enough to climb up inside the Bukowski ****ted trousers of Mickey Rourke? You can’t, of course, and you’ve clearly watched it wrong if by the films conclusion you aren’t stumbling out into the alley behind your house to sleep with the baby racoons that you have recently become friends with.

When it comes to Last House on Dead End Street though, it should be known beforehand that it offers no hope of quenching any kind of thirst. Best to simply show up already deplorable on drink since it is nothing but a half empty beer bottle being used as an ashtray. Filled with the remains of cigarettes half smoked by a lonely man on a sleepless night, it sits forgotten in a room, waiting to be mistakenly reached for when there is nothing left. The shock of all those cigarette ends soaked with old beer will not be pleasant as they land on your tongue, but in some ways they are precisely the beverage that should be paired with such a movie. The lingering flavor of ash carrying on and mingling with tomorrows hangover is the equivalent of how Last House cakes the senses, and refuses to be forgotten. It tastes like something as mundane and common as an untidy room, but for one moment manifests itself as something almost exotic. At least before you spit it out.

As a film, Last House seems to have been born from those moments before we find the aspirin or a toothbrush. It is sleepy and aching and empty, yet still also somewhat deranged from the night before. It presents itself to the audience as if it too is hungover and hasn’t quite gotten over the fact that it has left the bed. Characters are often found sitting in chairs or shuffling through rooms, staring in a fog, the only conversation they can muster being the voiceovers grumbling away in their head like a headache. The colors that emanate from its images don’t so much transmit from the screen, as dry and crack upon it. The sounds it makes are muffled like the arguing of neighbors through the walls. Everything seems presented to us from a distance. At least until those moments where it unleashes its violence upon us, and then the film becomes alive in ways that you might prefer it not to be. The color of blood, while seeming murky as if mixed with dirt, will still manage to glisten in a way that the rest of the film is much too dehydrated to ever do. The cries for help will be tinny and distorted, but will cut straight through whatever other dialogue is being mumbled, leaving audiences with no other option but to just sit there and gape. You are very aware you won’t be able to save anyone.

The violence will be so profound that it alone manages to give the entire movie some sense of a shape. From the ashes of their hungover mope, characters who have just been sitting around sneering about the world throughout the first half of the film, will suddenly rise up and move towards their victims as if they have purpose. Every thing about them now seems well rehearsed. They appear almost choreographed as they move closer. They will tend to their duties with a fervor hardly expected of such horrible slouches. Digging deeper and deeper into the entrails of their victims, they proceed undaunted by the blood or the screams. They are seemingly involved in an archeological excavation that will not stop until it reaches the center of the human body. Maybe the hope is simply to prove that there is no soul to be found inside of such a mess. They may even prove this as they hold what they find up to the camera as evidence. Nope, no soul here, their dead eyes will glint.

But is this enough? Anyone well versed in grindhouse films should be well aware that ugliness is as easy to create on film as giving someone the finger to their back. Going too far is even easier. Last House is guilty of both of these crimes in ways that, when simply describing what happens on screen, makes it seem like a movie that hardly has any more worth than some anti-social teens tantrum. Why don’t you come take a mouthful of this **** sandwich, world! **** you, **** you, **** you, it seems to cry out before barricading itself in its room. And in many ways, this is actually very much a part of its boast. It is deliberately unapproachable because it has already decided it doesn’t like you. It hates you for showing up to watch it, and it hates you even more if you think you’re too good for it. You can’t possibly win with a film that has fallen so deeply into its own sense of self and societal loathing.

But make no mistake. Last House on Dead End Street is a very good film. What makes the ultimate difference here, and elevates what on first impulse seems like junk, into something that could legitimately be called art, is that somehow director Roger Watkins manages the impossible. He makes what seems little less than juvenile provocation actually frightening. Never before has splatter felt so soul shaking. Although it is not nearly as successful, the only comparable reference point in modern film is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like Hooper’s exercise in human depravity, these films elevate what is little more than the crude actions of violent men, and turns them into something other worldly. The horror isn’t really about the threat of death, but is much more about creating a surreal and dream like space in which such corporal abominations can occur in. The internal organs the actors hold up to the camera for investigation are like discoveries from a lost world. It just so happens that this lost world is inside all of us, just out of view, and this movie exists just to let us know how terrifyingly easy they are to discover.

By employing a cruddy cinema verite style in introducing the lives of these slum villains during the opening half hour, Watkins creates a very drab and unadorned base world from which he will launch the rest of the film into the blood-sunset violence of its built-to-spill conclusion. In the beginning, cameras are static. Characters seem to wander in frame aimlessly. Rooms are so dark and smoke filled figures are hard to make out. Dialogue is directionless. But then as the smell of violence rises in the air, the camera will suddenly begin to move with an eerie grace. Great care will be placed in how the rooms are lit (or over lit, or under lit). Atonal music will begin to clang. Characters appear from unexpected places, sometimes even banging holes through walls to make an appearance, other times breaking into dance at inappropriate moments. The difference in these two competing approaches is striking, and yet Watkins somehow will stitch these scenes of violence that appear to be transmitted in from another dimension, seamlessly into the Sunday morning blah of the surrounding film. They almost play like mirror images of those classic stories of alien abductions in the 1980’s. Some drunken yokel sobers up from his standard afternoon beer binge to find himself on an operating table, beneath strange lights, surrounded by inhuman faces holding up shining utensils. Except in this instance, it is not aliens but the hillbillies who are responsible for the kidnapping. As well as the upcoming surgery.

Like all nihilistic loud mouths, Watkins will of course not be able to resist attempts to blame his film on a corrupt modern world that would never dare to pay him any attention unless he was willing to sink to such vile displays. This wasn’t a particularly compelling excuse when Deodato attempted it in 1980 for Cannibal Holocaust, and the fact that Watkins got there first is hardly commendable, even if he doesn’t have the baggage of actually killing things and terrorizing native villages to justify his moral objection to violence. He does seem slightly more studied in his hatred towards society though, which gives his brutish philosophy, if not any reason to be contemplated seriously, a certain extra uneasiness. He comes across as a man who could possibly be just articulate enough to convince the sort of deadbeats that populate his world to do the horrible crimes he imagines. He was clearly able to convince others to appear in this film, which itself is something, considering at times it nearly seems to verge on the line of criminality itself.

With such a misanthropic world view at hand, Watkins doesn’t dare clutter up his philosophizing with complicated plot mechnizations or character motivations. Everything is kept at a bare minimum in Last House. His gaze will keep its unblinking focus on the days following a mans release from prison, and his big plans to begin producing snuff films. There is no eureka moment. No need to make a great case for others to join him in his pursuit. It is simply presented as a matter of fact principal. He’s angry, the world is ****, and he believes he has something to show it. The presumption that the world wants what he has, will go unchallenged.

And this shouldn’t be surprising, considering the way Watkins sees the world. In Last House, there is only him and his band of misfits, and those Watkins seems to view as the Have’s to his Have-Nots: the professional pornographers. No one else seems to exist or matter. The only time he will ever cut away from the dingy snuff world he has created, will be to show us the pampered lifestyle of these actually successful smut peddlers, as if simultaneously condemning and jealous of them. Just look at them laughing it up in their middle class luxury, drinking wine and eating cheese, their decadent lives being entertained by the sight of a humpback whipping a woman in blackface. Tra-la-la and please pass the brie. With such bourgeois atrocities as sadomasochistic minstrel pantomimes presumably being performed in the living rooms all across American suburbia, there is almost a feeling that Watkins is using this as a wedge issue to make the case that his penniless scumbags are some kind of working class heroes. Not because they are any better, but simply because of the fact they have been denied the chance of profiting off of their scumbaggery. What has white privilege ever given them, dammit!

At times the main character will fantasize about the stardom and money he believes he will be rewarded with for being so prescient about the value of real violence in film. Playing this leading role himself, it becomes easy to imagine that Watkins himself may have thought similarly about his unapologetic vision of a super violent American New Wave, and that the world would soon be his oyster. It’s definitely possible that his view of society was so debased that he truly believed Last House would put him within reach of the first rung on the ladder of success. But with this unholy mix of HG Lewis’ dime store cynicism and a primal version of Ingmar Bergman’s existential terror, the result was of course never going to be anything but abject failure. Nothing this toxic could ever grant any one access to anything beyond a societal shunning, and so he would sadly never attain the luxury of having his very own humpbacked servant with a whip. Instead, after making this film, he would fall directly into the world of sex films and pornography, the very industry he had condemned as not being forward thinking enough to appreciate his auteurs eye for debasement. Such a step backward into oblivion makes it easy to conjure up images of him late in his failed career, sitting up alone at night, fuming at society while filling a beer bottle with one cigarette after another. One can only hope he never mistakenly took a sip, since such a taste could not help but bring him back to memories of his failure, and the strangely misery masterpiece it created.





I picked up the Vinegar Syndrome releases of two of Watkins' films recently (Corruption, Her Name Was Lisa). I think the former includes an unrestored copy of Last House as a special feature, but not sure if it's on the edition I have and I'd need to pop in the disc to check (I think it's supposed to be hidden). Might give it a rewatch soon if that turns out to be the case.



I picked up the Vinegar Syndrome releases of two of Watkins' films recently (Corruption, Her Name Was Lisa). I think the former includes an unrestored copy of Last House as a special feature, but not sure if it's on the edition I have and I'd need to pop in the disc to check (I think it's supposed to be hidden). Might give it a rewatch soon if that turns out to be the case.

I'm very curious about the other ones. I wasn't even aware of them until earlier today on Letterboxd when I saw someone reference Corruption.



You would think at some point they might considering restoring Last House though. Unless it already has been done and I'm just sitting on my funky copy for no reason. It's actually hard to imagine seeing the movie 'better' would actually make it....'better' though. It's unappetizing appearance is a bit of the draw



the sight of a humpback whipping a woman in blackface.
Long way to go to get sold on this movie.


You would think at some point they might considering restoring Last House though. Unless it already has been done and I'm just sitting on my funky copy for no reason. It's actually hard to imagine seeing the movie 'better' would actually make it....'better' though. It's unappetizing appearance is a bit of the draw
I don't want any clarity to distract from my humpback minstrel lashings. No names. No regrets.



I'm very curious about the other ones. I wasn't even aware of them until earlier today on Letterboxd when I saw someone reference Corruption.



You would think at some point they might considering restoring Last House though. Unless it already has been done and I'm just sitting on my funky copy for no reason. It's actually hard to imagine seeing the movie 'better' would actually make it....'better' though. It's unappetizing appearance is a bit of the draw
Letterboxd doesn't list that side of his filmography...*



From my understanding (don't quote me on this) Vinegar Syndrome has been working on it but apparently the elements available are in particularly bad shape and good elements are hard to find.



Letterboxd doesn't list that side of his filmography...*
Oh, yes. I see. I'm still curious, but I've sampled about all of the vintage 'porn' that I'm really interested in. But I can't help but wonder if he brought any of his 'gift' into the proceedings.



I will watch and report back if that is the case. I also picked up one from Roberta Findlay (A Woman's Torment, which briefly plays on a TV in The Oracle). Really classing up my viewing her.



I will watch and report back if that is the case. I also picked up one from Roberta Findlay (A Woman's Torment, which briefly plays on a TV in The Oracle). Really classing up my viewing her.

I thought I was about to go onto a Findlay tear, then Prime Evil stopped me in my tracks. Oof, what a dog



I thought I was about to go onto a Findlay tear, then Prime Evil stopped me in my tracks. Oof, what a dog
Looked up your Letterboxd review. I see you started doing what I do when I'm tuning out a movie and tried to pretend better, similar-looking actors were in the movie.



I hope you young Canadian lads have had a less terrifying afternoon than me.



I hope you young Canadian lads have had a less terrifying afternoon than me.

I think there were some Trump hosers beeping their horns in Toronto but thats about the extent of it here



Looked up your Letterboxd review. I see you started doing what I do when I'm tuning out a movie and tried to pretend better, similar-looking actors were in the movie.

I have a terrible attention span at the best of times, and that dogs dinner pushed it to its limit.



What do I watch to quell my tears? Z? Face in the Crowd? Ghosts Don't Do It?


I guess it'll have to be Strangelove. Again.



Maybe I'll wear my Marty Feldman mask and whip Ariana Grande.





Joe likes to wear simple motorcycle T-Shirts and sunglasses and keeps his hair grease-mucked into a rocker quaff. He has a tattoo of a skull on one arm and a tattoo of a swastika on the other, which when asked about, he is reluctant to explain, but that he also can’t be bothered to hide. He wears almost all black, sometimes dark blue, and in particular doesn’t like to wear orange because it’s f*ggy. Or so he tells the flirtatious clothes shop owners who can’t wait to fuss over who gets to measure the inseam of his pants. He moves with a strange macho yet almost bow legged waddle, but there is confidence in this man, regardless of the fact that he often looks towards Andy Warhol’s camera as if he isn’t sure why a movie is being made about him.

This is Joe Spencer, titular Bike Boy, a member of an unnamed motorcycle gang who likes to smoke and drink and eat pussy and either sneer at or laugh off everyone who crosses his path. But as fully formed as this rebel without a cause character seems to be, almost as if he was born with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his shirt, when we are first introduced to him he feels destined to be a very different brand of Bike Boy. This is an Andy Warhol film, after all, and there are certain homoerotic connotations with a title like that.

In the cold opening to the film we will find ourselves suddenly peering in on Joe as he showers. There will be no context to who this man is. We only know that he is naked, young, shivering, seemingly not permitted to speak (the camera cuts whenever he begins to say anything) and often looking towards the camera pensively to check that the film is still recording. As the scene carries on for nearly ten minutes, only the sound of the water cascading down on him to be heard, these moments present Joe as intensely vulnerable. Not only has he not yet donned the uniform that makes him who he is, there is a sense that he seems slightly unaware as to whose gaze these moments are made for. Initially branded as a sex flick, marketed more to the sort of New Yorkers that Spencer would be more than happy to flick a cigarette at and call fairies, he seems to be little more than yet another bit of nubile flesh that Warhol has dangled stardom in front of in exchange to see him get wet and wash his dick. There is hardly any expectation that once he gets out of the shower, dries himself and gets dressed, that he will suddenly be transformed into the local tough he will appear as in the next scene. It turns out he is a very different kind of Bike Boy, one that may not end up appreciating what the film soon plans to do with him.

In this opening scene what Warhol has done is permitted his voyeuristic audience to glimpse the pale underbelly the keeps itself hidden beneath the leather and the sunglasses and all of the talk of sexual conquests (which includes a completely unashamed how-to-****-a-sheep-proper tutorial, performed on the knees for authenticity). From the get-go we know there is something there that can be attacked, maybe even hurt, as much as Joe may seem unaware we know this. This will be what makes Warhol’s next step particularly cruel in its intentions.

Proceeding to lock his Bike Boy into one New York apartment after another, leaving him to fend for himself as a series of cold, calculating, mean spirited and highly esteemed members of Warhol’s entourage attack his seeming simpleness, his difficulty in pronouncing certain unfamiliar words and his working class accent, there is a deliberate maliciousness on display here. What is being attempted is to undress him yet again for the audience, but this time symbolically and through a method of unrelenting teasing, insults and pointed attacks. Warhol seemingly wants us to see through his disguise straight to that hidden vulnerability once again. He is not satisfied with the notion that Spencer be allowed to maintain this image he presents to the outside world, a world that has by now already seen him showering and shivering and under instruction to lather up his crotch just one more time.

It will be through these constant attacks that the sympathies of the audiences will slowly return to Spencer, regardless of whatever unpleasantness his masculine bravura has shown the camera. We can now manage to view the claims of bestiality, and the swastikas, and the disdain for homosexuals, and the treatment of women as spare parts, as elements similar to that tough leather jacket and sunglasses he uses to disguise that unsure looking man we first met in the shower. While the attempts to emasculate their whipping boy have mostly failed, they still manage to show the human beneath the getup regardless. There is a joy in watching the considerably more articulate and educated Warhol Superstars, slowly begin to meet their match in a man who, while clumsily tongued and often struggling to find words, has his own street level wit that is strong enough to fend off the likes of the merciless Brigid Berlin or the ice princess Viva. In their attempt to expose his artifice, his unflinching defense against their attacks in turn exposes them. We can now see how the aloofness and ironically detached manner of his attackers just so happen to be the disguises they have cloaked themselves in.

In the end, the film will eventually succeed in its attempts to yet again get Spencer’s cock out, but in these final frames his nudity will now seem as more of a victory for Spencer, and not necessarily for Warhol’s amphetemized army. This second go round with baring himself to the camera will this time only be spurred into being by the naked image of Viva sprawled out on a couch beneath him, calling to him to join her. While she may have spent the last twenty minutes of the movie acting casually disinterested in his flirtations, and teasing him for his terrible kissing technique, and her undressing may mostly be her final weapon to draw Spencer in, there is a sense that her seduction is no longer just a part of some calculated Warholian plan. She has, just like us, grown enamored of him, his simple resolve, that strange earnestness that lies at the core of this motorcycling bad boy. And as he pulls off his boots, and then his pants and lays on top of her just as she instructs, it will be at that moment that the film will suddenly end. In the abruptness of this finale it will seem that Spencer will be claiming even yet another victory, as all of those in the darkened audience who have come here to see this very moment are blue balled at this cruelest of all moments. And so we can only presume Joe Spencer is the one having the last laugh as we imagine, off camera, he gets himself one more notch on his bedpost. And everything will all be fine with him as far as he’s concerned, regardless of how many times Viva pants into his ear that he’s doing everything wrong.








Spoilerish below (basically outlines the basic plot of the film, but for those who want to know as little as possible about a film, might want to avoid reading)




It's hard for me to reckon with the disappointing second half of The Black Stallion. It may simply be a stumble by the film itself, breaking its spell by trotting Mickey Rooney into the frame to teach us life lessons, force poor Kelly Reno out of bed much too early and stretch out his jockey pants with his fat little legs. Or maybe it’s entirely my fault, unable to reconcile how the mystery and magic of the first hour gets itself siphoned into the gas tank of some horseracing narrative. Personally, I prefer my childhood desert island fantasies to leave me stranded on the beach with a horse, communicating with nothing but our hearts. Not rescue me for a lifetime of child labor and the sight of what was once the world’s biggest star humping a bale of hay.

As the film begins, we are out at sea with a father and son travelling by boat. Everything we see seems to exist in a place not rooted anywhere specific but memories. It plays more like a collection of images: a child remembering the shape of a boat, the expanse of the ocean, and the figure of a father seated at a card table with all sorts of other strange and exotic looking men. There are many sounds—the wind, the water, the tinkling of glass—but few words are ever spoken. The world of conversations, and all the sitting still that comes with them, seem exclusively to be the domain of adults. When words are sometimes spoken to the boy, they are from the mouths of those threatening him in foreign languages, or the screams of shipwreck drowners. In both cases, we can only silently observe, just as the boy does. He is a tourist watching a world he is not a part of yet. And he seems entirely comfortable staying there.

It will only be the child’s father that will have any words in these opening scenes worth listening to. He tells a fabled story of a stallion. Something both whimsical and yet relatable for a child to dig his brains into. When the ship they are travelling on soon after begins to sink, this story will be the last memory of his father he will bring with him as he tumbles overboard. And as if emerging from this very tale itself, a horse we have seen on the boat earlier, being wondered over by the boy, and being abused by its owners, appears in the water to save him. Grabbing its reigns, it pulls him to shore, saving him.

The rest of the film, while it remains on this island, seems as if it has grown from the words the boy’s father spoke to him. Both he and us, the viewers, have been transported to some sort of mythological state. It’s a fantasy we may have once hoped to insert ourselves into as well. While there is peril on the island, and we have concern for the safety of the boy at times, as the child’s relationship with the horse develops, there seems little reason for us to ever leave this place. The purity of their friendship keeps both loneliness and terror at bay. They ride through the waves and sleep on the sand. Nothing much happens, but nothing needs to. When a boat suddenly arrives near the shore, as the boy spots it rowing above where he swims, at first it is looked at more as a curious thing instead of a means to escape. Returning home is not of any primary concern. When you are living in a fiction at such an age, why would you look for a way out of it? Exactly, my sentiments as a member of the audience.

In the early scenes of the boy returning to his hometown, there is still a sense of dreamy wonder that somehow lingers. The boy is treated as an outcast, even as he is heralded as a hero for surviving the shipwreck. He still stands outside of conversations and stares out the window to where his horse now lives in their suburban backyard. But it won’t be long before the gravity of narrative, and the need to give us something to root for, lasso’s the whole film and wrestles it to the ground. He begins working at Rooney’s stable to pay for board. What a drag.

Then it’s discovered the horse is fierce fast, would be a beast at racing, and before we know it, the film has become something completely different. It is no longer a poem told through the eyes of a child. It is an ode to success and hard work. Blech! One minute, we are watching a child and horse celebrate their tentative friendship with a dance in the waters of an African tide. The next I am expected to cheer them on towards a finish line, while derelicts with mint julip pulp in their teeth clutch winning tickets to their chest. What a positively utilitarian thing to do with childhood whimsy. How grimly counterproductive to now be happy the child has gainful employment. Make sure you put “Tamer of Wild Stallions” on your resume, kid. It’s only going to get worse. And thanks for reminding me I’ve got work tomorrow (sidenote: no I don’t)

But while my nature may cause me to wince as I watch free-form island life sullied by the intrusion of watching a child learn the jockey trade, this does not mean I am entirely blind to the possibility that, when considered from both sides, the two halves of this film actually do have something to say about the brief illusion that is childhood. But I don’t have to like it. I don’t need to accept that, yes, this is where all the great mysteries of our youngest years lead us, left behind, almost as if on a desert island as we forge a path in this life, towards something that is supposed to make our dreams worth something. As if the dream wasn’t enough to begin with.

I suppose filmmakers, even with as much talent as Carol Ballard shows here, are prey to the same folly. And while the movie is still brilliant and a wonder, it still feels like a shame that it let perfection somehow slip from its grasp. It should have stayed where the reigns of the horse, grasped in the drowning waters of the Indian Ocean, brought us. And Mickey Rooney could have instead thankfully be left standing tippytoe on some street corner in Hollywood, talking about world domination as if it is something any of us should care about in the first place.







Yeah, that summarizes my experience with the film. I loved the first half, but didn't like the second half as much. Like, it was fine, but it lacked the poetry if what came prior. I think I liked the film a bit less than you did though.