Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Stu, I haven't watched wrestling since I was eight, when I watched the Dudley Boys (Boyz?) break a table over a woman in her sixties.


So no to whatever the question is.

She (Mae Young) was actually 77, which just makes it all the more awesome:

I'm pretty sure it makes it even lamer that they beat up a septuagenarian. Elder abuse is NOT cool.

Exactly.

I watched this over the weekend. Fun! I couldn't find enough to say to do a full review but I definitely enjoyed it. HK sexploitation is a bit of a blind spot for me (I've seen a number of Category III movies and one hardcore porno, in my defense Nick Pinkerton recommended it), but for all the supposedly sleazy content in this, it's channeled through a wacky Evil Dead / Chinese Ghost Story style so that it's hard to be put off by any of it.


Some nice surprises too, like when the man with a freakishly large dick turns out to be a kind, loving husband. (The movie recreates a gag from Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, which is important to note.) And of course, it lends itself to the kind of political read as much of Hong Kong cinema from the era.

I just remember it was a fun watch. A bit crazy. We used to do commentaries on here. A few ppl watch same movie and discuss it. I viewed it with someone here and we had a fun time. I think the fight scene in the tree was funny.

The actress in the tree fight was Julie Lee, who starred in and co-directed the porno I referred to, Trilogy of Lust. Which is actually quite good, if a bit icky depending on one's proclivities. (As a connoisseur of fine arts I didn't find it unmanageable.) Also not an anthology like the name might suggest, I think something got lost in the translation. I did a review on Letterboxd a while back, will dig it up later when I'm on my PC.

I'm a sucker for any movie that puts a bunch of cool characters together for a mission, and this is no exception. We get Brigitte Lin with an eyepatch. We get a tattooed Amazon who beats up a great big sumo wrestler for her introduction. We get a lady with a ridiculous hair metal coiffure who kills a man in a white suit when he accuses her of cheating at cards. (We never learn if she actually cheated. She seems cool so I'm inclined to take her side.) We get Sally Yeh as a mercenary proficient with explosives. (She's introduced on horseback, and I was tempted to refer to her as the "horse lady", but that might make this sound like Emanuelle in America, but this is mostly good clean fun for non-degenerates. There is however some dicey stuff involving animals, involving grenades going off way too close to horses, so I suppose I should warn viewers sensitive about such things accordingly.) There's a kleptomaniac and a prostitute who stabs her john...eh, these characters aren't that cool. And there's an alcoholic samurai. This character has the best introduction because her alcoholism is played initially for drama, but when the bar staff try to cut her off, she instead cuts them off...literally! (This character spends most of her scenes either drinking or looking for a bottle. And people say these movies don't care about character development.)

These characters end up in prison, although the movie sidesteps the usual sleazy pleasures of women-in-prison movies in favour of borderline comic relief wherein Lin repeatedly squeals on all the other characters to the prison staff and/or finds other ways to **** them over. There's also a basketball scene where the characters play fast and loose with the concept of dribbling and one of them does a backflip to escape, only to be caught immediately. Eventually, Lin reveals her plan to break out and take out an enemy laboratory. At this point I should mention that this is set during World War II under Japanese occupation, but period integrity is not one of the movie's primary concerns. The other characters decide to ignore all the red flags raised by Lin in the first act and escape with her, at which point they become hunted down by a group of murderous black-clad riders, and the movie shifts from a WIP flick to a spaghetti western.

Along the way, there's a fun scene where the characters dodge boobytraps, and Lin reveals a snazzy fur hat that bears a strong resemblance to the hair metal lady's hairdo. (They stand back-to-back at one point so you can note the resemblance.) And there's a run-in with a group of villagers who challenge them to a swordfight, and eating contest (our heroines' representative cheats by tying her noodles to those of her challenger) and a drunken shooting match. There might even be ghosts. And there's an explosion-filled showdown with the riders and a shoot-'em-up climax when the characters infiltrate the laboratory.

This is directed by Chu Yen-Ping, responsible for the wildly entertaining Fantasy Mission Force. It shares with that movie a disregard for period detail and a cavalier approach to genre, although this doesn't cycle through quite as many, settling for just WIP, spaghetti western and WWII mission movie. (Fans of that movie will remember its WWII story involved Abraham Lincoln, Rocky, hopping vampires and Mad Max Nazis.) The movie is actually pretty astute about the iconography of the genres it navigates, particularly the western (there are plenty of great shots of the heroines and villains on horseback, and their confrontation is nice and dusty). It also has a secret weapon in the form of stolen Ennio Morricone music, which not only is a shortcut to production value but it actually deploys to rousing and even moving effect. By the time the movie reached its unexpectedly poignant conclusion, maybe it was the "L'estasi dell'oro" blaring on the soundtrack, but I admit I was a little touched. Am I getting soft? Maybe.

__________________

Trilogy of Lust, the first Hong Kong hardcore picture I've seen, has a misleading title, to say the least. It's not an anthology movie with three segments. It's technically part of a trilogy, but from having seen the second film and what I could glean from the plot synopsis of the third, the movies don't seem especially related (and indeed, the star of this one is only in one of the sequels). And it's certainly bold to declare yourself a trilogy with just the first installment. The only other thing I can think that the title is referring to is the central relationships, between a fisherman, his badly treated wife and the farmer with whom she starts an affair, but trilogy is a weird way to refer to a group of people. Triangle of Lust doesn't sound much worse to my ears, but perhaps something gets lost in the translation. What I'm saying is, leave your trilogy-related expectations at the door. Anyway, on to the movie.

The fisherman is unpleasant in demeanour, not very bright and spends his days pretending to be a doctor. In fact, he's mad at the world for not letting him achieve his dream of becoming a real doctor (a sentiment expressed most boisterously when he urinates off the edge of his boat screaming "I'm a real doctor, not a fisherman! **** your mother, society, the whole world is unfair!"). He takes it out on his wife, whom he bought during a trip to the mainland, which is seen as a corrupt and repressive place, while Hong Kong is presented as cruel and exploitative in its own way. She's stuck hiding away in his home for fear of being deported, with little to do but peruse his porno magazines or take notes while he demonstrates sex with a hooker ("You should write this down, it's important" he says has they demonstrate doggystyle), so ends up having an affair with the kindly farmer who's also being exploited by her husband.

As things between them get hot and heavy, eels, eggs and other acts and appendages figure into the proceedings (literally, in the case of the eggs and the appendages), while the movie makes fitting detours into noir. (There's also a sex scene on top of a hill scored to what sounds like the Blade Runner soundtrack, or at least a good Vangelis imitation.) The sexual content, aside from its own outre nature, is additionally jarring because of the movie's overall slickness. In terms of its visual language and production values, it doesn't feel too different from other Hong Kong productions I've seen from the era, just with the occasional close-up to remind you that you are in fact watching a porno (in one particularly jarring moment, a gruesome murder is followed immediately by a shot of the heroine being vigorously penetrated). (I have not seen any other hardcore productions from Hong Kong, but am interested in digging further if there are any more of this calibre to be found.) The contrast is imbued into the characterization, as the heroine is traumatized from having seen her parents killed by the Red Army as a child, so will have horrific flashbacks at the sight of blood, as when her husband stuffs a bloody fish down her panties or she bites her lover's thumb.

Directing credits go to Julie Lee, who delivers an admirably committed performance as the heroine, and Tun-Fei Mou. I'd previously seen Lee in The Untold Story, the unbelievably scuzzy but effective true crime thriller, and this I found this easier to sit through than that. Mou is best known for Men Behind the Sun, a horror movie about Japanese war crimes in WWII notorious for it's, uh, unorthodox special effects. I am not brave enough to watch that movie, but I did see Lost Souls, his film for Shaw Brothers that similarly concerns exploitation of and cruelty towards migrants from the mainland, and the scene here where the heroine finally gets a clear sight of Hong Kong from a hilltop, is one of its most affecting. The movie is directed with a certain verve that makes this all quite compelling, although for certain viewers, let's call them Level Ones, the sex might seem too icky and weird to enjoy. Level Two viewers, however, will appreciate that the weirdness of the sex matches the escalation of their relationship and is necessary for the film's emotional arc. (Vive l'amour fou!) But the Level Threes in the audience, the real galaxy brains with their degenerate viewing habits, will note that the specificity of the sex acts gives them a certain charge. The ickiness and weirdness are precisely what makes it hot. Where did I land on this spectrum? That's none of your damn business, and I'll remind you that it says in the Bible, "Judge not that ye not be judged."

I did watch the first sequel, which shares the original's star and co-director Lee but is softcore. (Mou is replaced by Jiro Ishimura, who has no other IMDb credits.) Lee once again plays the lead in a completely unrelated story, this time a femme fatale who parades around in revealing leather outfits and goes about having sex with and murdering men she picks up as revenge for having been gang raped as a child. Like the original, this is directed with some level of polish and features its share of eyebrow-raising sexually charged moments (the highlight involves a squid, nipple clamps and a staple gun). Unlike the original, this one doesn't ground its arc in anything resembling real emotion, feeling more like a loose collection of outrageous moments. (There is a potentially intriguing idea involving the transference of sexual and violent trauma, but it's not explored with any thoroughness.) I wasn't bored, and I enjoyed Lee's strong presence and her commitment to a completely ridiculous role, while the first one managed to move me in its own strange way, this one I more or less shrugged off. I understand there's another sequel that has even less to do with the original (Lee is neither in the cast nor the directing chair) and none of the Letterboxd reviews I've read are encouraging, so I will not treat it as a priority.

There we go.

On this Canada Day in the year of our Lord 2022, I decided to do my patriotic duty and support a great Canadian filmmaker. So I hopped on the subway, headed downtown to the TIFF Bell Lightbox (a theatre that's been responsible for some of my favourite moviegoing experiences, but perhaps has lost some of its luster recently thanks to increasingly boring programming choices) and handed over my hard earned Canadian dollars for a ticket to David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future. Now, this wasn't just patriotism at work, although there is a certain national pride I feel in enjoying the work of a great director who came out of this country whose work doesn't have that stench of distinctly Canadian lameness about it. (It might be hard to explain to non-Canadians, but imagine if 90% of the film and TV output of your country was centered on the most boring, tacky signifiers of national identity. Tune in to the CBC and just drown in an embarrassing flood of hockey, Tim Hortons, "aboot" and "eh".) But there's also the fact that like many movie fans, Cronenberg's work is near and dear to me.

Videodrome was a formative movie for me during my high school years, not just because it was a cold, weird, off putting movie that also kicked ass, but because it was a kind of metaphor for my cinephilia, putting me on a quest for the weirder horizons of cinema. (So yes, I'm going to blame my embarrassing viewing history over the last two years all on this one movie.) At the time it felt like I watched something truly transgressive. A movie with this collection of plot points shouldn't exist. Snuff TV, stomach vaginas, fleshy bulging cassettes, kinky redheaded Debbie Harry? The last one may have broken my brain. Why does the singer from Blondie have red hair? Also the whole kinky weirdo angle.

In that respect, Crimes of the Future offers up two characters in the same tradition, who I suspect would have similarly wreaked havoc on my cerebral functions had I watched this at a younger age. There's Lea Seydoux, former surgeon and partner of Viggo Mortensen, with whom she does a performance art act of cutting out his organs for an audience. And there's Kristen Stewart, as a bureaucrat in a secret government agency responsible for logging Mortensen's organs who not-so-secretly is turned on by all this. (An early scene has her visibly aroused as she inspects Mortensen's organs through a camera jammed inside his stomach.) She coins the movie's key phrase: "Surgery is the new sex." (Seydoux and Mortensen have scenes together that show this concept in fairly literal terms, which kind of grossed me out but I suspect will do a lot for somebody somewhere.) The former brings an innate warmth and emotion to an otherwise cold and alienating movie (is there another actress currently who is as good at looking on the verge of tears?), and the latter has a nervy delivery that provides some of the movie's biggest laughs.

Now, I suppose I should gesture towards the overall plot, which features Mortensen and Seydoux wowing the art world with their daring surgery-centric performance art. This is in the context of a world where human evolution is leading to the growth of weird and scary new organs and a corresponding increase in aggressive body modifications. Some of this seems to be a vehicle for Cronenberg to air out his thoughts on art, and one especially funny scene has a rival artist dance to techno music while covered in ears in his self-satisfied, up-its-own-ass act. This is a funnier movie than I expected, although much of the humour is of the deadpan variety. I already mentioned Stewart's comic timing, but I also chuckled at Mortensen's outfit, which looks like something a ninja would wear, or perhaps pilfered from a Yohji Yamamato or Rick Owens collection. The wardrobe of the rest of the cast is less dramatic, aside from the rise of their pants. (Yes, yes, I'm talking about clothes again.)

But there's also a political dimension, as Mortensen is working undercover for the government to infiltrate a group of subversives, although it wasn't clear to me what exactly the ideological difference was between the two parties. The movie is not interested in political coherence, and seems cagey about the nature of the government's repression, although we do get a sense of atmospheric decay from the crumbling Greek locations, presence of analog technology (which leads to the sporadic use of different film and video formats), and scenes of political operatives carrying out grisly assassinations. (There is also the frequent presence of flies, which I found a bit on the nose.) I suppose there are similarities here to the vagueness with which Videodrome sketches out its political dimensions, but that movie at least put words to the villains' ideology, giving that element a certain charge.

I haven't seen Cronenberg's last few films, but there is a sense that he was getting more respectable over the last two decades. (I'd seen A History of Violence and Eastern Promises from that period. Both quite good, but aside from a few instances of extreme violence, fairly palatable to mainstream tastes.) So seeing him go back to the biopunk sensibilities of his earlier work, the stuff that speaks to me more directly, does make the movie pretty interesting in the context of his career, and I did mostly enjoy seeing him play around with those elements. But where movies like Videodrome, Scanners and Shivers (to take a few examples) work for me and this one doesn't is that those movies had a certain cohesion and forward momentum. You enter worlds that are fairly well defined and attach yourself to protagonists who are propelled through their narratives, all delivered with a feverish, punk rock energy. (Of those movies, Videodrome has the best leading man in James Woods, whose sleazy presence gives added queasiness to the proceedings.) This movie has no real interest in making its contextual elements cohere, and kind of ambles to its climax. Also, I appreciate that we all have different sensitivities to certain subject matter, but the fact that this movie places its dramatic crux on something as upsetting as a child autopsy completely alienated me from the final section. And that the movie closes with a scene of what looks like the worst YouTube food vlog in the world meant that I was not won back before the end credits rolled.

CR1M35 0F +H3 FU+UR3

I've seen Scanners a few times now, and with each viewing I seem to go back and forth on Stephen Lack's performance. No, I've never thought that it was actually "good", but I'm torn between whether he's a bad actor who is used well in the movie or a bad actor who deflates the centre of the movie. With this viewing, I'm leaning towards the former. To put it kindly, Lack is a limited actor, perhaps because he wasn't primarily an actor in the first place. I understand he was mostly a painter and sculptor, and one can speculate whether David Cronenberg cast him to help out one of his art world buddies, or to brutally dunk on an art world rival. (The former is more likely, the latter is funnier to imagine.) It's worth noting that Cronenberg later cast him in a small but affecting role in Dead Ringers.

There are probably two effective qualities that Lack brings to the material. One, as a relative void of charisma, he comes across as out of his element compared to his more experienced co-stars, and as a result ends up being a good audience vantage point. We are uneasy as this strange story hurtles forward, so it makes sense that we latch onto a character who seems as uneasy as ourselves. Two, Lack has large, spherical eyes, which lend themselves well to this story of malevolent psychics. The psychic battles here are depicted through a combination of stares, tilts of the head, and contorted and bulging faces, sometimes assisted by bladder effects. (If any of this sounds silly, it's a credit to Cronenberg's craft that he knows exactly how to shoot and cut these scenes for maximum energy.) While Lack is not the smoothest at executing these gestures, his stares photograph well, and his relatively affectless demeanour gives him a certain zen quality that works well in the final confrontation.

The cast around Lack however is a lot easier to defend without qualifiers. Michael Ironside provides an intense contrast to Lack in an early role, and it's easy to see why he became a go-to character actor in the years since. (Ironside also does those tilts and contortions a lot more naturally, perhaps because he seems ready to explode at any given moment.) There's Jennifer O'Neill, anticipating the tension of the Debbie Harry role in Videodrome with conceptually challenging hair (she isn't old, why is her hair so grey? okay, I'm only thirty and have a bunch of grey hairs too, the point is, she's good in the movie). There's Lawrence Dane as the kind of conniving executive that would be played by Ronny Cox were this a Paul Verhoeven movie. There's a brief but quite moving appearance by Robert A. Silverman as a tortured artist who has found other ways to manage his psychic powers. And there's Patrick McGoohan, providing the closest thing to a warm, paternal character in the movie, and whose rich, deep voice feels at one with the movie's textures.

Of Cronenberg's filmography, this is the first one in my opinion that really nails that sense of coldness we associate with him. A great deal of assistance comes from Howard Shore's vaguely futuristic score, but there's a certain sterility in the cinematography, a good eye for cold, unwelcoming interiors and great use of locations. This was shot in Toronto and Montreal, and while the movie doesn't specify the setting, Cronenberg is able to imbue these places with a subtly dystopian quality. Has Yorkdale subway station ever looked this sinister? (This quality continues in Videodrome, which is perhaps the definitive Toronto movie, giving the city some of the sleazy charge of a pre-cleanup New York.) And this quality even extends to the corporate names in the movie, with "ConSec" and "Biocarbon Amalgamate" both carrying a certain obfuscating coldness.

As body horror, this falls well into his pet concerns, and while it maybe isn't as sophisticated as some of his other movies in this regard, it benefits from a relentless forward momentum in the narrative and some memorable special effects. This is far from the grossest thing Cronenberg has made, but when you bookend your movie with the most famous exploding head in cinema and a gruesome psychic duel that evokes Thich Quang Duc, it's safe to say you've made an impact.

Happy (belated) Canada Day!

Have you seen The Mind’s Eye? Joe Begos’ unofficial, low budget follow up to Scanners? I’m a pretty sizable fan of it.

I had not even heard of it, so will add to the watchlist on your recommendation. I think Scanners has a bunch of sequels as well? I remember them playing on a specialty horror cable channel back in the day (that gave out endless free previews until it went off the air), but don't think I've seen them discussed much otherwise.


I've had Begos' VFW on my radar for quite some time, will get to it one of these days...

"All right. We're gonna do this the scanner way. I'm gonna suck your brain dry!"

This is the part where I assume the original audience started hooting and hollering.