Smut Evolution.

Wherein it occurs to me that a pile of paperbacks I found in the same box at a charity book fair last week make an interesting case study re: changing attitudes toward sex in paperback publishing through the ‘60s and ‘70s.

1962:


(Fontana, cover illustration uncredited.)

1967:


(Collier books, cover uncredited.)

1972:


(Grafton, cover photograph: Beverley LeBarrow)

1974:


(Pinnacle Books / Heinrich Hanau Publications, Cover design: Neil J Crawford / Bromley Arts)

‘The Escapees’ review at Fascination.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything for my Rollinades strand, so thanks are due to Jeremy Richey of the consistently excellent Fascination weblog for inviting me to contribute a guest-post, thus providing me with the impetus I needed to put together a review of one of Jean Rollin’s more underappreciated films, 1981’s ‘Les Eschappees’ aka ‘The Escapees’ aka ‘The Runaways’.

The review is up there right now, and in some ways I think it manages to get to the heart of what I love about Rollin’s films more clearly than anything I’ve written in the past, so, uh, yeah – by all means give it a look, if you’re thus inclined.

VHS Purgatory:Sister Streetfighter(Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

Let’s start this one off with a confession: I’m afraid I’ve never been much into kung-fu movies. I don’t dislike them or anything, but at the same time I’ve never embraced them quite so readily as I have most other exploitation genres.

My stock explanation for this has long been to just to say that I’m not really all that excited by the idea of watching a bunch of guys fighting, but clearly this logic doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. I mean, if you look at things in those reductionist terms, I’m not *particularly* interested in watching people wondering around in the woods looking confused, or bored actresses performing unconvincing softcore sex scenes, or some guy with rubber fangs going around biting people’s necks… but I’m still happy to dedicate thousands of hours to watching films in which all that stuff happens.

No, I think perhaps my disinterest in kung-fu dates back further, to when I was about 12 or 13, and I had this friend who – as wimpy teenage boys are apt to do – had decided he was really into martial arts, and so his dad had bought him a box set of all the pre-‘Enter The Dragon’ Bruce Lee films. What a cool dad! They were all rated 18, and I was totally psyched to watch them. With my childish expectations calibrated according to a mixture of big budget Hollywood action flicks and Mortal Kombat style video games though, it was a brutally disappointing experience.

If I’d seen the slicker, more Westernised ‘Enter The Dragon’, I probably could have dug it, but the appeal of the Hong Kong flicks was entirely lost on me at the time. Not only were they entirely lacking in the kind of skull-crushing, eyeball mangling gore-violence I was anticipating, but, well… what is this shit, y’know? Where are all the explosions, the motorbike chases, the sword-fights? Why is everybody speaking in that weird way where the words don’t match their lips? So he’s just got to protect his buddy’s restaurant from some goons? You mean.. that’s the whole plot? Shouldn’t he be SAVING THE WORLD or some shit? Some fucking hero, this guy. Spiderman would’ve saved a few small businesses from goons before the opening credits. If he’s not gonna pull anyone’s spine out in the next five minutes, I’m outta here.*

I thought it was funny when Bruce Lee punched some guy through a wall and he left an exact outline of his shape, with splayed arms and legs. And I liked the inexplicable comedy bits where he drank loads of soup, or made a kid cry at the airport. But aside from that… well it was just guys slugging each other really, and, not being in a frame of mind that allowed me to appreciate the grace and power of the way in which they were doing the slugging, I was pretty underwhelmed. And, having failed to cultivate the appropriate frame of mind in subsequent years, kung-fu and ‘fight movies’ in general remain a bit of a blindspot for me ever since.

I mean, I’ve seen a few Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies and thought they were awesome, and I’ve seen a few of the wackier Shaw Bros flicks with all the magic and special effects and whatnot, and they were great too, but I’ve never really investigated further. My wider interest in Japanese films has at least led me though to check out Sonny Chiba in ‘The Streetfighter’, a quintessentially kick-ass venture that really delivers on the kind of bone-crushing grue my 12 year old self might have appreciated. And that brings us (finally) to the little number pictured above, housed in a sweet 1983 big box from the venerable Video Tape Centre of Suffolk Street, SW1.


I was going to continue with a disclaimer saying something along the lines of “I really enjoyed ‘Sister Streetfighter’, but because I don’t really watch many of these films, I’m perfectly prepared to accept the fact that all the things I thought were weird or noteworthy about it are pretty standard kung-fu topes”. Hopefully that won’t actually be necessary though, because having looked up a few online reviews, it seems it wasn’t just me who got KOed by the film’s general goofiness - in fact the general consensus seems to be that ‘Sister Streetfighter’ really is just totally crazy.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that several key-players from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s heyday of Japanese action/exploitation films are involved in the film (Kazuhiko ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’ Yamaguchi directs, and our old pal Norifumi Suzuki co-wrote the script), but the tone and style is so different from the Toei films I was writing about in my Think Pink feature that you’d never guess in a million years that this movie emerged from the same studio within the same five year period.

Whilst it’s true that popular film industries all over the world went into a catastrophic financial nosedive during the ‘70s, it seems that in Japan the decline took place more quickly and severely than elsewhere, reaching a crunch point as early as 1974, when the relatively lavish action and youth films that had filled the release schedules only a few years earlier started to disappear, replaced by nastier, lower budget sex films and, after the international success of ‘The Streetfighter’, an occasional bit of kung-fu. As such, watching ‘Sister Streetfighter’ feels a bit like watching an Italian film from the early ‘80s, when directors who’d helmed slick, even respectable, productions a decade earlier found themselves jamming econo, going straight for the gore/boobs/blockbuster rip-off jugular and basically blowing whatever reputation they had left out their ass in thoroughly entertaining fashion.

Clearly made with both eyes on the international market, it actually features far less sleaze and nastiness than your average Japanese exploitation flick - the bone-breaking action of ‘The Streetfighter’ has been significantly scaled back, presumably to reflect Etsuko Shihomi’s more genteel fighting style, and, give or take the odd implied rape and a relatively tame torture set-piece during the finale (are these guys actually incapable of making a movie in which no women get tied up and beaten..?), things more or less conform to ‘70s Western notions of good taste.


In most other respects though, it very much shares the spirit of the kind of threadbare, one camera epics that the Italians were trying to foist upon the world market as their film industry collapsed around them. One of the first things you’ll notice about the film is that, in stark contrast to the technical professionalism found in earlier Toei films, the camerawork is completely out to lunch. Whole scenes are weirdly framed and blurred, and the camera rattles around like it’s been mounted on one of those rickety coalmine wagons. Sudden lurching pans and ‘da-da-dah!’ shock zooms happen relentlessly, for no reason, to the point where the constant disorientation is almost headache inducing.

Perhaps seeking to ‘dumb down’ their product to fit the lower expectations of overseas kung-fu audiences, Yamaguchi and co also seem intent on packing the film with as many chop-socky clichés as they can come up - maybe it’s just the English dubbing track that’s to blame, but did they REALLY have to throw in that awful ‘Hong Kong Garden’/’Kung Fu Fighting’ music cue – you know the one - every time the action switches to Hong Kong..? I think most of the characters here are meant to be Chinese, hanging out in the ex-pat community in Yokohama, but for all the English dub cares for such subtleties they could be living on Mars, and with the filmmakers all too happy to throw aside such tired notions as continuity and basic coherence, the result is a flick that often plays more like some crazy-ass, death-or-glory shit from Indonesia or The Philippines than a product of one of the oldest and proudest film industries in the world.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Suzuki’s contribution to the film’s writing, but ‘Sister Streetfighter’ definitely exhibits a certain strain of bewildering, fast-moving craziness that strongly echoes that found in his pinky violence films. Who cares that our heroine is suddenly teleported to a clifftop rope bridge for one showdown, then inexplicably returns from the dead after plummeting to the rocks below, when you’ve got a guy in a feather headdress firing poisoned blowpipe darts hiding round every corner, and a former priest in a black cape leaping out of a wardrobe armed with a prototype spear-gun when you least expect it, all whilst distorted library music blares and the camera blasts around the place like an out of control helicopter..?

Then there’s this whole thing about heroin being smuggled boxes full of wigs, a wild Franco-esque nightclub scene, and even a classic, shrieking rubber bat attack scene at one point, just because, well.. why the hell not? Perhaps compensating for the lack of any serious sex n’ violence, random zaniness amped up to the nth degree seems to have been the intention here, and it's a strategy that certainly works for me.


Much of the film’s entertainment value arises from that fact that the main drug dealer bad guy’s favourite hobby is ‘collecting killers’, surrounding himself with what must surely be one of the most unlikely arrays of eccentric martial artists ever assembled on-screen. “It’s just as much fun as a car full of gorillas”, he enthuses. And, whilst I have to admit that I think a car full of gorillas would be pretty fun, he may have a point. In one wonderful / hilarious sequence, the Big Boss is shown chilling by the pool as his collection of freakish combatants practice around him, the movie helpfully freeze-framing with on-screen captions telling us who they are – “Tessin – The Sickle User!”, “Hachigen Ma - Japanese Cudgel Play!”, “Eva Parrish – Karate Champion of Australia!”, and so on.

Some of these guys we get to see quite a bit of (that annoying bastard in the red robe with the nun-chukas just won’t shut up and die), but others (like poor old Eva) are never heard from again. Playing a particularly prominent role in proceedings is a guy named ‘Hammerhead’, a generic self-regarding demi-boss with his own gang of loyal goons. What I liked about them is that they march about with what appear to be steel wastepaper baskets on their heads, but when engaging in a fight they immediately take them off, presumably realising how unhelpful such ‘armour’ would prove to be in a hand to hand combat situation, but unwilling to fully abandon the enjoyment they gain from parading through the streets with steel buckets on their heads. I also like the fact that the big prize the bad guy has promised him when he kills Shihomi is “a gym you can be proud of”.


Another WTF highlight is the inclusion of the ‘Amazons 7’, a troupe of tiny Thai kick-boxing ladies who wear animal masks and Fred Flintstone style leopard-skin mini-dresses. As with many of the more outlandish baddies on display, Etsuko and Sonny Chiba deal with them in disappointingly double-quick time, but hey, ya pays ya money, ya takes ya choice.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Sonny Chiba is in this movie? The original American advertising certainly did, misleadingly proclaiming him to be the star, when in fact he manages little more than a extended cameo, turning up every now and then to kick some ass (which he does spectacularly, of course) before enigmatically disappearing again. Dunno what it is that keeps tearing him away from this desperate life & death conflict. I guess he’s just a busy man. Bizarrely, the back cover blurb on the UK VHS claims that Chiba’s character has ‘..the power to become invisible!’, which I can only assume is the result of the writer working from a translated plot synopsis that said something like “Chiba keeps vanishing”, and taking it a bit too literally.


Left to carry the film largely on her own, Etsuko Shihomi does a pretty great job if I’m any judge. Presumably pretty young when the movie was made, she’s a charismatic and likable enough screen presence to stand alongside Chiba, a capable actress within the confines of what is admittedly an astoundingly silly movie, and – insofar as a rube like me is able to tell – an extremely impressive karate fighter and physical performer. If Chiba can be taken as a fairly obvious unofficial reference point for Ryu in the Streetfighter video games then Shihomi is a shoe-in for Chun Li, and it’s not surprising that she followed up for success here with ‘The Streetfighter’s Last Revenge’, ‘Return of the Sister Streetfighter’, ‘Sister Streetfighter: Fifth Level Fist’ and a whole raft of other karate movies that, along with some straight acting roles, kept her busy all the way through to the mid ‘80s, including ‘Karate Inerno’ (directed by Teruo Ishii) and the brilliantly named ‘Which is Stronger, Karate or The Tiger?’ (aka ‘Sonny Chiba’s Dragon Princess’).


So, in conclusion: ‘Sister Streetfighter’ makes barely any sense, is jam-packed with craziness, has a cool, ass-kicking cast, and appears to have been thrown together in about a week by a bunch of jittery maniacs with a few domestic camcorders and a hang-glider. Perfect entertainment, in other words. A thing of beauty and a joy forever, as the boy Keats once had it. If I’d seen this back when I was 12 years old, my life might have been very different (and hopefully not just because I’d be running around with a bucket on my head orchestrating ill-advised wig-based smuggling escapades).

Until somebody bothers to issue a takedown notice, ‘Sister Streetfighter’ can be viewed in its fuzzy entirety on Youtube (from whence I took the rough screenshots above). Meanwhile, here’s the US trailer:

If I recall correctly, the VTC tape also has a bonus trailer for some movie in which Chuck Norris and Lee Van Cleef fight the Illuminati. It looked pretty great! Remind me what the title is in the comments box and win, well… a very fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, and possibly an acknowledgment when I edit this post to include a link to the trailer.


* It should be noted that these are my garbled 15+ years ago recollections of the Bruce Lee films, and do not necessarily reflect what actually happens in them, even in the slightest. I haven’t watched them since, but I’m sure they’re all marvellous. Please don’t spam me Bruce fans.

Youtube Film Club: Korea-ing

Happy news reaches us this evening via the Mondo Macabro weblog. It seems that the Korean Film Archive has decided to post no less than 70 feature length, subtitled examples of classic Korean cinema on Youtube, all dating from the ‘50s through to the ‘80s, and many appearing for the first time with English subs.

Never again will any world cinema aficionado in a building with an internet connection have any excuse to cry “I’M BORED”… (unless they’re watching a boring Korean movie I suppose, but let’s try to stay positive here).

I know next to nothing about Korean cinema, so it’s difficult to know where to start with such a treasure trove really, but Mondo Macabro commend the work of director Kim Ki-Young, and in particular his film ‘Woman After A Killer Butterfly’, to our attention, so that sounds like a good start, and beyond that I’m sure I’ll soon be zeroing in on anything remotely weird or sleazy looking like a bear on a picnic basket.

Dig in here.

Godmonster of Indian Flats (Fredric Hobbs, 1973)

When we last encountered cracked conceptual genius Fredric Hobbs on this blog, he was busy trying to squeeze our brains through the sieve of the unforgettable Alabama’s Ghost. Needless to say, after a few months spent recovering from that experience, I was primed for more, and thankfully, so was Hobbs. In the brief window between wrapping up work on his magnum opus and witnessing its presumably disastrous unveiling on the grindhouse circuit, some damn fool gave Fred the green light once again, and production began almost immediately on 1973’s ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’.

Perhaps they figured, well, how far off the rails can he go with a straightforward monster movie anyway? I fear you and I both know the answer to that question.

Having said that though, it’s clear from the outset that ‘Godmonster..’ is a far more low-key affair than ‘Alabama’, rarely seeking to replicate the overdriven freakery and psychedelic excess of its predecessor. More of a slow-burner in the weirdness stakes than an OMFG mindblower, close attention and contemplation nonetheless reveal it to be an equally inexplicable proposition; a bilious and indigestible film, by turns frustrating, whimsical, beautiful and genuinely upsetting, ‘Godmonster..’ is unmistakably the work of a creative mind running on a completely different set of rails from the rest of mankind, and for that alone it should be celebrated.


As Hobbs relates in an interview (more of a vast, disjointed monologue really) conducted by Stephen Thrower for his indispensable book Nightmare USA, the seeds of ‘Godmonster..’ were sewn largely from the director’s connections with the community of Virginia City in Nevada, a former goldrush city built on the profits of gold extracted from the legendary ‘Comstock Lode’, and subsequently preserved for the ages as a kind of period-authentic tourist town.

Hobbs created much of his best-known artwork during sojourns in Virginia City, as well as assisting in the restoration of town’s historic buildings and co-authoring the book ‘The Richest Place on Earth: The Story of Virginia City and the Heyday of the Comstock Lode’ (1978). So setting his film there, taking advantage of unusual architecture, awe-inspiring scenery and the goodwill of the local community, must have been a no-brainer really, and indeed ‘Godmonster..’ is in many ways a tribute to the strange atmosphere of Virginia City – full of local tales, local people and local peculiarities, even if it is not, I should imagine, the kind of homage many residents might have anticipated.

In classic ‘50s monster movie style, the film posits an isolated laboratory in the hills outside the town, where Dr Clemens (“head of Anthropology at the University of Reno”) and his perpetually dazed flower-child assistant Mariposa are working on unspecified matters requiring a great deal of secrecy and isolation. (In another great example of Hobbs’ knack for enhancing his movies through use of ‘found’ locations and props, Dr Clemens laboratory is housed in an incredibly sinister looking concrete pile that is apparently an abandoned US government cyanide factory.)


One night, Doc Clemens encounters Eddie, a simple-minded local sheep-farmer who has ended up penniless after a night of drinking following a fruit machine jackpot in Reno resulted in his being fleeced and run out of town by the Virginia City locals. Drunkenly collapsing amid his beloved sheep after the Doc drives him home (“how’s God’s children tonight?” he asks them), Eddie witnesses something that the film seems to invite us to interpret as a divine/miraculous happenstance.

First he sees a blinding light in the sky, and glimpses strange, swirling creatures in the darkness above him. Churning, super-imposed sheep imagery fills the screen and loud bahhing mixes with religious choral music on the soundtrack as a flash of lightning descends from the heavens, and Eddie awakes to find himself cradling a mewling, misshapen mass of newly-birthed sheep-flesh.




When he checks in on Eddie the next morning, the Doc apparently recognises the birth of this misbegotten creature as “an amazing event, almost incredible from a scientific standpoint… possibly the result of chromosomic breakdown and cross-fertilisation”, and immediately rushes it back to his lab, installing it in an incubator for further study. And, just when we’re wondering why the head of an anthropology department would need a fully-functioning medical lab equipped with a high-tech incubator and an all-purpose assortment of other mad scientist equipment, Clemens helpfully fills us in at length regarding the reasons he really came to the Comstock – namely, the investigation of “..a certain theory of cellular realignment..” inspired by unusual fossil imprints found in the abandoned mines, and goldrush-era legends concerning a supposed ‘mine monster’. Pity the poor clerk at the University of Reno who had to process the invoices for that one.

Meanwhile, back in town, other business is afoot, and Hobbs wants to make sure we know all about it. Mayor Silverdale – patriarchal head of the Virginia City Historical Society and also, allegedly, of a secret society known as the 601s who ‘protect’ the city’s interests – is having breakfast with one Mr Barnstable (played by Alabama himself, the one and only Christopher Brooks). Barnstable has come to the town on behalf of a Howard Hughes-esque billionaire named Rupert Reich with the intention of persuading the townsfolk to sell their mining concessions, allowing the Reich Corporation to commence a programme of economically-devastating industrial stripmining.



Understandably, Silverdale – whose desire to preserve the status quo upon which his power rests verges on fascistic paranoia – is less than sympathetic to Reich’s overtures. When the charismatic Barnstable refuses to take no for an answer and leave town though, Silverdale and his cronies decide to take more drastic action.

Somewhat uniquely, this action consists of seeking to ruin Barnstable’s reputation in the eyes of the townspeople by encouraging him to take part in a shooting contest during the town’s ‘Bonanza Day’ celebrations, then framing him with the death of a beloved local dog (whose owner, the local sheriff, instructs the beast to play dead).


Several long scenes are spent elaborating the details of this unfeasible ruse, as we hear about how the dog has been deposited with the sheriff’s nephew in Albuquerque for safe keeping, and witness the tearful funeral that is held for the purportedly slain mutt in the town’s central church. (“He was only a dog, but he filled out lives with joy and gaiety.. until a bullet struck him down” opines Silverdale’s lackey Maldove in the midst of the most solemn and overblown dog funeral oration in cinema history.)

In spite of his new status as a pariah and dog murderer though, Barnstable continues his quest to try to win over the townsfolk, experiencing much toing and froing and double-crossing that we won’t bother going into here, until he eventually finds himself on the verge of being lynched by the black-shirted 601s, after discovering that Silverdale has already gone over his head and sold out the town directly to Reich.

Escaping the lynch mob with the help of brothel proprietor/clairvoyant Madame Alta, Barnstable seeks sanctuary with Doc Clemens at Indian Flats, and it is during the subsequent tear gas assault by Silverdale’s men that the now fully-grown ‘Godmonster’ makes its inevitable escape.


It must be said at this point that, in purely technical terms, ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’ is not really a great work of cinema. In keeping with what you might expect from a largely unheralded regional genre film, the pacing is pretty sluggish and the direction perfunctory (give or take the occasional moment of oddball inspiration). In spite of the remarkable shooting locations and the often astounding imagery presented on-screen, Hobbs works predominantly in bland medium and long shot, with camera movement clearly at a premium. Unconvincing post-production audio inserts are sometimes used to enhance or replace dialogue from original shoot, whilst the music track is largely comprised of stock ‘suspense’ cues and outdated theremin jams seemingly pulled straight from a ‘50s sci-fi/monster flick.

The performances – though less blunt than those in ‘Alabama’ – are still of the declamatory, am-dram variety common to many off-the-map independent films, meaning that if characters don’t QUITE enter a scene with the fingers looped in their belt buckles and say “WELL, I DO DECLARE..”, they constantly seem to be on the verge of doing so.

Not every story needs nuanced, method style intensity to get where it’s going though, and likewise, ‘Godmonster..’ doesn’t really *need* to be a great technical achievement to make its point, when the wayward imagination and unguessable sideways logic that Hobbs packs into his screenplay instantly serves to separate him from the Don Dohlers and William Grefes of this world.

By necessity, ‘Godmonster..’ is a slower, more realistic venture than ‘Alabama’, but even in his most earth-bound moments, Hobbs can’t help but get a bit weird. In the film’s opening few minutes depicting Eddie’s night out in Reno, rows of slot machines wheeze and drone like part of an alien landscape, as salty characters ramble their way through sprawling mouthfuls of quintessential Hobbsian dialogue. (“It’s getting’ up into drinking time… it’s the golden hours, boy… full of banjo-dust and starry-eyed broads, lookin’ for a good time…”, announces one Elbow Johnson, apropos of nothing, as he props up the bar.)

Elsewhere, Hobbs’ obvious love of street parades and Western culture is in full effect as he comes on like some cranky, cowboy Fellini during the scenes depicting Virginia City’s ‘Bonanza Day’, filling the screen with leering, drunken faces, blaring oom-pah bands, cheering prostitutes, pie-eating contests, railroad spike-driving demonstrations, sixgun-blasting yahoos and you name it.



As the film progresses, it starts to accumulate some heavy psychedelic and spiritual undertones too, regardless of Hobbs’ apparent efforts to try to ground his tale in scientific/economic reality.

Making their way through Virginia City’s hilltop graveyard, Eddie and Mariposa witness Madame Alta pushing her face against the branches of a tree, apparently in some kind of supernatural trance. Sitting beneath an impressive obelisk (‘Captain Storie’s Monument’), Eddie gives his own impressionistic account of the ‘Godmonster’s birth (“when I had this.. vision.. it seemed like the whole sky opened up.. filling the barn with gold-dust..”) whilst Mariposa chimes in with some trippy local folklore (“the Indians say they owe their origins to the marriage of a white wolf and a princess.. the wolf turned into a rock at the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain”).

Occult vibes continue to predominate when Alta gives Mariposa a particularly eerie fortune reading, warning her against “..a great machine, a machine of science, a machine of death..” as bead curtains swing in the breeze and the theremin goes into overdrive. “I’m clairvoyant remember… I see in the dark” Alta announces, before the scene cuts to a POV shot of railway tracks rumbling through the darkness in an abandoned mine tunnel.




This strange thread of mystical / emotional logic, which seems to be embodied by both of the film’s noteworthy female characters - in stark contrast to the boorish materialism exhibited by most of the males - is further explored in one of the film’s most peculiar and memorable scenes, when Mariposa corners the escaped monster and tries to communicate with it and soothe its anger. Engaging it in a kind of strange, cosmic dance, she attempts to lead it down the mountain…until Eddie stumbles onto the scene and thoughtlessly hurls a rock at the frightened creature.


And at the emotional heart of the film of course lies the ‘Godmonster’ itself. Designed and created by Hobbs in his trademark ‘eco-art’ style, it is one of the most hilarious, pitiful, godforsaken beasts imaginable - a shambling bag of fur and bone that looks like the contents of a KFC bucket wrapped up in a moth-eaten carpet, topped with a head that could have been stolen from a mummified camel. With opaque, black eye sockets, the creature appears to be blind, swinging a grotesque, overgrown limb ahead of itself like a kind of primitive feeler as it endeavours to keep its unstable frame upright.

Probably the most achingly sad creature ever created for a movie, just seeing the poor thing (which looks to be about the size of a large cow) painstakingly drag itself up the hillside on underdeveloped legs, shuffling about confusedly as Silverdale’s rough-riders surround it with lassos, is absolutely heartbreaking.

Only the cruel idiots who make up most of this film’s cast of characters could possibly deem this unfortunate animal a ‘monster’, and even its obligatory ‘rampage’ is lovably pathetic (it inadvertently destroys a Chevron gas station when it knocks over a petrol pump, then frightens some children by stealing their picnic food).



After the creature is captured, Silverdale calls an impromptu gathering at the town dump, and, absurdly, announces the poor beast – now confined in a giant parrot cage strapped to the back of a pick-up truck - as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’, outlining his plans to make a fortune charging tourists to see it.

The assembled townsfolk recoil in horror when the repugnant sight of the wounded, hog-tied beast is revealed (“kill it, kill it!”, someone shouts in disgust), and the crowd, who by this point have caught wind of the fact that Silverdale has sold them out to The Reich Corporation, attempt to charge the creature, pelting it with rubbish as the gathering collapses into chaos.

Coming totally out of the blue, the sheer, directionless frenzy that follows is really quite unsettling. “Kill them, kill them, run them down!”, Silverdale yells to his outriders as they lay into the crowd. A frightening and tragic scene of destruction ensues, as cars burn, citizens scream in each other’s faces and fight in the dirt, and horses trample screaming innocent bystanders. It’s not exactly the Odessa Steps I guess, but something about the modest staging of the scene, the way Hobbs is able to suddenly create a kind of apocalyptic fervour with about forty extras and a few cars and horses scattered around a bit of Nevada wasteground, is truly horrific.



In the end, the selfish, squabbling humans barely even notice as the long-suffering ‘Godmonster’ is pushed down the slope to its fiery death; a failed messiah whose brief and pointless tenure on earth has yielded nothing but pain, confusion and fear. As it suffocates beneath a mountain of burning trash, perhaps it remembers those few fleeting seconds of inter-species communication, when Mariposa led it in that strange dance on the mountainside, before a well-aimed rock ended even that glimmer of mutual recognition.

“People have said, ‘Why does everyone go crazy at the end?’,” recalls Hobbs in the Thrower interview. “Well it’s in the dialogue – they’ve been had! Even the distributor, who’s a smart guy, said, ‘Everybody goes nuts at the end! Is that what you always do, Hobbs? In every movie you make everybody always goes nuts at the end!’ I said, ‘No, for chrissakes listen to the dialogue!’ It’s in there – people in the crowd shouting ‘Silverdale’s got our money!’ But you know what? The images were so strong that nobody listened. That’s why some of my movies fail, in some things. People say, ‘Oh, the story’s weak, Hobbs doesn’t know how to do stories.’ That’s bullshit! My imagery is so powerful that they can’t listen.”



As the film ends, the camera pans upward to frame Silverdale, still ranting like a maniac, as a charred, apocalyptic landscape stretches before him. A few sheep graze contentedly as noxious sulphuric gas seeps up from earth around them, and the theremin wheezes on tunelessly.

Thus ends the cinematic career of Fredric Hobbs, wrapping up the strange tale he’s been stringing us along with for 85 minutes in about the bleakest, most misanthropic manner imaginable.

Some may question the proposition that independent American cinema has been significantly poorer for his absence in subsequent decades, but it’s certainly been a hell of a lot less strange, and that, I think, is a shame.

Caviarby Theodore Sturgeon(Sphere, 1968)

“He had never held a girl before. He was not terrified; he had used that up earlier when he carried her in and kicked the door shut behind him and had heard the steady drip of blood from her soaked skirt, and before that, when he when he had thought her dead there on the curb, and again when she made that sound, that sigh or whispered moan. He had brought her in and when he saw all that blood he had turned left, turned right, put her down on the floor, his brains all clabbered and churned and his temples athump with the unaccustomed exercise. All he could act on was Don’t get blood on the bedspread.”

Best-known to many as the man who coined the unassailable critical maxim “90% of everything is crap”, Theodore Sturgeon’s published writing has in my experience been mercifully unencumbered by the limitations of its author’s own diktat. Certainly, his best-known novels (‘More Than Human’, ‘Some of your Blood’) are amongst the best the classic era SF has to offer, with his writing bringing a refreshingly visceral, humanistic and darkly humorous quality to a genre that was all too often lacking in that kinda thing.

Despite owning several volumes of them though (the covers, the covers), I’ve never previously had a go at tackling Sturgeon’s short stories, which would seem to make a quick rip through author’s-personal-faves collection ‘Caviar’ long overdue.

How did it go? Well the back cover’s suggestion that Sturgeon’s imaginings are “macabre and perhaps even a little sadistic” seems a pretty spectacular understatement in view of the opening story here, ‘Bright Segment’ (1955), a jaw-dropping tale written from the point of view of a mentally handicapped (possibly autistic?) man who finds a stabbed woman bleeding to death on the street and drags her back to his one-room bedsit to ‘fix her up right’. The exhaustively detailed accounts of his DIY surgery - involving duct tape, pliers, aluminium gauze and sewing needles - will be enough to make even the hardiest horror fans go a bit weak at the knees, but thankfully our fella is in fact a skilled and conscientious ‘repairman’, and when the woman eventually regains consciousness, the fractious relationship of mutual dependence between the two proves more unsettling than any amount of gore.

Sadly none of the tales that follow are quite as memorable as this extraordinary opener (which could form the basis for a great, disturbing low budget horror flick, assuming it hasn’t already), but they’re all worthwhile to one extent or another, most notably for the way in which Sturgeon seems to end up completely reversing the standard expectations of SF stories, crafting tales full of solid, fast-moving prose, engaging characters and weird incidental detail… but often weighed down by central concepts or twist endings that seem hackneyed, predictable or just plain dumb (to a modern readership, at least).

Case in point is ‘Ghost of a Chance’ (1941), which begins with an intriguing late night encounter between a worldly ladies man and a potential conquest whose behaviour seems to defy all reason, including an opening paragraph that’s hard to beat in the gettin’-the-reader-hooked stakes;

“She said ‘There’s something following me!’ in a throttled voice, and started to run.
It sort of got me. Maybe because she was so tiny and her hair was so white. Maybe because, her white hair and all, she looked so young and so helpless. But mostly, I think, because of what she said. ‘There something following me.’ Not ‘someone’. ‘Something.’ So I just naturally hauled out after her.”

Subsequently, the story takes in a detour via “the Duke’s beer garden party”, during which the titular bohemian aristocrat amazes guests with his twelve foot high sunflower and trained squirrel, before a slip up on the part of our protagonist spells disaster for both, ending the party in a scene of chaos akin to something out of a ‘60s Peter Sellers movie. Sadly though, this otherwise highly enjoyable tale eventually concludes with a groan-worthy, sub-Scooby Doo wrap up that would make you want to punch Sturgeon in the face if he’d spun you the yarn in person.

Most of the other stories follow suit to one extent or another, with the straight SF numbers generally faring better than the light-hearted horror/mystery ones, but nonetheless Sturgeon’s inane skill as a writer kept me truckin’ throughout, and, just like his novels, it’s strangely refreshing to encounter an SF writer who puts more emphasis on strong, empathetic characters and emotional gut-punches than on ingenious metaphysical conundrums. A swell read, with certain reservations.

Back.

Well, I'm back from Japan.

You can see & read about some stuff I did there here, if yr interested.

Meanwhile, just thought I'd drop a quick heads up for any UK residents, to let you know that Alex Cox's 'Repo Chick' will be available to watch for two more days on the BBC iplayer.

I just watched it, and to my surprise I thought it was really great! I guess some people might be put off in advance by the broad satire, bright colours and lo-fi special effects, but I feel their opinion should probably be disregarded. That stuff all sat real well with me, and the wayward/imaginative script, fast-moving, goofy tone and great ensemble acting from the cast all helped bring it home. Best Alex Cox movie in years in fact, and I'd love to see it get some wider distribution/recognition. High five to Mr. Cox for pulling the whole thing off so well, and kudos to the BBC for giving a whirl too.

Goin’ To Japan / Week of Hong

Well I’m that’s all the Think Pink we’ve got time for at the moment. Pity, because there are loads more pinky violence films I’d like to have written about – guess I’ll save ‘em up for a second installment at some point in future.

As mentioned in the introductory post, I’m going to Japan tomorrow, so won’t be posting anything for the next few weeks.

In the meantime though, why not pop over to Lost Video Archive, where the folks who brought you the unforgettable Linda Blair and Yaphet Kotto events are gearing up for a Week of Hong on April 9th to 14th, celebrating the career of prolific Asian-American character actor James Hong.

I’ll confess that the name James Hong didn’t immediately ring a bell with me, but it only took one look at a photo to provoke instant “Oh, THAT guy!” recognition. Because seriously, Mr Hong has done sterling work in a LOT of movies, many of which you will have seen.

I’m sad that I won’t be able to participate this time due to being out of the country (guess that 2500 word dissection of ‘Wayne’s World II’ will have to wait), but I’d very much urge you to check out the contributions of the other participants later this month, and maybe even consider signing up yourself if you’re a blog-writing type person.

Anyway, take care of yourselves, and I’ll be back in the second half of April, maybe with some exciting things in my suitcase to watch/scan/write about.

Think Pink: Sex & Fury(Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

Thus far in this series we’ve been looking at films with a contemporary setting, but there were also quite a few pinky violence-affiliated films with a period setting - attempts to incorporate the 'violent female action' sub-genre into the more traditional confines of the ninkyo (‘chivalry’) films pioneered by Toei during the ‘50s and ‘60s, presumably with the aim of rejuvenating the latter genre’s fading box office appeal.

Of the three films I’d consider a rough ‘holy trinity’ of these kinds of cross-overs, two - Toshiya Fujita’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ and Teruo Ishii’s startling ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’ – are very much borderline entries that I’d be reluctant to place under the ‘pinky violence’ banner. The third though – ‘Sex & Fury’ – certainly makes no bones about its alignment to the genre, as the reliably manic Norifumi Suzuki drags all the chaos and sleaze of his girl gang and WIP films back in time, with (needless to say) hugely entertaining results, working with what looks to have been an unusually lavish budget to create a movie that's basically the closest thing the world will ever see to a Pinky Violence Historical Epic.

As distinct from feudal era Samurai films, ninkyo movies are usually set in the Meiji era, which began with the end of Japan’s isolation from the wider world in 1868 and officially ended in 1912. A period of vast social change and political turmoil, the Meiji era can (in filmic terms at least) be roughly equated to Japan’s own ‘Wild West’, with the heroes of these movies – gamblers and gangsters attempting to uphold the traditional virtues of chivalry in the face of strife, corruption and malign foreign intervention – perhaps veeery roughly equating to the last-real-men-in-a-doomed-world heroes of a Leone or Peckinpah western.

I mention this background simply because it plays into ‘Sex & Fury’ to a considerable extent. Our tale begins in 1886 (or Meiji year 16) with a young Ocho seeing her father (a police detective) killed by yakuza. (Funny isn’t it how so many PV films feature daughters avenging their fathers, a fairly rare turn of events in Western revenge films?) He dies clutching a handful of hanafuna playing cards, providing the transition in to a wonderfully stylised opening sequence that sees Ocho, now grown up into the shape of Reiko Ike, tattooed and wielding a short-sword, striking combat poses amid a brightly-lit pop-art fantasia that reproduces the imagery from the bloody cards on a huge scale – a pretty striking visual device that immediately marks out ‘Sex & Fury’ as something a bit grander in ambition than your average PV flick.

This impression is underscored by the fact that the credits are immediately followed by a lightning fast history lesson, with captions and still photographs giving us the skinny on significant Meiji era events, including the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, leading all the way up to 1905 (Meiji 38). “Now is a civilised era of enlightenment”, the on-screen text concludes, on what we already know is going to be a blackly ironic note.

An independent woman par excellence, the grown-up Ocho seems to be doing alright for herself pursuing her interests as a gambler, sword-fighter and compulsive pick-pocket, but fate swiftly takes a hand when she steps in to aid the escape of an apparently crazed anarchist who has just tried to assassinate a big-shot politician named Kurokawa. (Very much a ‘modern’ sort of chap, he is seen engaging in internationalist power-broking in baronial, Western style surroundings.)

After Ocho subsequently witnesses an entirely unconnected (or is it..?) murder at a gambling house she frequents, the boss of the house apparently dispatches a gang of armed men to take her down, leading directly to what is almost certainly the film’s overall highlight, an absolutely breathtaking sequence that sees our heroine leaping nude from the bath and slaughtering about a dozen warriors in glorious slo mo – as the snow falls on the ornamental garden outside, naturally. I’ll admit that even on my second viewing I wasn’t *entirely* sure what’s supposed to be going on here plot-wise, but who cares frankly – the sight of Reiko Ike, blood-soaked, tattooed and naked, performing acrobatic leaps and dives as she severs limbs and slices throats surely has to be one of the quintessential images of all Japanese exploitation cinema.

It’s an exhilarating bit of filmmaking, inexplicably accompanied by a jaunty tune that sounds like something off a Herb Alpert album, and the crazy echo on the sword swoosh sound effects alone blows my mind. Aside from anything else, it’s a testament to the professionalism of the film’s editors, technicians and fight choreographers that they managed to cut together a five minute, multi-angle sequence in which a naked woman spins around a room fighting multiple assailants, without once breaking Japanese cinema’s pubic hair embargo. And if the rest of ‘Sex & Fury’ never quite manages to top this scene, well, it’s certainly not for want of trying. Unexpectedly throwing in a sequence that outdoes the finale of 90% of action movies in the opening fifteen minutes sets the bar pretty high for the subsequent seventy five.

By the time we’ve got our breath back and poured a stiff drink, an ambitious and convoluted tale has already begun to unfold, honouring the film’s historical setting with a real Dickensian sprawl of intersecting storylines, packed with intrigue and melodrama to beat the band.

First off, it turns out that the anarchist whose life Ocho saved is desperately in love with a foreign spy named Christina. Not only “the foremost female gambler from a Western country”, but also apparently “the most popular dancer in the stormy city of London, England”, Christina is played by none other than Scandinavian sexploitation goddess Christina Lindberg. Unable to even speak the same language, it seems its love at first sight for these two, prompting all manner of star-crossed shenanigans, set against some pretty complex political machinations. Christina’s ‘handler’ is a chap named Guinness, an Englishman and guest of Kurokawa who secretly aims to bring Japan under the influence of the British Empire by means of “starting a second opium war in this barbaric country”.

As an aside, can anyone help me ID the actor who plays Guinness? IMDB has him down as one ‘Mark Darling’ in his only screen appearance, but I’m SURE I’ve seen the guy in a few Euro-horror movies and such. Anyone care to jog my memory?


Like any good pinky violence heroine, Ocho has her own gang of loyal female buddies, time in the form of a sisterhood of fellow orphan pick-pockets who operate as part of a kind of benevolent Bill Sykes / Fagin type operation overseen by the big-hearted lady who describes herself as their adopted mother. Then there’s a sub-plot about Ocho taking up the cause of a dying gambler who was trying to raise money to stop his sister is being sold into slavery. Oh, and of course she’s also trying to identify the coded yakuza animal tattoos that identify her father’s killers, in order to wreak the necessary vengeance upon them.

So seriously, there’s all kindsa shit going on, all realised on the kind of scale that Western exploitation flicks of the same period barely even attempted. Suzuki certainly doesn’t skimp on the sex or the fury either though, happily rocketing through his usual line-up of OTT set-pieces, this time taking in a battle with switchblade-wielding nuns onboard an express train to Osaka, and Lindberg in a cow-girl outfit whipping a chained Ike to the accompaniment of spookshow organ music in a weird Christian chapel / torture chamber straight out of ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (what is WITH this guy’s thing for cowgirl outfits and Xtian imagery anyway..?). One particularly eye-popping / credulity-stretching scene even features Ocho’s pick-pocket friends being tied to the ceiling and beaten with sticks in a darkened room that looks like one of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable concerts, prints of Japanese military exploits projected on the wall overlaid with psychedelic lighting and flashing strobes.

Plenty of the usual rapey unpleasantness is also in evidence of course, but even several lengthy (semi-consensual) sex scenes don’t slacken the pace – they’re excitingly shot with kinetic camerawork and some winningly kinky details (the bit where Ocho kills a vengeance-recipient by smearing her body with poisoned perfume is worthy of Jess Franco’s fevered imaginings). Many things ‘Sex & Fury’ may be, but it’s NEVER boring, the beautiful, lively photography full of fast cutting, crash zooms and focus shifts, detailed close-ups and solid blocks of bright colour, reminiscent of both Jack Hill’s better exploitation efforts and the technicolor frenzies of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Toyko Drifter’.

As with many of Norifumi Suzuki’s films, ‘packed with incident’ scarcely does the maximalist approach on display here justice. To all intents and purposes, it’s a‘70s exploitation fan’s wet dream come true, a rollercoaster ride through everything that made that decade’s popular cinema so wild and vibrant, and a directorial high wire act that serves up enough sex and fury to satisfy the audience’s appetites ten times over, with vast swathes of barbed socio-political commentary, historical melodrama and pop art visual excess thrown in for good measure – the kind of densely-packed, rip-roaring 90 minute entertainment that shows up today’s slack-ass multiplex directors for the time-wasting clowns they are. God bless you Norifumi, you freakin’ maniac.

Surprisingly, about the one thing this movie doesn’t manage to cram in is an enka ballad, so instead here’s a nice English language voice-over segment in which Christina Lindberg discusses the sad lot of a female spy.