FRANCO FILES: The Diabolical Dr. Z(1965)

AKA:
‘Miss Muerte’, ‘Das Geheimnis des Dr. Z’, ‘In the Grip of the Maniac’.

Context:

During the mid 1960s, it seems Jess Franco was primarily working out of Paris, building on the relative success of ‘62s The Awful Dr. Orlof with a whole series of low budget pulpy capers, many of which are sadly quite difficult to track down these days. So for the moment I’ll have to merely imagine the joys contained within the Orson Welles-endorsed jazz-noir of ‘Death Whistles a Blues’ (1964), the comic book euro-spy shenanigans of 1967’s ‘Lucky The Inscrutable’, and the sight of Eddie Constantine tangling with some enraged automatons (presumably) in ‘Attack of the Robots’ (1966). Thanks to the sterling efforts of Mondo Macabro though, we can at least enjoy a pristine presentation of a film that the few critics who have seen fit to comment on such things rate as one of the best of Franco’s black & white years, ‘Miss Muerte’, better known to English-speaking viewers as ‘The Diabolical Dr. Z’.

Content:

Ok, take a deep breath folks, because I'm afraid we've got some plot synopsisin' to get through.

After escaping from a high security prison, an exhausted convict has the bad luck of falling into the hands of one Dr Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano), a blind elderly scientist with some peculiar notions about the manipulation of the nervous system, which he believes can be ‘adjusted’ to refine a creature’s balance of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tendencies. This being a zany mad scientist movie of course, these somewhat esoteric concerns (based, we’re told, on the work of a certain Dr. Orlof) also allow him to administer electrical charges to subjects’ spinal columns, frying their brains and forcing them to obey his every command.

Delighted to have a live human to test his theories on, the wheelchair-bound doctor takes his discoveries to what appears to be the local council of research scientists, or somesuch. When his esteemed colleagues mock and belittle his ideas, Zimmer is so overcome that he promptly suffers a heart attack and dies on the spot.

And that would seem to be that. But, stepping up to prevent this from being a very short mad scientist movie indeed, we have Zimmer’s devoted daughter Irma (Mabel Karr), who vows to continue her father’s work by any means necessary, and also to hunt down and destroy the callous scientists whose scorn drove him to such a sad end.

At this point, the plot will be starting to sound familiar to those who’ve seen Franco’s rather dreary ‘She Killed In Ecstasy’ (1970), amongst others. Could we be in for an early example of the director’s seemingly endless stream of softcore variations on the old ‘The Bride Wore Black’ storyline?

Well… sort of. But there’re enough twists and turns left in this prototype to make it a somewhat weirder and more enjoyable prospect. You see, whilst she’s contemplating the form her vengeance will take, Irma finds herself (as you do in a Franco movie) attending a freaky strip club, where she catches a performance by one ‘Miss Death’ (Estella Blain), a dancer who writhes orgasmically around a giant spider web, pretending to dispatch helpless male mannequins.

Having faked her own death via a convenient car fire and a murdered hitchhiker, Irma – with the help of the aforementioned prison escapee and her father’s housekeeper, now both mindless zombie slaves – contrives to kidnap Miss Death (real name Nadia), conditioning her to obey unquestioningly via the now familiar spinal shock treatment, and sending her out to track down the disparaging doctors, seducing and killing them one by one with her long, poisoned fingernails!

So there ya go. Interestingly, it seems Franco co-wrote this one with Luis Bunuel’s regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and whilst there’s certainly nothing here to suggest that Carrière took this assignment as seriously as his work for Bunuel and other art-house directors, we can at least speculate as to how much of the movie’s unusually eventful (by Franco standards) plotting, its queasy psychological overtones and more outré elements, might have originated with him.


Kink:

For the period, ‘Miss Muerte’ seems singularly erotically charged, but it’s sometimes difficult to quite figure out why. Although it’s definitely at the saucier end of mid-‘60s horror, nothing here is *particularly* shocking or explicit, but somehow the whole thing is just sort of… kinky. Everything seems to crackle with a slightly unsavoury sort of sexual energy, as unusual bits of fetishistic imagery pop up here, there and everywhere.

There’s an unmistakably sapphic, S&M-like quality to the way Irma treats her female victims and slaves – a line of thinking that may only be only hinted at here, but will need no further explanation for fans of Franco’s later work – whilst a lengthy sequence in which she murders the aforementioned hitchhiker during an off-road skinny-dipping excursion sees her donning surgical gloves over a dripping wet swimsuit as she takes the wheel of the car to run down the bikini-clad girl; provocative, to say the least.

Miss Death’s spider web striptease is of course the film’s big erotic highlight though, and as befits Franco’s legendary enthusiasm for staging such bizarre nightclub sequences, it is absolutely spell-binding, causing what until this point seemed to be a simple mad science b-movie to suddenly disappear down an erotic avant-garde black hole; accompanied by free-form, discordant wailing and creepily abused Indian strings, Blain writhes wildly as a white web is projected across a featureless black background… human eyes dart back and forth beneath the face of a porcelain mannequin, as the rest of the film’s world seems to vanish into deep space… and god bless Jess for managing to make all this *sexy*, for god’s sake.

Not that it takes that much effort I suppose – the transparent spider body-stocking (initially complemented by a Dracula cape) that Blain wears both during her act and through the rougher business of her subsequent kidnap and brain-washing is extremely risqué, only barely managing to conceal her modesty as she flees from Irma’s zombie henchman and wrestles on the dusty ground with Dr Z’s housekeeper, and by the time Irma takes her on lion-tamer style with a raised chair and whip, it’s safe to say things things have heated up to the level of psycho-sexual frenzy that Franco would go on to explore more thoroughly in his best films of the ‘70s and ‘80s. 3/5

Creepitude:

Very little here is creepy in the old school gothic horror sense, but in terms of yr unsettling medical imagery and furtive perversions of science type stuff, it’s totally out to lunch.

For a start, Dr. Z has a great, weird laboratory going on. Franco’s early ‘70s run of Frankenstein films revealed his obvious love of this sort of thing, and the selection of paraphernalia on show here is truly strange: giant sun lamps, primitive computer equipment, banks of oscillators, maddening flashing lights and a menagerie of caged animals. The undoubted star of the show though is one of the film’s most memorable conceits – a sort of remote controlled confinement device that allows a captive to twist around in place whilst strapped to an upright gurney, wrists and ankles clamped by flexible robotic claws, perforated like giant drinking straws. Never given a word of explanation, this thing is totally unique in my experience of watching strange horror & sci-fi films - more like a weird bondage toy gone horribly wrong than something you’d be liable to find in a non-Jess Franco affiliated laboratory.

There is something really peculiar too about the sound design in the laboratory sequences, as demonstrated by the deep, melancholy jazz theme that plays over yet another bonkers scene in which Irma operates on her own scarred face - an incredibly strange and unsettling moment. (Interestingly, some shots here are framed with jagged black borders and white lines, in what seems like an audacious bit of pre-pop art stylistic invention.)

These icky shots of Irma cutting her own burned flesh with a scalpel, and of Nadia having electrified rods driven into her forehead and naked back during her zombification, aren’t terribly strong stuff today, but their graphic nastiness seems deliberately designed to shock and appal a ‘60s audience. Perhaps taking their cue from Franju’s infamous surgery scene in ‘Yeux Sans Visage’, they seem to be aiming for an instinctive gut response - ‘gore moments’ before the dawn of gore.

And on a more conventionally atmospheric note, sequences like opening prison break and Miss Death’s pursuit of one of her victims through cramped, vertiginous streets of what looks like some Dutch lakeside town have a wonderfully, shadow-haunted noir quality to them… but we’ll get to that in a minute. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

Given what’s been outlined above, it shouldn’t take much work to justify a good score in this category, and indeed, ‘Miss Muerte’ draws upon all manner of 20th century pulp fiction to aid its assorted carnage, with a particular accent on the French tradition.

In addition to the story’s obvious debt to Franju and ‘Yeux Sans Visage’, there are other sequences such as the one in which the villains asphyxiate poor Dr Moroni using a fake taxi with an interior exhaust pipe – an idea that makes no sense whatsoever in script terms, but seems to have been introduced solely to bring a gleefully ghoulish, Fantomas-like sensibility to proceedings. And elsewhere, in between the more contemporary horror thrills provided by poison-nailed zombie strippers, chilling train murders and Frankensteinian bondage craziness, the clued up viewer will be able to identify deliberate nods not just to Franju and Feuillade, but also to figures as diverse as Robert Bresson, Cornell Woolrich, James Whale and Orson Welles. 4/5

Altered States:

At this point, Franco’s films were often closer to being conventionally ‘well-made’ than his later, more wayward work, as well as using scripts that take greater pains to conform to the logic of linear plotting (in spite of the crazy subject matter). Often, this striving for cinematic ‘normality’ can serve to short-circuit the kind of hypnotic drift that characterises Franco’s ‘70s work, but, so long as you’re prepared to tolerate the lethargic pacing and workaday ‘investigative’ scenes, this higher degree of formalism actually pans out pretty well in ‘..Dr. Z’.

If my rough estimate of the timing involved is anywhere near correct then Franco was fresh off working as an assistant to Orson Welles on ‘Chimes At Midnight’ when he came to make ‘..Dr.Z’*, and, perhaps fired up by that experience, his desire to make his presence felt as a ‘proper’ filmmaker can be clearly seen here right from the opening prison-break, with its audacious POV camera work and moody, Wellesian tracking shots. Subsequently, a seemingly endless supply of long corridors, imposing low angles and multi-layered, deep focus mise en scene does little to hide Franco’s obvious fascination with Welles' technique, giving the film a dense, vertiginous sort of quality that renders it both atmospheric and faintly trippy in a way that fans may not quite have been expecting.

This is helped by the way Franco often makes an effort to inject potentially dull scenes with at least some gratuitous weirdness, as can be seen when an exposition-heavy conference between the film’s police duo (Franco himself as the local detective, with British mad-composer-genius Daniel White making a rare cameo as “Inspector Grinder of Scotland Yard”) takes places whilst a lady in evening dress blows long, discordant notes on a trumpet in the background, almost drowning out their dialogue.

And speaking of Mr. White, the dissonant, expressionistic jazz score he provides here adds considerably to the film’s top-heavy, Wellesian flavour, generating some moments of real cognitive dissoannce as it accompanies flailing robotic arms, feverish hints of bondage and icky surgery sequences, helping to ensure that, whilst it might be a stretch to call ‘..Dr. Z’ ‘surreal’, it’s certainly pretty damn weird. 3/5

Sight-seeing:

Aside from a few references to a place called ‘Hartog’ (a quick google search reveals no European towns of that name), the setting of ‘The Diabolical Dr. Z’ remains entirely vague. Germany? Holland? France? Anybody want to take a guess?

Studio sets and anonymous suburban locations predominate, and it would likely take more research than I’ve got time for to pin down either the Spanish looking castle exterior that appears at one point (looks a lot like the one in ‘..Dr Orloff’?), or the impressive municipal building that Dr. Zimmer enters to attend the medical conference.

The film’s sight-seeing highlight is probably the aforementioned lakeside slum town (my instincts say it looks Dutch, but again, who knows). The whole stalk / suspense sequence set amongst the winding streets is wonderful, full of slow-moving shadows and artfully composed shots that provide an early example of Franco’s talent for both picking out distinctive locations and utilising them in unearthly, transformative fashion. 2/5

Conclusion:

Of the innumerable mad science movies made in Europe during the ‘60s, this is definitely the wildest I’ve come across, imbuing its zany storyline with a sense of lingering perversity and a cracked aesthetic sensibility that is pure Franco.

Inevitably, the film takes a heftier chunk from ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ than some may be comfortable with, but if ‘The Awful Dr Orlof’ can be seen as a “garage rock cover version” of Franju’s masterpiece (a nice turn of phrase I picked up from this article), ‘..Dr Z’ returns to the same source material for something more akin to a side-long psychedelic freakout.

That said, the “consumer advice” aspect of my responsibilities as a movie reviewer causes me to note in closing that, whilst I certainly enjoyed it a great deal, ‘The Diabolical Dr. Z’ is perhaps not *quite* as much of a b-movie fun factory as the review I’ve just written would tend to imply. As is often the case when Jess Franco tackles stories that should by rights be snappy and fast-moving, much of the film has an infuriatingly meandering feel to it, with a lot of down-time between the highlights that drags even more than usual. As such, those who have a bug-bear about movies being ‘too slow’ should probably note that they may not find the assorted craziness outlined above delivered to them quite as quickly or regularly as they might wish.

But, as Franco fans will be well aware, all of his movies have their share of slack, and such gripes are minor indeed compared to the wealth of batty riches that a film like ‘The Diabolical Dr Z’ offers the indulgent viewer.

 

 

*Unfortunately we don't have much time here to go into the story of how Franco hooked up with Welles, and why he wasn’t credited on the finished film, but, uh, yeah… it happened. Look it up online, or read about it in ‘Immoral Tales’, or ask me about it sometime.

Wow, I Actually Saw a New Film:Some Thoughts on ‘Django Unchained’.



This week saw me undertaking my bi-annual trip to the cinema to actually see a new film, and turns out it gave me a whole bunch of stuff to get off my chest, so why not do so right here, I thought to myself, if only to spare my real life friends the hassle of having to listen?

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Readers should be aware that there are going to be some fairly extensive spoilers in what follows, so if that’s an issue for you, I’d suggest waiting until you’ve seen the film before reading.

***

To begin, I should state that I like Quentin Tarantino’s films and offer no apology for it. For all that their thefts from other films can prove irksome at times, they remain ridiculously good fun, technically impeccable, and generally represent the best (only?) chance we currently get to see some of the spirit of 60s/70s low budget filmmaking blown up to 21st century blockbuster proportions. And like all QT pictures,’ Django..’ is indeed hugely entertaining - a defiantly UN-subtle, brightly hued business that’ll have you leaving the auditorium with a swing in your stride and a cool song in your head (hopefully the newly composed Ennio Morricone one, which is bloody stunning – wish it had been allowed to play out for longer in the film).

Moreso than any of his previous films though, the second you start to think more deeply on what just transpired on screen, the illusion collapses, and the gaping, ugly flaws of the project are revealed.

The thing is y’see, for me the success of Tarantino’s previous films rests on the fact that (with possible exception of ‘Jackie Brown’) they have all been entirely cynical, self-absorbed endeavours, wherein characters and situations simply play out as tropes of the various genres and aesthetics he’s riffing on – mechanisms for providing the requisite sights and sensations we expect from films like these, openly rejoicing in the fact that there’s no deeper purpose, no moral imperative at work whatsoever – the cinematic equivalent of the enthusiastic sneer that seems permanently etched on the director’s face. None of which is a criticism; on the contrary, it’s great, and it works very well for him.

‘Django Unchained’ though marks something of a sea-change in his approach. Perhaps tapping a bit too heavily into the underlying sentimentality of the Western genre, this one sees him inexplicably presenting us with what is essentially an earnest melodrama with a fairy tale ending – a film in which the characters speak directly in terms of love and friendship and destiny, rather than just offering barbed comment on the cinematic archetypes they represent, and in which genuine historical/political issues are evoked, and dealt with on a strictly one dimensional good vs evil type level. This new approach brings with it a new set of expectations, one that the director is perhaps not quite so used to meeting.

We’ll get onto that shortly, but first off, a more minor, personal, ranting-outside-the-cinema type gripe. I’ll put these paragraphs in italics so you can easily skip them if you just plain don’t give a shit.

Despite his presumed status as a big fan of Westerns, I felt that QT at several points failed to stay true to the core values of the genre as I understand it. I don’t mean in terms of stuff like shifting the action from the West to the South and pushing back the clock to the pre-civil war era (things that you could at least *imagine* Leone or Peckinpah doing, even if they didn’t actually do them), but more in terms of the way the characters function, and the way that their actions define our sympathies towards them.

In essence, what I’ve always loved about the figure of the archetypal cowboy hero – what makes him so distinct from the often tedious romantic/chivalric heroes of most popular fiction – is that he operates on a purely utilitarian level. In a good Western, making a big show of honour and pontificating about one’s beliefs is left up to the bad guy. The cowboy silently observes, his motives opaque. And when the time comes, he does what needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, then buggers off, leaving the bad guy floundering in his own pomposity and hypocrisy until he meets his inevitable demise. Fucking brilliant! That’s what I want ‘heroism’ within this genre to represent basically, and I was hoping that, given his ingrained cynicism and love of genre tradition, QT would come though with some of that good stuff. Sadly not.

What particularly irked me was the key moment when Christoph Waltz’s character shoots DiCaprio. Waltz’s Dr Schultz very much comes from the ‘canny, educated foreigner / enabler of the primary hero’ tradition of Van Cleef in ‘For a Few Dollars More’, Franco Nero in ‘Companeros’ etc, and if there’s one thing all of those guys would have recognised, it’s that they had a clear chance here to walk away in one piece with their goal (freedom for Django’s wife) achieved, without having to fire a shot… mission accomplished. But instead Schultz gets involved in some sanctimonious puffery about refusing to shake hands with the guy. Any proper, utilitarian cowboy-hero would realise that shaking hands with a bastard means nothing – that both men will be judged by their actions, not some ceremonial gesture – and would have got on with it and got the hell out of there. Even William Holden and the Wild Bunch would have realised that the odds were against them at that point, capitulated and withdrawn to contemplate vengeance at a later date.

Not Tarantino’s beta-hero though – he’s got to beat his chest and refuse to compromise and make his big moral point… even when that guarantees his own death and of a life of continued misery for the friends he’s gone to so much trouble to help out. Schultz is presented to us as a steadfast and noble character, worthy of tribute, but as he dies all we can think is “what an idiot”. Tarantino sets him up as a hero, but in the end he doesn’t make the grade and dies a fool, betraying his ground level goals for some misplaced moment of idealism.

So that pissed me off. And as for Django himself, well his conduct is even more troublesome in the hero stakes. If you were to assemble a panel of great cowboys of yore – Franco Nero’s Django included - and ask them to put themselves in New Django’s shoes during the epic gun battle that immediately follows the deaths of Shultz and Candie, I think their priorities would be clear – the girl (D’s wife) is the pivotal object in this scenario (and as far as the film is concerned, she very much IS an object, but that’s another story..), so keep her in sight, keep her safe and get her out of there. But what does Django do? He abandons her completely, running off to some other part of the mansion and blasting away at everyone in sight, as the remaining baddies casually creep up and put a gun to her head. Again – what an idiot! I don’t care how cool and aspirational you look in your black cowboy get-up Django, you fail cowboy class for that one.

Obviously these are just my own bugbears with the minutiae of the film’s plotting, based on expectations created by a bunch of old movies I happen to like, and as such might be entirely irrelevant to the casual viewer, but there is also something more seriously wrong with ‘Django Unchained’ that didn’t really occur to me until I was walking home from the cinema, something that put a bad taste in my mouth and proceeded to infest my feelings about just about every part of the movie, and that – and I realise how much of an ass I sound saying this about a Quentin Tarantino film – is the moral message that ‘Django..’ conveys.

As mentioned above, ‘Django..’ is the first film Tarantino has made that, by the very nature of its melodramatic storytelling and emotive subject matter, is forced to embody a social/political message, however simplistic. Ok, so I guess ‘Inglourious Basterds’ spent a long time telling us that Nazis are bad, but hopefully most viewers were smart enough to realise that that movie had more to do with other war movies than it did with the actual war, and treated its goofily superficial ‘message’ accordingly. ‘Django..’s message is similarly blunt, and we get it sorted out nicely in the opening five minutes - “racism is bad, folks – now enjoy the show”. And we do, patting ourselves on the back for being such a good liberal audience as we go along.

But unlike ‘..Basterds’, ‘Django..’ has no post-modern safety-net to fall back on, and, well I don’t quite know how to best put this, but: demonstrating that racism is wrong and that black people are the equals of white people should not exactly be a difficult proposition for a filmmaker to achieve in a one dimensional comic book-style movie in 2013. Issues of fate vs free will, imprisonment vs self-determination, the individual as representative of the masses etc should pretty much write themselves into a story about slavery, with no additional head-thinkin’ required. It’s not like QT is trying to do anything difficult or challenging with this material – it’s straight down the line primary school level ethics, and yet somehow he manages to screw it up royally.

The mess he makes of things might not be immediately obvious on a surface level, but just dig this ok, and see if you can get what I’m talking about:

When Schultz picks out Django to help him at the start of the film, it’s more or less pure chance. It’s not because he’s the toughest or the coolest or the smartest, it’s just because of some random information he happens to possess. Under different circumstances, he could have picked out any other slave in the South, and surely, we assume, this is going to be the point of the movie – that each and every slave can become Django, can break free and define his or her own future.

And yet when we reach the end of the story some two and a half hours later, this fairly elementary point has never been made. Instead the film falls victim to the rather insidious notion of unearned exceptionalism that seems to have become the norm in heroic Hollywood narratives in recent years – a notion that takes on a particularly ugly aspect when mixed up with issues of racism and historical destiny.

Although Candie and the world he represents has been thoroughly shot, castrated, crippled and blown up by the end of the film, his central doctrine of phrenology-guided racism – which he is allowed to fully outline in a lengthy dialogue scene – has never actually been effectively challenged. At the film’s conclusion, Django actually TAKES A LINE from the dead villain’s bullshit, happily describing himself as “the one in ten thousand exceptional n**ger”, whilst the other black characters in the film remain helpless imbeciles, craven traitors or, in the case of the women, so incapable of independent action they might as well be statues.

I mean, I hate to be the one to engage in supercilious “blah blah, so and so’s being vaguely racially insensitive” internet bitching as regards a movie that was generally highly enjoyable, and yes, Spike Lee’s much-publicised dismissal of the film was pompous and self-defeating (pretty much turning his nose up at the idea that a mere genre film could ever address serious issues), but still: honest to god Quentin, what were you THINKING?

Not only does this poorly-managed shift from random everyman to pre-destined superhero make for a lousy bit of screen-writing that even a second-rate spaghetti western director would probably have wanted ironed out before the cameras rolled, it also exposes a failure to responsibly address even the most basic moral/political issues that reflects very badly on a guy who’s been directing pretty good movies for over twenty years now. Hopefully he can chalk this one up to experience and return to what he does best – making superficial, escapist capers about amoral characters with no connection to the real world whatsoever.

Because, on that level at least, ‘Django..’ succeeds pretty well. There are lots of memorable scenes, good gags, fine performances from the supporting cast, great bits of filmmaking etc, all present and correct. It’s a pretty light-hearted affair given the subject matter, but as long as you’re primed to expect something more like one of Robert Rodriquez’ shiny action movie westerns than a work that approaches the great directors mentioned elsewhere in this post, it’s a good time, with a handful of transcendent moments that stir the blood the way a good western should.

For me, the best of these moments comes in the scene in which Django dispatches the Australian gangers who have been charged with delivering him to a hell-on-earth mining operation and high-tails it back to Candie’s plantation for a final showdown. There’s something truly rousing – genuinely heroic - about the way he hitches himself up on an unsaddled horse and roars off over the horizon, rifle in hand, as his fellow slaves stare at him in disbelief, his legend being born behind their eyes – “holy shit, check THAT guy out”. The film could have benefitted hugely from a few more moments like that – moments that give the figure of Django a wider role in the emancipation of black America, rather than just callously writing him off as an “exceptional n**ger”, standing head and shoulders above his fellows.

The western may traditionally be regarded as a genre that celebrates the individual, but as aficionados of the form like Tarantino should be aware, many of the best entries in the canon – and even most lesser-known John Wayne flicks – tend to end with the hero succeeding only thanks to the bonds of trust and compromise he has built with his allies (that utilitarianism again). And in the rare instances in which westerns have engaged with political issues and succeeded in making some kind of point ( I’m thinking particularly of Corbucci’s ‘Companeros’ and Damiano Damiani’s superb ‘Quien Sabe’ /‘A Bullet For The General’), they have done so through an appeal to a basic revolutionary collectivism, ending with the individual hero subsumed into the mass of the people, ready to overthrow the grandiose clowns who oppress them, regardless of personal loss or gain. I think that this approach would have been a perfect fit for Tarantino’s mixture of spaghetti western and slave plantation Southern gothic, and could have really given Django’s story the wings it deserved.

Given the director’s joyous screwing with history in “..Basterds”, what I really wanted to see at the end of this film (and it wouldn’t have taken much of a change of narrative to bring it about) is Django riding back towards the Big House not alone, but at the head of a whole army of freed slaves, fighting the Civil War two years early, with no damn Abraham Lincoln needed to help him out.

Corny and obvious maybe, but then EVERYTHING in this story is corny and obvious, and if you’re going to spell things out for the audience rather than relying on their perceived cultural sophistication (as per QT’s previous ironic mode), you might as well go the whole distance and leave their hearts swelling with cathartic glee, rather than with that faint withering feeling that accompanies yet another tale of a Chosen One stomping all over everybody for the sake of his individual happiness with his plastic fairy tale bride.

And I know, I know – I’ve just spent two thousand words chewing Quentin Tarantino out for making a film that doesn’t *mean anything, man*. I can’t believe it either. What a bore. As I say, the fact that they don’t mean anything is what I LIKED about all his previous films! But like any good cowboy, if he’s going to talk the talk, he needs to walk the walk, and failing to even mosey through a one-dimensional “racism is bad” revenge story without falling on his ass does not bode well for his future career as a proponent of grown-up issues. Sorry dude. But at least the violence was cool, and the one-liners were funny, and the music was good. Roll on ‘Kill Bill Pt. III’.

THINK PINK, Round II: Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

Snow falls like a funeral

For the dead morning

Stray dogs howl in the distance as she walks

The sound of her ‘geta’

Piercing the air

She walks on, weighed down by karma

Justice and mercy

Tears and dreams

Yesterday and tomorrow

Words that have no hold on her now

The woman who has immersed herself in the river of vengeance

Gave herself up long ago

As mentioned in my introduction to the first Think Pink reviews round-up, I always intended to use the heading to take in a number of films that don’t fit at all comfortably under the ‘Pinky Violence’ banner but nonetheless find themselves associated with it in the West – a notion that’s particularly worth bearing in mind in this case, as I’m sure that star Meiko Kaji, director Toshiya Fujita and Toho studios would all spit blood at the thought of their film being described as PV.

Though she is often thought of as the definitive Pinky Violence star thanks to her pioneering work in the ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ and ‘Stray Cat Rock’ franchises, it seems that Kaji – by all accounts a lady just as determined and formidable as one of her characters – did everything she could to distance herself from the kind of exploitation typified by the ‘pinky violence’ tag, and the films she made outside of the two aforementioned series during the early ‘70s are all essentially attempts to take a more serious, ‘respectable’ approach to female-led action/revenge movies, largely free from the nudity and cheap sexploitation elements that were becoming increasingly prevalent in Toei and Nikkatsu’s output.

Produced for a subsidiary of the more venerable and up-market Toho studios, ‘Lady Snowblood’ – based on the manga by ‘Lone Wolf & Cub’ authors Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura – perfectly typifies this trend in Kaji’s films. Although many of the elements here – the simplistic revenge plotline, ridiculously exaggerated comic book bloodshed and frequent use of the zoom lens as a visual exclamation point – are still pure ‘70s exploitation, ‘Lady Snowblood’ nonetheless adopts a heavier, more self-consciously artistic tone than most of its competitors, fleshing out its central character’s traumatic background in lengthy, harrowing detail, accompanied by much pontificating on the whims of fate and the nature of revenge and so on, set against the muted tones and beautified landscapes of a grand historical drama.

Some may see all this as adding a compelling, atmospheric grandeur to proceedings, helping to elevate the film to a level rarely seen in quick turnover b-movie fare. Others though will no doubt find it as overblown and self-important - an empty attempt to raise the stock of what’s essentially just baseline pulp fiction. Myself, I’m kinda on the fence.

In the film’s favour is the fact that it’s extremely well made, with Fujita clearly making optimum use of the resources at his disposal, revelling in some of the most elaborate production design ever seen in a female action/revenge film. Sets, shooting locations and costumes are all exquisite, with the entire movie giving the impression of being art-designed and colour co-ordinated to the n-th degree, lending its images an ‘iconic’ resonance – a certain, ineffable sense of elegant ‘coolness’ – that would certainly be prove difficult to replicate on a tighter budget & schedule. (In particular, you wonder where Kaji’s character gets her supply of stunningly beautiful outfits, roaming the land with no means of financial support, not to mention the cleaning costs necessitated by all that blood flying everywhere, but… oh yeah, stylised comic book adaptation – we’re not supposed to think about that stuff too deeply.)

The achievements of the art department are also matched by the effort that’s been put into the film’s fight sequences, which again goes way beyond the level normally seen in Japanese exploitation, aspiring more to the high velocity swashbuckling of a prime Hong Kong wuxia flick, with the addition of majestic arcs of gore spurting hither and yon, the effects team seemingly rigging up each victim with a series of hosepipes to aid the beyond parodic celebration of arterial spray.

So, yeah - basically, if you’ve got a thing for absurd fountains of blood soiling pristine white kimonos, this is the movie for you. No opportunity is missed to fill the screen with bright whites and reds, whether represented through actual blood and snow, or costumes, flowers, décor and set dressing, the two colours blaze supernaturally against a stormy, autumnal background - a less than subtle reflection of the imagery of the film’s title of course, but also one that takes on added resonance in view of the story’s rather nebulous political sentiments.

And indeed, much of the time this stuff works brilliantly, delivering precisely the kind of hyper-real bloodshed us post-Argento, post-Tarantino ‘cult film’ fans are supposed to eat for breakfast, whilst also drawing us into the movie with a genuine emotional clout, filling our heads with bold, blazing images that live long in the memory.

Other times though, it doesn’t quite cut it. The film’s ponderous narration swiftly becomes comically tedious (can you remind us that this woman is “a child of the netherworld, living only for vengeance” again, mr. narrator? You haven’t mentioned it for a few minutes, and I’m worried I might forget..), whilst the sporadic attempts to invoke an ‘arthouse’ aesthetic are questionable at best. A good examples is the sequence in which the daughter of one of Kaji’s victims throws her collection of hand-wrought wicker dolls into the ocean as ‘poignant’ music swells on the soundtrack, bringing back unhappy memories of the unbearably pretentious Chinese ‘New Wave’ films I had to watch as part of a college course a few years back. (Honest to god, I mean, I love experiencing cinema from all countries and genres, don’t get me wrong, but sitting through some of those made me wish I’d taken Chemistry instead.)

During moments like these, I couldn’t help but think of the very different films Norifumi Suzuki was making over at Toei at around the same time, and in particular the incredible Sex & Fury. Although it’s difficult to confidently ascertain which came first given that both films share a 1973 copyright, Suzuki’s epic certainly plays very much like a cheeky sexploitation response to Fujita’s film, verging into the realm of an outright rip-off at its near-identical conclusion. Garish, prurient and opportunistic, a film like that would no doubt have been looked down upon by everyone who worked on this one, but taken out of context 'Sex & Fury' is arguably the more impressive of the two works, weaving together a tapestry that is just as lavish and visually imaginative as ‘Lady Snowblood’, building an altogether more complex and uncertain portrait of Taishō-era corruption and injustice, and doing so in a manner that is often a hell of a lot more entertaining than the dour, formal approach taken by Fujita and his collaborators.

Not that ‘Lady Snowblood’ is exactly lacking in political clout – in fact it’s just as suffused with it as with gore. Despite their slightly abstract period settings, Koike and Kamimura’s manga maintained a strong connection with contemporary left wing issues, and whilst Lady Snowblood’s calling as an all-purpose righter of class-based wrongs is explored in more depth in the film’s sequel, this initial instalment still never misses a chance to characterise her antagonists as representatives of various aspects of the wave of capitalist greed and state-sponsored criminality that was seen to be sweeping Japan in the period in which the story is set.

Straight out of the opening credits, scene-setting historical narration immediately begins criticising the Meiji-era government for their use of a military draft and misguided pursuit of imperialism, zeroing in on the assorted evils wrought by “mercenary businessmen, plutocrats and corrupt officials” – a class which in fiction set in the Meiji and Taishō eras often seems synonymous with those trying to import ‘decadent’ Western values (and, by extension, the subsequent excesses of European-style military imperialism) into Japanese society.

Even if this notion is never broken down in great detail in the film’s script, the subtext becomes hard to miss during the film’s conclusion, in which the Final Villain (who is now an arms dealer, gleefully helping prepare Japan for the ensuing global conflict) explains through a rather clunking chunk of exposition that he runs his operation out of a newly constructed, Western style building ostensibly opened by the government to receive guests from foreign powers, but in reality housing nightly orgies of “self gratification and shameless hedonism” for the country’s corrupt elite.

When Yuki subsequently attends one of these gatherings in the course of instigating a showdown with the rascal in question, her traditional dress sticks out like a sore thumb amid the multi-lingual, Western-garbed chattering classes, and when the bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him, he does so clutching the Japanese flag, as the literal and symbolic applications of the film’s colour scheme combine in one of those tormented moments of fractured national identity that Japanese b-movies can often embody so powerfully – nationalism and socialism, pacifism and bloody murder, all mixed up in a cathartic howl of cinematic confusion.

Despite all this though, the film is first and foremost a personal vengeance narrative, and beyond of any of the other notes filling up our ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ columns, it’s worth noting that Meiko Kaji herself is absolutely superb, delivering probably an even more extreme, single-minded performance than in the Scorpion films, and certainly a more nuanced one. Drawn and ashen- faced, she perfectly embodies the kind of unstoppable, quasi-supernatural force that the role demands, but at the same time manages to bring out a fragility in the character that helps transform her into a genuinely great heroine. However much she may aspire toward becoming a robotic, inhuman avenger, there is something behind her eyes that suggests that any minute now, her mask will crack, her training will fail, and the abused, orphaned child within will be revealed.

Allowing the sometimes melodramatic nature of the story’s presentation to bounce off her as painlessly as the blows of the assorted goons she ploughs through en route to her real targets, she keeps the human calm at the centre of the metaphorical storm solid and touchable at all times. A subtle touch, too fleeting to really explain properly, it is this certain something in Kaji’s performance that really makes the character, and, by extension, makes the film.

If you’ve read anything at all about ‘Lady Snowblood’ then you’ll no doubt be aware that it is the film that ‘inspired’ the central episodic framework (and much more besides) in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’, so I’m contractually obliged to mention that before we finish, but needless to say, it’s easy to see why the film made such an impression on him. For all its affectations and potential missteps, and for all that it might help to perpetuate just about every Japanese cinema cliché in the book, '..Snowblood' remains a landmark tour de force of stylised action film-making, and, in much the same way that Harry Kumel’s ‘Daughters of Darkness’ is often described as “the Citzen Kane of lesbian vampire movies”, I think Kaji and Fujita have a pretty good contender here for “the Citizen Kane of movies about wronged women wreaking bloody vengeance”... with all the positive and negative connotations that might imply.

(Thanks to the machinations of the big QT, ‘Lady Snowblood’s fantastic theme song is of course widely available from your mp3 provider of choice, so, rather than providing a download here, I’ll leave you to track it down via legitimate means, perhaps even helping to earn Meiko Kaji some miniscule amount of royalties in the process.)