Yes, I know - this took forever. I’m sorry. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back onto a regular(ish) posting schedule soon, fingers crossed, but in the meantime, please enjoy the superlative gushing which follows.
During the late 1960s, Argentinian director Emilio Vieyra made a number of striking (yet also curiously boring) low budget films mixing horror tropes with nudity and sexploitation elements. Vieyra’s strangest effort was probably ‘La Venganza del Sexo’, a sort of warped reimagining of Jess Franco’s ‘The Awful Dr Orlof’ (amongst other things) which sees a mad scientist dispatching a paper mache-faced monster to kidnap young people, whom he subsequently hypnotises and forces to have sex with each other as part of his rather vaguely defined experiments - the nature of which appears to be dictated to him by a sentient brain he keeps in a jar in his lab.
In and of itself, ‘La Venganza del Sexo’ certainly makes for an intriguing oddity in the history of global horror cinema, but it really only achieved infamy / immortality [delete as applicable] after a print was acquired by a New York-based hustler named Jerald Intrator, who haphazardly chopped about and reshaped the film, largely to allow for the inclusion of additional, extraneous sex scenes. A wilder and more tightly paced experience all round, Intrator’s reworking also benefits from a staggeringly knuckleheaded / inspired English language dub, written with scant reference to the original Spanish dialogue and featuring several of the most extraordinarily unlikely pronouncements ever to be formed by human lips (let alone minds).
Given a brief run on the NY grindhouse circuit as - yes, I’m afraid so - ‘The Curious Dr Humpp’, the result is an inexplicable, indigestible hodge-podge of relentless, theremin-drenched psychotronic dementia capable of blowing minds at 200 yards. Suffice to say however, the owners of any minds blown during the film’s original release seem to have kept the matter to themselves, leaving the depredations of Dr Humpp entirely forgotten for several decaes, until Frank Henenlotter and the late Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video acquired a print at some point in the ‘90s, cued it up, and - I can only imagine - performed some cult-movie-nerd equivalent of that “we struck gold” dance Walter Huston does in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ before promptly retreating to the bathroom to soak their heads in cold water for a few hours.
Honestly, if I started unpacking this thing to pick out particular highlights, we’d be here all night, so, by way of exemplifying the general off-kilter vibe of the whole thing, I’ll simply leave you with the zen-like question solemnly posed at one point by the film’s pipe-chewing police detective; “why would a man who needs drugs send a monster to the pharmacy?” Well, quite.
Along with much of the rest of the Western world, watching ‘Parasite’ early in 2020 inspired me to belatedly catch up on the rest of Bong Joon Ho’s filmography - the first stop being this train-bound, post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic, which immediately scores bonus points for having seemingly caused such consternation for financiers Miramax that (as I understand it) they initially did everything in their power to bury the damned thing.
Based on a long-running bande dessinée created by the revered Jacque Lob and shot in English with a multinational, all-star cast, ‘Snowpiercer’ - for which I’ll spare you an easily google-able plot synopsis - is the kind of movie which really, honestly SHOULD NOT WORK. For all its grandiose ambition, the story’s core premise becomes increasingly preposterous the longer you spend thinking about it, and presenting the comic’s world with the kind of nuts-and-bolts verisimilitude it demands would have required a budget and duration far beyond that available to any feature filmmaker.*
And yet… if we leave such concerns aside and simply view ‘Snowpiercer’ as a blunt allegory for the same socio-political concerns its director seems to wish to address in all his films, well, it actually works rather brilliantly.The same story ‘Parasite’ frames as a contemporary thriller, ‘Snowpiercer’ essentially tells through the lens of a CG-slathered SF blockbuster, and the challenges and conclusions it dares to confront its audience with are bold indeed for a film in this general genre/budgetary realm, mercilessly pricking the balloons of us-vs-them dualism and individual exceptionalism which generally keep such pulpy action/adventure narratives afloat. I’m pretty sure in fact that the harrowing succession of revelations and script flips which comprise during the story’s final act would never in a million years have seen the light of day in a common or garden multiplex clogger (much to the studio’s chagrin, I’m assuming).
As the stubbornness he seems to have demonstrated in preserving his film’s content and tone in the face of full spectrum interference clearly demonstrates though, Joon Ho is a strong enough director to keep even a project this sprawling and ridiculous tightly focused, and the result is, in its own weird way, just as effective as his later Oscar-winner.
* It’s worth noting that, as much as the ‘Snowpiercer’ concept may seem preposterous in strictly logical/utilitarian terms, given that we now find ourselves living in a world in obscenely wealthy celebrity plutocrats are routinely blasting themselves into space and planning gigantic underground highway networks… well, perhaps the idea of a monomaniacal Ed Harris chuntering across the dead globe in a giant train set powered by the blood of his serfs isn’t quite as far-fetched as may have seemed a decade ago…?
8. Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975)
Sticking with dystopian nightmares, here we have one of the very best - and, I would suggest, most widely misunderstood - of the many such visions which emerged from Hollywood in the 1970s. Misleadingly promoted as a violent future-sports action movie upon release, Jewison’s film is a more foreboding and cerebral work than audiences (then or now) may have anticipated, feeling almost like a distant cousin to John Boorman’s ‘Zardoz’ or the late Douglas Trumbull’s ‘Silent Running’ vis-a-vis pushing the ‘anything goes’ philosophy of ‘70s Hollywood to the point of commercial suicide in an attempt to bring the aesthetic of the era’s new wave literary SF to the masses.
The film’s actual rollerball sequences are indeed as hard-hitting as the violence-in-the-movies blather which accompanied the film’s release may have implied, but they are more frightening and confusing than conventionally exciting, and by the time we reach the film’s ugly, desultory climax, the monolithic fascist pomp of the arena spectacle has become genuinely nightmarish, the callousness of the game’s brutality leaving us as tired and nauseated as a public execution or a Nazi pep rally.
Outside of the arena meanwhile, the rest of the film is unsettlingly inert. Pacing is glacial and the atmosphere hangs heavy, like an unseen weight on the audience’s shoulders, mirroring that hefted by James Caan’s lost, lonely, test tube-bred athlete, groping around the edges of his world for an exit he can’t even begin to envisage.
‘Rollerball’s masterstroke I think is the way that (with the exception of one or two brief scenes) it keeps us trapped within Caan’s heavily blinkered perspective, refusing to allow us beyond the walls of the placid, self-contained environment within which our protagonist, as an elite Olympian within a corporate/totalitarian global state, is allowed to exist. He has no reliable sources of information, no context for his existence, no friends whose word he can rely upon - and as a result, neither do we.
In a conventional dystopian / earth-future SF tale, we would expect to zoom out and get The Big Picture at some point. We’d get some omnipotent narrator filling us in on the exact nature of the ‘corporate wars’ which seem to have turned North America (and by extension, the rest of the world) into a vast, homogenous monoculture. We would cut away to the huddled masses at whom the spectacle of rollerball is presumably aimed - be they toiling, subterranean morlocks, impoverished, inner-city TV zombies, or whatever. But, there is none of that here, and the absence of this context feels deeply troubling.
Caan’s corporate handlers keep him in a land of plenty, in which a sparse population seem to shuttle between ranch houses, sports arenas and gleaming corporate palaces. But we know that this can’t really be the full story, don't we…?
The icy, transactional manner in which Jonathan E is expected to conduct his interpersonal relationships, the way that decisions are made on his behalf, the complete lack of culture, history, knowledge or education accessible to him - all of this is telling. Meanwhile, the occasional hints we do receive of the Big Bad underlying ‘Rollerball’s world (such as the haunting sight of a group of executive parygoers, high on synthetic drugs, destroying a copse of trees with some kind of flame pistol) feel queasy and inexplicable.
Viewed from an era in which dystopian sci-fi and post-apocalyptic survival fantasies have become a familiar part of the tapestry of popular escapist entertainment, ‘Rollerball’ provides a stridently NOT FUN reminder of just how existentially terrifying it must actually feel to subsist within the calm heart of a vast Orwellian machine, with any notion of truth or understanding kept far beyond your reach.
Seemingly an attempt to break into the commercial mainstream from NY underground filmmaker/punk scenester Amos Poe, ‘Alphabet City’ may not have exactly made his Hollywood dreams come true, but, newly scrubbed up by Fun City Editions after decades of neglect, it still stands out both as a beautiful, hyper-stylised exemplar of neon-drenched ‘80s psychedelia and a fiendishly gripping, straight-down-the-line crime drama.
The film’s basic plot is as old as the steam rising from Manhattan’s subways. Ambitious young drug dealer Vincent Spano cruises the streets and alleys of the Lower East Side in his sweet white Trans-Am, paying the rent on the swanky penthouse loft he shares with his artist girlfriend and baby son. When his mafia paymasters order him one night to firebomb the housing project where his mother and sister live though, that’s a step too far. Ya don't say ‘no’ to the mob though of course, so by dawn he and his young family are on the run from the mob, with a violent showdown fast approaching.
Simple as this tale may be, it’s brought to life with admirably fevered intensity by a wildly varied cast of character players (ranging from ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’s Zohra Lampert to ‘Police Academy’s Michael Winslow), generating some real, edge-of-seat investment in the story’s outcome. Beyond that though, it is ‘Alphabet City’s stunning visuals and period detail which seem really set to blow 21st century minds.
Real downtown locations are transformed into phantasmagorical wonderlands by Poe and DP Oliver Wood’s inspired lighting and tracked to a characteristically slinky/superb Nile Rodgers score, meaning that, if you’re into that very particular cinematic aesthetic found only in early ‘80s New York, you just found the motherlode.
From glimmering reflections of headlights on washed down streets and incessant, blinding neon, to infernal gel red lighting cascading down towerblocks as trashcan fires blaze in the foreground, from smoke-filled, candlelit subterranean shooting galleries to swank, art-filled loft spaces and handheld crawls through genuine Manhattan nightclubs…. it’s almost too much, man. Like some flickering fever dream of Michael Mann’s ‘Thief’ mashed up with every Abel Ferrara movie you’ve ever seen, cut with a manageable dose of ‘Liquid Sky’ and whizzed up in a blender for easy mass consumption; just incredible.
(It’s no surprise to learn that, after a screening of this film, Mann himself is rumoured to have demanded that Oliver Wood be immediately tracked down and offered a job on ‘Miami Vice’; no such luck for Mr Poe sadly, but he abides.)
Marred by well-publicised behind the scenes clashes between Jackie Chan and director Lau Kar-Leung, and long available to viewers in the West only via a cut/dubbed Miramax version [thank you to Hong Kong Rescue for fixing me up with the real deal - now no longer on sale, sadly], ‘Drunken Master II’ hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it over the years.
Nonetheless, it remains a staggering high water mark of Jackie’s late 80s/early 90s “imperial” phase (and of late period HK martial arts cinema in general), applying epic, no-expense-spared production values to a frankly exhausting compendium of super-human physical/martial prowess, resulting in a film which, for sheer spectacle and entertainment value, arguably tops even the revered 1978 original.
At which point I should probably just give up and resort to asking “need I say more?”, but, I can’t help also taking the time to point out that this is one of the rare kung fu comedies in which the script’s broad comic chops actually worked very well for me, cutting the expected screwball farce with a welcome dose of full-on surrealism - particularly when embodied by Anita Mui, who is absolutely fantastic here as Jackie’s strong-willed step-mother; surely one of the funniest, coolest female characters HK popular cinema ever produced.Meanwhile, the film’s ending - during which it seems to have suddenly occurred to the filmmakers that encouraging their audience to drink excessively and fight in the streets was maybe just a little bit irresponsible - presents a tonally jarring, bad taste WTF moment which few cult film fans will be able to find it in themselves not to adore.
Back on the Bong Joon Ho trail, this riveting, technically impeccable police procedural details the travails of a pair of incompetent / borderline corrupt small town cops and an in-above-his-head rookie detective from the city as they - spoiler alert - completely fail to solve an on-going series of sex murders in rural South Korea during the dreary, mid 1980s tail-end of the nation’s period of military dictatorship.
Arguably rivalling ‘Parasite’ as the director’s best film to date, ‘Memories of Murder’ is less bleak than its unsavoury subject matter and grey, muted colour scheme would tend to suggest. Essentially playing as a down-at-heel black comedy for much of its running time, it takes an admirably non-judgemental attitude toward its morally equivocal protagonists, as each apparent breakthrough in their case soon dissolves into a sticky morass of bungling, botched evidence, interpersonal bitterness and base level stupidity.
Though the stark social commentary which went on to define much of Ho’s later work remains very much on the back burner here, there is nonetheless a strong sense that no sensibly ordered society would leave an active serial murder investigation in the hands of people so clearly incapable of dealing with it, whilst the low level poverty and emotional emptiness of the characters’ surroundings meanwhile speak for themselves.
Amidst the grimness though, the director’s obvious talent for commercial / genre-based cinema still shines through strongly, with superb editing and photography contributing to a series of painstakingly choreographed chase and suspense sequences which feel as exhilarating as anything in a more conventional action picture. Defined by a lingering sense of irresolvable complexity and human frailty which matches up to any of cinema (or literature)’s finest hard-boiled procedural fiction, what we have here is in fact something of a slow-burn masterpiece of 21st century crime cinema, I feel.
Straight from the “can you believe I’ve never seen this one before?” file. Hitch’s entry in the short-lived post-war “those pesky Nazis are out there somewhere, we’ve got to find ‘em” sub-genre (also see ‘The Stranger’ (1946), ‘Cornered’ (1945) amongst others) finds him at the absolute peak of his powers, delivering an elegant, engrossing and (needless to say) nail-bitingly suspenseful thriller which measures up to any of his more frequently screened classics.
Alongside the expected technical mastery and inspired visual storytelling, the photography and production design also deserve a shout-out here, with the gleaming, high noir style of DP Ted Tetzlaff’s nocturnal Rio De Janeiro exteriors looking so rich you almost want to step into them and lose yourself, whilst the labyrinthine geometry of Claude Rains’ luxurious rented townhouse meanwhile assumes a foreboding, paranoid gothic atmosphere, reminiscent not just of Hitchcock’s earlier smash hit ‘Rebecca’, but also of the kind of digs in which Rains’ aristocratic Nazi business magnate was presumably ensconced shortly before he and his domineering mother were forced to skedaddle across the Atlantic.
Beyond all this though, ‘Notorious’ is, surprisingly perhaps, more an actor’s movie than anything else. it’s no exaggeration to say that Ingrid Bergman proves an absolute revelation here, hitting a wild palette of complex emotional states in a far more demanding and multi-faceted ‘heroine’ role than Hollywood’s leading ladies usually had to contend with (then or now), whilst Ben Hecht’s admirably hard-boiled script skirts into dangerously ambiguous terrain by allowing Rains’ urbane Third Reich-apologist to often seem like a more appealing presence than Cary Grant’s hectoring and duplicitous, jobs-worth FBI man.
Like many of the finest ‘40s American films, ‘Notorious’ seems to offer the viewer a choice between skimming the surface of a masterfully crafted, beautifully rendered entertainment, or plumbing the bottomless depths of psychological motivation and socio-political significance which bubble beneath it. Whichever level you choose to engage with it on though, it’s difficult not to reach the conclusion that we’re looking at a stone-cold classic right here.
This one is perhaps not strictly speaking a 2021 first-time viewing, as I believe I battled through an iffy bootleg of the U.S. ‘Legend of Blood Castle’ version of this film at some point in distant past, but to be honest I barely remember anything of that sleep-and-alcohol fogged misadventure, and besides, watching the film as its intended form via Mondo Macabro’s revelatory blu-ray release - and actually paying attention to it, more to the point - proves a whole other goblet of gore.
In fact, I’d now go so far as to place ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’s within the very top tier of European gothic horror - a status rarely acknowledged in the past perhaps simply because director Jorge Grau largely rejects the kind of campiness and exploitational thrills we fans tend to expect of ‘70s Spanish gothic, instead treating this loose extrapolation of the Countess Bathory mythos with a straight-faced artistic seriousness which leads one to suspect he saw himself competing against Buñuel and Pasolini (or at the very least, Michael Reeves and Harry Kumel) rather than Amando de Ossorio or Paul Naschy.
Thankfully however, Grau and his collaborators match these lofty ambitions with a level of imagination and technical accomplishment which ensure the film never slide into pretention or tedium, employing rich, shadow-haunted photography, fascinating and impeccably detailed historical production design, and a far stronger set of performances than one would generally expect to encounter in a horror film of this era.
Of course it’s not my intention here to in any way denigrate the purveyors of pulpier, more down-to-earth Spanish horror (as regular readers will be aware, I love them dearly), but Grau is working on another level here, laying down a sombre, engrossing atmosphere - half lice-ridden realism, half oneiric fairy tale - through which to explore the weird hinterlands separating psychological dysfunction from the supernatural, and the fevered, libidinous effect which such ambiguities tend to inspire within the medieval mind-set which predominates in the film, in spite of its ostensible 19th century setting.
Folk-horror - as we’re now obliged to call it - plays a significant role in the drama here, as do the more prosaic horrors of the feudal class system, with authentic-seeming details of folk magic(k) customs extensively detailed and contrasted with the grander, more blood-thirsty satanic pomp and sexual predation practiced by The Countess (Lucia Bosè) and her dark-eyed consort (played with memorable menace by playboy/producer Espartaco Santoni).
What I appreciated most of all about ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’ in fact is the way it pulls you so deeply into the beliefs which underpin the film’s world that, after spending 90 minutes convinced you’re watching a a tale filled to the brim with witches, vampirism, demonic possession and corpses rising from the grave, you find yourself reviewing the events you’ve just witnessed and realising that, when reassessed from a “rational” 20th/21st century perspective, nothing objectively supernatural actually happens here at all. A neat trick which I don’t think I have ever seen pulled off this successfully in a period horror film.
And, just for the record, there’s also lots of gushing blood and naked neck-biting, and candle-lit processions through fog-drenched wilderness and wild, reality-shredding delirious editing, so c’mon horror fans - give it a try. The pace may seem a little ponderous at first, but trust me, once you get into it, the restored ‘Blood Ceremony’ really is a WIN-WIN proposition.
It’s difficult to express how much I enjoyed Don Siegel’s psychotic, perverse, action-packed late period hitmen-on-the-rampage noir…. but hopefully I had a pretty good bash at it when I reviewed the film in July last year.
Going into Paul Schrader’s directorial debut, I was expecting, I suppose, a downbeat, neorealist character drama; and heaven knows, I sure got one. Simply put, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel deliver extraordinary performances in ‘Blue Collar’, each of them pretty much tearing out yr heart n’ soul and giving them a good kicking across the parking lot at various points in the picture, whilst the late, great Yaphet Kotto isn't far behind as their somewhat more canny and laidback cohort Smokey.
Although I daresay the closest Schrader likely ever got to “working the line” was turning in copy for Pauline Kael at the New Yorker, he is, as ever, a phenomenally gifted screenwriter, and the words and scenarios he throws at his volatile cast into here feel entirely authentic. Splitting the weight of the story’s drama between several characters works extremely well, allowing the film to breath somewhat without sacrificing the intensity of each performance, whilst the necessity of concentrating on the essential ordinariness and gut level relatability of our characters’ quandaries meanwhile offers a compelling alternative to the obsessive, lone wolf male martyrs who usually tend to populate Schrader’s universe.
Likewise, I don’t know if there is an aspect of modern life which has been subject to such a weight of fatuous, factional bombast in its fictional portrayals as labour relations, but Schrader, as he is apt to do, cuts straight to the heart of the matter here, rejecting both the chest-beating, all-for-one sentimentality of the left and the poisonous, Social Darwinist bullshit of the right. Instead, he depicts trade unions for what they (in my experience at least) really are. Which is to say, a necessary evil; a leaky cushion of hot air and graft shielding workers from the faceless, instinctual divide-and-conquer tyranny of their employers. The frustration and paranoia which results from being caught in the grind between these two tectonic plates, whilst attempting to remain beholden to neither is, I would contend, perfectly captured here.
Beyond any of this though, what really got me about ‘Blue Collar’ is the unexpected discovery of what a great crime movie it is. It is instructive to hear Schrader speaking about how, nervous about directing for the first time, he wanted to ensure that this movie was “plotted to within an inch of its life” in the manner of a ‘40s thriller, leaving no holes in which the pacing could sag or the actors could lose the narrative thread, because that is indeed very much how the finished movie plays out.
From the painstaking (often hilarious) detail built up around our protagonists’ botched heist attempt to the intractable hell which proceeds to engulf each of them in its aftermath, and the excruciatingly yet totally inevitable manner in which they each willingly deliver themselves up to their own destruction, ‘Blue Collar’ is, surprisingly, one of the best anti-capitalist noirs ever made, be it neo- or otherwise.
It is rare for me to urge readers to watch the conclusion of a film outside of the context which preceded it, but anytime you feel in need of a refresher re: the straight dope on the forces that govern our lives, you could do a lot worse than consult the last two minutes of ‘Blue Collar’ prior to your next encounter with an interview panel / line manager / union rep / tax assessor / polling station.
