New Movies Round-up.

So, for no particular reason, last weekend was a “new movie special” in my house. A rare occurrence, to say the least. Here then are some notes on the post-2020 releases we covered. 

 

New Order 

(Michel Franco, 2021)

Well, you'd have to go a long way to find a commercially released fictional film more thoroughly depressing than this one.

It kicks off like Mexico’s subtlety-free answer to ‘Parasite’, as a swanky wedding party full of head-in-the-sand rich people is crashed by the feral, green paint-splattered rioters that the media has been warning everybody about for days, prompting their own security staff to also turn against them, with predictably harrowing results.

Meanwhile, the apparently well-intentioned bride-to-be is out swerving roadblocks, trying to obtain urgent medical care for the wife of a former domestic servant. Long story short, she is captured by a cartel of rogue soldiers, who are taking advantage of the new martial law regime to orchestrate their own mass kidnapping operation, based out of a disused prison building.

Rape, torture and general dehumanisation ensues, until the bride’s brother and fiancé- fresh from burying their dead after the wedding massacre - take the ransom demands to the family’s high level military-industrial connections, who proceed to close down the embarrassing rogue element within their ranks the only way they know how: by killing absolutely everyone involved, including the prisoners, and framing the poor, long-suffering working class family whom the bride was initially trying to help for her kidnap and murder. They are executed. The End.

Jesus. I perhaps should have put in a spoiler warning before the above paragraphs, but to be honest, it’s clear within the first five minutes that nothing nice is going to happen to anyone here; the remaining screen time is just an exercise in delineating the precise detail of how their lives are going to be destroyed.

Basically comprising a blandly restaged mega-mix of assorted terrible situations which have occurred in different regions of the world in recent years, liberally spiced with older visual references to the Mexican and French revolutions, Michel Franco’s film offers little thematic nuance, no glimmer of hope, no trace of human warmth - just a relentless parade of middle class nightmare fuel and craven injustice.

Normally, I’m inclined to at least give these kind of short-sharp-shock dystopian atrocity films props for their ability to shake viewers out of their complacency and so forth, but in this case… well, let’s just say, if you want to find out about the distressing consequences of the growing disparity between rich and poor or the dangerous slide toward corrupt authoritarianism across the globe, there are a wealth of documentaries and activist films out there which can give you the skinny on that. Given that you’ll emerge feeling like crap either way, I daresay they would constitute a more useful viewing experience than Franco’s rather slick and emotionally detached outburst of one-note rage.

At least he has the decency to cram it all into less than ninety minutes, but that’s still longer than I really wished to spend being battered with the “LIFE IS SHIT” stick. 

 

Slash/Back 

(Nyla Innuksuk, 2022)

Now this one on the other hand, I really liked!

Basically, what we've got here is ‘Over the Edge’ meets ‘The Thing’, shot in an Inuit fishing village just south of the Artic Circle, where a gang of bored teenage girls are forced to defend their community against body-hopping alien monsters whilst their parents are off getting drunk at a square dance.

Things are very nearly ruined by some absolutely terrible CGI animals, mixed with scarcely-much-better, “guy in a Halloween mask” level practical effects... but, given that the horror aspect of the film is soft-pedalled throughout, none of this really matters too much.

Really, the alien/monster stuff is just an excuse to get the girls into tense and scary situations, allowing their characters and relationships to morph and reshape themselves under pressure, and allowing them to use their combined ‘ancient hunting culture + modern digital teen’ style moxie to fight back against the invaders. All of which is handled just beautifully by first-time director Innuksuk and the teenage cast, and is really where the film excels.

The remote setting is an unusual and compelling one for an action/adventure story, giving us a lot of casual insight into 21st century life as experienced by indigenous peoples in Canada’s far north along the way, and all four of the central characters are just awesome. They speak and behave like real teenagers, but are also hugely likeable and super-cool - a very difficult balance to pull off, but ‘Slash/Back’ nails it 100%. (Again, I'm reminded of Jonathan Kaplan’s classic ‘Over The Edge’ (1979) in this regard.)

I guess this is more-or-less teen-friendly viewing, but its approach to the material is in no way condescending or juvenile, and it’s easy to imagine that viewers in the girls’ own age group would get a real kick out of seeing them band together to kick ass with hunting rifles and giant choppers whilst protecting their younger sublings from harm, making this a solid “family movie night” recommendation for anyone out there with kids.

Fun, heart-warming low key stuff,  this certainly made for a perfect palate-cleanser after the joyless slog of ‘New Order’. I mean, if kids like this are growing up out there in the frozen North (and aspiring filmmakers presumably a mere couple of the generations older are casting them in cool movies), maybe there’s hope for the human race after all, y’know?

 

Enys Men

(Mark Jenkin, 2023)

Ostensibly the latest self-proclaimed “folk horror” / hauntological hang-out movie to receive a big push from the BFI and big hype from the hipper end of the media here in the UK, it’s probably fair to say that filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s second feature as director takes a rather different approach to this kind of genre-adjacent territory to the Stricklands and Wheatleys of this world.

I haven’t seen Jenkin’s previous film ‘Bait’, but I became interested in checking this one out after reading that he still shoots using a 16mm bolex without sync sound, processing the resulting footage in his kitchen sink and single-handedly foleying the entire soundtrack - a statement of DIY intent which I find both appealing and intriguing, given that I’m sure he could have easily wrangled professional level production values off the back of his first film’s success, had he wished to.

And indeed, this notion of filmmaking reinvented as a kind of rural handicraft can be strongly felt throughout ‘Enys Men’, with the director’s focus often seeming to dwell less on the elliptical tale of a woman (Jenkin’s partner Mary Woodvine) residing alone on a fictional Cornish island observing a copse of rare flowers (in 1973, natch), and more on the windswept vistas of the oppressive, rocky coastline, or the richly textured detail Jenkin wrings out of the man-made elements within the frame. (His obsessive concentration on radio apparatus, petrol generators, kettles and the like suggests a sense of bone-deep analogue fetishism which I suspect it will be difficult for any of us pre-digital relics to fully begrudge.)

All of this looks absolutely beautiful, needless to say, rendered uncanny and weirdly subjective by heavy layers of grain, flashes of over-saturation and other assorted artefacts of Jenkins’ determinedly lo-fi technique, whilst the director’s own score - seemingly conjured up from a bunch of found sounds and radio static filtered through some pedals - furthers the homemade vibe.

I also enjoyed the way in which Jenkin maps out the topography of his imaginary island using carefully framed bits of mainland - a process which put me in mind of certain ‘70s Jess Franco films - whilst the film’s ominous use of abandoned mine workings allowed me to loosely place it within the canon of earlier “Cornish horror”, alongside Doctor Blood’s Coffin, ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and Mike Raven's ‘Crucible of Terror’, which pleased me no end.

Not that there’s a great deal of explicit horror stuff here, it must be said… or indeed much in the way of a clearly delineated series of events at all, really. Though the film is densely packed with images and movement (the inability of the bolex to extend shots beyond thirty seconds probably helps in that regard), the narrative information we are given eventually becomes so oblique, contradictory and chronologically disjointed that each viewer will probably emerge with their own interpretation of exactly what the hell is going on here… which is probably just as it should be.

In fact, ‘Enys Men’ fulfils its function as a kind of ‘mystery film’ with a rare intelligence and lack of pretention, allowing images and sounds to function like pieces of a cursed jigsaw puzzle, never quite fitting together into a satisfying, coherent whole, but suggesting a wealth of strange and intriguing patterns along the way.

As such, I suspect many viewers lured in by the hype surrounding the film’s release will find themselves left cold and irritated by the whole experience, and I certainly wouldn't blame them for that. It’s not exactly what you’d call a ‘film for everyone’, that’s for sure.

Personally speaking though, whilst it didn’t have a huge emotional impact on me, I still really enjoyed it on a meditative/aesthetic level, simply because the stuff it’s made out of (grainy 16mm footage of craggy headlands, deconstructed fragments of M.R. James-esque ghost stories, eerie coastal ruins, retro-‘70s lo-fi experimentalism) always really appeals to me. After all, I’m only a few years younger than Jenkin, I grew up in a broadly similar environment, and I suspect that some of the same bone-deep connection he clearly feels to this material must carry over to some extent. Your own ability to tune into the same wavelength may vary, but that’s just fine.

Deathblog: Piers Haggard (1939-2023)

I was very sad to hear this week that Piers Haggard - director of probably my favourite horror film of all time, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ (1971) - has passed away at the age of 83.

Speaking about ‘..Satan’s Claw’ in interviews over the years, Haggard always seemed very serious about his intentions for the project, and the lengths to which he and writer Robert Wynne-Simons went in realising them - an attitude which, though largely responsible for helping the film turn out as brilliantly as it did, perhaps ironically also damaged his prospects for a follow-up career as a director of features. (By which I mean, it probably wasn’t quite the vibe that the likes of Tony Tenser, Deke Heywood or other players in the cash-strapped world of early ‘70s British genre movies were looking for, or so I can only imagine.)

Instead, Haggard carved out a career for himself as a reliable director of respectable British TV (winning a BAFTA for his work on Dennis Potter’s ‘Pennies from Heaven’ in 1978) - in which context we should also single out his role as director on the 1979 ITV ‘Quatermass’ serial (or ‘Quatermass Conclusion’, as I think it should probably have been called - the one with John Mills, anyway). Odd, disturbing and perpetually underrated, it’s a series which arguably feels more resonant and relevant today than it did when first broadcast, and which could perhaps be seen to share a seriousness of purpose, a warped sense of realism and a willingness to disregard genre convention which all loop back to Haggard’s earlier horror masterpiece.

Thereafter, we’ve also got to admire his chutzpah in stepping in to take over 1981’s infamous ‘Venom’ after Tobe Hooper bailed, and actually delivering a half-decent movie in the process. (I know he’s been credited with saying, “the friendliest person on set was the snake,” or words to that effect, but I can’t actually find a source for that quote; his slightly more nuanced thoughts on wrangling one of most difficult casts in film history can be found here however.)

Scarcely much less problematic, Haggard also has the misfortune of being credited as the director of Peter Sellers’ ill-fated ‘The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu’ in 1980, although the internet informs me that he was actually dismissed after a few days shooting by Sellers, who completed the bulk of the film himself, so hopefully that whole farrago won’t cast too much of a shadow on his legacy.

Also worthy of note: Piers was the grandson of H. Rider Haggard (author of ‘She’ and ‘King Solomon’s Mines’), and the father of ubiquitous British TV actress Daisy Haggard.

RIP, and my thoughts and best wishes go out to his family & friends. 

 

Two-Fisted Tales: The Star Witches by John Lymington (Macfadden, 1970)

I was recently hipped to the work of John Lymington via a great piece written by Jacob Charles Wilson in the estimable Books Review of Books (issue # 3, June 2021), wherein Wilson basically makes the case for Lymington as a kind of forgotten idiot savant of British pulp SF, citing his 1965 giant spider opus ‘The Green Drift’ as “..a terrible book and an amazing book. It’s a miracle it was ever published.”

Suitably intrigued, and noting that I already have several Lymington joints stashed unread on my shelves, I chose to begin my investigation with ‘The Star Witches’, because… well, how could I not? It sounds bloody brilliant.

Well, what can I tell you readers - a sense of morbid fascination saw me through to the final pages, but I’m not much inclined to repeat the experience. First published in the same year as ‘The Green Drift’ (though this U.S. edition dates from 1970), ‘The Star Witches’ is, unquestionably, a terrible book. An amazing one though…? I fear not.

Although nothing in the exciting back cover copy Macfadden’s editorial staff managed to wring out of this damned thing is technically incorrect, the arrangement of these events within Lymington’s text is… not quite as compelling as we might hope, to put it mildly.

The Reverend David James, for instance, only discovers that “..a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan..” via a few throwaway dialogue exchanges towards the end of the novel, and he scarcely has much time to be perturbed by the issue amidst the thunderous rumblings, “cold smells”, petty bickering and great globules of misbegotten, barely coherent, shapeless prose through which Lymington attempts to convey the descent of his (far too numerous) cast of characters into a state of supernatural hysteria as they are buffeted by the assault of some kind of incorporeal alien intelligence.

The Reverend James, by the way, is in no sense the novel’s hero or protagonist - instead he is merely one member of an ever-expanding ensemble of pointless and dislikeable individuals Lymington conjures into existence to stretch out his word count, each chiefly defined by their assorted weaknesses and grotesquery. (The Reverend, for instance, is a venal, self-serving type, possessed of prodigious girth, multiple chins, and invariably described as either picking remnants of fish from his teeth or tripping over his impractical ecclesiastical vestments.)

Mirroring both Wilson’s description of ‘The Green Drift’ and the staggeringly uneventful 1967 film adaptation of Lymington’s ‘Night of the Big Heat’, the “action” of ‘The Star Witches’ is largely confined to the interior of one cold, strange, smelly house (the squire’s abode in a fictional Cotswolds village), wherein upward of a dozen characters gradually accumulate and spend the entire first two thirds of the novel fretting about the absence of one Harry Royce, owner of the gaff in question. An amateur scientist, Royce seems to have disappeared, ‘Marie Celeste’-style, mid-way through his dinner, whilst carrying out some vague researches into matter transference and inter-planetary telepathy, or, y’know - something along those lines.

Harry’s dinner, incidentally, was paprika stew, “with the cheese on the steak,” which his housekeeper (a gargantuan, simple-minded West Country stereotype, like all of the book’s working class characters) repeatedly insists he would never have voluntarily left unfinished. And, if you feel it would be beneficial to receive frequent updates on how long this dinner has been left sitting in his study, and what happens to it as it gradually congeals, and to read several discussions on the subject of whether or not it would be a good idea to clear it away, then, friends - John Lymington is the author you’ve been looking for!

A similar dialectic is invoked on a slightly grander scale during the final third of the book, when, after discovering the body of the absent Mr Royce in a trance-like state within a wall cavity, the characters spend most of the remaining pages arguing about whether they should kill him - in order to destroy the ‘bridge’ his consciousness has formed with the evil alien intelligences which are trying to take over everyone’s minds - or alternatively, just, y’know, not kill him, even though they probably should, just due to general milquetoast queasiness and procrastination on the part of the middle class contingent.

Meanwhile, in the grounds of the house, pound-shop Nigel Kneale vibes are soon the order of the day, as reality warps and frays around Royce’s ‘pepper pot’ private observatory, wherein he has trained his high-tech telescope on the distant planet from which the book’s malign, shapeless entities originate. Eventually, the local residents, tiring of both subterranean rumblings ‘spoiling’ the beer at the pub and their assorted husbands and wives failing to return from the indecisive palaver going down at the manor house, do the decent thing and assemble a pitchfork-wielding mob to take care of business.

Spoiler alert: they do not really succeed, and the book ends, hilariously, with a field report composed by one of the extra-terrestrial invaders, who apparently intend to continue sending signed and dated letters to each other and compiling paper records whilst they conquer the globe, despite being shapeless, nameless telepathic beings from a wholly unknown realm of distant space.

John Lymington is credited with having written over 150 books between 1935 and 1989 - not quite matching the output maintained by his fellow British ‘mushroom pulp’ godhead Lionel Fanthorpe during his peak years, but regardless, Lymington also pumps out his prose like a fog of inarticulate, stream-of-consciousness blather, showing little regard for whether the ends of his sentences bear any relationship to their openings. It reads as if he (like Fanthorpe) was simply dictating the novel into a tape recorder, ‘first thought = best thought’ style, as the clock ticked down to his deadline, before sending it straight off to some poor, underpaid typist to be transcribed.

Fanthorpe however was a worldly and charismatic individual, meaning that the random digressions into his day-to-day which inevitably filtered through into his writing often proved interesting or amusing. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to read 200 bad science fiction novels written by this guy?) 

The incessant irrelevancies which accumulate within Lymington’s prose by contrast feel mean, narrow-minded and crushingly banal. It’s all suggestive - though I may be projecting unfairly here - of a kind of culturally blinkered, unhappy existence, the experience of which feels more unhealthy than the writhing, inter-dimensional tendrils of the alien mind-stealers the author rather half-heartedly seeks to invoke in ‘The Star Witches’.

In the first chapter here for instance, we learn that ‘bovine’ housekeeper Clara suffers from wind in the mornings, because her husband Bill puts far too much sugar in the mug of tea he brings her at six o’clock, and which she needs to drink quickly because she needs to get up before seven. We learn that lecherous gardener Bert Gaskin (“known throughout Keynes as a big, blundering, blustering, beggaring knowall”) wears ‘yachting shoes’, because his feet “suffer in hot weather” and “linen shoes can be good for that”. We learn that the doorbell in Harry Royce’s residence is “an original installation from 1850,” and that he “likes original installations”. “Sometimes he had them put in even if they weren’t there when he came,” Lymington would have us know.

Perhaps you think I’m being a bit unfair here. I mean, isn’t it through this kind of detail that all authors develop character, and create a sense of place for their stories? Maybe, but after suffering through a few dozen pages of Lymington, I’d defy you make a case for this excruciating drivel adding up to anything except his daily word count.

It certainly succeeds in torpedoing any promise of the kind of cosmic grandeur which the SF and horror genres are conventionally supposed to deliver, that's for sure, but beyond that, Lymington’s hum-drum eccentricities fail to even register as perversely fascinating or unintentionally funny. Carelessly tossed off, and full of minor lapses of logic so painfully mundane it’s barely worth even registering them, instead it’s all just really annoying. 

Indeed, the main feelings generated by spending 140 pages enveloped in the sweaty, feeble mess of ‘The Star Witches’ are those of futility, tedium, mild revulsion… and a creeping realisation that, even for us most dedicated excavators of forgotten 20th century popular culture, there are some stones which are perhaps better left unturned. 

 

TOP TEN DISCOVERIES: 2022 (Part # 2 of 2)

5. Sailor Suit & Machine Gun 

(Shinji Sômai, 1981)

It should have been the smash hit pop cultural event of Japan’s summer of 1981, and to a certain extent, it was exactly that; the era’s preeminent pop idol, Hiroko Yakushimaru, starring in her first blockbuster movie, financed and pushed into the public consciousness via a full spectrum publicity blitz courtesy of her primary backer, publishing mogul and aspirant saviour of the nation’s film industry Haruki Kadokawa.

Pretty much everyone who was alive in the country at the time seems to remember the ever-present TV spots featuring the image of Yakushimaru in her ‘sailor suit’ school uniform wielding a tommy gun, or can sing the full lyrics to her #1 hit theme song four decades later, but, in the hands of uncompromising auteurist director Shinji Sômai, ‘Sailor Suit & Machine Gun’ stands out as so much more than just a flash-in-the-pan moment of pop supremacy.

Attacking this unlikely tale of a high school girl who unwittingly becomes the boss of a down-on-their-luck yakuza clan with nigh-on Wellesian audacity, Sômai entirely jettisons such expected youth movie staples as romance, music and coming-of-age cliché, instead delivering a movie which largely plays out like a peculiar hangover from the yakuza movies of the ‘70s, complete with frantic pacing, gritty location footage and harrowing outbursts of extreme violence, but imbued here with a weird ‘Terry & the Pirates’ kind of vibe, as the four loveable rogues who comprise Yakushimaru’s gang learn to respect and revere her.

In technical terms meanwhile, Sômai turns the movie into an astonishing tour de force, utilising painstakingly orchestrated extended takes, extreme high angles and a constantly moving camera to pull us through multiple worlds and spaces within the duration of a single shot, creating a disorientating, ever-shifting environment within which cast members - apparently driven to distraction by being forced to rehearse each scene upward of one hundred times prior to shooting - enact exchanges of raw and strange emotional intensity.

Clearly revelling in the outrageous / emblematic imagery he was able to wring from his iconic star, Sômai frequently pulls the film into a realm of outright pop surrealism, whether posing Yakushimaru in the lap of a bodhisattva statue, or tying her to a crane and repeatedly dunking her in a vat of liquid cement - a tendency which takes a more nightmarish turn in the second half of the film, when our heroine finds herself kidnapped by one ‘Fatso’ (Rentarô Mikuni), a deranged, Sadean Bond villain-type character who, amongst other things, crucifies Hiroko-san on a cubist cross, forces her to balance on an active landmine, and briefly threatens to subject her to vivisection before gun-toting help eventually arrives.

Shredding genre expectations and cinematic norms like confetti, Sômai pulled off an incredible balancing act here, creating a movie that is so provocative, so wildly stimulating and so damned fun that it’s difficult to imagine the teenage target audience left theatres anything less than totally exhilarated by what they had just seen, even as the nation’s critics and cinephiles were meanwhile no doubt queueing up to hail the director as the natural successor to Welles, or Godard, or whoever else.

Feeling like the ultimate culmination of the unruly car crash between commercial and artistic agendas which overtook Japanese cinema in the era immediately following the late ‘70s collapse of the nation’s studio system, ‘Sailor Suit..’ stands alongside Ôbayashi’s ‘House’ and Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s ‘The Man who Stole The Sun’ as one you need to see, irrespective of what you make of it all afterwards.

Arrow’s blu-ray edition comes complete with extremely groovy artwork (by Michael Lomon) and an unusually lengthy and informative booklet. 

  

4. Gonin 1 & 2 

(Takashi Ishii, 1995/96)

The stylised S&M epics to which the late Takashi Ishii dedicated most of his working life aren’t really my cup of tea, but this duo of thematically-linked heist movies certainly leave me in no doubt as to his talents as a filmmaker.

In fact, it’s fair to say they absolutely blew me away, rocketing straight to the top of my hypothetical list of ‘90s Japanese crime films, rivalled only by the early works of Takeshi Kitano - who indeed makes an appearance in the first of the films, playing a near-parody of his usual screen persona, as the shabby, expressionless psychopathic killer charged with hunting down a group of five agitated misfits who have signed their own death warrants by ripping off a fortune from a Shinjuku crime syndicate.

Beautifully staged, intricately and intelligently plotted, relentlessly brutal and perversely funny, it’s a nigh-on perfect crime movie, but Ishii’s name-only sequel is even better, amping up the action sequences to a Hong Kong-like level of kineticism and fully embracing a neon-saturated vision of ‘90s Tokyo as a dystopian, neo-noir wonderland, as it switches the gender of the heisters and mixes their travails with the tale of a lone, katana-wielding avenger seeking vengeance for the death of his wife.

The central set piece of the second film - in which five previously unconnected women impulsively join forces and manage to turn the tables on a heavily armed gang who hold up the jewellery store in which they happen to be browsing - is hands down the most jaw-dropping sequence I have seen in any film this year. They eventually take off together through the city streets, weighed down with stolen ice and laughing manically, and the fraught and desperate set of relationships which subsequently evolve between these female characters lends ‘Gonin 2’ a sensibility which feels near-unique in the ultra-macho realm of Japanese crime cinema.

Both of these films are beautifully shot, but the 20+ year old, tape-sourced DVDs which currently represent the only English-friendly means of watching them look absolutely terrible. HD upgrades/restorations are painfully overdue. Basically anyone who can manage to get these out on blu-ray has my money immediately. 

 

3. Thrilling Bloody Sword 

(Hsin-Yi Chang, 1981)

Within the first five minutes of this delirious Taiwanese fantasy epic, a queen finds herself impregnated by a crudely animated comet, and gives birth to a huge, pulsing red gherkin. Disowned by the king, the gherkin/egg is sent downstream in a moses basket, where it is retrieved by seven ‘dwarves’ (actually regular sized men, filmed using forced perspective techniques of variable effectiveness), who declare their intention to eat it, only to see it hatch in the middle of their dining table, revealing a human girl-child whom they subsequently adopt.

Zipping forward through the requisite eighteen years, the child has of course grown up into a beautiful ersatz Snow White, apparently none the worse for having been raised by a gaggle of capering, comedic dwarf-men. Back at the royal court though, there’s trouble brewing, as our heroine’s not-quite-father the king has resorted to hiring a ‘woman exorcist’ and her unscrupulous, devil-worshipping consort to rid the kingdom of a both kaiju-esque cyclops and a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon, and… well, you get the general idea.

Yes, it’s another smash hit from the mysterious, myth-shrouded film industry which brought us the likes of Wolf Devil Woman, Kung Fu Wonder Child, Zodiac Fighters and Golden Queen’s Commando, mashing up the bizarro mutant fairy tale outlined above with Harryhausen-via-Tsubaraya special effects, wire-fu heroics, red-tinted Satanic horror, warped fragments of Chinese folklore, weird-ass, human-toothed bear-suits, glowing-eyed flying heads and costumes jointly inspired by Elric of Melnibone and the late Mike Hodges’ ‘Flash Gordon’, all accompanied by stolen music from ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’, along with some Parliament-esque funk-rock which inexplicably soundtracks the film’s comedic sequences.

A relentless torrent of fearless visual imagination, it’s fair to say that if this had played on British TV when I was ten years old, nothing else would have been discussed in the playground for YEARS. In fact we’d still probably be talking of it in hushed tones to this day; a fair reflection I feel of the sheer, outsized magnitude of the effort Hsin-Yi Chang and his collaborators put into this insane masterwork. Their determination to wring pure excitement and joy out of the presumably minimal resources available to them is writ large here, glowing, shining, zapping, flaming and exploding from every fuzzy-edged frame. (And if you think I’m exaggerating, just check out these three minutes, and tell me you’re not in for the full ninety.)

All of which makes it all the more tragic that the vast majority of ‘70s/’80s Taiwanese genre cinema remains trapped within a tape-sourced, pan-and-scan netherworld of bootlegs and frequently deleted youtube uploads - a circumstance which somehow makes the glorious excesses of films such as this one seem even more unreal and extraordinary.

For the time being, Golden Ninja Video’s raw scan of a battered theatrical print seems about the best viewing option we’re ever likely to get for this one. (True, the old school, burned-in HK-style subtitles make it quite difficult to figure out what’s going on much of the time, but on the other hand, they also allow us to enjoy people saying things like, “Listen, now I will speak in the voice of the cock,” so, y’know - swings and roundabouts.) 

 

2. Tough Guys Don’t Dance 

(Norman Mailer, 1987)

“You know, it takes a girl with big feet to dig old Norm,” Stephen McHattie’s character tells his radio station’s assistant when he finds her reading a Norman Mailer paperback in 2008’s ‘Pontypool’ (officially my favourite 21st century horror film to date, incidentally)…. and, after catching up with the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s sole venture into commercial feature film directing this year, I’m beginning to understand what he meant.

In short: ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is absolute, 24 carat, deranged macho/camp genius from start to finish.

On first viewing, it’s easy to imagine the project originated with Mailer chilling at home one evening with a mountain of coke, watching a double bill of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Out of the Past’ before exclaiming, “fuck, I can make one of these things, how hard can it be” - at which point he immediately got Golan & Globus on the phone to talk budget and casting, and, a year or so later, the American critical establishment found itself trying to come to terms with the existence of a flick which, on the face of it, functions on a similar wavelength to ego-driven disasterpieces like Duke Mitchell’s Massacre Mafia Style (1974) or John De Hart’s Champagne & Bullets (1993), despite emerging from the mind of a man on the opposite end of the social/artistic spectrum.

To some extent, 21st century internet wise-asses have perhaps come closer to comprehending the grandeur of Mailer’s cinematic vision - but, as usual, they’ve also woefully missed the point, meme-ifying possibly the least extraordinary moment in the film, whilst lazily assigning the dreaded “so bad it’s good” label to the whole shebang, in spite of the fact that, though his script often walks a perilous line between earnestness and outright parody, the overdriven, baroque excesses of Mailer’s lampoon of the hard-boiled style here cannot possibly have been anything less than entirely intentional.

I mean, he may have been a maniac, but he was too smart not to have realised what he was creating here… and for my money, the fact that he did it anyway makes the result even more outrageously enjoyable.

Whatever your take on Mailer’s intentions is though, one thing’s for sure - you’ve got to be careful trying to drink fluids whilst ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is unfolding, because you’ll find a spit-take worthy “WTF did s/he just say?!” moment waiting to hit you about once every forty seconds. I would try to make an effort to pepper lines from this film into my conversation for years to come, except for the fact that Mailer’s lingo is so consistently outlandish and offensive that I very much hope life will never lead me into circumstances where I have cause to employ any of it.

Ostensibly a convoluted tale of murder, amnesia and paranoia set in Mailer’s adopted hometown of Provincetown, Massachusetts (indeed, much of the film is shot in his house), almost every male character in ‘Tough Guys..’ is riven with homosexual panic, unhealthily fixated on reaffirming their masculinity and sexual prowess whilst being driven on to ever greater outrages by the looming spectre of priapic psycho-cop Wings Hauser (napalming the joint, as per usual), whilst every almost every female is meanwhile an unhinged, scheming nymphomaniac.

The only notable exceptions are the great Lawrence Tierney, who, playing an obvious stand-in for Mailer himself, is the only cast member with the chutzpah to actually invest the director’s outré dialogue with a sense of gravitas, and Isabella Rossellini, who spends the bulk of her limited screen time looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else on earth than appearing in this horrible movie.

Perhaps triggered by the sheer absurdity of Mailer’s scripting and the oversized bravado of the performances, the film begins to take on a fascinating, otherworldly aura as it progresses, complete with a botched séance, ritualistic weirdness transpiring deep in the woods, and characters claiming to be possessed by the ghosts of dead whores. In fact, as the idea of a nameless, malign spirit lurking beneath the surface of a small, picturesque town begins to predominate, it’s difficult not to pick up on a distinctly Lynchian vibe going on here, to the extent that some scenes pretty much play out like tributes to (or parodies of) the director’s signature style.

This is interesting, in that, whilst the presence of both Rossellini and the late Angelo Badalamenti (RIP) on soundtrack duties suggests the possibility of a concrete connection, ‘Tough Guys..’ actually began shooting just one month after ‘Blue Velvet’ premiered, and years before ‘Twin Peaks’ fully nailed down the aesthetic which Mailer was - unwittingly? - pre-empting here. Go figure.

Anyway, regardless - let’s just say that ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is an insane, unrepeatable masterpiece which you need in your life, and leave it at that.

I could’ve told you - never call Vinegar Syndrome ‘small potatoes’! 

 

1. A Scene at the Sea 

(Takeshi Kitano, 1991)

Well, despite all the genre movie madness outlined above, maybe I’m just a sentimentalist at heart.

You’ll find no yakuza power struggles, no sudden outbursts of violence and no sexual perversity in Takeshi Kitano’s third film as director, but nonetheless, for me it represents both the purest expression of the ‘detached’ cinematic style he developed across his pioneering early work, and his most deeply affecting work as a filmmaker.

Action, technique and narrative exposition are all minimised here to such an extent that Kitano’s simple tale of a deaf garbage collector (Shigeru, played by Claude Maki) who finds a discarded surfboard and decides to learn to use it feels almost like an ambient form of cinema; a meditation on the transitory beauty of day-to-day life, often veering closer to one of the director’s naïve, faux-childlike paintings than to anything resembling commercial filmmaking.

Given that both Shigeru and his girlfriend (played by Hiroko Ôshima) are deaf, it seems fitting that the vast majority of the dialogue spoken by supporting characters in the film consists of inconsequential nattering, of far less significance than the more basic information conveyed by their actions and positioning within the frame. Although this is not a silent film, Kitano allows us to enter the confined, wordless world of his central characters in a way that feels both natural, and almost kind of welcoming.

Even more-so than in his other early films, Kitano takes the time here to present a side of Japan’s urban sprawl which is rarely depicted on screen; a thin strip of grey, undefined beach, surrounded by nondescript pre-fab buildings and concrete highway infrastructure define the limits of Shigeru and his girlfriend’s world. This space serves a backdrop for their gentle, low-key interactions with strangers and casual acquaintances, and, when the action (such as it is) moves to a surf-meet further up the coast, it’s difficult not to share the love the director clearly feels for the awkward formality and quiet surrealism with which such events are conducted in his home country.

Narrative information within ‘A Scene at the Sea’ is cut down to the extent that we don’t know how Shigeru and his girlfriend met, or what the length or extent of their relationship has been. We only have faintest idea where they live, and are never made aware of them having any other family members. As you will have noted, we don’t even know the girl’s name - which again seems entirely consistent with the couple’s existence in a world where such things simply don’t matter. All that matters to her is that she is with him.

In fact, we don't even really know the reasons why Shigeru feels so strongly drawn to the sea (aside from the fact that it’s there, and it’s beautiful), or what triggers the climactic events at the film’s conclusion.

What I do know though, is that, when Joe Hisaishi’s deceptively saccharine jazz score rises over the closing shots, there will not be a dry eye in the house - guaranteed.

Available on blu-ray or streaming in the UK from Third Window Films.

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Happy new year everyone - thank you for reading, and I'm hoping against hope that I'll be able to return to regular posting schedule here through 2023, so, watch this space.