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BLOG POSTS: Skid Marks: Cool Car Movies For Your Consideration

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I feel like I’m being too unreasonably excited about Fast and Furious 6 coming out in a couple of weeks to be devoting an entire blog to “cool car movies”, but anyhow here I am, writing about some cool car movies in anticipation of Fast and Furious 6.

A few things to keep in mind:
(1) I am in no way a petrol/gear/car-head. I don’t know anything about cars. I drive auto.
(2) I am a fan of the first Fast and the Furious and Fast Five.
(3) Two-Lane Blacktop is one of my favourite movies, and it won’t be included here, so don’t get all “what about Two Lane Blacktop?” on me now (and The Driver too).
(4) I’m defining “car movie” in a fairly broad sense, that is to say it contains some form of car-focus, a strong element of driving, racing, chasing, anything in the spirit of burning rubber.
(5) Car movies are intrinsically cinematic. Car chases, car bodies, open roads = all visually dynamic to photograph, and occasionally, metaphorically rich (this Chevy is a coffin that enslaves my soul!)


GRAND PRIX/LE MANS

There seems to be a little rivalry between fans as to whether John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1968) or Lee Katzin’s Le Mans (1971) represents “the ultimate racing flick”. I’d say if you’re into cars and racing at all, you will want to see both; they ultimately represent two sides of the same coin, and are equally worthy of the title. It really depends on your sensibility. Frankenheimer’s film, made when the guy could do no wrong (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds), is a three-hour, shot-on-65mm behemoth which paved the way for how to rig cameras on racing cars and shoot them at real speed without any frame-rate manipulation. Soapy narrative aside – though made totally watchable by the distinguished, international cast – Grand Prix’s Formula 1 footage is heart-thumping and dazzling and would kill on the biggest screen.

Le Mans is also ahead of its time, more for the fact that it’s one of the most experimental studio movies ever. Racing nut Steve McQueen sunk his money into the project to get it completed, and the result is uncompromisingly purist in its devotion to the race: minimal “dramatic” story, dialogue, performance. It’s all about the track. It’s also less dated.


PIT STOP

Set in a milieu as far away from Grand Prix’s star-studded, high-livin’ Euro-glamour as possible, Jack Hill’s grungy little Pit Stop (1969) may have been cranked out on the cheap, but this pic has more guts, heart and personality than most studio productions ten times its size. Originally titled The Winner, it’s a somewhat under-recognised achievement in Hill’s career, made before his string of better-known, career-defining exploitation classics (Switchblade Sisters, The Big Doll House, Coffy).

Dick Davalos (East of Eden) stars as Rick Bowman, a brooding drag-racing punk who gets bailed out of a jam by dodgy, money-hungry race sponsor Grant Willard (Brian Donlevy, in his final role) to compete in the utterly mad world of “Figure 8” racing. Shot in starkly realistic black-and-white, there’s a remorseless intensity to the fender-smashing mayhem only matched by the repellent, sociopathic behaviour of the characters. Hill regular Sid Haig (Spider Baby) is awesomely over-the-top as Hawk Sidney, Bowman’s nemesis, whose overbearing, competitive swagger hides an emotionally stunted man-child who hasn’t fully grown to manage his tantrums just yet. Superb psych-fuzz-rock soundtrack by the Daily Flash gives this tough, wiry movie the necessary amount of pedal-to-the-metal kick.


THE LAST AMERICAN HERO

Early stock car racing legend Junior Johnson – who gets a passing mention in Pit Stop – inspired this winning 1973 gem. Based on a series of Esquire essays by the then-unknown Tom Wolfe, The Last American Hero features Jeff Bridges in a plum early role as Johnson – renamed Elroy Jackson Jr. here – a moonshine runner who enters the NASCAR to provide for the family when his dad (Art Lund) goes to jail. Familiar racing movie archetypes abound, from Ed Lauter’s controlling sponsor to William Smith’s lady-killing opponent, but the film is a modest triumph, driven by its good ol’ mountain boy charm, with director Lamont Johnson balancing finely wrought character drama with thrilling, well-shot track action. A favourite of Quentin Tarantino, who recently appropriated the use of its affecting theme song, Jim Croce’s “I’ve Got a Name” in Django Unchained. Real-life Johnson served as a “technical advisor”.


DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY

If you need a more existentialist ‘70s car chase movie, Vanishing Point is your best bet, but for a straight-up drive-in romp, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) can’t be beat. Peter Fonda plays a Daytona dreamer – basically a slightly older version of his anti-establishment, devil-may-care self from his Easy Rider/The Wild Angels days – who robs supermarket manager Roddy McDowell and goes on the lam with partner-in-crime Adam Roarke and ditzy hanger-on Susan George.

Vacuous plot and shrill performances (oh God Mary and Larry’s bickering!) can be forgiven when the film shuts the hell up and unleashes its array of killer car stunts, including a magnificent, eye-popping helicopter-vs-Dodge-Charger showdown towards the end. Brit director John Hough (The Legend of Hell House) stages everything with a minimum of cuts that reminds us how much more dangerous, and exciting, stunts were back in the day. A frankly nutty, and perfectly downbeat ending seals the deal. Pair this up with a Race with the Devil for a hell-and-hair-raisin’ Fonda/chase double feature.


THE GUMBALL RALLY

It’s a impossible to resist this mindless piece of pre-Cannonball Run open road anarchy from ‘76, which rarely strays from its appeal as a goofy, good-natured live-action cartoon, but actually contains a brief moment of transcendence rarely seen on film: cars speeding through an empty Times Square at dawn. The remaining 90 minutes are filled with zany, loony stunt antics, too breezily directed by veteran stuntman Chuck Bail to generate much competitive tension but choreographed with panache all the same.

The fun cast – clearly having a ball with their tongue-in-cheek parts – includes Michael Sarrazin as the mastermind behind the illegal street race, a hilarious Raul Julia as an amorous Italian “ringer” (“1st rule of Italian driving…what’s behind me is not important”), and Gary Busey, a hillbilly driver who I’d like to imagine as the parallel-reality twin of his role as Bridges’ brother in The Last American Hero. Fundamentally It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World for gearheads, The Gumball Rally is the kind of thing you’d watch all the way through on TV even if you’ve seen it a thousand times before.


FAST COMPANY

In between two of his best horror outings, Rabid and The Brood, David Cronenberg directed this entertaining tribute to one of his other – non-icky – passions: drag-racing. There seems to be a lot of derision heaped on this film. Cronenberg’s worst until he made M. Butterfly! Pssh. Don’t believe the hate: Fast Company is great, terminally underrated. “Atypical” yes, but Cronenberg’s meticulous, attentive touch – aided by his regular, reliably proficient collaborators like art director Carol Spier and cinematographer Mark Irwin – boosts this otherwise standard, predictable B-story about race champ William Smith getting royally screwed by his scumbag manager John Saxon. If you look hard enough, there IS stuff you may want to call “Cronenberg-esque” – a threesome where motor oil is poured over a girl’s breasts could be seen as prefiguring Crash, for example – but the film can be easily enjoyed on its own populist, unpretentious terms, most likeable when it emphasises the warm, loyal camaraderie between the members of Smith’s racing crew.


Car movie favourites? Anyone?


BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #8

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In this edition of Shelf Life, Aaron Yap’s ongoing series of back catalogue film viewing, you’ll meet a crazy bomber, grumpy cop and serial rapist in The Police Connection; a pre-Mad Men ad exec beset by existential angst in The Arrangement; and young punkers Diane Lane and Laura Dern as The Fabulous Stains in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Table for six?


THE POLICE CONNECTION

Not sure where Bert I. Gordon’s head was in 1973, but he took a break from his usual monster movies to make this scuzzy, forgotten piece of exploitation that resembled nothing else in his filmography. It’s not just that The Police Connection (aka The Mad Bomber) is such a genre change, but also that it’s marked by an unusually misanthropic vibe. Sleazing up the screen with nasty rape scenes, not one but three unsavoury main characters, and a jaw-droppingly graphic and downbeat ending, this procedural/psycho-thriller will make you feel like having a rigorous post-viewing hose-down.

In light of recent events, the film exudes a certain disquieting quality too, being about an unhinged man named William Dorn (Chuck Connors) who’s getting back at the world for his daughter’s drug overdose by planting homemade bombs around Los Angeles. Grumpy cop Geronimo (Vince Edwards) is tasked with finding Dorn, but his one and only lead is Fromley, a serial rapist (Neville Brand) who might have caught a glimpse of Dorn during an attack on a mute girl in a hospital.

So yeah, it is a bit of a tough ask to hang out with these three individuals for an hour-and-a-half; actually the more I think of it, Dorn comes off best, mainly because of Connors’ terrific, magnetic performance — easily a career best. A former pro basketball and baseball player who came to prominence on the classic western TV series The Rifleman, Connors, with his thin glasses, tall, threatening frame, and intensely square jaw, does look suitably mad, and he does a convincing job of ranting against social ills, while becoming increasingly haunted by memories of his daughter. Edwards (from TV’s Ben Casey) plays Geronimo with such a scary, piggish lack of compassion that borders on psychotic; his bright plan to nab Fromley is to “blanket the city with policewomen asking to get raped”. Go-to villain Brand (D.O.A.) is thoroughly repugnant as Fromley, a character whose wormy presence reaches its skin-crawling nadir in a scene where he masturbates furiously to 8mm loops of his naked wife — something which she seems perfectly okay with.

Code Red’s DVD presents the film uncut for the first time and it looks pretty good all things considered. Unfortunately no extras though; it would have nice to get a little background on its production (was Marc Behm’s story inspired by real-life mad bomber George Metesky?). ’70s exploitation fans will want to snap this up pronto.


THE ARRANGEMENT

In the ‘50s and ‘60s Elia Kazan enjoyed success in Hollywood as one of their most revered directors, having made such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and East of Eden. At the same time he was a hugely controversial figure: in 1952, he dobbed in some of his fellow colleagues – and Communist Party members – before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a move that would taint his entire career.

The final nail in his proverbial coffin was probably The Arrangement (1969), a critically savaged adaptation of his semi-autobiographical bestseller. But time has been fairly kind to this film, its devastating, exhausting, unwaveringly personal portrait of an ad exec (Kirk Douglas) suffering an existential crisis in many ways prefiguring current TV fave Mad Men.

The film joins Frank Perry’s The Swimmer as the era’s superlative unravelling of cushy American suburban dream: it’s soulful, haunted, emotionally tethered to the psyche of a protagonist who has to break himself down to escape the superficial, false contentment of his life. Douglas, in a role initially intended for Marlon Brando, gives a versatile, powerfully anguished performance, and he’s joined by a dynamite cast that includes Deborah Kerr as his bitter, long-suffering wife and Faye Dunaway as his alluring mistress.

The Arrangement is probably Kazan’s LOUDEST film, slathering a myriad of New Wave/pop-arty stylistic tricks (flashbacks, dream sequences, voice-over, comic exclamations) on top of its blaring melodrama in an effort to mirror Anderson’s loopy, chaotic mindset. Think Michelangelo Antonioni’s chilly studies of the disenchanted affluent given a booster shot of Nicolas Roeg’s psyched-out editing: it’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess that’s too compelling to forget.


LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS

I can’t think of many record producers who’ve dabbled in feature filmmaking, but Lou Adler, who recorded the likes of Sam Cooke and Carole King, was one. During the ‘70s Adler ventured into cinema, producing the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show and directing the Cheech and Chong stoner romp Up in Smoke. The only other film he ever directed was Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1981), a grungy little punk movie that was barely released and shelved by the studio but has since gone on to gain a loyal following, among them Toby Vail from Bikini Kill and Courtney Love.

Written by Slap Shot’s Nancy Dowd, who later disowned the film after the studio re-shot the ending, the story charts the brief rise-and-fall of a teenage garage band (Diane Lane, Laura Dern, Marin Kanter) who accidentally end up an overnight hit whilst on tour with ageing heavy metal rockers the Metal Corpses and Brit punkers the Looters (led by Ray Winstone, who looks like he just crawled out of his mother’s womb).

It’s essentially a satire on both the media and audience’s influence on shaping and nurturing flavours-of-the-month regardless of talent: the Stains are amateurish at best, sloppy performers with off-key singing, but their rebellious, provocative dress sense, “skunk” hairdos, and angsty catchcry of “Don’t put out” make for perfect sensationalist news fodder. In this age of pre-fab pop stars and fame-seeking reality TV idols, Adler’s film clearly still strikes a sharp chord, even if its tone veers towards needlessly broad spoofing on occasion.

Regardless, it’s held together by Lane’s raw performance as Corinne “Third Degree” Burns, the Stains’ leader — it’s a gutsy role full of stroppy vigor that’ll resonate with anyone who’s ever been a misunderstood teenager aching for their voice to be heard. Look out for The Clash’s Paul Simonon and ex-Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook in Winstone’s band.

BLOG POSTS: M. Night Shyamalan Was Aliens

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The universe has spoken: M. Night Shyamalan has – pardon my French – crapped out another shitter. Furthering his decline from any form of credibility, his latest film, the sci-fi adventure After Earth (unseen as of writing but reviewed on Flicks here) has crashed and burned, tanking miserably at the US box office while getting mercilessly eviscerated by film critics. Not even Sony’s pre-emptive decision to de-emphasise Shyamalan’s once-marquee-strong name from marketing materials could save this one (“From the director of The Sixth Sense” doesn’t have much pull these days). All of which is to say of course, that everyone saw this coming.

From the outset After Earth already smelled stinky: Shyamalan’s involvement, Will Smith’s creative shepherding of the project as a platform for his son Jaden to become Future Will Smith, and an underwhelming trailer that visually made the film look like it was assembled from the wreckage of the not-too-dissimilar post-apocalyptic Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion from a few months ago…all prime ingredients for the perfect collective shrug. But I’m gonna set all this aside for a second.

Don’t get wrong, I don’t think the relentless mudslinging levelled at Shyamalan is undeserved. He tried to sucker us one too many times with his silly rug-pullin’ antics; his well-documented raging ego is laughable, not exactly the most admirable trait. Add me to the list of people who enjoy ragging on him, simply because it’s easy to. But you know what? All things considered, his signature body of work, between the lightning-bolt mainstream success of The Sixth Sense and the unmitigated laugh-out-loud trashiness of The Happening, resembles no other Hollywood filmmaker of his generation working in the field of the fantastique. M. Night was on some other wavelength, which for a brief period, everyone wanted to tune into, even as people were just as quick to switch off. I think he’s a little too weird to completely write off, too offbeat to ignore, thus I’ve dedicated 12 hours of my life to re-watching those key films that made, and ultimately derailed his career to see if they’re as good or bad as I remembered. (Spoilers follow)


THE SIXTH SENSE

It’s easy to joke about this game-changer now (“I see dead people” hahaha) but once upon a time in 1999, Shyamalan’s brand of slow-burn spookiness genuinely captivated audiences. There was no Ti West around doing this sort of thing, and it was a breath of fresh air in the post-Scream world of American horror, harking back to subtly creepy classic ghost stories like The Haunting and The Changeling. It cemented Shyamalan’s reputation as a lover of twist endings, but also demonstrated his keen sense for creating suspense and atmosphere, with a strong command of technique that had critics – perhaps prematurely – comparing him to Spielberg and Hitchcock.

And the film remains tremendously watchable today because of the meticulous craftsmanship, with ace contributions from cinematographer Tak Fujimoto and composer James Newton Howard, both of whom Shyamalan would continue to work with in subsequent films. Of course, the engaging, absorbing chemistry between Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osmont helps too, the latter giving one of the best child performances of that era. Seen a second time, the twist serves as a stinging reminder of how foolish we were to miss it the first time around, but the bulk of the film more or less works as a moody, melancholy tale about a guilt-ridden ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead yet.


UNBREAKABLE

How do you follow up an unexpected box office smash like The Sixth Sense? In Shyamalan’s case, you deconstruct the comic book and make a movie that plays like a superhero origin story directed by Tarkovsky! I’m giving him too much credit there, but Unbreakable’s chief distinction is definitely the ponderous gravity it brings to the superhero genre, an approach that Christopher Nolan would later use for his Batman films. Shyamalan’s style crystallises here: it’s deliberate, economical, self-conscious even, but his willingness to milk tension from long takes and eschew effects-powered set-pieces results in a strangely artful, conceptually ambitious and elegantly unremarkable addition to a now-commonplace blockbuster genre (the entirety of Unbreakable probably has as many shots as The Avengers does in its first 30 minutes). Willis gives another great understated performance (he used to be really good at this kinda thing), and Samuel L. Jackson is quietly maniacal and tortured as the arch enemy whose physically debilitating condition provides a sound emotional foundation for the finale’s reveal, even when it’s no longer a surprise. As time goes on, Unbreakable looks more and more like Shyamalan’s best film.


SIGNS

I’ve never been been a fan of Signs, considered by some to be Shyamalan’s answer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s perhaps his most deeply religious film, about a preacher (Mel Gibson) who’s lost his faith and his journey to reassess it when an alien invasion threatens the livelihood of his family. I don’t have a problem with the film’s spiritual overtones, nor its allusions to 9/11, and I can appreciate his attempt, once again, to tweak genre expectations by narrowing the focus to the family and keeping the aliens mostly hidden from view. But the gigantic lapses in logic kill it, especially once you realise how thinly scripted the narrative is (even more evident on repeat viewing). This is the movie where aliens have the capability to travel through space and create intricate crop circles undetected, yet have difficulty opening pantry doors and aren’t smart enough to figure out that about 70% of the Earth consists of the thing that’ll destroy them: water. Fleeting moments of suspense aside, Signs is one stodgy, hokey, uneventful movie, and god, Mel’s such a ham.


THE VILLAGE

I’m tempted to call The Village Shyamalan’s most underrated film. He’s directed three films with well-known twist endings (maybe less so with Signs), so the fact he actually went for it and pulled another one was pretty, pretty ballsy. The twist here is the easiest to figure out of all his films, partly because viewers were more clued-in at this stage to Shyamalan’s ways and would have been paying extra attention… and partly ‘cos it’s just easy.

Hey guys I'm here do you see me

On re-watch it’s easier to appreciate The Village as the best movie Rod Serling never made. The revelation that the village was fake, created by “elders” to remove themselves from the ugliness of the present and lead more primitive but innocent lives in the past, has a moralistic bent worthy of Serling. It also excuses, maybe unintentionally, the mannered dialogue, which often sounds like it’s being delivered by am-dram actors doing The Crucible or something. But with Coen brothers DP Roger Deakins on his side, Shyamalan made the most exquisitely textured, gorgeously shot and designed movie of his career, its surface qualities so ethereally rich that it offsets its goofier bits while enhancing the haunting implications of the ending. You’d be surprised at how well this one holds up.


LADY IN THE WATER

I really – like really - wanted to give Lady in the Water another chance, thinking maybe I was too harsh on it the first time round. This is the one Shyamalan film that feels like his most personal work, an untouched vision ripped from his Id (it’s based on a bedtime story he told his kids). I can respect that. But the truth is, the roots of his career decline could be traced directly back here. The film’s rickety road to production is now the stuff of Hollywood legend: when Disney, who made his other films, said it was shit, Shyamalan said screw you, and went to Warners, who let him go wild with this quirky little fairy tale featuring sea nymphs, grassy-skinned beasts, a snippy film critic played by Bob Balaban (who later gets mauled to death by said beasts) and Shyamalan himself as a world-saving writer. Result? His first Razzie. My opinion hasn’t changed: it’s turgid, incomprehensible and overbearing in its self-importance. Tip to Shyamalan: if you want to build a fantasy world that requires rules to be set, don’t use a stuttering caretaker to be our guide into that world. Paul Giamatti’s tic-ridden performance is so painful to watch.


THE HAPPENING

Shyamalan’s last true Shyamalan movie before morphing into an anonymous, studio gun-for-hire with The Last Airbender, The Happening is generally cited as his worst. Tellingly, it’s also his first R-rated work, falling back on the splattery shocks that his previous films merely hinted at. But man do I love The Happening. For sheer entertainment value, it’s my desert island Shyamalan pick. Gone is the portentousness that’s disguised some of the hoary genre cliches he’s trafficked in; what’s left is pure, unaffected B-movie heaven, a modern camp classic of the nature-run-amok genre.

Supported by gloriously terrible performances by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, Shyamalan’s lousy execution abandons all narrative logic and finds him writing tin-eared, unnatural-sounding dialogue that’s consistently quotable – when it’s not bringing you to tears. I don’t think anyone other than Shyamalan could have gotten away with making a movie about a killer wind and play it dead straight.

It also features my favourite Shyamalan cameo – he’s that creepy “Joey” on the cellphone who’s trying to call Deschanel after a tiramisu date! Watching all the extras in the background only adds to the fun. The Happening is another game-changer in its own right.


BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #9

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Aaron Yap dusts off another trio of seldom-seen titles from his pile of unwatched films in the latest edition of Shelf Life. This time around, allow yourselves to be lured in by the wonderfully titled Haunts, School of the Holy Beast and Closet Land – none of which may be about what you first think…


HAUNTS

As much as I love the hideously awful drawing on this VHS release of Herb Freed’s Haunts (1975), it doesn’t do any favours for the film, which (a) isn’t your usual slasher flick or (b) some Z-grade turkey that cover would have you believe. It is, however, more in line with female-centred psychological meltdowns like Images, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Repulsion et al, albeit done on a much lower budget, and with a more unusual crew that contributes to its appealingly offbeat feel.

Freed, who wrote the film with his wife Anne Marisse, used to be a Rabbi (!); he later went on to make ‘80s B-horrors like Graduation Day and Beyond Evil. May Britt was a Swedish actress whose marriage to Sammy Davis Jr. caused a ruckus in its day, and her presence in this distinctly-Americana setting, acting alongside hammy, gruff genre pros like Aldo Ray and Cameron Mitchell, is definitely weird. To top it off, there’s Italian composer Pino Donaggio, who did Don’t Look Now and many of Brian DePalma’s movies (Carrie, Blow Out), scoring occasionally grander, lusher moments than you’d expect from a threadbare production like this.

Britt plays Ingrid, a mousy middle-aged woman who lives with her Uncle Carl (Mitchell) on a farm. The film doesn’t waste any time hinting there might be something up with her, cutting shots of her innocuously milking a goat with brief flashbacks of a couple rolling around in bed and a young girl getting molested by an unseen man. Meanwhile, a homicidal maniac is on the prowl, raping and killing women in the community. The sheriff (Ray) can’t figure it out, though red herrings point to womanising butcher Frankie (William Gray Espy), or the new dude in town, Bill Spry (Robert Hippard) — both whom are pretty keen on Ingrid.

Despite the unpleasant subject matter, nothing overtly graphic happens in Haunts; Freed’s game here is atmosphere over gore, and the film succeeds in discharging a drowsy late-night spell, so much so that I feel stupid for not seeing the goddamn twist coming. It’s not an especially original twist, but a nifty example of the ol’ bait-and-switch — I’ll give it that. The Psycho-like post-mortem ending that follows directly after explains plenty, but I’m not sure if Freed and Marisse adequately balance between explaining TOO much and holding back just a little to retain some mystery. That final freeze frame is dang creepy though. Worth a look if you like your cheap ‘70s rural psycho-sexual slow-burns.


SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST

Time for another doooozy! Cult Epics released this Japanese nunsploitation pic on DVD nearly 8 years ago and I’ve only found the inclination to break the seal last week. Nunsploitation is a bit of a weird one for me; I don’t naturally gravitate to this subgenre as I would to others, but it would seem that on some subconscious level I have a place for it in my heart, having enjoyed some of its finer entries, such as The Devils (an all-time fave), Alucarda and Killer Nun (I’m a huge fan of Black Narcissus too, if we want to include that on a list of crazy nun movies).

Produced by Toei in ‘74, School of the Holy Beast is generally considered one of the best of its type from Japan — or any other country for that matter — due to the exhilaratingly stylish direction of Norifumi Suzuki, a seasoned pinky violence specialist who’s helmed such luridly titled fare such as Beautiful Girl Hunter and Sex and Fury. Comparable to Italian horror auteurs like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Suzuki’s visual inventiveness elevates potentially bog-standard sleaze into the realm of arthouse-worthy artistry.

The film’s basically just a nunned-out prison movie, complete with uninitiated newbie and evil, sadistic warden-type character, plus tons of gratuitous nudity, bondage and torture scenes to satisfy its exploitation quota. Yumi Takigawa stars as Maya, a girl who enters a sacred convent to investigate the mysterious death of her mother there 18 years ago. Of course, instead of finding a haven of discipline and devotion, it’s a hotbed of repressed sexuality, medieval savagery, wicked conspiracies and naughty, self-flagellating nuns.

Crammed with tasteless debauchery, astonishing political incorrectness and stylized colour schemes that’ll have your eyes screaming “holy shit!”, School of the Holy Beast is an audacious, wildly profane, deliriously entertaining F-you to religious hypocrisy — a great place to start for anyone looking to step into the world of nuns gone very, very bad.


CLOSET LAND

Apologies for covering back-to-back films with torture themes… I didn’t exactly have a torture double feature planned out, but since we’re living in the age of post-9/11/Patriot Act/NSA bugging/Zero Dark Thirty etc, what the hell, this bizarro little curio from ‘91 is timely as ever. The question is though, what did super-producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard — and Universal Pictures — see in this decidedly uncommercial, two-character, one-set chamber piece from debuting writer/director Radha Bharadwaj (apparently the first Indian to have have a film released by a major Hollywood studio)?

The holier-than-thou closing quote from Amnesty International indicates politically driven motivations at work, even if Bharadwaj, interestingly, has denounced its inclusion as too propagandistic. Taken at face value, Closet Land is perhaps too heavy-handed in its ideas to function as effective political treatise, and is best appreciated as a moderately gripping Orwellian nightmare, featuring strikingly surreal sets by noted costumer designer Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Cell) and little-seen but superb performances from Alan Rickman and Madeleine Stowe.

Stowe — a totally underrated actress I don’t think Hollywood ever knew what to do with — is a children’s writer who’s yanked from her bed at gunpoint, blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location where she’s subjected to all manner of brutal interrogation by a government official (Rickman, at his snaky best) accusing her of “subliminal indoctrination”. Mind-games ensue and intensify, with Rickman doing what ever he can to squeeze a confession out of Stowe, including, but not limited to, tarting her up in pigtails, garish make-up and black underwear, and breathing garlic in her face (that was a weird sentence to write).

Other than the odd bit of trippy, folk-arty animation used to illustrate Stowe’s stories, the action rarely strays from the minimalist, power-struggle set-up, and although Bharadwaj’s direction tends towards the static, the potent acting and baroque strangeness of Ishioka’s production design held my attention. If any of those screenshots above grab you, it’s likely you’ll find Closet Land of some interest.

BLOG POSTS: NZIFF in 1993: A Look Back, or Remember When Movies Used To Be $5?

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1993 was quite a pivotal year for me as a budding 13-year-old film buff. I saw the first film that profoundly altered my perception of the medium: Falling Down. Although today it’s easy to scoff at the idea that a Joel Schumacher movie could have  had such an impact on me, as a naive, moody, temperamental young‘un, that’s exactly what happened. It shook me to the core; I connected deeply with its anti-authority angst, and somehow this made me realise there was much more to cinema than Star Wars or dumb action movies. Movies could be angry, impassioned, psychologically scarring, not simply “entertainment” (Taxi Driver — a clear influence on Falling Down — re-confirmed this not long after).

The second thing that happened was the New Zealand International Film Festival. I can’t remember how I came to be aware of it but I picked up the programme somewhere, and ended up dragging my dad along to the Civic in the hopes of catching a little movie called Reservoir Dogs. I knew that it was R18 but was eager to try my luck, reasoning that if I had my dad there to “supervise” I would get in. So we rocked up to the box office and asked if we could get tickets; the lady outright said NO, advising that it was “extremely violent”, “unsuitable for children”, etc. But I was adamant and retorted, with The Silence of the Lambs in mind: “I’ve seen worse”. No dice. We went home soon after, and I wouldn’t see Michael Madsen’s ear-slicing antics until a year later.

‘93 was kind of an interesting year for film too. Quentin Tarantino was on the cusp of superstardom. Reservoir Dogs reignited the controversy of violence in film. Jurassic Park stomped into theatres. Anna Paquin melted hearts in The Piano. Robin Williams cross-dressed his way to the bank as Mrs. Doubtfire. Brandon Lee died. As I nostalgically leaf through the programme guide for the 25th NZIFF, it’s all coming back to me now, with the none-too-surprising realisation that much has changed in the last 20 years…

These ads in the programme tell us a lot. For example, you could still rent videos and laserdiscs..

Brad Pitt was still in his awkward phase…

… and the most novel of all, you could still see Brendan Fraser movies at the movies…

Seriously though, let’s take a closer look and see what we can learn about the festival itself back then and what’s changed:

The Programme Cover

This artwork suggests an element of exclusivity. The gold/bronze colour scheme is dark, dull, stuffy. It looks like a prestigious, members-only VIP club that wouldn’t seem especially inviting to anyone who doesn’t watch arthouse or festival movies. Put it next to this year’s programme and the difference is night and day. The programmes have become brighter, more attractive — and “youthful” even — over the years, no longer giving off that exclusive, slightly film-snobbish vibe it might once have. And as for the sponsor…

Ticket Prices

Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, you used to pay only $8.50 to see a movie (and an insane $5 for B-coded sessions). Everything has practically doubled. We had it good. Sniff.

Venues (Auckland)

Screenings today are spread over 7 venues, including a few out of the central Auckland hub (Lido, Bridgeway, Rialto). In ‘93, they were just adding a third venue, the now-defunct Hoyts Midcity. It seems like screenings were mostly held in the Civic Theatre, and somewhere called the Civic “Showcase” — which if I recall was a small theatre under the Civic? Please correct me if I’m wrong. I remember going under the Civic to see Bride of the Monster one year.

Documentaries

Once upon a time documentaries were not cool. In his intro, fest director Bill Gosden laments, “Nobody else in New Zealand believes there’s an audience for them”. The opposite is true now of course, with docos becoming more accepted by the mainstream and contributing to some of the festival’s biggest hits of the past decade.

Film Count

I counted 100 or so films, which is about 60 less than what we have today. But…there were only 2 New Zealand films playing in ‘93: Desperate Remedies and Bread and Roses. This year we have 44 and a section completely dedicated to NZ film.

what you could see that year

- The humble, unassuming early works of two directors who went on to do bigger things: Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet).

- Promising American indies who have now mostly gone into TV: Carl Franklin (One False Move), Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), Nick Gomez (Laws of Gravity).

- A bunch of world cinema regulars still more or less going strong: Zhang Yimou (The Story of Qiu Ju), Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine), Abbas Kiarostami (And Life Goes On), Werner Herzog (Lessons of Darkness), Michael Haneke (Benny’s Video), Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf).

- A solid retrospective featuring the films of Buster Keaton (whose The Cameraman returns this year) and Orson Welles (Macbeth, Othello, The Trial), plus Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped and Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut (which was the only film I ended up seeing).

- A side of quirky Canadians: Guy Maddin (Careful), Atom Egoyan (Calendar), Bruce McDonald (Highway 61).

All in all, a pretty strong line-up.

Just as a curious final note… there’s a brief blurb in the programme about censorship that refers to a “banned” “stalk and slash” movie:

Anyone out there know what it was?

Also, feel free to share your memories of past NZIFF experiences if you have any…

BLOG POSTS: Fresh Blood: Five Overlooked Vampire Movies To Sink Your Teeth Into

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Where the zombie genre has grown somewhat stale, rarely having its limitations challenged nor re-imagined beyond rudimentary splatter, vampires arguably remain the most narratively flexible, most allegorically rich of all monsters. In anticipation of two brand new bloodsuckers heading our way soon – Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and Neil Jordan’s Byzantium - here are five of my favourite offbeat, overlooked movies in the genre:


THIRST

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009) may be excessively long, too meandering, and lacking in the immediate cathartic thrills of his Vengeance trilogy, but the upside is there aren’t many revisionings of vampiric lore as insane, outlandish and unpredictable as this one. Loosely adapted from Émile Zola’s 19th century novel Therese Raquin, the film stars Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’s Song Kang-Ho as Sang Hyun, a priest who undergoes an experimental vaccine trial for a deadly virus that accidentally turns him into a super-human vamp.

It’s an irreverent little twist, and Park definitely delivers on the perversely funny kick of seeing a Man of Faith struggle with his newfound bloodlust and resort to surreptitiously slurping out of hospital IV drips to avoid killing people. But that’s only the start of it, as Thirst morphs into a deliriously loony love story that announces itself as a wickedly gonzo corrective to formula vampire films.


TROUBLE EVERY DAY

I still cringe every time I see the inexplicable, tacky use of Comic Sans in the credits of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), especially for a filmmaker with such a distinct, developed — and un-tacky — visual sense, but in some weird roundabout way of its own, it does signal that there is nothing “usual” about this film. Thinly plotted but densely atmospheric, Denis’ spacious, elliptical reverie retains the skeletal framework of several identifiable genre tropes of the icky Cronenbergian kind, but rarely honours them, at least in a way that’ll appease traditional horror viewers. The word “vampire” is never uttered, but physical symptoms do manifest themselves in Beatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo’s characters, both of whom are given sequences of bloodletting that don’t hold back from lingering on the erotic, animalistic undercurrents of their afflictions.


Trouble Every Day turns genre inside out, with Denis’ fluid, sensual, impressionistic style and Tindersticks’ brooding, haunting score generating woozy, oneiric textures that sometimes recall the work of ‘70s European sex-horror auteurs such as Jean Rollin and Jess Franco in feel, if not content and sensibility.


THIRST

Rod Hardy’s Thirst (1979) boasts such a fantastic modern-day spin on the genre I’m surprised no one has bothered to remake it yet (not that I’m aware of anyway). John Pinkney’s screenplay imagines an industry of “blood farming”, where drugged-up humans are milked for blood which is then covertly shipped in milk cartons to vampires all over the world. One could argue that Thirst doesn’t go far enough with this brilliant premise, but I think it expands its ideas as much as its meagre budget will allow.

Produced by Anthony “Australia’s Roger Corman” Ginnane (Turkey Shoot, Patrick), the film features a clever meld of clinical sci-fi-ish tech (vats of blood, suction tubes, assembly-line facilities) and old, creaky Gothic touches (coffins, candles, cavernous rituals), and is held together by a believably frazzled performance from Chantal Contouri as a woman who discovers she’s the descendent of Countess Bathory when a vampire cult known as the Hyma Brotherhood kidnaps her. The film’s lengthy centrepiece, a dream-within-a-dream sequence that’s a result of Contouri getting “reprogrammed”, is a dazzlingly disorienting psych-out, stylishly directed by veteran TV guy Hardy. In supporting roles, familiar international faces Henry Silva and David Hemmings, both good as high-ranking Brotherhood members, add genre appeal to this highly original thriller.


NADJA

Droll and dream-like — sometimes in the same scene — Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) is a post-modern take of Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter that suggests nothing less than an intersection of David Lynch’s otherworldly, nightmarish imagery and Hal Hartley’s hip, deadpan philosophising in its execution. Almereyda’s decision to shoot portions of the film in PixelVision to evoke the vampire’s perspective is a divisive one, but on repeat viewings, this aesthetic quirk goes down much easier, fitting in with intrinsic strangeness of it all.

The zeitgeist-bottling ‘90s soundtrack (My Bloody Valentine, Portishead), Jim Denault’s ghostly, contrasty black-and-white visuals, Elina Lowensohn’s positively ethereal performance and Peter Fonda’s babbling, kooky characterisation of Van Helsing make Nadja one uniquely stylized, existential vampire pastiche like no other. No surprise that Lynch exec-produced and has a cameo.


HABIT

I never felt Larry Fessenden ever got his due as an independent horror director. Although a prolific actor and producer (recent credits include Ti West’s The Innkeepers and House of the Devil), he’s only directed a handful of features. His best-known works (though not well-known enough) — No Telling, Habit, Wendigo, The Last Winter — are more intelligent and interesting than much of what passes off as “horror” these days, off-setting their low budgets with thoughtful ideas. Three A’s figure strongly in Fessenden’s films — ambiguity, allegory, atmosphere — and 1995’s Habit (actually a remake of his earlier ‘82 film) is perhaps his most well-rounded calibration of these elements, a low-key but engrossingly character-focused tale of vampirism-as-alcoholism.

The thing that strikes you most about Habit is its deep sense of place: Fessenden’s gritty location shooting in New York exudes a seedy, grungy realism that eschews any of the grandiose theatricality one might associate with the genre. It’s reflected in the main character too: Sam (Fessenden), a hard-drinking loser who’s trying to get over the recent death of his father and a messy break-up by hooking up with a kinky, mysteriously nocturnal girl named Anna (Meredith Snaider). Their torrid sexual encounters invariably end with blood drawn in some manner, an addiction to which Sam likens to “having hot milk run through your veins”. But rather than explicitly state the true nature of Anna’s being, Fessenden spends a good deal of time building the toxicity of their relationship, before allowing the hallucinatory passages of Sam’s psychological disintegration to entertain the possibility that her behaviour may also be a by-product of his out-of-control boozing. One of the best indies of the ‘90s, vampire or otherwise.

BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #10

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Aaron Yap’s dusting off of seldom seen back catalogue films continues… This time around he watches a coming-of-age Western from the director of Fantastic Voyage; the amazingly-titled Cocaine: One Man’s Poison (boasting a cameo from Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor as a depressed, toupee-wearing dentist junkie!) and an old school Hitchcockian thriller starring a pre-fame James Caan alongside Katharine Ross…


THE SPIKES GANG

A solid, deftly versatile journeyman whose career spanned nearly 50 years, Richard Fleischer has dabbled in every genre you can think of: film noirs (The Narrow Margin), psychological thrillers (10 Rillington Place), sci-fi adventures (Fantastic Voyage), war epics (Tora! Tora! Tora!), musicals (Doctor Dolittle), etc. Unfortunately The Spikes Gang (1974) isn’t one of his better-remembered films, a coming-of-age western made during the genre’s waning days.

Written by legendary screenwriting couple Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch from Giles Tipette’s novel The Bank Robber, the film opens with three teenage farm boys — Wilson (Gary Grimes), Tod (Charles Martin Smith) and Lester (Ron Howard) — sheltering and nursing wounded outlaw Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin). When Wilson’s God-fearing father finds out, he gets the belting of his life and revolts by running away, an exciting-enough prospect that his loyal buddies Tod and Lester decide to tag along. Following a botched bank heist, they’re reacquainted with Spikes, who bails them out of a Mexican jail and offers them a chance to ride with him.

Shot in Spain, The Spikes Gang doesn’t break any new ground, but neither does it deserve its forgotten status in Fleischer’s filmography. Briskly paced and economically directed, it’s an enjoyable mix of stirring gunplay, lively comic moments and engaging characters that ends rather grimly, as per standard of the era’s gloomy revisionism. The youthful cast acquit themselves admirably as naïve, idealistic wannabe-rebels, but they’re no match for an old pro like Marvin, who, sporting a magnificent handlebar moustache, brings his signature burly charisma to every scene he’s in, leaving no room for doubt that the boys would fall under Spikes’ magnetic, roguish spell.


COCAINE: ONE MAN’S POISON

Cocaine: One Man’s Poison (1983) was probably shown a lot to high school kids at the height of the drug’s boom, but now that we’ve been been accustomed to more graphic depictions of drug addiction like Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting, this TV movie has about as much dramatic persuasion as daytime soap. Dennis Weaver (McCloud; the dude terrorised by a truck in Spielberg’s Duel) plays Eddie Gant, a financially desperate real estate agent who isn’t the sales star that he once used to be. Frustrated by being passed over for a promotion, he discovers the answer to his problems: snorting coke to septum-depleting levels. After several “toots”, his mojo’s back, and he’s buying a cadillac, wearing leather jackets, gettin’ all frisky with wife Barbara (Karen Gassle) and winning clients over.

But the educational warning signs kick in soon, with Weaver pulling out the stops in Eddie’s decline, sweating feverishly, getting ill and paranoid, and hitting rock bottom by pawning valuables to afford the next hit. Veteran TV director Paul Wendkos (Hawaii Five-0) hits all the beats predictably without much subtlety, and though the movie is never laughably terrible or over-the-top enough to be a trash classic, there’s enough sincerity here to make it at the very least, a quaint bit of cautionary entertainment. A young James Spader, in one of his earliest roles, appears as Eddie’s son Buddy, and Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor as Eddie’s depressed, toupee-wearing dentist junkie friend, a hoot of a performance that’s worth watching for alone.


GAMES

Curtis Harrington’s Games (1967) hasn’t always been one of his easiest films to see, so it’s good to have it finally released as part of Universal’s Vault Series a couple of years ago. A much under-recognised director from the Corman school, Harrington’s made some fine B-films in his time, including offbeat genre gems like Night Tide and The Killing Kind, and like those films, this early thriller is certainly worth a look.

Featuring pre-stardom James Caan and Katharine Ross as bored, wealthy New York socialites into deviant mind games, Games has clear narrative ties to Agatha Christie’s fiction and more obviously, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 suspense classic Les Diaboliques. The connection is further cemented by the presence of the latter’s star Simone Signoret, who gives a delightfully eccentric BAFTA-nominated performance here as a cosmetics saleswoman who moves into Caan and Ross’ apartment with possibly sinister intentions.

The set-up is a tad stagey, but cinematographer William A. Fraker (Rosemary’s Baby) shoots the gaudy, pop-art-cluttered apartment with a good feel for the characters’ claustrophobic decadence. Modern viewers will likely figure out the twists before the end, but if you’re into insidious, old school Hitchcockian thrillers, Games should prove to be a pleasurably macabre watch. Cool double feature idea: pair it up with Herbert Ross’ more diabolically plotted but similarly games-focused Last of Sheila.

BLOG POSTS: Elysium: The Blockbuster Saviour That Wasn’t

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Elysium’s gonna be the one”, I said, in hopeful anticipation that Neill Blomkamp’s second feature would turn things around for the Modern Blockbuster, which in the last few months, has given us plenty of reasons to lament its current state. Whether it’s all the gloomy industry talk of a potential “implosion” in Hollywood, or the setting-in of “blockbuster fatigue”, the copious think-pieces pumped out recently by film writers have definitely made it clear that this is a significant period for reflection: is there something actually going on with the ol’ blockbuster or is it just business as usual?

But before I get into a post-mortem summary of the latter, let’s position Elysium into the scheme of things. In hindsight, all signs should’ve pointed to “I should have known better”. But if you had talked to me earlier this year, I would have been certain that we’d be in the hands of a winner. Blomkamp built up much goodwill with his debut, 2009’s District 9, a smart, ferocious, socially conscious sci-fi thriller that showed he could stage impressively effects-heavy action on a relatively tight budget. If he could do this with $30 million, imagine what he could do with FOUR times that budget, right? And with Elysium arriving at the tail end of a underwhelming tentpole season — with regards to box office performance and critical reception of key releases — it’s not unreasonable to expect that Blomkamp, based on the promise of District 9 and an attractive trailer, could only do good.

Disappointingly, this wasn’t the case. Elysium didn’t open to either great business (it made less than District 9 did in its opening weekend in the US) nor great reviews. They were mixed at best, and I have to concur: it’s just not a good movie. While it has the odd, designery visual that’ll catch the eye, Elysium is constantly undermined by clunky writing, abysmal performances (Jodie Foster: seriously, wtf) and unmemorable, shaky-cam action only saved by the generous R-rated allowance of exploding body parts. Worst still, considering how much money Blomkamp had to play with, the entire thing feels oddly cheap and undernourished — even cheaper than District 9, which it is essentially a rehash of. I can’t fathom how the early buzz (such as this) could characterise anything seen in Elysium as “jaw-dropping”. The film’s more enjoyable when you view it as a big-budget version of trashy Italian Mad Max knock-offs from the ‘80s.

To Elysium’s credit, its relatively contained scope does make for a refreshing change from the bludgeoning bigness of the year’s other tentpole blockbusters: there aren’t any massive, budget-blowing scenes of annihilation, and the runtime clocks in neatly at well under two hours. Nevertheless, being the last studio release of a dystopian/pre/post-apocalyptic-themed movie in a year chock full of them (see: Oblivion, After Earth, World War Z, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, World War Z) obviously hasn’t done it any favours. The general feeling is that audiences, myself included, have tired of these bleakly imagined visions of Earth getting battered by aliens, zombies, monsters from the deep and whatnot. Hell, even Damon Lindelof is sick of it.

Moviegoers like comfort food, but a little variety in their multiplex diet won’t hurt too. Okay, so it’s a given that the boffo takings of Fast and Furious 6, Despicable Me 2 and Monsters University will ensure that sequels, franchises and brands are always a sure bet for studios, whereas pricey gambles like R.I.P.D. and The Lone Ranger, based on niche-ier sources, could, and have resulted in disaster. But some of the year’s best success stories come from counter-programming, with low-to-mid-budget genre films like The Purge and The Conjuring reinforcing horror’s time-tested profitability and providing audiences scares amidst superheroes and sequels. Meanwhile, the Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy’s buddy comedy The Heat effectively worked its female-skewed target audience – whom summer blockbusters aren’t generally targeted to – and came up top against Roland Emmerich’s White House Down.

But the problem is that variety is harder to achieve these days when the realities of tentpole exhibition means smaller films have to fight for screentime in theatres and are often simply elbowed out of view. Furthermore, risk-averse studios are less likely to get behind projects remotely deemed a little left-field. Stories of established veteran filmmakers finding other avenues to realise their vision are common: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln almost became an HBO film; Francis Ford Coppola is now making little indies like Twixt and Tetro; Steven Soderbergh’s retired from theatrical features (his illuminating State of Cinema address is worth a watch); Spike Lee and Paul Schrader have turned to Kickstarter to get films off the ground. And you wouldn’t know it but the forthcoming Formula One racing pic Rush, with successful Hollywood players like director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer attached, is an independent British production with money pooled from various sources when Universal passed on funding it.

We’ve been saying this for years but the lack of original ideas in Hollywood is ever prominent. Audiences aren’t thick; they recognise formulaic structures, predictable beats. Even a film like Pacific Rim, touted as an “original”, based on no existing property, suffers from banal characters and storytelling unable to match its visual mastery, making it so reminiscent of other “destruction porn”-type movies that it feels like it’s based on something. Pixar, usually championed for their inventiveness, have also succumbed to franchise-extending formula with the likes of Cars 2 and Monsters University. In a recent dig at American animation, Coraline director Henry Selick too recognises the samey-ness. Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of all this is the homogenising of product solely to make it travel. With US studios now relying more than ever on global box office to make up the shortfall of domestic performance, movies have to play well across the world, which basically means more spectacle, less subtlety. Then there’s the business of international co-funding with countries like China, where the creative integrity of movies are replaced by contractual obligations to please financiers (e.g. the Iron Man 3 deal).

The trend will continue exponentially. A quick look at the blockbuster release slates of 2014 and 2015 reveals just more of the same, more expensive, and just more. The flops of ‘13 may have stung a little, but hey, it looks like overall the summer season did OK, like, the best ever. To take a positive outlook from all this blockbuster drama: there’s no point fighting it. Will powerful studio execs listen? Nope. The best bet for nurturing and distributing new, unique voices will come from a myriad of other non-studio channels (Kickstarter, Netflix, HBO, Amazon etc.). If audiences aren’t turning up to blockbusters, it could be fatigue, it could be bad buzz. Or it could be the fact one can’t afford to consume everything out there; cinema is competing with the television and gaming industries, both mediums that have grown by leaps and bounds over recent times in accessibility, popularity and critical respectability. Or it could just be that sitting in a theatre with other people can be a shitty experience that’d you’d rather not spend $17 on.


BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #11

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Aaron has dug out another batch of little-known films in his blog, running the gamut from sci-fi horror to incest shocker to truck driving. Pretty much the same scope as the Academy Awards, really… Read on and be enticed into tracking these titles down for yourself – or, depending on your tastes, running as far away from them as possible.


EMBRYO

I first came across Ralph Nelson’s sci-fi-horror shocker Embryo (1976) on a public domain DVD some years ago but my memories of the movie were quite foggy ‘cos the transfer looked no better than a fourth-gen VHS copy. In 2009, it surfaced again on DVD, in France of all places, and though it’s not a release that will probably excite HD buffs (the English audio goes out of sync at numerous points), I think this edition remains the most watchable to date until a scrubbed-up Blu-ray release comes along (unlikely, but stranger things have happened).

Embryo combines two things I have a particular — peculiar perhaps — fondness for: respectable veteran actors/directors slumming it in trashy B-movie material, and twisted PG-rated genre pics from the ’70s that make you question how in the world it ever got that rating. To put Embryo in perspective: today you’d never see a PG-rated movie that features the corpse of a prostitute with her foetus ripped out. The tone of the whole film is just plain wrong.

For Nelson, who in the past has done racially conscious work like 1963 Best Picture Oscar nominee Lilies of the Field and the controversial western Soldier Blue, to forward-thinking sci-fi dramas like Charly, Embryo is easily the schlockiest, most exploitative thing he’s ever made, funneling the abortion politics of the time through cheap, Frankenstein horror-show theatrics that barely probe the ethical conundrums posed by its playing-God narrative.

A past-prime Rock Hudson is glum widower Dr. Paul Holliston, whose experiments in rapid hormone growth pays off when he accidentally runs over a pregnant doberman. Discovering that his “placental lactogen” can turn a dog foetus into a full grown canine in a matter of days, he decides to sneakily try it on a human specimen, and soon has exotic one-time Bond girl Barbara Carrera (Never Say Never Again) walking around naked in his house, learning math and wanting to bang him.

Embryo certainly offers a rather somber, alarmist view of genetic tinkering; its notion of growing a miscarried foetus, then to have sex with it — and impregnate it — is all kinds of fucked-up only made less unpleasant by the levity afforded by the film’s generally ludicrous, heavy-handed execution. Carrera’s development into a scheming killer in the third act is hard to take seriously, and scenes like the house party where she is propositioned by a sleazy doctor (“We’re going to enjoy a rousingly good hump”) and causes Roddy McDowall to flip out over a chess game invite laughter more than anything.

Not something I’d wholeheartedly recommend anyone, but if you know what you’re in for, Embryo should hit that spot as a reminder of how deranged ‘70s cinema could get.


THE MAGIC TOYSHOP

The dream-like, subversive fairy tales of late British fantasist Angela Carter are so rich in cinematic possibility, it’s a wonder why very little of her writing has made it to the big screen. Neil Jordan’s wicked 1984 adaptation of Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves — an adult re-envisioning of Little Red Riding Hood — is the best known, but there was also The Magic Toyshop (1987), a little-seen made-for-TV, theatrically released adaptation of her second novel.

It’s at heart a coming-of-age story about a girl on the brink of womanhood: when 15-year old Melanie (Caroline Milmore, who was 23) learns that her parents have been killed in an airplane crash, she, and her two younger siblings, are sent to London to live with their eccentric Uncle Philip (Tom Bell), his Irish wife Margaret and her two brothers, in their toyshop where they put on bizarre stage plays.

Though the film was initially intended for television broadcast, there’s nothing to suggest that any of its content has been particularly neutered for that audience in mind. Carter, as on The Company of Wolves, was heavily involved during the adaptation process, and her fervent, provocative imagination remains intact enough that it ensures that the film’s subtler moments are even tinged with sharply Freudian perversity.

From Milmore’s early full-frontal nude appearance where she regards herself in the mirror (“Physically I’ve reached my peak; from now on I can only deteriorate”), to Bell’s perfectly repellent performance as the taciturn surrogate father (“Do you get periods?” he asks with the disturbingly insinuating cadence of a serial killer), The Magic Toyshop doesn’t lack for creepy nor malevolent vibes. Add to that some Švankmajer-esque stop-motion animation, druggy dream sequences, a dose of incest and a gaggle of dead-eyed marionettes, and you’ve got yourself a fairly dodgy “family flick” that straddles the line between child-like enchantment and nightmarish unease.


WHITE LINE FEVER

The trucking movie is a genre that probably won’t enjoy any kind of revival anytime soon; though the last couple of decades have produced solid entries like Breakdown and Joyride, the genre arguably hit its peak in the ‘70s with the release of films like Convoy, Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose, all of which rode on the wave of CB radio’s popularity.

Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever (1975) is one of the best, a tough, gritty, honest-to-goodness B-picture starring Jan-Michael Vincent as Carrol Jo Hummer, an air force veteran returning home to start a new life with his wife (Kay Lenz) and hoping to get into the business of independent trucking. Unfortunately the scene’s been corrupted by unseemly fellows like contraband smuggler L.Q. Jones and corporate asshat Don Porter, who aren’t making it easy for him to make a living without breaking the law.

Stuffed with terrific character actors (Slim Pickens, Dick Miller, R.G. Armstrong!), and aided by pacey, unfussy direction from Corman factory graduate Kaplan (Over The Edge), White Line Fever delivers some fine drive-in thrills from its time-tested decent-man-pushed-t0-breaking-point premise. Vincent has never been an actor of much range, but he’s likeable, and possesses a boy-scout-ishness ideal for the role. The final stunt where Vincent rams his truck through the logo of Porter’s energy company — conveniently propped up on a mound of dirt — is a totally satisfying piece of slow-mo vehicular destruction.

BLOG POSTS: The B-Roll Judges Your Horror Movie

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As the deadline approaches for the Make My Horror Movie comp, I thought I’d put on my imaginary producer’s hat and give you my picks for the entries I would, and would not give $200,000 to make. Just to be clear, I am not a judge on the panel, just your average opinionated horror fan offering his 2 brutal cents.

Plowing through all these story pitches and trying to select a Top 5 has been a bit of a brain-frying slog, so I don’t envy the position the judges find themselves in. But it’s also rather been interesting seeing what people perceive a “good horror film” to be, and how many variations on the same idea you can have, etc.

To save you trouble of trawling through them, here’s a quick look at the sort of things you can find in there: period horrors (The Ghost Master, Medipocalypse), techno-phobia (Final Call, diePhone), creature features (Kea, The Maul), dark satires (Big Beach Body Count, Fat Farm), serial killers (The Dead Earth, Lifeless), psychics (Forensic Killer Instinct, Gravedust), viruses (Airborne, Mr. Cutter), faux-cult/grindhouse (Big Tits Massacre, Chaos!!! on Delivery), possessed objects (Chair Evil, Spirits of a Jester), torture porn (The Game, Worms Never Die), Maori legends (Tapu Island, Tiki), terror-in-space/sky (Log, Flight Time), meta-movies (The Director’s Cut, Bad Idea), weird-small-towns-with-secrets (Dead Reception, Horrors of Currans Creek) and a decent helping of what-in-the-goddamn-fuck (Land of the Dead, Body and the Brain). There’s even a Bad Taste sequel.

observations/thoughts

Keep it simple, concise. The worst thing about reading a synopsis is tuning out because it doesn’t make any sense or is too waffly. The winner will have a nifty hook and some semblance of a narrative arc. Too many pitches devolve into the “nothing is as it seems” school of storytelling, which in most cases here is shorthand for “I don’t know what my movie is ultimately about or how it’s going to end” more than “boy, just you wait, I’m gonna blow your mind”.

Use spellcheck. I’m giving you a lot of money so I’d like to know that you can spell, or at least have the smarts to get someone who knows how to. Ditto for punctuation, grammar, coherent sentences.

I don’t expect you to be a Photoshop expert but again, conviction and first impressions are everything. If you slap something together that looks like you have zero sense of design and are not even trying, I’m gonna pass. For example, if you don’t know the basic implications of using Comic Sans, it’s unlikely your horror movie will be made.

Personally I’d like to see a horror movie in the purest sense. Not something done for laughs. Not some tongue-in-cheek over-the-top zombie-stoner-splatter fest. Something with TONE, that’ll get underneath my skin. One of the great things about making horror movies is that it’s one of the few genres where it works best when there’s NOTHING to see on the screen. The negative space, the way it prods your imagination through mere suggestion. Hence, it’s very cost effective… which brings me to my next important point…

Remember the BUDGET! You only have $200,000. If you can create “a super-expressway populated with bizarre inhabitants” (Highway ∞) or a Voltron-type robot (Red Zone) with that much money, more power to you… otherwise it’s smart to think about budget when you’re punching away at the keyboard. Tie those great ideas directly in with what you think is achievable convincingly within the given budget. If you’re going for costumes, make sure you’re confident that you can pull the viewer into that time, and not have it look like cruddy theatre with am-dram actors.


TOP 5 picks

A GOD FEARING MAN

This one had me at “an 80-year-old atheist intellectual”. Admittedly, octogenarian protagonists in horror movies don’t tend to put bums on seats but the notion of an atheist theology professor questioning his sanity in a retirement home is a heady, thought-provoking proposition for me. I can imagine this being a late ‘70s George C. Scott/Paul Schrader-type collaboration. Low-key, slow-paced, cerebral, with a compelling lead performance. The poster is a striking piece of design too.


EVERYONE EVERYWHERE

The last-person-on-Earth premise is one of my favourite “what if” scenarios, and I think there’s still so much potential there to mine. Everyone Everywhere kinda sounds like it could be a retread of The Quiet Earth, but its themes of anxiety and connection in our social networking-obsessed age could make it function more like an eerie spiritual cousin to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and its icy horrors of solitude. Ambitious and intriguing.


LEAVE ME COLD

Not crazy about the title, but I can see this teen-romance price-of-vanity monster flick really hummin’ in the Deadgirl/May/Ginger Snaps vein. The myth-like idea of a bullied misfit feeding a creature with powers to make her beautiful is resonant, and “South Auckland’s state housing neighbourhoods and bleak industrial parks” would make a vividly gritty backdrop to anchor the fantasy elements in some realism. I’d be interested to see how the character’s physical transformation will be handled (two actresses? prosthetics?). Of all the entries, this probably has the most workable beats.


39 DAYS

If the filmmakers can effectively execute the logistical challenge of shooting entirely on location at sea, 39 Days could be one intense, terrifying movie. The merging of relationship-on-the-rocks drama, survivalist thrills and mutation horror unfolding in a nerve-rattlingly tight space is something I’m perversely excited about seeing. It’s Long Weekend meets Open Water meets… The Fly! Stripped-down nature will require script, direction and acting to be top-notch.


PLEASE COME IN

Winner of the Would-Greenlight-Solely-Based-on-Poster Award. The elegant simplicity of this teaser poster stands out from the pack and is almost enough to make me want to see the film. The synopsis itself doesn’t necessarily live up to the poster — it’s just a little bit underbaked — but I dig the working class/kitchen sink vibe, and the idea of leaving your children in the care of “comforting” strangers while you work long shifts is a solid foundation to build a horror movie that feeds into parental nightmares.


THE BEST AND WORST OF THE REST

RUNNERS-UP BEST POSTERS

CarouselThe Blue BloodsThey Only Come At NightThe Monster Among UsRed Zone


HOW NOT TO DESIGN A POSTER

Mate or Mate?Clearwater CreekInfringementInfectionThe HarpoonSilence in the ShadowsBody and the BrainThe Director’s CutReady or Not Here They ComeThe Ponsonby KillerEternal DeathTo Hell and Back AgainNews CycleIt’s All In Your HeadStorytellingBad Idea


RECOGNITION FOR ATTEMPTS IN SOCIAL MEDIA RELEVANCE

Face-BookUnfollowInternet Friends


BEST FLATLINERS RIP-OFF

Dead Guys Finish First


HORROR MOVIE… IS THAT YOU? & BEST JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP REFERENCE

Everlasting


I SORT OF WANT TO SEE THAT

A movie about melting peoplesleep paralysisgiant lampreysa talking facial sore.


BEST CHARACTERS

Either Liz Hunter, the retired cop-turned-mall security guard in The Maul, or Dustin, the scrapyard inventor and part-time crocodile wrestler in The Melt People.


Got a better idea?

There’s still time to score a $200,000 budget and bring your horror film to life.

Visit www.makemymovie.co.nz and get your idea in by October 10th – or they’ll make someone else’s and all you will be able to do is complain about it.

BLOG POSTS: Memory is a Giant Mutant Cicada Man

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My earliest memories of watching horror movies were, I guess you could say, not exactly pleasant. Scary? Yes. Traumatic? Perhaps just a little. I was maybe around 8 or 10. My dad was watching some movie on VHS** one late night and I caught a glimpse of the glowing TV screen from behind him (whether he knew I was there or not, I can’t recall, but I don’t think he did).

The first image I remember seeing was of this guy in a bathroom. He was wearing a blue hospital gown. He then undressed, turned his back to the mirror and revealed a hairy growth/scar-like tissue at the base of his neck. It looked like it was on the verge of splitting open. (Yeeesh) The next thing I remember the same guy was transforming into something. Parts of his head were falling off, his facial features deforming beyond recognition. By the end of this transformation, he had become a terrifying bug-eyed creature of some sort. (Gaaaarghh) Seeing this left me paranoid and fearful for my own well-being. I was under the impression I had a similar skin condition on my back, and was going to suffer a similar fate. Phew, thank Christ for the overactive imaginations of children, right?

Later in my teens I tried to track down the movie these images came from, and finally found it in the late ‘90s: The Beast Within (1982), a creature feature directed by Philippe Mora, who’s also responsible for the gloriously awful werewolf travesty The Howling II:… Your Sister is a Werewolf and the super-creepy Christopher Walken alien abduction thriller Communion.

Upon rewatching it in its entirety, I can confirm that it’s one sick little movie, and is not, in any way, suitable viewing for children. Those disturbing images had stuck with me so much after all those years that it inspired an art project for the graphic design course I was taking. And if I had known I’d be revisiting the movie again, more than a decade later, for this blog, I would’ve kept those paintings and shared them here, but alas, they’re long gone.

Anyway, I watched the movie again last week, and it was only then that I could fully appreciate the extent of its grisliness (I’d forgotten much of the plot specifics since the initial rewatch). Adapted by Tom Holland (Fright Night) from Edward Levy’s novel, the story starts off with a woman (Bibi Besch) getting raped in the backwoods of Mississippi by an unseen man-creature-thing, and then picks up 17 years later when her son (Paul Clemens) falls ill and appears to be slowly turning into the same creature.

The Beast Within definitely lives up to the “Beast” part of its title. The film’s atmosphere is unrelentingly grim, with every performance pitched at screechingly histrionic levels. There are no sympathetic characters. The locals are portrayed as some of the skeeviest, most grotesque hillbilly types this side of Deliverance. And holy hell, that climactic transformation sequence! It hasn’t lost any of its gut-churning power. The slimy, rubbery prosthetic special effects by veteran make-up artist Tom Burman are disgusting, barf-inducing and crudely effective in a way that CGI can never be, and Clemens’ tortured performance — heaving and spazzing out like a man possessed — helps sell the agony of the transformation. It’s quite the sight, but yeah, not something you want to casually leave on TV for your children to peek at.

The other horror image that freaked me out as a kid was this (another fleshy/scar/skin thing):

I had a harder time searching for this movie – it’s even more obscure than The Beast Within: Gianfranco Giagni’s The Spider Labyrinth (1988). (I have to wonder right now, what was up with my dad watching these horror movies? He never showed any interest in them in the last twenty years of his life) Although the advent of DVD helped the re-release of countless, previously-tough-to-see Euro-horrors, The Spider Labyrinth curiously has never been given a proper, non-bootleg digital remaster, and I had to go the grey market route to obtain a murky-looking dub of a rare Japanese VHS release in order to watch it.

Today, the film’s even better than I remembered, a well-crafted, genuinely nightmarish summation of everything I love about Italian horror films, notably made at a time when genre masters like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci all have had their best work well behind them. If it had come out 10 years earlier, it might have been hailed a classic of its kind.

The conspiracy-driven plot, following a professor of languages (the wooden but awesomely named Roland Wybenga) who stumbles onto a bizarre spider-worshipping cult in Budapest, recalls films like The Wicker Man and Perfume of a Lady in Black, and fans will see unmistakable hints of Bava/Argento/Fulci here and there, but The Spider Labyrinth is no mere second-rate clone, with Giagni exhibiting style and atmosphere to burn. Sergio Stivaletti’s ghastly The Thing-like make-up effects, like The Beast Within, aren’t the slickest, but they’re difficult to forget once seen.


** Growing up in a wee South East Asian city in the ’80s, there were no legitimate, big chain stores like Video Ezy or Blockbuster around to service home video entertainment as there are in New Zealand. The “store” my dad used to take me and my brother to every weekend was called “First Release Video”. It was fairly small, and every tape on the wall was a copy with no cover art, just a white label and stenciled title. There were numerous folders that displayed the cover art in plastic sleeves, and we’d flick through them and point to the films we wanted to see. Then we’d get the lady at the counter to “test” them — usually in a top-loading VCR (remember those?) — to see if the “quality” was okay (i.e. tracking issues). If I could travel back in time for purely nostalgic purposes, to experience this ritual again would be at the very top of the list things to do.

BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #12

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Just in time for you to plan your Halloween viewing, Aaron Yap has dusted off a few seldom-seen horror titles in the latest edition of his Shelf Life blog. Will you be able to track all of these down? Maybe not – but there’s no harm in trying! They’ll sure beat a Saw marathon if that was your original plan…


DELIRIUM: PHOTOS OF GIOIA

If ever you need evidence that a filmmaker possessing a legendary family name doesn’t automatically guarantee the inheritance of the same creative genes, look no further than Lamberto Bava. The gulf in skill and aesthetic between Lamberto and his revered pops Mario is painfully clear in Delirium: Photo of Gioia (1987), a late-period giallo where Bava Jr. cribs his father’s signature colored gel lighting and none of his cinematic finesse. To be clear, I’ve enjoyed some of Lamberto’s work- huge fan of Blastfighter here- but don’t walk into Delirium expecting anything other than a delightfully trashy and absurd time.

Serena Grandi, whose voluptuous assets made her something of a popular fixture in Italo softcore and horror flicks in the ‘80s, stars as Gloria, the editor of a porn mag called Pussycat whose models are getting bumped off by a madman who appears to have a thing for her. We get plenty of suspects to choose from: could it be her photographer brother Tony (Vanni Corbellini)? Or gay stylist Roberto (David Brandon)? Perhaps it’s her pervy, wheelchair-bound neighbour Mark (Karl Zinny), who likes to peep at her through his telescope and call in with elegant rhetoric like “You’re a sex goddess who makes my throbbing member explode with desire”.

Hardcore horror fans who revel in the genre’s stylized sadism might balk at Delirium’s relatively tame violence, but the set-pieces, including the first murder where the killer imagines the victim with a giant eyeball for a head, and the following death-by-bees sequence, are hilariously daft and memorably bizarre. Best enjoyed by giallo completists, who will be unable to resist the film’s kitschy ‘80s music video visuals, goofy English dubbing, guitar-shredding hard-rock cues and sleazy attention to Grandi’s 38Ds.


THE STRANGENESS

Prospective Make My Horror Movie-makers looking for inspiration should take a few notes from The Strangeness, a technically primitive but oddly appealing little monster movie slapped together on paltry pocket change by a group of film school students in 1979.

The plot is fairly straightforward, following a ragtag team of expeditioners into a goldmine that’s been shut down after its previous explorers mysteriously disappeared. There’s the caving expert and his sidekick, the grizzled, inexplicably British guide, the blabbermouth researching writer and his photographer girlfriend, the glum geologist and the stern businessman who’s in charge of the operation. The guide, Morgan, warns them that the mine is on sacred American Indian land, and the natives used to make up ghost stories to scare the white people away. But the truth is there’s a slime-drooling, vagina-head creature with slithery tentacles residing in those caves, ready to devour any human that tries to cross its path.

Reviews tend to slam this film for being a total bore; I can definitely see how the uneventful, talky first half could lose viewers, especially considering how the characters are a rather annoying bunch to spend time with, and that the monster’s initial appearance is limited to one or two brief shots of its tentacles. Okay, it’s no The Descent, but there’s something to be said for the film’s home-grown, rough-hewn charm, from the amateurish acting by the cast of nobodies to its glaringly cheap interior sets, which were constructed from paper mache and tin foil (something you probably wouldn’t get away with shooting on HD digital, but looks very forgiving on 16mm). The stop motion-animated creature itself — one of the weirder-looking monsters out there — is something Ray Harryhausen would be proud of, while the chilly Carpenter-esque synth score help enhance the claustrophobic, cavernous setting.


THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M

Back in the early 2000s, a short-lived, curiously dodgy company called Beverly Wilshire Filmworks released a number of vintage Mexican horror flicks on DVD. Titles like The Brainiac, Curse of the Crying Woman and Doctor of Doom, all which were originally brought to the States and dubbed into English by a guy named K. Gordon Murray in the ‘60s. The DVDs (if you can even call them that) had shitty transfers and even shittier cover art, but they were dirt cheap and I couldn’t help myself and picked up a few. Thankfully, the films were fantastic pulpy fun, and it’s easy to why anyone who caught them when they initially aired on late night TV would remember them with fondness.

Fast forward to 2006, another company, CasaNegra, began issuing some of the same films on DVD, but actually did the hard yards and went through the process of completely remastering them from vault elements. In addition, the DVDs were presented in their original language with optional English subtitles and came with informative special features. These lovingly packaged editions revealed the films to be more than cheesy B-horror entertainment — they were works of considerable artistry and imagination that could rival any of the monster classics Universal put out in the ‘30s. Unfortunately CasaNegra has long since folded, but I did snag their releases of The Brainiac (a favourite) and The Black Pit of Dr. M before that happened.

I would maintain that Chano Urueta’s The Brainiac is the best gateway into Mexican horror, just ‘cos it’s so wonderfully batty, but Fernando Méndez’s The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959) is easily just as solid a film to start with. Méndez had already established himself to a top-drawer genre director with El Vampiro a few years earlier, and this gloomy 1959 supernatural shocker simply reinforces the fact.

Fascinated with the afterlife, Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) reaches out to his recently departed colleague Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) via seance to see how he can experience it without actually dying. Aldama’s spirit materialises and informs him that in a few months, on November 15, at exactly 9pm, he will know the answer. This creepy prophecy is soon set into motion with a series of puzzling incidents, starting with Aldama’s daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés) entering the picture, and continuing with a subplot where a mad gypsy inmate goes on the run after disfiguring an orderly’s face with acid.

The Black Pit of Dr. M is a Grand Guignol class act, pure and simple. With a hurtling pace that rarely lets up, the film practically explodes with gothic flourishes: Victor Herrara’s visually arresting black-and-white cinematography fills the backdrops with deep, ominous shadows that threaten to consume the characters at every turn, the images of screaming mental patients, coupled with a brassy, booming orchestral score, keep us rattled, and there’s a fog-and-wind machine working overtime to sustain the spooky, dread-soaked atmosphere. The “black pit” of the title is conspicuously missing — a metaphor for Masali’s death-consumed soul/mind, perhaps? — but it’ll be the last thing on your mind once you’ve been gripped by this gloriously morbid madhouse of a movie.

BLOG POSTS: If ‘Escape Plan’ Sucks, Watch These Prison Flicks

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It feels like it’s been ages since we’ve had a solid prison movie, and I’m hankering for one. Recently I’ve been putting my money on the Arnie/Stallone team-up Escape Plan to fill this void, but my hopes of it being any good are growing dimmer by the minute. Not to pre-judge the movie to hell or anything, but the reviews stateside have been pretty lukewarm. So no, I am not optimistic. In the event you finally watch Escape Plan whenever it comes out and it does indeed suck the big one, here are five rad/underrated prison flicks you should definitely see after…


CAGED

Been enjoying Orange is the New Black on TV, have ya? Here’s where it all started. One of the earliest, and best examples of the women-in-prison (WIP) picture, John Cromwell’s Caged (1950) offers a still-pertinent view of a deeply flawed penal system that fails its inmates by ineffectively rehabilitating them. With its vividly drawn characters and a stark, noirish feel, the film hasn’t lost much of its edge, observing the harsh realities of a State Women’s Prison through the naïve eyes of 19-year-old “new fish” Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker).

Caged has often, and unfairly, been categorised as “camp”, and while it’s true that Parker’s Academy Award-nominated performance does veer off into shrill overacting at points, the film is much too well-made to be completely written off as such. It’s much less exploitative than its counterparts of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but don’t worry, many genre staples are here — jaded, tough-talking lifers, solitary confinement, sadistic guards — so you won’t be mistaking this for a cheery Disney pic.


THE HILL

Brilliant, under-seen film from 1965 doesn’t get mentioned enough when discussing the careers of Sidney Lumet or Sean Connery. Set in North Africa during World War II, this high-tension drama unfolds in a British prison camp where the inmates, mostly deserters and insubordinate types, are made to endure gruelling punishment in the form of climbing up and down a steep man-made mound of sand until they collapse from exhaustion. Connery, just hot off Goldfinger, is Joe Roberts, one of five new prisoners entering the camp who quickly discover that the officer in charge of them, Williams (the positively loathsome Ian Hendry) is a serious a-hole.

While the film sets Williams up as the villain, Lumet, working with an intelligent script from Ray Rigby, examines various levels of conflict inside the camp — racial, political, personal — generating dissent within the ranks as much as the ever-escalating friction between the prisoners and their officers. The Hill is raw, strong stuff, with crackling performances and punchy monochrome cinematography that succeeds in making us feel every bead of sweat dripping from the characters’ sun-parched foreheads.


FEMALE CONVICT 701: SCORPION

God bless the Japanese; they really know how to bring their prison A-game. Female Convict 701: Scorpion (1972) may not be as hallucinatory and amazing as its sequel Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, but it’s a perfectly sleazy and out-there start to an exploitation series that surpasses similar American/European WIPs for sheer nastiness.


Lady Snowblood’s Meiko Kaji makes for a fiercely stoic angel-of-vengeance as Nami Matsushima, who’s been wrongly imprisoned after being betrayed by her narcotics officer boyfriend Sugimi. In this hellhole of a prison, she gets hogtied, hot miso soup poured over her, strung up by inmates and prodded like a piñata, and becomes the target of an assassin hired by Sugimi to knock her off. Packed with outrageous violence, stylized sets and dizzying camerawork, Female Convict 701: Scorpion gets away with crazy shit you’d never see in the West and is all the more memorable for it. An obvious influence on Kill Bill.


FAST-WALKING

Fast-Walking (1982) probably doesn’t come up too much when people think of prison films, being one of more offbeat, forgotten examples of the genre. Director James B. Harris has had a curious career: he’s only made five movies in a span of 30 years, and he might still be better known for co-producing Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. But this cool little flick, based on the Ernest Brawley novel The Rap, is the best thing he’s done (with Cop a close second), full of irresistible pulpy moments, lightly comic touches and fantastically amoral characters.

Viewers expecting a straightforward, hard-hitting prison drama might be taken aback by Fast-Walking’s leisurely pace and surprisingly serpentine neo-noir plot — involving an assassination attempt on an African-American revolutionary (Robert Hooks) — but the company is unbeatable: James Woods is at his most endearingly weaselly, Kay Lenz burns the screen up with her foxy duplicitousness, and Tim McIntire steals the show as a charismatic, loquacious neo-Nazi.


AMERICAN ME

Part prison, part gangster pic, American Me (1992) was the directorial debut of actor Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica), who strangely, given the strength of this film, hasn’t gone on to have a fruitful career behind the camera. Though far from perfect, it’s a passionate, grim, often brutal chronicle of the rise of the Mexican Mafia in Folsom State Prison in the ‘50s through to the ‘80s. Olmos plays mob boss Montoya Santana with stony conviction, befitting a man who built a ruthless drug empire from within prison walls. William Forsythe is compellingly vile as his sidekick JD.

I’ll give Olmos this: he didn’t hold back. Shankings and rapes galore here, and there’s a jaw-dropping, admittedly overblown sequence where Santana is making “proper” love for the first time that’s cross-cut with a dude getting assaulted in the ass by Santana’s gang. The finale is just so goddamn bleak, a devastating gut-punch that highlights the troubling cycle of violence afflicting gangs and their kin. One of American Me’s producers is Robert M. Young, who also made Short Eyes (1977), another great prison movie worth hunting down (starring Bruce Davison as a pedophile!).

What are some of your favourite prison movies?

BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #13

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Aaron serves up another trio of under-recognised films in this lucky thirteenth edition of Shelf Life. From a canine murder suspect to some culty weirdness and a film that audiences apparently had to sign an anti-spoiler waiver before seeing, these films might just encourage you to step out of the sun, draw the blackout curtains and wile away the day in front of your flickering screen…


THEY ONLY KILL THEIR MASTERS

The final film shot on MGM’s backlot before it was sold and the sets bulldozed, James Goldstone’s Chandler-esque mystery They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) probably isn’t on anyone’s radar for re-appreciation, but it might pique the interest of excavators of odd ‘70s studio curios due to its canine protagonist, a doberman named Murphy who’s thought to be the culprit behind the body of a woman washed ashore a small coastal Californian town.

James Garner plays Abel Marsh, the police chief who’s a little peeved to have returned from a week-long break to be saddled with investigating the case, which as it turns out, isn’t Murphy’s fault. In between closely escaping an arson, stopping a bar fight, quizzically deliberating over nudie photos and getting drugged by dog-prostate-meds, Marsh also has to reluctantly babysit Murphy and put up the county sheriff (Harry Guardino) poking his nose where it doesn’t belong.

They Only Kill Their Masters isn’t as fun as the endearingly ridiculous The Doberman Gang from the same year, but Garner’s easy to watch as the “city folk”-hatin’ Marsh, his laid-back mystery-solving skills amusingly suggesting indifference and ineptitude as he appears to be more consumed by bedding Katherine Ross, who isn’t given much to do but play pretty as Hal Holbrook’s vet assistant-turned-suspect. The film definitely has a TV-ready flatness about it: Goldstone’s extensive background on the tube (The Fugitive, The Outer Limits) shows in his functional but thoroughly bland visual style, making this occasionally seem like a lost episode of Garner’s later show The Rockford Files.

Nevertheless, Lane Slate’s script flirts with a few risque elements — “shocking” revelations of lesbianism and group sex! — while elsewhere it goes for tasteless, tone-deaf, politically incorrect exchanges, like Garner saying offensive things like “I’m a faggot”, and a cop enjoying a hearty chuckle over a case of a woman who got her nipple bitten off. The supporting cast features a bunch of seasoned Hollywood old-timers such as Arthur O’Connell (Anatomy of a Murder), Edmund O’Brien (D.O.A.), Ann Rutherford (Gone with the Wind) and June Allyson (Little Women), all adding colourfully eccentric qualities to their roles as the town’s locals.


MYSTERIOUS TWO

The bizarro true story of “Bo” (Marshall Applewhite) and “Peep” (Bonnie Nettles) — the pair behind the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate which led to the mass suicide of 39 people in 1997 — could do with some form of definitive cinematic representation, but to date there haven’t been too many attempts to bring it to screen (Louis Theroux once tried to contact the group for his BBC 2 series Weird Weekends).

In 1982, there was The Mysterious Two, an appropriately weird TV movie from writer/director Gary Sherman (of genre favourites Dead and Buried and Raw Meat) who shot it in ‘79, initially intending it to be a pilot for a show that never materialised. Apparently Applewhite served as an uncredited advisor; either way, it’s likely that he would have approved the final results, since Sherman seems to have effectively tapped into whatever spaced-out wavelength he was on.

Simply referred to “He” and “She” in the film, the celestially-outfitted Bo-and-Peep characters are played by John Forsythe (Charlie’s Angels) and Priscilla Pointer, who first turn up at an abandoned missile silo, then begin to recruit folk from all over the US to join them for “The Event”, which involves the promise of interstellar travel to a better life. Not everyone is fooled by their quasi-spiritual mumbo-jumbo (“Shed your earthly possessions!”) though, and they intend to do something about it, including Tim (James Stephens), a hippy flautist whose girlfriend has joined the cult, Sheriff Virgil Molloy (Noah Beery, Jr.) and his deputy Boone (Robert Englund), and persistent, headline-chasing reporter Ted Randall (Vic Tayback).

As a look into the influence of false prophets, The Mysterious Two is occasionally disturbing, especially during an eerie, blatant callback to the still-fresh Jonestown massacre of ‘78. However, the chintzy optical visual effects, awkwardly inserted voice-overs and seemingly unfinished storytelling prevent the film from achieving its narrative ambitions — but not disastrously so. It’s still an absorbing watch, particularly if you’re fascinated by the subject matter, and the score, alternating between minimal flute cues and droney sounds, has a hypnotic, late-night vibe that reels you in.


THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL

I’ve been wanting to see this thriller from the Sick Sixties for years (you don’t forget a title like that), but it was pretty hard to come by until VCI released a special edition DVD earlier this year. I’m pleased to say that it didn’t disappoint and I lapped up every psychotic minute. No game is actually declared “Kill” in the movie — its other title The Female Trap is perhaps more accurate, though hardly as awesome — but writer Gary Crutcher supplies just enough twisted shenanigans to warrant its lurid title.

Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-O) is Symcha Lipa, a Hungarian drifter who gets picked up by Mickey Terry (Susan Strasberg) in the middle of the Arizona desert. She offers to take him back to her house — a grubby gas station — where he’s soon acquainted with her family: mum Mrs. Terry (T.C. Jones), and her two sisters, the elder Diz (Collin Wilcox Paxton) and younger Nan (Tisha Sterling), whom when we first meet, has just been expelled from school for lighting a cat on fire. Uh-oh.

I won’t say too much for fear of ruining some of the plot’s finer demented pleasures, but I will mention that the Terry’s don’t have a great track record when it comes to men and leave it at that. If you like shock endings, The Name of the Game is Kill has an outstanding one that surprisingly knocked the wind out of me. One of the earliest movies shot by celebrated cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), who contributes a visual sheen that makes the film seem less schlocky despite its ragged production values.

BLOG POSTS: The B-Roll Year in Review 2013

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With another year drawing to a close Aaron Yap presents “these brutally culled, sheepishly un-ranked bests of what I saw in 2013″. How do they stack up against the best films of 2013 as decided by all our writers? Read on to find out…


TOP 10 ALTERNATIVE LIST

Newish/recent movies that I saw non-theatrically, or for various reasons did/could not fit into my Flicks list.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day – Don Hertzfeldt’s knack for wringing uncanny reservoirs of dimension from his crude stick figure drawings has never been more apparent than in this mesmerizing, multi-media, micro-epic meditation on life, existence, etc. It’s like a lo-fi, scrappy The Tree of Life: just as cosmic and exploratory, but much shorter and often hysterically funny.

The Crash Reel – Much, much more than a snowboarding doco — in fact, don’t even approach it as such; Lucy Walker’s film examines the aftermath of a training accident that left young Olympic hopeful Kevin Pearce with a serious brain injury. An affecting, inspirational, occasionally agonising-to-watch tale of dashed dreams, rehabilitation and reinvention.

Resolution – If Drew Goddard’s recent Cabin in the Woods rubbed you the wrong way, like it did me, with its ultra-glib form of meta-horror, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s fabulously loopy character-driven low-budgeter is the ideal corrective. It’s clever, but quieter, more cerebral, chock full of creeping unease. A gem in a market flooded with DTV crud.

Drug War - Johnnie To’s most straightforward, no-nonsense action pic in ages, judiciously trimmed of expository fat and executed with lean, mean, elegant precision. The incredible closing shootout once again demonstrates To’s peerless flair for complex but spatially coherent action choreography.

The Loneliest Planet – Julia Loktev’s masterful use of engulfing landscapes to convey the unnerving ambiguity and bubbling tension of an emotionally fraught trekking scenario add up to an unexpectedly powerful, even devastating experience. Superbly naturalistic performances. Wish I’d seen seen this in a theatre.

Leviathan - Easily the year’s most sensorily immersive stunner. Shot entirely on board a commercial fishing trawler with GoPro cameras, this ethnographic masterpiece sucks you into its bleak environment with images of nightmarish, abstract beauty set against the noise of sea life being gutted, squawking seagulls and clanging machinery.

Berberian Sound Studio - A terrific celebration of old analog sound production in cinema wrapped inside a claustrophobic, dream-like, brain-teasing Lynchian rabbit hole. Not a drop of blood in sight, but tons of atmosphere, with eerie, dissonant score by Broadcast.

Miss Bala – Visceral, hair-raising trip into the world of Mexican drug cartels. Astonishing direction by Gerardo Naranjo, whose exceptionally fluid, virtuosic long-take style constantly keeps us disoriented by the threat of violence erupting at any moment. Horrifying, gritty, edge-of-your-seat viewing.

The Tall Man - Despite this being the follow-up film from the director of Martyrs — one of the most talked-about horror films in recent years — The Tall Man barely made a blip. Probably ‘cos it was marketed as a generic-looking horror flick when it’s more of a lost Twilight Zone episode. The plot’s ingeniously structured, the ending made my jaw drop, and Jessica Biel gives her best performance to date.

Byzantium – Neil Jordan made a new vampire film and no one cared! Part Gothic noir, part coming-of-age fable, this stylish, lushly shot revisionist bloodsucker is his most cohesive, satisfying work in years.

Rewind This! - Such a great, entertaining history lesson in everything VHS, made with plenty of affection, nostalgia and also insight. VHS geeks will have a field day. I might blog this one up in a bit more detail one day. Buy it here.


TOP 10 FAVOURITE DISCOVERIES OF 2013

These are older films I caught for the first time this year that I loved. (I tried not to include to any Shelf Life picks — too many gems there).

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) - I’d always been aware of this Sydney Pollack film due to its crazy title but I wasn’t really prepared for how frankly insane and dark it is. And it’s a true story — about a Depression-era dance marathon where contestants dance for weeks on end to win $1500 while spectators watch on. A lot of them get ill, some go insane, a few die. A truly grim, proto-reality-TV-type spectacle.

Trick ‘R Treat (2007) - Michael Dougherty’s nifty Halloween anthology has gained a loyal following since being largely ignored upon its release, and you can add me to that cult. Directed with panache, it captures and honours the annual celebration’s colourfully festive, ghoulishly fun spirit.

Eye of the Needle (1981) – Underrated, well-done romantic spy thriller starring Donald Sutherland as a ruthless Nazi agent who stabs a lot of people with a switchblade while falling for Kate Nelligan on the English coast.

And God Said To Cain (1970) – Cool Spaghetti western from versatile Italian journeyman Antonio Margheriti with a dread-filled Gothic horror feel. Klaus Kinski creeps in and out and frame like a ghost throughout this solid revenge yarn, plotting payback as a storm ominously looms in the background.

I Walk the Line (1970) - Generally panned John Frankenheimer pic, and I don’t see why. Moody romance/character study set in the grimy-as-hell Tennessee boonies, with a perfectly downbeat finale. Absorbing perfs from Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld.

2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984) - Sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey is way better than its reputation would suggest. Of course it pales in comparison to Kubrick’s singular vision, but taken on its own terms, it’s an intelligent, engrossing piece of science fiction that doesn’t insult its audience like most Hollywood films today. This from a director who would later make Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Also, big Roy Scheider fan here.

When the Wind Blows (1986) - This anti-war animated feature blew my mind. It’s like a cartoon version of Threads! Maybe the most depressing and heartbreaking thing I saw all year (sorry Blackfish).

Buried (2010) - Director Rodrigo Cortes really rose to the challenge of making an entire movie set INSIDE A COFFIN. A Hitchcock experiment taken to mind-bogglingly minimalist extremes, as realistically calibrated as possible given the circumstances, plus Ryan Reynolds is surprisingly watchable. I also dug Cortes’ enjoyably goofy follow-up Red Lights, which everyone seemed  to hate.

The Wild Child (1970) - Wonderful, beautiful black-and-white Truffaut period piece, based on a real-life account of a 18th century doctor trying to bring a feral, forest-dwelling boy into society. Néstor Almendros’s cinematography is just sublime. Compassionate, philosophically rich filmmaking.

The Hill (1965) - Sidney Lumet’s criminally neglected WWI prison movie. Sweaty, intense, filled with crackling performances, including a career standout from Sean Connery.


BLOG POSTS: Something Weird This Way Comes

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The death of Mike Vraney on January 2nd was a real shit way to start the year. As the founder of home video distro company Something Weird, Vraney was responsible for salvaging and preserving a massive library of films few people would devote the same amount of energy, money and passion into. From the distinctive works of exploitation auteurs such as Doris Wishman and H. G. Lewis to the bona fide smut hucksterism of producers Harry Novak and David Friedman, these films were not slick, classy, polished, politically correct entertainments, but a mixture of sordid roughies, quaintly pervy nudies and lurid genre obscurities, many from the ‘60s-’70s, all catering to the grindhouse crowd and made on non-existent budgets.

Noel Murray at The Dissolve rightfully described Something Weird as the “Criterion Collection of Sleaze”. Although one might struggle to find any SW release that LOOKED as pristine as Criterion’s transfers — some prints looked astoundingly immaculate, but more often than not, they were in ragged, speckly condition — it didn’t matter, considering their rarity. Usually the scratchiness added to the film’s mystique and charm, as if one were discovering a lost treasure that’s just been dug up from the earth. And releasing the film wasn’t just enough for Vraney, who regularly lavished his DVD releases with an abundance of bonus features: trailers, shorts, outtakes, audio commentaries, exploitation art, radio spots, etc. The guy really knew how to please.

When I recently watched Rewind This!, Josh Johnson’s excellent documentary on the history of VHS, Vraney popped up as one of the interviewees. It struck me that I’d rarely seen him in the flesh — the man who had introduced hours of wild and highly unusual cinema into my brain — and the fact that he passed so soon after that viewing hit me strangely hard. In memoriam, I revisited a bunch of my favourite Something Weird “classicks”. If you’ve never seen any, here are five perfectly weird essentials to get you started (heads up: things are about to get sleeazzy):


TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN

Thought I’d get this one out of the way first, since it’s easily one of the most creepily wrong and sick movies in SW’s vast catalogue. Released on the bottom half of a Harry Novak-presents double feature DVD with the sex-and-aliens mind-fuck The Toy Box, Stanley Brassloff’s 1972 sexploitation shocker is a monumentally messed-up chunk of ickiness about a 20-year-old, newly hitched toy-store clerk named Pearl (Marcia Forbes) who decides to resolve her daddy issues by turning to prostitution. Dramatically overwrought in every way, and marked by a grim, serious tone, Toys Are Not For Children is relatively well-made and acted for what it is, and surprisingly restrained in the nudity department, its suggestiveness only heightening the squirm-inducing, holy-shit factor of its jaw-dropping ending. Consider yourself warned.


THE SINFUL DWARF

Okay I lied — this one’s super-grotty too. In fact, legend has it that SW’s DVD distribution partner Image Entertainment passed on releasing The Sinful Dwarf because it was just. too. much (it’s now available through Severin Films). And who can blame them for being a little cautious? This notorious Danish import features a drooling, hobbling, evil-looking dwarf called Olaf (Torben) who abducts young girls, drugs them with heroin and imprisons them in the make-shift-brothel-attic of his alcoholic mother’s boarding house. Every depraved frame of this dwarfsploitation masterpiece beggars belief. The sex is as near-hardcore as you can get without seeing “it”, but the atmosphere is so unrelentingly squalid it’s difficult to see anyone getting turned on. One-of-a-kind filth.


BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL

As close as Doris Wishman has come to making a perfect film. Much less over-the-top than its pulpy title would imply, this 1965 picture, running just over an hour, is the most accessible gateway into her oeuvre, starring shapely blonde Gigi Darlene as a housewife who, after being attacked by her apartment janitor, embarks to New York where she finds herself the victim of more mishap. Ostensibly a bridge between her early nudies and seedier, more explicit later work, Bad Girls Go to Hell is fairly tame content-wise, but all Wishman’s trademarks — the disconnected post-dubbed dialogue, wobbly camerawork and random fascination with feet and pot plants — come together here to create a noir-like dream-logic movie worthy of Freudian and feminist readings.


THE PSYCHO LOVER

If you need evidence on how great a SW release can look on DVD, seek out Robert Vincent O’ Neill’s delirious 1970 thriller The Psycho Lover (aka The Loving Touch). Bursting with psychedelic colour, this nutty exploiter takes a page from The Manchurian Candidate, following the dastardly plans of psychiatrist Kenneth Alden (Lawrence Montaigne) to rid his wife by brainwashing a patient to kill her. Conveniently, the patient’s a homicidal, misogynistic maniac known to strangle women while Bava-esque green-and-red lighting glows around him. Filled with psycho-babble, ‘70s kitsch, acid freak-outs, speedboats, space-age cars and romantic sled rides, this is one primo trash oddity.


SOMETHING WEIRD


I guess it’s fitting to cap this list with the movie that Vraney’s company was named after. It’s directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast), who took a break from his gore-fests for a mind-boggling mess of ESP, LSD and witchcraft. The “story”, about a disfigured electrocution-survivor-turned-psychic who makes a pact with a witch — un-aided by Lewis’ primitive direction and the terrible, terrible acting — can be a chore for some viewers to sit through. But approached in the right frame of mind, Something Weird is a very vibey and endearing movie with enough bizarre tangents to pack several more movies. The DVD is a must-have, due to the invaluable audio commentary where Vraney, who’s joined by Lewis and producer David Friedman, relays the entire history of how his company came about.

BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #14

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Aaron Yap serves up another trio of under-recognised films in this, the fourteenth edition of Shelf Life. This latest post features a typically intriguing trio of films in which a snowbound whip-wielding heroine from the Shaw Brothers rubs shoulders with a 1970s thriller starring James Coburn and a tale (set in futuristic 1994) that pits Vietnam vets against the violent guardians of Atlantis…


THE SHADOW WHIP

The only thing sadder than Mike Vraney’s death earlier this month was Run Run Shaw‘s so soon after. This guy was simply a GIANT of the martial arts genre, with countless amazing films to his name. Naturally I pulled a few long-unseen Shaw Bros DVDs off the shelf to watch, and it didn’t take long, as I found out settling into The Shadow Whip (1971), to be reminded why I love these films so much.

Whip may not find its place among the top-tier Shaws, but its gorgeous sets, pulpy, absorbing story and healthy serving of martial arts action make it solid, entertaining work all-round for a stable of the studio’s regulars: stars Cheng Pei Pei and Yueh Hua, both from King Hu’s 1966 wuxia classic Come Drink with Me, pairing up for the last time after five films; screenwriter Ni Kuang, who wrote seminal Shaw favourites like Five Deadly Venoms and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; and super-prolific director Lo Wei, who would soon give Bruce Lee his breakthrough roles in The Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

The film’s unusual snowy setting has always been of interest: there’s more exterior location shooting than normal for the Shaws, giving the production a bit more of an expansive, western-y scope and feel (it’s hard not to think of the blizzard-covered vistas of The Great Silence and McCabe and Mrs Miller). The use of the whip as a weapon is a weird one too — the film even has a character state that it’s one of the rarer martial arts — but it adds some worthwhile novelty to the otherwise standard sword-based wuxia template of the time.

Cheng, spunky and charming as always, plays Yun, the bullwhip-crackin’ owner of a guest house who discovers that her reclusive master/uncle Fang Chengtian (Feng Tien) might be a notorious jewel thief and is wanted by payback-seeking swordsmen.

Lo isn’t a knockout action director by any means — he’s no Lau Kar Leung, for instance — but is adept at moving the narrative along at a lively pace. The scant 76 minute running time doesn’t allow much for much character development but the numerous, pleasingly varied fight scenes work well to distract us. It helps that Cheng looks the part in her furry eskimo-like outfit, busting out the whip against dozens of sword-and-spear-wielding assailants like a true boss. There’s a noticeable amount of “editorial cheating” going on, but not fatally so, and there are enough wide shots of Cheng doing her thing so as to be convincing. Shaw fans will find much to enjoy here.


THE INTERNECINE PROJECT

Shelf Life catnip alert: a cool-as-shit, forgotten ‘70s thriller starring James Coburn! Based on a story by Mort Elkind (who’s apparently ex-CIA), The Internecine Project (1974) features Coburn in top form, cranking up the smooth to 10 as the devious, debonair Robert Elliot, a former secret agent who learns that he’s next in line to become the US president’s advisor. To eliminate any connections to his shifty past, Elliot hatches an intricate plan to kill all four spies in his European network — masseur Harry Andrews, high class call-girl Christiane Krüger, scientist Michael Jayston, civil servant Ian Hendry — in the span of one night. The hook? They’re going to be ones killing each other, without knowing it.

Okay so the idea, painstakingly plotted by Brit-com veteran and future My Cousin Vinny director Jonathan Lynn, is somewhat implausible, working on the assumption that everything will be in the right place and right time for anything to work. But for puzzle-minded thriller buffs, there’s an undeniable pleasure and satisfaction in watching these plot pieces snap into place with chilly precision, and the low-tech-iness of the operation is refreshing: Coburn spends half the movie cooped up in his study, ticking off a scheduled list of tasks that his agents have to execute, while the murders themselves — including a rather nasty strangulation Hitchcock would approve of — would not be out of place in an Agatha Christie whodunit. Ken Hughes’ direction is fairly vanilla most of the way, but the actors are good, and the film is buoyed by a killer Roy Budd score and the dusky, moodily captivating cinematography of the great Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey). Lee Grant is kinda wasted as Coburn’s perfunctory love complication.


THE RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS

After making two of his most notorious films in 1980, Cannibal Holocaust and House at the Edge of the Park, Ruggero Deodato eased off on the rape and animal cruelty and gave us one of his cheesiest, most ridiculous — and by that token, greatest films: The Raiders of Atlantis (1983).

Fundamentally another laughably cheap Mad Max rip-off the Italians were so fond of churning out in the ‘80s, this one’s set in the futuristic period of 1994 in Miami, Florida. A team of scientists on an oil rig are trying to raise a radioactive nuclear sub from the ocean floor, but in doing so, have inadvertently caused the return of the entire civilisation of Atlantis! The guardians of Atlantis — bandana-clad, face-painted biker punks known as “Interceptors” — are now hellbent on destroying humanity, and only a pair of grizzled, gung-ho Vietnam vets (Christopher Connelly, Tony King), and sexy “pre-Colombian dialect” expert Dr. Cathy Rollins (Gioia Scola) can stop them.

As you can probably tell from this dopey plot, the movie’s link to reality as we know it is tenuous at best, so it’s easier to just go with the flow and enjoy its glorious trashy goodness. The action — a good portion of which was shot in Manila — is practically non-stop; barely a minute goes by without someone lobbing a Molotov cocktail or firing an arrow/machine gun/rifle. There’s also an attempt at the ol’ wire-across-the-road trick we recently saw more elegantly staged in The Counselor. The dumb-ass dialogue had me grinning from ear to ear (“Don’t look like no advanced civilization to me – just a bunch of trees!”), and Deodato’s use of miniatures, mannequins and stunt-recycling (same stunt, different angle) all add to the movie’s budget-deprived goofiness. And if there’s any doubt you’ll be in for a good time when you pop in the tape, this totally sick disco tune plays over the opening credits:


BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #15

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Aaron Yap’s back with another batch of hardly-seen, or at the very least, barely-remembered films consigned to the dusty shelves of history – sometimes watching them so you don’t have to… In this edition Aaron checks out a perennial villain turned leading man in Johnny Cool, makes half-hearted apologies for cranking through a lot of sleazy thrillers recently while talking Scalpel and assesses whether stuntman Evel Knievel managed to land starring vehicle Viva Knievel!.


JOHNNY COOL

If you’ve seen your share of ‘70s and ‘80s action movies, you might have come across this face at some stage (if you haven’t just go watch Above the Law now or something and come back):

This is Henry Silva. He has one of the most magnificent faces ever, the kind that could just look at you and make you poop your pants.

Though usually relegated to supporting bad guy roles, in 1963 Silva tried his hand as a leading man in Johnny Cool, a — yes — cool hardboiled crime flick produced by Rat Packer Peter Lawford, whom he starred with in Ocean’s 11 a few years earlier. It’s not exactly a revelatory performance, and it’s apparent why he’s never been top-billed material, but he does an agreeable job of straddling dapper charm and gangster swagger as Salvatore Giordano, a Sicilian Robin Hood-type outlaw who, in an elaborately faked death, is hired by exiled mob boss Colini (Marc Lawrence) to take out Telly Savalas’ organised crime ring in America.

His quick reinvention into the smooth-talking ‘Johnny Cool’ maybe a little too quick to be believable, but hey, it’s good enough to seduce Elizabeth Montgomery (pre-Bewitched), who plays his naive, bar-hopping socialite love interest/partner-in-crime of sorts.

Directed with frills-free, functional punchiness by TV veteran William Asher — who was also married to Montgomery at the time — the film is practically devoid of blood, but the implied violence is shocking enough, especially for its period. Silva’s awkward karate chopping is the only odd, out-of-place touch, but elsewhere he’ll be stabbing and shooting dudes with ice-cold fervor, or throwing a suitcase of dynamite into a pool with children around like it’s just something you do. Montgomery’s early off-screen assault leaves a bad taste in the mouth (the film never addresses that moment again), but as if to compensate, the ending wraps everything up with a particularly nasty sting that might surprise even if you’ve been desensitised to modern-day Scorsese/Tarantino-esque levels of gangster brutality.

For those who like to play Spot-That-Guy, there are lots of well-known faces in the cast, including two other Rat Pack members, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. (who also did the swingin’ soundtrack), and Elisha Cook. Jr and Robert Armstrong, both who have little to do as second-fiddle mobsters.


SCALPEL

It might seem like I’ve been gravitating to these sleazy psycho thrillers lately, but I swear I do watch other things, and it’s definitely not intentional…  Anyhoo, Scalpel (aka False Face) is a fantastic slice of queasy Southern gothic trash in the scuzzy PG-rated ‘70s mold (see also: Embryo). Still unreleased on DVD, this seedy little Georgia-set psycho-drama of incest, doppelgangers and facial disfigurement stars Robert Lansing (4D Man) as Philip Reynolds, a brilliant plastic surgeon who’s also a deeply unhinged murderer. Obsessed by the mysterious disappearance of his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman), who’s in line to receive a massive inheritance, he decides to recreate her face on an unidentifiable, horribly disfigured dancer (“Jane Doe”) so she can claim it and split the fortune with him. This wacky scenario, cooked up by producer Joseph Weintraub, gets even weirder when the actual Heather re-appears.

Chapman, later a mainstay on soaps like General Hospital and The Young and the Restless, handles dual roles laudably, with Jane serving as a brasher, louder counterpoint to the more elegant, poised Heather. She’s no Tatiana Maslany, but at least it feels like we’re watching two characters most of the time, and the clever blocking and compositions from director John Grissmer, who only ever made one other film (Blood Rage), help too. Not that anyone would be able to tell, but Scalpel was photographed by acclaimed DP Edward Lachmann (Erin Brockovich, Ken Park). Someone get this gem out on DVD/Blu-ray stat!


VIVA KNIEVEL!

Being something of an American icon, you’d think that maybe — just maybe — stunt performer extraordinaire Evel Knievel would be perfect to star in his own motion picture vehicle. Not really, as Viva Knievel! proves in embarrassing spades. In this entertainingly awful 1977 ego-stroking turd — the last film directed by journeyman Gordon Douglas (In Like Flint, Them!) — Knievel plays Knievel in his own inane action narrative, which involves a mind-bendingly complicated plan by corrupt promoter Leslie Nielsen to smuggle drugs across the border. Here’s how he hopes it’ll work out: get Knievel to do some stunts in Mexico, sabotage his bike so he’ll die in action, then hide the dope in the trailer that’ll be part of his funeral procession back to America. The cops won’t even THINK about stopping Knievel’s funeral, geddit?

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Anyway, it takes an eternity to get to that bit; in the meantime, Knievel is — unfortunately for the audience — given many opportunities to demonstrate what an utter charisma-void he is on screen, instead of the stuff that, you know, he’s actually good at, like jumping his bike over a bed of caged lions.

There’s a bunch of phony subplots to pad out the runtime, including a dash of non-romance with Lauren Hutton, whose tough photographer can’t wait to shoot Knievel on his last ever stunt (read: the one where he dies), and some cheesy father-son melodrama with Gene Kelly, profoundly slumming it as Knievel’s crusty, hard-drinking mentor/mechanic who has to deal with the reappearance of his son Tommy he never knew. Marjoe Gortner, Red Buttons and Cameron Mitchell are also somewhere in there, keeping Viva Knievel! on the endearing side of wall-to-wall polyester-smeared vanity dreck, plus the soul-funk theme song is bloody infectious.

BLOG POSTS: Shelf Life #16

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Don’t think for a second that Aaron stopped watching movies – these posts may have dried up for a bit, but now he’s back with a fresh batch of not-so-fresh, seldom-seen films that might just tickle your fancy. From a mock assassination thriller (probably not safe to try on US campuses these days) to a testament to erection (of buildings, sleazebag) and an intriguing psychological tale, these three titles deftly sidestep the familiar.


TAG: THE ASSASSINATION GAME

I can’t say I’ve ever played the “assassin game” — a phenomenon which apparently swept campuses in the ‘80s – but this long-forgotten 1982 feature film version by John Carpenter’s buddy Nick Castle doesn’t do a good job of making it look particularly enticing (it looks super-lame actually). Probably best known for playing Halloween’s Michael Myers and directing cult fave The Last Starfighter, Castle spends little time spelling out the mechanics of the game, but it isn’t too difficult to figure out, basically involving contestants, all whom belong to a guild, getting assigned targets to assassinate with plastic dart guns.

In the film, the game is folded into a straightforward slasher plot, featuring a five-time champ named Gersh (Bruce Abbott, Re-Animator) who goes berserk and starts offing his opponents for real when he accidentally loses a hit. Linda Hamilton, just on the verge of breaking out with The Terminator, plays his main competitor, Susan Swayze, a sultry Bacall-esque psych major who’s among the film’s many hat-tips to film noir. Another is Robert Carradine’s cigar-chompin’ reporter who falls for Swayze in a romantic subplot that mostly fizzles.

The tone is fairly light throughout, and the kills are probably too bloodless to capture the attention of genre fans accustomed to the more hardcore slashers of the era. One definitely wishes Castle added more directorial zing and psychological weight to the material, but it’s a harmless curiosity with some novelty value, and Abbott’s over-the-top performance is kinda fun — just don’t expect oodles of twists, much gore or stylishness. Keep an eye out for Forrest Whitaker (in his film debut), and Michael Winslow (Police Academy) doing some funny noises. Hamilton tied the knot with Abbott after meeting on set.


STEEL

The cancellation of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1978 left Lee Majors without any TV work for a few years, and he tried his hand at the big screen — a career transition that was short-lived. But if you want to see a hint of what-might-have-been, Steel (1979) is your best best. Pretty hard to track down these days, this lively good ol’ boy romp directed by B-movie guy Steve Carver (of Lone Wolf McQuade fame) casts Majors as Mike Catton, a truck driver whose past as a revered construction foreman is called back into action when he’s hired by the daughter (Jennifer O’Neill) of a deceased property tycoon to expedite the floor-hanging of a building in time for a tight deadline.

Steel isn’t sophisticated art, but damn if it isn’t entertaining, a broad, sharply paced actioner soaked in the blood, sweat and tears of short-tempered, comically macho steel workers. You’ve got a solid ragtag crew of reliable character actors (Art Carney, Richard Lynch, George Kennedy, Harris Yulin, etc), on-location non-green-screen stunts (including one which sadly claimed the life of a stuntman), and a hilarious script that succeeds into turning the simple skyscraper construction premise into a high-stakes drama of exploding gas tanks, petty sabotage, badly timed weather and eleventh-hour vertigo. Kick back with a six-pack and enjoy (Freudian reading optional).


THE MIND OF MR. SOAMES

An adaptation of Charles Eric Maine’s 1961 novel, this moving, fascinating gem from 1970 was a rare non-horror venture for British studio Amicus, and unfortunately one that made no money at the box office. In one of his least-seen roles, Terence Stamp plays John Soames, a 30-year-old man who’s been in a coma since birth until neurophysiological scientists find a way to awaken him. Supervised by Dr. Maitland (Nigel Davenport) and visiting American surgeon Dr. Bergen (Robert Vaughn), Soames’ slow transformation into a fully functional, self-aware human drives the film’s narrative, which probes the ethically sticky question, through the doctors’ clashing approaches to nurturing, of whether he’s to be clinically studied like a guinea pig or raised as a free-thinking individual.

Alan Cooke’s matter-of-fact direction avoids sentimentalising the subject – he’s more inclined to step back and foreground the scientific discourse – while Stamp inhabits Soames’ man-child sense of wonder and confusion in a tour de force performance that’s both humorous and haunting (you’ll never forget the moment he wakes up). The Mind of Mr. Soames also contains one of cinema’s earliest depictions of reality TV, as Soames’ operation and subsequent development is filmed and broadcast by a television crew for the world to see. The dark, open-ended conclusion leaves sufficient food for thought. Available through Sony Screen Classics’ DVD-R line.

BLOG POSTS: DVDs Are Not !#$%ing Dead (Yet)

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I took this picture earlier this year and was surprised by how much it depressed me. I haven’t rented anything from a video store in years, but the sight of this empty, abandoned Civic Video outlet in Grey Lynn, Auckland still touched a raw nerve. This is the future. And the future DOES NOT HAVE ANY VIDEO STORES.

I used to frequent this store back in the day. My first time with a Jim Jarmusch movie was through this store. I rented a copy of Stranger Than Paradise and fondly recall the dude at the counter perking up and giving me the A-OK hand gesture. It gave me a little confidence that I had made a good choice. The movie is now a favourite of mine, and that small but resonant gesture of approval? Not something I foresee experiencing again anytime soon. The sad reality is that there’s a video store or two closing every week in New Zealand. Not sure if anyone has noticed (or even cares) – if you’re reading this, it’s likely that you haven’t stepped in a brick-and-mortar rental store since you’ve discovered the myriad wonders of the internet – but it’s happening at such an alarmingly rapid rate, we’ll soon have to file Clerks under “Period Pieces”.

The imminent extinction of the video store as we know it is echoed in this recent Cinemablend article, which claims “DVDs are going the way of the dinosaurs”. Of course, this isn’t news. Tech watchers have been calling it for a while now. Digital is dominating every facet of the content-delivery industry and nothing can stop it. Apparently at least 30,000 tech-savvy Kiwis are already using Netflix, and who knows how many more are torrenting their hearts out. But as a long-time consumer of physical media, I’m not ready to give up just yet. I can’t see a future where demand for DVD/Blu-ray = 0.

The easiest comparison we could make is with books and music. Kindle hasn’t killed the library; mp3s haven’t killed CDs nor vinyl (which if anything has enjoyed an upswing in sales). But it’s probably wise to distinguish between the two “cultures” of content consumption for movies and TV. There’s a large portion of society who just want to watch stuff. And they want it NOW. Fast, easy, cheap. Those are the people who flock to Netflix, Pirate Bay etc. It makes perfect sense. You can’t beat the convenience. Physical media will not serve these people. For them, DVDs are shiny coasters. (Let’s not forget, one person’s convenience is another’s chore: whether it’s the unfamiliarity with the tech, or the prohibitive expense of broadband, we are not at a time where every living human being is hooked up, or knows how to download and manage content with the ease of popping a DVD into a player and hitting play).

The other portion are key to the longevity and survival of DVD/Blu-ray: the collectors. I’m not arguing that the rental market won’t suffer or decline – it will eventually – but we shouldn’t underestimate the collectors: those for whom just streaming/renting a movie is not enough. They want that movie sitting on their shelf. Collectors take pride and satisfaction in building and maintaining their own library of movies; to have 1000 avi files on a 1 Terabyte hard drive won’t cut it. I mean, who cares about your hard drive or Mega cloud locker? Some pathologically entitled 15-year-old Game of Thrones-pirating monkey will have the same thing. A personally curated library – okay, now that’s interesting.

The thing is, the value of watching a digital file dissipates after you watch it. It’s a cold bit of data. There’s no love, no human element. You can’t hold it. If you don’t know what I’m getting at, watch this terrific video that shows the painstaking lengths in which Criterion Collection go to produce their DVD and Blu-rays, from the restoration of film elements to the final artwork:

In a perfect world, all films – well maybe not Blended, but particularly those that risk vanishing forever due to lack of attention – will be treated with as much care and passion as this. Perhaps the most important thing the video highlights is quality control. When you buy Criterion, you KNOW you will be getting the best-looking, most definitive version of a film possible. The world of streaming offers no such guarantee or consistency – it’s just content dump. Netflix are notorious for streaming things in the wrong aspect ratio and stuck with whatever materials the studios provide them, quality be damned. Average Joe paying $7.99 a month won’t care though.

What a company like Criterion effectively do is elevate the packaging and presentation of movies into an art form. The film looks pristine, the artwork is stylish and elegant, the extras are thoughtful and valuable, not just fluffy EPKs. The media itself is transformed into something of WORTH. It’s the beautiful result of a group of people who are mad about movies and want the best for them. Once you can communicate that, there will be people out there with a similar level of passion who will keep buying your shit.

Criterion aren’t alone though; other boutique companies like Eureka, Arrow Video, BFI, Vinegar Syndrome, Shout! Factory, Olive Films and Twilight Time have also proven themselves to be similarly quality-focused saviors of cinema in physically packaged form (read this piece on Shout! Factory). You know when there’s someone out there actually going through the process of restoring a mega-obscurity like Runaway Nightmare in 4K, there’s still hope for DVD and Blu-ray.


* This Forbes article is a year old, but I think it makes some still-relevant points about DVD.
** Let’s imagine a future where people give each other SVOD links or codes as gifts. No actually let’s not.
*** Worth watching: Inside Scarecrow Video: The Largest Independent Video Store in the World.

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