Welcome to this new, longer and potentially more indulgent incarnation of The B-Roll, a tiny column I started for the now-sadly-defunct street press Volume. Some background: the column (a glorified side bar, more like) had a brief 12-issue run in the mag and was literally tiny: 100 words to be exact. It was the result of Volume editor Sam Wicks and I sitting down to hash out how we could improve the film page, i.e. turn it into something that was something more than an afterthought in a predominantly music-oriented publication. So I offered this idea of a small space where I’d be free to write concisely about films I’d seen that were far removed anything else that was on the page. It was an attempt to ‘personalise’ things so it wasn’t just another film review page.

And personal it was – to the point that it pretty much reflected what I’d pull out from my stash to watch in my own spare time. Some of the films covered were recently released DVDs which I wanted to talk about, others were just films I wanted to write about period, out of self-indulgence and devoid of any commercial interest and motivation.

There’s a sensible rationale for all this. When you’ve been reviewing films professionally for almost 10 years, burnout and disillusionment almost unavoidably set in. The latter figures especially when you’re subjected or forced to watch dreck like Battleship week after week for the ‘job’, and when you’re attending screenings, where you’re in the mindset of a ‘job’. I can’t speak for others, but this aspect of film reviewing for me has over time become less glamorous, enjoyable and cushy than people might expect. Free movies are great, and I’m not about to call it a day just yet, but sometimes it’s such a drag to catch a screening of the latest Tim Burton flick at 6pm that you’d rather not bother. (I’m getting to my point shortly…)

For the longest time, when I realised that burnout was inevitable I justified doing a job as it would basically mean I could afford to acquire what I actually wanted to watch. If I endured Wrath of the Titans and churned out a couple hundred words on it, it meant I could probably pick up that Fernando di Leo Blu-ray set that I’d had my eyes on. It’s about maintaining some kind of sanity and balance, and in terms of ethos, I’ll approach this blog in a similar manner (as I previously did with VHS Vortex for Real Groove [RIP], or currently do with the film stuff in Barker’s 1972 mag), and hope that it will be of some interest.

I guess a lot of what I’ll want to do with this blog, or at least try to, is to address the things I brought up in The Curse of Hype back in March: the hunt, the discovery, the richness of film history. It’s a great, opportune time for us to seek out and champion lesser known films and see what’s really out there beyond opening day. As prints are being phased out and destroyed in favour of digital and more and more emphasis is placed on the bottom line, countless films will be forgotten and never see the light of day again. A fraction of what’s come out on DVD will come out on Blu-ray, as a fraction of what was released on VHS made it to Laser Disc and DVD and so forth.

What should you expect here? It may involve me revisiting and re-evaluating films, picking stuff from my unwatched pile and watching it blind, raving about something I saw last night that blew my mind, spotlighting a director/genre/person/thing, or maybe using a recent news item as a jumping point (as I have below). As for the availability of these films, I refer you to lmgtfy.com, but seriously though, where possible I’ll try to mention where you can buy them, or warn you if it may involve trawling through the VHS bin at salvo shops or maxing out your credit card on eBay (seriously though, Google is your friend…). Also it goes without saying that anything covered here will reflect my tastes, so if you find certain genres/elements over/under-represented here … sorry.

Okay, so picking up where things left off… the last B-Roll I did before the plug was pulled on Volume and it could be published was on William Friedkin’s ill-fated 1977 film Sorcerer. Friedkin (The Exorcist) recently sued Paramount and Universal over ownership rights of the film, a then-costly remake of Henri-George Clouzot’s ‘53 French classic Wages of Fear that hasn’t really been treated all that well over the years – it certainly deserved better than the crummy DVD Universal dumped onto the market way back in ‘98. Though a massive failure in its day – a combination of being up against Star Wars, a weird, head-scratching title and a bit of how-dare-he from critics – Sorcerer’s rep has grown over time. Here’s one immensely underrated work that’s as good as, if not better than the original.

Only a director of Friedkin’s ballooning ego and ambition would choose to follow up making one of the greatest horror films ever with the most difficult shoot possible in his career. Completely shot on location in the Dominican Republic, the film, a near-Herzogian yarn of trucks carting unstable nitro across treacherous jungle terrain, is a sweaty, tense, dark, even hallucinatory masterpiece, with an ominously bubbling Tangerine Dream score, a memorably haunted performance from Roy Scheider and incredible, logistically nightmarish set-pieces that remind you how powerful seeing things as they are, unaugmented by any digital trickery, can be. Sorcerer is a personal favourite of Friedkin’s, and one hopes a Blu-ray remaster of some sort will be forthcoming once the legal wrangles are done with. Check out this fantastic, anecdote-packed Q&A below with Friedkin from the American Cinematheque screening of the film last year (it’s in five parts):

Perhaps even more neglected is the film Friedkin made right after Sorcerer in ’78: the lightweight caper flick The Brink’s Job. I first stumbled on to it on Sky’s MGM Channel (plenty of rare gold there), and it’s quickly become one of my favourites, a reliable pick-me-upper if I ever need one. As far as I am aware, the first official DVD release actually came out in our neck of the woods from Shock as part of their very cool MGM line, though the film is now easily available from Universal’s MOD Vault series and Netflix Instant if you live in the States.

Like Sorcerer, The Brink’s Job didn’t perform and is now something of a blip in Friedkin’s filmography. But damn if it isn’t one of the most supremely enjoyable things he’s ever done. Working again with Sorcerer scripter Walon Green to adapt Noel Behn’s book Big Stick-up at Brink’s, the film is based on an infamous, real-life 1950 Boston robbery which prompted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to hilariously surmise that it was the missing link between the Communist Party and organized crime. In reality the heist was really the work of local boys, in the film led by Peter Falk, who plays Tony Pino, a fast-talking, fast-fingered small-time thief whose team consists of wonderful character actors like Allen Garfield, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino and Warren Oates in a standout role as a former Omaha beach vet who lends his technical know-how. Gena Rowland’s in there too, as Pino’s wife.

Friedkin, who took over the project from John Frankenheimer, was inspired to make a comedy caper in the style of Mario Monicelli’s 1958 Italian classic Big Deal on Madonna Street, and The Brink’s Job works a charm as homage, while its breezy tone compares favourably to other ‘70s caper films like The Sting and The Hot Rock. The heist scenes are not exactly intricate – part of what makes it funny is how ridiculously lax security was once for Brink’s, a world leader in cash transportation – but Friedkin’s finesse in pacing and staging ensures there’s always suspense where required. The cast overcome their flawed accents simply by being a delight to watch, embodying the working class sense of neighbourhood the film so earthily portrays. It’s telling how the central heist itself never pop outs like The Big Climactic Sequence, playing more like another, almost-mundane moment out of the characters’ daily lives. The film’s beautifully realised period look received an Oscar nomination for art direction and its shooting on various locations where the robbery occurred adds a touch of authenticity.

Again, like Sorcerer, many bizarre events plagued the production, the most notorious of all being the gunpoint theft of unedited reels for a $600,000 ransom. A detailed account of the behind-the-scenes stories can be found in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond.

Soon: maybe a reappraisal of Friedkin’s The Guardian and Jade…

With film fest season just around the corner, I thought I’d take a look back at the Incredibly Strange Film Festival in its pre-NZFF days. The plan is to revisit – over two, maybe three parts – several films from the ISFF of old that really left an impression on me. This won’t be a “greatest hits” package – it’ll be futile to reflect on everything that knocked my socks off over the years – and is more of a nostalgic exercise, an excuse to catch up those fondly remembered movies I haven’t seen in nearly 10 years or more.

For those uninitiated in the history of the Incredibly Strange: it hasn’t always been part of the NZFF. Back in the mid-’90s, filmhead/programmer Ant Timpson served up his archive of weird and wonderful movies away from the umbrella of the NZFF. For a solid 6 or 7 years, we were treated to the exploitation/B-movie masterworks of Ed Wood, H.G. Lewis and Russ Meyer, and a frequently mind-bending array of cinema that involved sinful dwarves, bee girls, drunken masters and 4-D witches. In the early 2000’s, a decision to move the festival in a new direction prompted a name change. As the Incredible Film Fest, it began offering the latest, button-pushing, populist genre entertainments from around the globe in its programming: spooky J-horrors, hard-hitting docos, stylish Spanish thrillers. But not long after that, the fest re-embraced its Strange-name origins and found its way into the NZFF in a more compact form, while leaving the psychotronic materials – “the gold” if you will – stored up for the annual 24 Hour Movie Marathon.

Two films have been announced for this year’s IS section so far – Cabin in the Woods and Clown – both on-par with the sort of out-there, jet-black-humoured offerings of recent years. But while the renegade spirit of those films remain the heart of ISFF, it’s also night-and-day compared to say, in 1999, when we were given the chance to witness the likes of Death Game or Revenge of the Zombies unspooling their insanity at the St. James Theatre over two or three sessions. Today it almost feels like a privilege to actually have had those playing on the big screen, given how few and far between those opportunities are now.

I caught Peter Traynor’s 1977 psycho-sexual face-melt Death Game twice in its run, so bowled over was I by its pure unadulterated dementedness. Opening with a ridiculous “true story” title card that doesn’t jibe at all with the tone of what you’re about to see, the film’s a home-invasion bad dream/messed-up cautionary tale of some sort about what happens when you’re an old geezer (Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel) who decides to have a bath-tub threesome with two random hot young girls (Colleen Camp, Sondra Locke) when the wife’s away (attending to your son’s appendicitis!).

The first thing that probably hits you about Death Game is the theme song “Good Old Dad” by The Ron Hicklin Singers, a jaunty, child-like ditty that drills its pesky catchiness into your head during the opening credits and repeats itself maybe 10 more times throughout the movie. Then you’ll notice how laughably dopey and spineless Cassel’s character is, and how persuasively unhinged Camp (The Swinging Cheerleaders, and recently here) and ex-Mrs. Eastwood Locke are as the cackling psycho vixens who proceed to completely destroy his cosy little home.

Traynor will never be accused of being a subtle or skilled filmmaker (this is his only full-length feature directing gig), but the film does succeed in making one feel as squirmy, nauseated and terrified as Cassel does, especially when the intensity of the home invasion switches from flirty cockteasing to a highly maddening judge-jury-executioner-type scenario. There’s also a rather uncalled-for scene where a cat gets lobbed through the window, a dispatch of a grocery boy whose body is dumped in a fish tank-cum-coffee table, and an amazing left-field ending you won’t see coming.

VCI Entertainment put out an eye-sore dog-turd slap-job of a DVD of Death Game in 2004, and it somehow suits the film’s seediness, but I would totally welcome that long, long-awaited release from Grindhouse Releasing, who’ve done bang-up treatments of films like Pieces and Cannibal Holocaust (though not after agonisingly long waits too). Death Game still appears on their site, so hopefully we’ll see something in the vicinity of the next decade?

Allen Baron’s extraordinary 1961 low-budget noir Blast of Silence is the other film I caught twice at ISFF ’99. Made, somewhat fittingly, during the genre’s dying days, this indie oddity is a one-of-a-kind gem I’ve come to value a lot. Allen Baron, who looks like an uncanny cross between George C. Scott and Robert De Niro (and acts that way too), wrote, directed and starred in the film, playing Frankie Bono, a hard-ass Cleveland hitman on a job in New York which would turn out to be his last. It’s a standard crime-noir plot that’s made unique by one particular aspect of the film’s technique: the voice-over narration, which is so relentlessly bitter and cynical it’s practically a character unto itself.

Voiced by the unmistakably gravelly Lionel Stander, lines like “Remembering out of the black silence, you were born in pain” and “If you want a woman, buy one…in the dark, so she won’t remember your face” are absurdly over-the-top, but somewhere along the way the amusement wears off, and you just sit there and allow the misanthropy to kick you in the guts in the best, most cathartic way possible (you can definitely hear a little Travis Bickle in there – Scorsese’s a huge fan).

The film’s melancholy is occasionally, surprisingly overwhelming. Check out the scene where Frankie’s walking down Manhattan on Christmas eve, remembering the coldness of pressing his nose up against the shop windows: it’s one heck of a moment. It has that dreamy, meandering travelogue vibe of threadbare exploitation films, but is also imbued with a sad, almost unbearably lonely kind of beauty that’s hard to explain. And as per noir’s fatalism, the ending is bleak – one of the genre’s bleakest in fact – reinforcing its brutal, unforgiving worldview with a stark visual palette of rain, wind and mud. If you haven’t seen this, Criterion Collection’s DVD is well worth the investment.

Revenge of the Zombies (the nonsensical American re-titling of Black Magic 2) might one of the first ISFF films I saw that seriously made my stomach churn. This 1976 Shaw Brothers barf-bag bonanza, directed by Ho Meng Hua, who’s responsible for great number of wu xia flicks and terrific trash like The Mighty Peking Man and The Oily Maniac, is a pretty good introduction to the sublimely sick world of Hong Kong horror if you’re looking for one (it also anticipates other twisted Shaw pics such as Seeding of a Ghost and The Boxer’s Omen). Lo Lieh (Five Fingers of Death) stars as a sorcerer in a “tropical city” who offers a service to get chicks for guys for a reasonable fee of $5000, but in reality he’s just resurrecting some corpses he has stashed in his dungeon by hammering nails into their heads, a procedure that transforms them into horny, sexy young women who will automatically fall at your feet.

The plot is a bit of a mess, making no sense most of the time, but when the film’s consistently pumping out one icky and sleazy set-piece after another it’s hard to get caught up in specific narrative problems. Things get off to a nasty start when a crocodile devours a skinny-dipping village girl and a shaman guts said croc, and before long we’re trying comprehend the film’s maggoty vision of deformed foetuses, decomposing bodies, leaping zombies, Ti Lung eating eyeballs, Lo drinking breast milk, spitting blood and driving nails through his face, and bad rear-projection cable car fights. The gore effects are terribly cheap, but if you need a case for cheapo effects actually making for more disgusting and repulsive viewing, it’s Revenge of the Zombies.

More strangeness in a fortnight!

[Part 2 of my revisitation of old Incredibly Strange Film Fest favourites; click here for the first part]

Oh man, Anguish. If there’s one ISFF film I’d kill to see on the big screen again it’s this severely blazed 1987 horror pic by Spanish director Bigas Luna (Jamón, jamón). Do NOT under any circumstances ever view this on a cropped VHS. The film’s power is significantly diminished on home video and not because it just ‘looks good on the big screen’, but because its entire raison d’être is that it’s designed to be seen in a theatre with an audience. It’s about watching movies, and also about watching people watching movies. It’s about how movies affect us when we watch them; in fact, if a film censor or watchdog ever required propaganda to prove the physical effects of cinema on the mind, or more specifically, how life can imitate art, all they really need to do is just present Anguish as evidence in court.

A difficult film to synopsize without ruining the whole experience, Anguish is best watched cold, but it’s not a huge secret to reveal that it involves a film-within-a-film gimmick, and it actually holds up on repeated viewings even once you know the twists because it’s so well-constructed and there’s a giddy kick in seeing it all come together. The first portion of the film, introducing us to Michael Lerner as a psychotic, eye-scalpelling ophthalmologist and his domineering psychic mother Zelda Rubinstein, has some of the most incredible hypnosis sequences ever devised, with Lunas’ surreal imagery of spirals and shells effectively pulling us into an ingenious narrative vortex.

The body-count-in-a-cinema setting owes a bit to earlier self-reflexive films like Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (’68) and Lamberto Bava’s Demons (’85), but Anguish takes the meta reality-bending much further, culminating in a thrilling, fabulously disorienting, and just frankly awesome hall-of-mirrors crescendo that’ll make perfect sense and/or none at all once the credits roll and lights go up.

From ISFF 2000, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 Who Can Kill a Child? (screened as Island of the Damned, the shortened American International Pictures print) stood out above all else. This wasn’t some trashy Euro horror flick ripping off Village of the Damned, it was a dark, chilling, expert crafted thriller by a director who knew exactly what he was doing (Serrador’s only other theatrical film The Finishing School is well worth the hunt too). What sets Who Can Kill a Child? apart from other entries in the evil-children genre is its angry politically-charged subtext, bluntly displayed in the long opening credits where grainy archival footage of children victimised in various wars of the 20th Century set an unnerving, unpleasant tone for the terror to come. Child death and violence remain fairly untouchable taboos in film today, but Serrador fearlessly confronts it, and plays up the notion of children revolting against their adult tormentors, while cleverly exploiting the fact their invincibility, if you will, as monsters lies in their deceptively innocent appearance.

Fans of the slow-burn will love this one. The first shocks don’t come until nearly an hour into the film, where its two main characters – an English couple played by Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome – discover that the adult inhabitants on the isolated Spanish island they’re visiting have strangely disappeared and the children have taken over. Where Juan José Plans’ novel made explicit the nature of the children’s behaviour, Serrador’s script leaves it open for us to decide. Freak evolutionary development? Something bad in the water? Either way, it fills the film with dread and sinister children gazing dispassionately on-screen when they’re not beating old men to death and using their corpses as piñatas. Shot mostly in daylight by regular Almodovar DP José Luis Alcaine, the film’s masterful use of locations adds to the eerie atmosphere. The ending will stay with you.

Funnily enough, ISFF ‘00 also saw the screening of another little known child abuse-themed parable, albeit one at the opposite end of Who Can Kill a Child? as far as creative vision goes. One of the few features made by gay porn director Larry G. Brown, Psychopath (‘75) maybe the most neglected of all ISFF’s trash jewels. Fans fondly remember Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Sinful Dwarf but it seems no one ever mentions wee ol’ Psychopath, a film so misguided and loony it might have pushed lead actor Tom Basham to retire from the screen for over 20 years.

Basham, who bears a strange resemblance to Gus van Sant, plays Mr. Rabbey, a kids puppet TV show host who goes on a murderous crusade knocking off child-beating parents. The violence is fairly tame – we do get a strangling or two, a baseball bat to the face, an off-screen lawnmower kill – but it’s not really an issue. Mr. Rabbey is already a sufficiently mesmerising weirdo, a gentle, effeminate, eye-liner-wearing man-child who looooves his chocolate cake and playing a bit of cathartic piano after killin’ peeps. Meanwhile, the film’s tonal imbalance – think a slasher film made by PSA writers – is further highlighted by a stupidly inappropriate score that sways from horror cues to chirpy honk tonk to funky beats without any rhyme nor reason. A message movie only the ‘70s could get so horribly, but magnificently wrong.

Anyone keen for a part 3 of Strange Encounters? Or shall I stop here?

To conclude Strange Encounters, the next three films will be plucked from the non-retro side of the ISFF…

The first signs of the festival’s gradual move away from being an all-trash haven can probably be traced back to the inclusion of Masayuki Ochiai’s Hypnosis in 2000, where the programming still featured titles like Zontar, Thing from Venus and Night of the Lepus. This would be the last year the ISFF would sport the distinctive black-and-red colour schemes of its programme guide, and more significantly, its “Incredibly Strange” name. Hypnosis marked the fest’s growing awareness of certain genre trends in world cinema, which in this case, was the Japanese horror rage spawned by Hideo Nakata’s Ring in ‘98.

Seeing a newish J-horror film on the big screen in those days was a massive, rare treat, and Hypnosis blew us all back to the wall with its Grand Guignol set-pieces – even in the lovably cruddy, now-long-gone Chinatown cinema on Victoria Street. There was an overriding sense that we were in the presence of something different, something new and vital we hadn’t seen in American horror films of that period (“…so boldly audacious it could well signal the birth of a brand new type of 21st century film”, the programme notes raved).

Unfortunately time hasn’t been too kind to this once-potentially trailblazing pic. Hypnosis looks much less unique today than it did 12 years ago. It’s not as creepy as I remembered it, the shocks and images blunted by a full decade of run-of-the-mill Ring clones flooding the scene. Also, rewatching it on DVD, it’s even more evident how flimsily plotted it all is; the film’s big twist is so frustratingly obvious after repeated viewings it almost seems impossible ANYONE would not have noticed it the first time round (my memory being a little foggy, it’s also not out of the question that I did). And the less said about the CG effects the better.

That said, it’s still kind of a hoot, its pulpy, stylish mishmash of police procedural, psychoanalysis and supernatural malarkey approximating what Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure might look like if Brian De Palma had made it. The film wastes no time setting up the premise, immediately launching an irresistibly gruesome opening of three random suicides occurring across Tokyo: an athlete sprints so hard until her legs snap, an old man leaps out of a high rise on his wife’s birthday, a groom strangles himself to death with his tie. The following investigation, headed by veteran detective Sakurai (Ken Utsui) and budding psychoanalyst Saga (Goro Inagaki), leads to Jissoji (Takeshi Masu), a dodgy TV show hypnotist and Yuka (Miho Kanno), a mysterious girl with multiple personalities.

Ochiai’s definitely playing some of it tongue-firmly-in-cheek, and the dashes of humour help offset the ridiculousness of its plot – speaking of which, the confidence and guile in which he switches gears about two-thirds in is something other directors should take note of if they want to make genre movies that are narratively surprising and unpredictable. While there are a number of very cool sequences sprinkled throughout – including the concert hall centerpiece that smartly riffs on Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much – the bit I was oddly drawn to during my recent viewing was the lengthy scene where Saga discovers Yuka’s other personality. That whole sequence has a drifting, fever-dreamy, neon-splashed atmosphere that isn’t like anything else in the movie and makes us feel like we’ve momentarily landed in Blade Runner territory.

Pair Hypnosis up with Anguish for a whack double feature, and drop me a line if you figure out what that cryptic ending means…

In the next few years, the Incredible Film Fest exhibited a strong focus on the “new wave” of Asian cinema – particularly those from Japan and Korea – bringing the thematically provocative, genre-bending works of directors such as Takashi Miike (Audition) and Kim Ki-duk (The Isle) to our shores. At the same time, it recognised the Europeans were similarly bugnuts and doing extreme things with their movies. Most notoriously, two French button-pushers, Baise Moi and Irreversible, brought the fest some free publicity courtesy of a group of self-appointed moral watchdogs known as the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards who, unsuccessfully, called for their banning.

Surprisingly, they didn’t have anything to say about Marina De Van’s exquisitely grisly In My Skin (IFF ‘03), a film built around long, lovely sequences of a woman mutilating herself and snacking on her arm as if her life depended on it. Van, a regular Francois Ozon collaborator, wrote, directed and starred in this arthouse Cronenberg-by-way-of-Bunuel shocker which ultimately unsettles because of how identifiable it all is. That’s not to say I am prone to self-harm or cannibalism, but that Van’s film is clearly aligned with the idea that the human urge – to eat, drink, smoke, etc. – can be an inexplicable force we all have to contend with.

As graphic as it sometimes gets, In My Skin is no exploitative splatter flick. Much of its squirmy effectiveness is derived from Van’s sensitivity to texture and tactility – close-ups of sticky bandages and stitches, blood stains seeping through pants – rather than outright gore. Wisely, Van doesn’t compromise her vision through logical reasoning of her character’s actions, opening up the film’s psychological component to a raft of possible interpretations: the pressure-cooker environment of her workplace, the cracks in her personal relationships, the drastic changes in her lifestyle, or maybe it’s simply sheer, primal ecstasy at work. Of course, with a film so surely crafted as this, the whys can altogether be abandoned: In My Skin is just as damn near-perfect a movie you can make about a woman who begins eating herself.

One of the things I miss about the IFF were the chances it took with the programming, allowing smaller, more obscure films a prominence it might have otherwise not have in the bigger NZFF. You get to see something like Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds, a film that would probably never find its way to the current Incredibly Strange section. Not in any loud, obvious way “incredibly strange” (although not exactly conventional), it’s the most calm, reflective, Zen-like movie that’s ever played the ISFF, and maybe the most overtly romantic too.

The film starts off as a detective story, starring Tom McManus and Tilda Swinton as lovers in two intertwining, parallel stories somehow connected to a dead body with a missing brain. But John Mighton’s script, based on his play, is more concerned with heady questions probing the possibilities of our imagination to house universes and realities, making the film a more cerebral, philosophical cousin to those pre-millenial is-it-real-or-Memorex movies such as The Matrix, Open Your Eyes, Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ. If you love “brain” movies (a la Donovan’s Brain) and dream logic narratives, track this gem down (Magna Pacific put out a DVD some years ago which I’m hesitant to recommend ‘cos it looks like mud and does a disservice to this gorgeous-looking movie).

I’ve been plowing through the silliest TV series I’ve had the strangest pleasure of watching in a while. NBC’s The Event only survived one season, and it’s no surprise why after you’ve seen the pilot: there was no way in hell it could ever satisfyingly resolve the ludicrous narrative overreach of its Lost-meets-V-meets-FlashForward set-up. The show’s not without moments that hint at potential, but this is essentially bad serial television – stupid twists, hammy performances, lame characters, a complete absence of identity and direction – and mostly fascinating and watchable because of it.

However, one of the actual GOOD things about the show is veteran actor Hal Holbrook, who pops in and out of the story as a character named James Dempsey, an old man of unknown power and wealth who appears to be pulling a lot of strings of what happens (just to be vague and un-spoilery should feel like watching it). In a show where a lot of the actors flounder hopelessly to “find” their characters in the midst of all the labyrinthine plot requirements, Holbrook lends an air of relaxed credibility and authority to the drama, even if he doesn’t appear in every episode.

Best known for All The President’s Men, where he played Deep Throat, and more recently his acclaimed and Oscar-nominated supporting part in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, Holbrook maybe one of the greatest unassuming actors of his generation still around. Javier Bardem, in a gracious display of respect and appreciation, said the latter was “one of the best performances” he had ever seen. Thinking about Holbrook prompted me to dust off the VHS of a relatively unknown 1979 movie he starred in called Natural Enemies, a remorselessly desolate character study about a man on the verge of wiping out his entire family.

Based on a novel by Julius Horwitz, this is a powerful, gut-twisting, soul-destroying movie – it’s hard to believe writer/director Jeff Kanew is the same man gave the world Revenge of the Nerds a few years later. If you’re a fragile family guy in your 40s, best advice I can give you is to tread with caution before seeking it out. From the very first frame, you know things ain’t gonna end happily: we close in on Holbrook, as magazine publisher Paul Steward, pensively looking out the window, talking about how “all men think about killing their family” before getting his rifle and loading it. His narration is heavy with resignation – there’s no goddamn hope in his voice – and in the next scene, he creeps into bed with his manic depressive wife Miriam (Louise Fletcher), whom he hasn’t slept next to in 8 months, and begins to jerk off under the sheets.

Natural Enemies is one slow psychological tumble from there, with Kanew shying away from exploitative, sensational elements and remaining true to the dreariness of Steward’s routine, and the film’s jaded worldview that once a man’s incapability to provide for and protect his family has gotten the better of him, the only sensible – or “natural” – option is to get rid of them. It’s heavy-duty stuff: at breakfast, Steward looks over to his daughter in a state of mind that ponders how sad it must be that men like him will want to sleep with her, and as the film progresses to its haunting, chillingly restrained conclusion, there’s more dialogue about loneliness and his overwhelming dissatisfaction with everything in life. Holbrook’s grimly internalised performance deserves more recognition.

Peter Carter’s 1977 Canadian backwoods shocker Rituals also features another superb Holbrook perf that’s unfortunately not better known because the film’s been dumped on for the longest time. Leonard Maltin BOMBED it while Siskel and Ebert deemed it bad enough to be “dog of the week” on their show. It also was butchered, released under the less evocative title of The Creeper, and because of its woodsy setting, often been described as a Deliverance rip-off. Sure the similarities are there, but it’s way, way better than that lazy comparison would suggest, and its reputation as a superior survivalist horror film has grown substantially over the years – it’s easily my favourite of the genre.

Enormously suspenseful and harrowing, Rituals rises above the norm of its template (a group of men go camping and get picked off individually by an unseen assailant) with uncommonly fleshed-out characterisations and the sheer nightmarish terror of its imagery (the finale is a genuinely hellish hair-raiser that could easily go up against any of today’s more graphic horrors). Predominantly shot on location in the Canadian wilderness, the film is a grimy, sweaty, at times agonising experience; you can feel every gruelling, physically taxing moment the characters spend in the merciless terrain, helplessly trying to make their way to safety as they’re being hunted. Code Red’s DVD release is a godsend, the print’s not perfect but it’s completely uncut and the best way to view this great film right now.

Speaking of things which are (1) low-budget horror (2) Canadian (3) location-based and (4) released by Code Red, I just wanted to quickly mention a little gem they recently put out: Ghostkeeper (1981). It’s also maybe timely (unintentionally so) with the current fest film fever over The Shining (and its terrific accompanying doc Room 237), which Jim Makichuk’s film most resembles with its spookily isolated, snow-covered hotel setting. By any conventional storytelling standard, Ghostkeeper is a failure, especially its fumbled attempt to take on the Native American legend of the Wendigo. The mythology is underwritten and doesn’t pay off in any eventful way, but location is everything in this film, and Makichuk has created a thick, enveloping and hypnotic atmosphere from his threadbare production.

Ghostkeeper is filled with many moments where absolutely NOTHING happens on screen, but as with a lot of these regional shoestring horrors of the era, the zoney padding – where you sometimes feel like you’re about to lose your mind waiting for something to happen – is actually a favourable quality. If that sounds like your kind of drug, don’t hesitate to purchase the DVD direct from Code Red’s site (I SWEAR I do not work for these guys) – it’s a limited run, so won’t be around for long. And just before I go… apparently the transfer was taken from the only surviving 35mm print and I have to say it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve set my eyes on this year. Felt like some kind of refreshing visual tonic that I didn’t want to end.

This will be the last one. Next year go somewhere else. Or so I’ve been telling myself for the last few years. And yet again, I found myself returning to Melbourne this winter to watch a bunch of movies. I’ve previously detailed my love affair with going to the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) here so I won’t repeat the same points again, but if anything felt different about my trip this year it was that familiarity had sunk in. I still very much enjoy it but it no longer felt novel to fly across the ditch to attend a film festival (I’ll be back next year, for sure).

A few things of tangential interest before I get into the films I saw…

(i) Here’s the MIFF trailer that plays before EVERY single session:

It stopped being funny after the 1st time, but what’s funny is I was subjected to it so frequently it almost became a form of conditioning, and now I strangely miss rolling my eyes at it.

(ii) I caught Casablanca for the first time ever (shock horror right?) on the Emirates flight there on their terrific ICE in-flight entertainment program. I was beyond tired but stayed mostly awake through it. Great to see it all come together and hear its iconic dialogue in context (i.e. finding out who Louie is). Ingrid Bergman looked luminous on that tiny screen.

(iii) On the first night in Melb I paid a visit to Kino Cinemas for David Cronenberg’s newie Cosmopolis (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Cronenberg on opening night). Deadly quiet turnout of maybe around 7-8 people, and I can confidently say at least 3 were R-Patz fans, since about halfway into the film they made some comments about falling asleep, giggled and walked out. In some ways I don’t blame them though. If you go in expecting the film to fit in with the trailer’s emphasis on its more outré aspects – like vintage weird Cronenberg in the Naked Lunch/Videodrome vein – you’ll be sorely disappointed. Cosmopolis is a bore, impenetrable, static, talky, cold, lazily directed – easily his weakest film in a long time. Also some pretty unconvincing rear projection work there, DC. Still go see it though, there won’t be anything remotely like it when it comes out.

DAY 1 [03.08.12]

LAS ACACIAS (I think this played in Auckland last year?)
A nice way to start the fest. Argentinean road movie following a mid-aged trucker transporting a woman and her baby from Paraguay to Buenos Aires. Very much minimalist/slow cinema, gains subtle power watching the characters warm up to each other. MIFF still shows plenty of 35mm prints, and after being DCP’d into submission at NZFF, seeing scratches on this print filled me with unreasonable joy.

HEADSHOT
This Thai thriller, from Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe), attempts a little something different by having a killer who sees everything upside down after being wounded in the head. But before you nut over this admittedly intriguing hook, this only forms a small part of the film, which is a fairly standard crime story upended by non-linear telling and Buddhist self-realisation themes. Moody, at times visually striking, but muddled. I think I’m done with romanticised hitman movies for now.

CARRE BLANC
Hoped for a neato low-budget sci-fi winner like Primer and Timecrimes, but Carre Blanc was a massive letdown. Bits of Gilliam, Kafka, 1984, et al in this dystopian tale, but incredibly dull, with a record number of zoom-ins stuffed into its barely-80-minute-but-feels-twice-as-long running time. Seeing this 11:30pm on the first day may not have helped matters.

DAY 2 [04.08.12]

HAROLD AND MAUDE
Hal Ashby’s classic black comedy on the big screen = a treat. Part of MIFF’s “70s New Hollywood Comedy” section. Too many great scenes to mention, wondrous work from Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort. Funny, sweet, perverse, touching. Cat Stevens’ songs take you some place else.

FLICKER
Quirky/pleasant-enough workplace satire from Sweden crams a lot onto its plate: arachnophobia, infertility, electricity-induced allergies, superhero mobile phone ads. Super-precise, heightened reality Wes Anderson-y attention to props and sets with dejected, deadpan Roy Andersson/Aki Kaurismaki vibe. Grinds towards the end when it gets plot-heavy.

DAY 3 [05.08.12]

AVALON
60-something night club promoter with crime ties opens new digs but an accident threatens to screw everything up. Mick Jagger pal Johannes Brost is awesome as the leathery ageing party animal. This one kinda creeps up on you. Compelling, haunting look at unsavoury over-the-hill characters unable to let go of their youth. And yes, it’s named after the Roxy Music hit, and there is a cool montage in the film set to the song.

V/H/S
A real mixed bag/missed opportunity, unsurprisingly. Some fun scares, but uneven stories. Best saved for last, iffy middle segments. Dug the out-there weirdness of the Skype tale but not sure how Skype fits in with the VHS concept. The round-the-block queue for this sold-out screening was quite insane..

DAY 4 [06.08.12]

DARK HORSE
Todd Solondz schlub-com with Jorden Gelber as overweight toy collector who falls for out-of-his-league but semi-catatonic Selma Blair. Some laughs, and it’s easier to digest than his oppressively repetitive recent work, but doesn’t change my mind that the only two Solondz films that matter are Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. Walken quite restrained. Crappy digi look.

THE LEGEND OF KASPAR HAUSER
The WTF-er of the fest. Bizarro take on the story of Kaspar Hauser, with protracted blasts of electro/techno music. Vincent Gallo plays dual characters, shakes some booty. Sophomoric film school experiment meets midnight movie surrealism – weird factor makes it worth a view but too long for its own good. Wonder what the three old ladies sitting next to me thought.

DAY 5 [07.08.12]

WHERE’S POPPA?
File under: They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Carl Reiner’s bad taste 1970 comedy starring George Segal as a lawyer trying to get rid of his senile mom Ruth Gordon. Horrifyingly un-PC, with jaw-dropping rape and racist humour that would not fly today, no siree. But despite that, one of the funniest films ever made about attempted matricide.

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN
Fatigue set in and I couldn’t stay awake through this doco on the US war on drugs. Viewing consciousness dipped in and out, I mostly remember David Simon (The Wire) talking a lot. Looked pretty good though.

DAY 6 [08.08.12]

No films – relief! It was definitely getting to that point of the fest.

DAY 7 [09.08.12]

THE MAN ON THE ROOF
Classic Swedish police procedural begins as a slow-moving, character-driven whodunnit then morphs into a gripping, sweat-inducing sniper thriller. Similar feel to gritty ‘70s American films like The French Connection (which director Bo Wideberg was openly inspired by) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - not a bad thing! Wry humour is a nice touch. Almost pristine 35mm print was a revelation.

POINT BLANK
Not part of MIFF, but the great thing – at least for this small town Auckland kid – about Melbourne is you can roll up to the Astor Theatre later that night and catch something like this. Paired on a double with Get Carter which I missed (I was mostly after PB). Colour, editing, architecture, dreams, Lee Marvin…John Boorman’s masterpiece remains fresh, exciting, ahead-of-its-time, untouchable. Crime melodrama as fever dream. One of my favourite films ever. A++

DAY 8 [10.08.12]

THE DELAY
Single mother struggles to bring up the kids and take care of her ailing father, decides to abandon him. Dilemma posed by situation gets tense, unnerving. Carlos Vallarino is moving as the befuddled, mentally unsound granddad. Not bad if you like grim kitchen sink dramas.

Been thinking about Walter Hill a lot lately…for three reasons:

He’ll soon be releasing his first feature in 11 YEARS, with Bullet to the Head, the Stallone-starring adaptation of the Alexis Nolent French graphic novel. Trailer here.

The recent death of Tony Scott — not ‘cos they’re related in any direct way, other than the fact they’ve both done stylish action films. I’m thinking more about it in terms of the seemingly sudden “championing” of a filmmaker whose work has more often than not been denigrated in the critical sphere. Why wasn’t anyone giving Scott all this big love when he was around? How this connects to Hill: the guy turned 70 this year, and though I’d like to think he’ll be around for another a few years making movies, the reality is he isn’t getting any younger and he could be gone tomorrow. I don’t really want to compare their successes – Scott easily comes up top for box office, and is the more influential of the two – but there’s something undeniably humbling when you look at Hill’s overall career as a craftsman and the lack of notice he’s received, whether it’s due to poor B.O. performance and critical reception, or how the kind of old-fashioned movies he was making in the later part of his career have been out of step with a modern audience, whatever that may be.

The Expendables 2 — there’s all this nostalgia for ageing action stars, what about ageing action directors? Hill may be the only director of his generation – of his “type” – still around. When I say “type”, I’m thinking those from the old school-of-hard-knocks crowd like Sam Peckinpah, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel – directors with distinctly hard-nosed sensibilities who made tough, gritty, rough-hewn, lived-in, masculine films. They’re a rare breed these days.

All of this is to say, yes, I believe Walter Hill to be one of the most underrated directors around. Why? One frustratingly uneven career. In his first decade, Hill delivered with one killer film after another that marked his taut, lean approach to action: Hard Times, The Warriors, The Driver, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs. They’re all widely considered cult favourites/classics/masterpieces etc. And no talk of Hill should ever go without mentioning that he also produced/co-wrote Alien. After that, everyone seems to differ where they stand on Hill, although – with the exception of Another 48 Hrs. in 1990 – it’s clear he was box office poison. But while his post-mid-’80s features* have all been flawed, there’s enough GOOD in them to engage and warrant second/third looks and reappraisals (maybe a while until I get to Brewster’s Millions and Supernova though, the latter at least in its current Francis Ford Coppola-re-edited form…).

So I recently rewatched several of his films, and here are a few I particularly feel have been forgotten over time…

CROSSROADS (1986)

I love this movie. Crossroads stands out as Walter Hill’s warmest, gentlest, most accessible work to date – and I guess atypical too, since it’s not action-oriented nor a Western. So as an introduction, it’s perhaps not an ideal entry point to show what he’s capable of or known for, but placed in the context of his career, it’s almost a remarkable, one-off departure. Ralph Macchio plays 17-year-old classical guitar whiz kid Eugene Martone who blows off his chance at Julliard prestige to embark on a cross-country journey with cranky retiree Willie Brown, aka harmonica player Blind Dog Fulton (the fantastic Joe Seneca), to the birthplace of blues legend Robert Johnson. The casting of Macchio is obviously a cash-in on his then-hot The Karate Kid and its protege/mentor formula, but hey, it works a charm here with Martone’s cocky, youthful charisma brushing up wonderfully against Brown’s hesitant old-geezer gruffness. I dig how John Fusco’s script takes a turn for the metaphysical towards the end, culminating in a scorching guitar battle where Macchio, who impressively does his best to emulate composer Ry Cooder’s playing, faces off with ace shredder Steve Vai. Hill’s long-standing creative relationship with Cooder, who’s scored eight of his films to date, has to be one of the most perfectly matched director/composer combos ever.

JOHNNY HANDSOME (1989)

For all the talk of Hill’s The Driver being a key influence on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Mickey Rourke’s sensitive performance in Johnny Handsome as the proto-minimalist-Ry-Goz. Made in a period just before Rourke started losing his mojo, this adaptation of John Godey’s novel, about a facially deformed crim who is given reconstructive surgery and uses his newfound good looks to take revenge on his double-crossers, is an unusual sci-fi-noir hybrid, brought together by Hill with his signature Western-derived mix of tough-guy swagger and bluesy elegy. Seeing this again after many years I wasn’t prepared for the emotional notes it hits: Rourke is in incredible form – this is one of his most sympathetic roles, and features some of his best acting – while Cooder’s stirring guitar constantly hits the spot. Excellent supporting cast too: Lance Henriksen, Ellen Barkin, Forest Whitaker, Morgan Freeman. Another Hill film that unfortunately didn’t do much business in its time but is easier to appreciate today.

 TRESPASS (1992)

Trespass might have my favourite bit of IMDB trivia: “There are no women whatsover in this movie”. Yep, this one’s very much dude-powered all the way, notable for starring two Bills (William Sadler, Bill Paxton) and two Ices (Ice T, Ice Cube) in the leads. The former are two Arkansas firemen who stumble onto a treasure map and end up stepping on the East St Louis gangland turf of the latter, and all hell breaks loose.

Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’ script is fashioned like The Treasure of Sierra Madre, updated with nervy, early-‘90s race relation tensions (the Rodney King riots necessitated a title change from Looters to Trespass), but make no mistake, this isn’t a trenchant social commentary flick, it’s mainly a brutal, rough-and-tumble confined-space actioner about greedy people after gold – and more the gangsta pulp of New Jack City than the urban realism of Boyz n the Hood. It’s also a whole lot kitschier today (those goddamn chunk Motorola cellphones), but no less entertaining watching out-of-their-element hicks Sadler/Paxton running from the artillery-heavy, blinged-out T/Cube crew.

*It’s worth noting that Hill did some fine TV work directing the pilot of HBO’s Deadwood and the Robert Duvall miniseries Broken Trail.

Shelf Life will be my ongoing series of viewing diaries, writing about stuff I’ve picked off my shelf, seeing for the first time etc. Basically it’s a way to force myself to clear the ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies…

INNOCENCE

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence from 2004 is one of those films that has somehow strangely, glaringly slipped our film festival over the years. And it’s not exactly some impossible-to-sell anomaly that’s unfit for fest audiences. Hadzihalilovic is a collaborator of Gaspar Noé – she edited his debut feature I Stand Alone, co-wrote Enter the Void (they’re married too) – and the film’s stylized setting at a girls’ boarding school is rich with controversial and aesthetical qualities that would guarantee at least a modicum of intrigue for viewers who like their cinema a little offbeat and weeeird.

It would be too easy, and limiting though, to fixate on its images of prepubescent young girls (i.e. Slant Magazine’s Nick Schager: “will likely be the consensus pick for best picture of the year among pedophiles worldwide.”). Hadzihalilovic’s gorgeously nebulous work, loosely based on German author Frank Wedekind’s 1888 short story Mine Haha, or the Corporal Education of Girls, is an example of a true artist in complete, masterful control of everything – actors (and non-actors), wardrobe, sets, lighting, composition – to achieve what she wants.

Okay, Innocence isn’t entirely without precedent, as its fairytale trappings (underground tunnels, dark forests, etc.) remind us of the cinematic rabbit holes of David Lynch, the ballet school surrealist horror of Dario Argento’s Suspiria and the warped outsider paintings of Henry Darger. Maybe most interestingly, it also echoes cult French dreamweaver Jean Rollin with its tableaux of coffins and grandfather clocks, and still, trance-like pacing. But overall Hadzihalilovic’s film transcends reference points; for a highly abstracted, thickly symbolic narrative about the experience of adolescence on the cusp of maturity, there’s nothing quite like it. Innocence has yet receive a DVD release here but it’s available from Artificial Eye in the UK.

NEXT OF KIN

I’ve been meaning to check out this little-seen 1982 Aussie horror pic ever since Tarantino raved about it in Mark Hartley’s terrific Ozploitation doco Not Quite Hollywood. The film’s credentials are worth briefly mentioning: both director Tony Williams and writer Michael Heath are Kiwis, the latter wrote Sam Pillsbury’s The Scarecrow and David Blyth’s Death Warmed Up. Jacki Kerin stars as Linda, a woman who inherits and takes over her late mum’s retirement home when spooky things begin happening, like taps being left on, old people turning up dead in baths and details of her mum’s diary materialising in real life. On the surface seemingly a slasher, Next of Kin unfolds more in the slow-burning, suggestive Gothic tradition. The script’s uneven, but the film is atmospheric as hell, stylishly shot, and arrives at a cracker of a finale that you leaves wondering why on the heck Williams hasn’t made any more films after this. Komische giant Klaus Schulze’s disquieting synth score is a monumental addition to the film’s overall feel and impact. An Australian DVD came out several years ago but has since gone out-of-print.

BRAINSTORM

Douglas Trumbull is probably still more well-known today as the visionary behind the visual effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and most recently The Tree of Life, but he also directed a couple of great films, the 1972 ecological sci-fi film Silent Running, and 1983′s Brainstorm, which delved into concepts of virtual reality well before the likes of Strange Days and The Matrix came along. Thoughtful and driven by big, stimulating ideas, it’s the sort of “adult sci-fi” that’s rarely made anymore, though if a remake to gussy it up was announced tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised. Louise Fletcher and Christopher Walken (in one of his more normal roles funnily enough) play scientists who create a device that is able to record brain activity and transfer it into another person’s consciousness, i.e. you can put it on and feel like you’re on a rollercoaster without leaving your office meeting.

To convey the vicarious, out-of-body intensity of experiencing “the Hat”, Trumbull originally wanted to use a process he invented called Showscan, but when it didn’t pan out it was shot normally on 35mm film with the virtual reality sequences opening up to 65mm ‘scope dimensions. The magic is obviously lost on the small screen, but that doesn’t stop the film being a timely, thematically provocative parable cautioning against the misappropriation of technology for nefarious military use, excessive personal pleasure and commercial gain. On another level, it’s also works just well  as a sensorially ambitious trip into that unknown cosmic intersection of science, love, sex and death. Brainstorm was Natalie Wood’s last film, she mysteriously died before the film was completed. Available on Blu-ray from Warner US.

A couple of weeks ago after my review of Rian Johnson’s time-travel noir Looper was published, two readers (“Edward”, “liz”) left mildly dismissive comments that got me thinking. My knee-jerk reaction was to respond in a snide, similarly toned manner, but I eventually decided otherwise, since the more I thought about the issues they were getting at, the more I thought a full blog post was necessary, and ultimately more constructive, to address them (as opposed to starting a 140-character tweet-sized flame war). It probably seems that I’m on the defensive (I partially am), but the intention is not to put these commenters on the spot, but to discuss stuff that might lead to a possibly better understanding of certain sentiments that readers have of film reviewers/critics* (or something like that).

Okay, first up is Edward, who commented:

“Flicks – what a sourballs review. She’s a 5-star.”

There are two things that we can unpack from this comment:

A SOURBALLS REVIEW

It basically sounds like the reader felt I was too harsh with a film he unconditionally loved, and didn’t deserve the negative remarks I made about it. I’m guessing Edward’s being a little facetious, but I’m not exactly sure how a largely positive review would count as “sourballs”, especially when I say things like “jammed with clever ideas”, “pleasures are plenty”, “deserves kudos”, etc. Did his reading of the few negative points (Willis’s acting, lack of emotional ending) completely erase the impression that I actually liked the film?

A few questions to think about: do readers need critical validation of the film they loved anyway? What prompts a reader to place a comment of that nature, when there’s no changing what they thought of the film – unless they do in fact, feel like they’ve been challenged, or made to rethink, however small, what they thought of it? I dunno.

Which brings me to…

STAR RATINGS

If I could live in a world where star ratings are not required to accompany a review, I’d be completely content. But it’s a necessary evil. After reviewing films for nearly 10 years – for publications that do require ratings – it’s something you quickly come to accept and deal with. There’s nothing “bad” as such with star ratings. There’s a place for them. Readers can get a quick gauge of a film’s quality. Film distros can use them for PR/advertising purposes. And yes, it can even be useful for reviewers – as a form of discipline, a focusing tool – to help them write a review that matches the star rating.

But the downsides? Because they are visually powerful, immediate and final, people tend to fixate on them. You’ll get pissed off distributors harassing editors over your 2-star review of The Day After Tomorrow (true story). In reality, stars are simply indicators. A star rating is the lazy person’s review; if you really want to know how the reviewer felt about the film, READ the entire review. I mean, a 3-star film can actually be good and worth watching. Even 2 or 1 star films. It all depends on the person and what they want to take away from the film. I can enjoy a mediocre 2-star movie on the basis that it simply filled 90 minutes without demanding too much of me, and I can appreciate a 1-star film for how terrible it is, how it needs to be seen at least once.

There are many levels at play here, and the criteria for judging films varies. As far as I’m concerned, there is no All-Encompassing Rule of Star Ratings – you just need to be consistent with your logic, and sure there is a general logic (higher the rating, the better the film is). You could be a reviewer who thinks 5 stars = faultless masterpiece, or you could be one that assigns 5 stars regularly to any ol’ film that gives you a massive boner. You could be writing for a newspaper that gives 5 stars to “Must Sees”, 4 stars to films that are “Excellent”. I fall into the camp where 5 star rating is left for something truly special. Something I could call a favourite film, a classic, a masterpiece.

I don’t think Looper falls into either of those categories. How do I decide what gets 5 stars? When I watch a film from start to finish and there’s nothing about it that irks me in any way, then it’s likely to get a 5 or something close. It’s that feeling where you connect 100% with everything a film does. It burrows into your soul and stays there. This rarely happens of course, that’s why when it does it’s all the more amazing. I don’t see the point in handing 5 stars to just anything. On average most films are 2-3 star films. For me to give Looper 5 stars would mean that it’s on the level of something like – to use another time travel film – La Jetee, which it is definitely not. Looper’s a solid, entertaining film, but it doesn’t resonate any more than that.

Second comment – Liz asks:

“Why is someone who has to turn their head when Willis is on reviewing a Willis movie?”

WHAT’CHU TALKIN’ ‘BOUT, WILLIS?

A few things here. Firstly I just need to get nitpicky and slightly correct that statement: I don’t actually say that I turn my head when Willis is on. Only when he emotes. Turning the head is just an act of cringing. It doesn’t mean I can’t properly judge his performance – obviously I’ve watched it, and it’s made me feel this way. Secondly, I’d argue that Looper is NOT a “Bruce Willis movie”. Not a “Bruce Willis movie” in the sense that he gets single top A billing and plays unstoppable action hero (Die Hard et al). It’s as much Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s movie as it is Willis’ movie.

The third point is the one that seems to assume that you have to be a fan of Bruce Willis to review a movie starring Bruce Willis. I may be entirely wrong about this, but it reads to me like she might have assumed I have something against Willis so I shouldn’t be reviewing his films. But that’s not true – and how would I have known I was going to turn my head watching this performance BEFORE watching the movie? (this is getting as confusing as time travel!) What I was trying to say was that Willis’ acting range – or more so, overall appeal – has lessened over the years. And it’s apparent he’s a lot less relevant these days. The guy’s gone from doing films like Twelve Monkeys, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense and The Fifth Element to slumming in DTV fare like Set-up, Catch .44 and The Cold Light of Day lately.

Anyway, getting back to the point about “only reviewing types of films you’re a fan of, or starring actors you’re a fan of etc” – well it does make sense, and it happens in practice. I try to review a wide variety of genres, but the truth is, like anyone, I’m drawn to specific genres (action, horror, thriller, sci-fi) more than others (rom-coms, costume dramas, quirky indie, anything bland). This is a problem too. Even if I feel more suited to review say, an action flick, I also hold higher standards for that genre, because I LOVE that genre, and KNOW that it can be done well (why is Stallone churning out self-satisfied dross like The Expendables 2 when he can make a real action movie like Rambo?). So yeah, they’ll get a harder time from me.

* I’ve always felt uncomfortable/weird calling myself a film critic. I guess it boils down to semantics but I tend to say that I’m a “film reviewer”. There seems to be a loftiness attached to the word “critic”, like you need to add 20 years of experience before you actually can attain that title. Pauline Kael, Robert Ebert and Andrew Sarris are film critics, I’m just happy to review films for a little bit of pocket money.

Here’s the second installment of Shelf Life, my ongoing series of viewing diaries, writing about stuff I’ve picked off my shelf, seeing for the first time etc. Basically it’s a way to force myself to clear the ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies… You can read the first one here.

MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD

“Lost” films often become fetishised objects among film fanatics, developing mythic generation-spanning reputations that are difficult to live up to once you finally get to see them. “Discovered in an attic” three decades after vanishing from the few drive-ins it played, Christopher Speeth’s one-off mega-obscurity Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973) – not to be confused with the even crappier Carnival of Blood (1970) – falls into the camp of not quite being the trash holy grail you had hoped for, but still offering enough to like so as to not disappoint, particularly if you’re a fan of carnival horror flicks (Freaks, Night Tide, Carnival of Souls, The Funhouse etc).

The plot, as far as I can make out, is about a dark lord of some sort named Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich) who keeps a colony of long-living cannibals hidden in the limestone caverns underneath a dilapidated carnival. For some reason that escaped me, they’re forced to watch loops of Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, while above ground, sleazy middle-man Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey, awesomely hammy) – who’s more of a pivotal baddie than the somewhat screen-shy Malatesta – is tasked with finding flesh for them to feast on. In this case it’s the dysfunctional Norrises, who’ve come to check out the place and possibly oversee its operations.

Over a thankfully scant 74 minutes, the audience is left floundering in a zone of hallucinatory, near-avant-garde ineptitude. It’s not quite Manos-level of terrible, but there’s a more-than-sufficient supply of technically malnourished moments here to get that grotty thrift store feel and leave you somewhat disoriented. The action is haphazardly edited and poorly lit (usually by one, ill-defined source), and spatially we’re never sure exactly where we are in the carnival – we just know sometimes a hook-handed caretaker and a machete-wielding dwarf (The Man with the Golden Gun’s Hervé Villechaize) randomly show up, and there’s a lot of plastic, foil and bad psych-disco decor to writhe around in when needed.

The DVD, remastered by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas’ (!) American Zoetrope, is still floating around, and for all things Malatesta you can visit the film’s official website.

THE STUDENT BODY

I had no aching desire to watch this, no plan of the “been meaning to check this out for the longest time” sort, but there it was, that beautiful cover art, sitting on the top of a pile of VHS that was taken out of my closet by construction workers who had to rip up my closet (long story). “Three beautiful coeds set education back 100 years…” – sure, why not? It’s directed by Gus Trikonis (West Side Story’s Indio), who made some sweet B-movies (Swinging Barmaids, Moonshine County Express) early in his career before heading off to TV land (Baywatch!), and stars the foxy threesome of Jillian Kesner, Janice Heiden and June Fairchild as trouble-making convicts who agree to undergo an experimental drug program at a college in exchange for early parolement.

It’s a totally ludicrous idea, and The Student Body, in true exploitation fashion, promises more than it delivers. Teasing us into thinking we’re in women-in-prison/campus sex comedy territory with brief catfights and gratuitous skinny-dipping, the film eventually ends on a tamer, straighter note. But not to worry, there’s some top drawer stuff in there. Heiden’s nymphomaniac Chicago attempts to rape a dude who tells her to “cut out that caveman shit”, then minutes later proceeds to repeatedly dunk his girlfriend’s head in a barrel of water. Better still, Fairchild’s Mitzi becomes obsessed with penguins (!!), and in the film’s funniest scene, throws a bin into a store window just to steal a giant stuffed penguin.

Kesner’s the dullest of the lot, simply falling in love with Carter (Peter Hooten), the son of the program’s head Dr. Blalock (Warren Steven), whom she discovers is illegally using them as guinea pigs to pay off some mounting bills. That’s as “thrilling” as the story gets, but the brassy, energetic lead performances help get us through this daffy little sexploiter-with-a-message.

STATIC

If most people didn’t realise that Grammy-winning music video director Mark Romanek made a movie before his two better-known features, the Robin Williams psycho-thriller One Hour Photo and the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation Never Let Me Go (both underrated IMHO), that’s because he prefers it that way. His 1985 debut Static, co-written by his friend, and lead actor Keith Gordon (Christine, Dressed to Kill), is something he’s disowned, which could explain why it’s so damn hard to find and never made it to DVD. But man, it’s no piece of shit amateur hour – it’s actually pretty good. It IS the slightly formed work of a young filmmaker but regardless, Static is one of the more intriguing, oddball indie pics of the ‘80s – and the best Christmas movie you’ve never heard of.

Gordon plays Ernie Blick, a crucifix factory worker who’s almost completed a new, supposedly life-changing contraption he’s been working on for two years: a device that lets you to see into heaven. I often rail on about quirky indie movies, and that’s a quirky indie movie premise if ever there was one, but Static’s quirks and oddness mostly feel earned and restrained, absolutely in line with its characters’ overriding sense of melancholy and aimlessness. I’d go so far as to say that emotionally it’s a stronger film than either One Hour Photo and Never Let Me Go; the great scene where Blick unveils his invention is certainly more moving than anything found in those films.

Supporting cast includes character actor Bob Gunton (The Shawshank Redemption), who gets to show his rare lighter side as a ranting evangelist, and Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction), wonderfully low-key as Blick’s old flame Julia who’s back in town. If you like dreamy-synthy ‘80s scores, you’ll bliss out to this one (Eno, Japan, OMD).

Here’s a nice piece on Romanek from PopMatters.

When I first started thinking about this post it was simple and ordinary enough: a list of favourite ‘70s American crime pictures that I think should deserve more love. I was going to tie it in/add some relevance with the recent release of Andrew Dominik’s quite-’70s-crime-style Killing Them Softly, and mention that with a bunch of other crime pics coming soon to our theatres – Parker, Gangster Squad, Stand Up Guys, Seven Psychopaths, The Thieves, Lawless – it’s apparent that cinema is still very much in love with people on the wrong side of the law.

Then I was going to point out how after watching the trailer for Parker – Jason Statham’s take on crime fiction writer Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark’s character of the same name – I was like this. Simply based on the trailer, it didn’t look like the film, directed by Taylor Hackford (Ray), seemed to honour the world of Parker*, or at least in the way that the low-key, understated but realistically gritty look and feel of the following films I’m about to discuss seem to do. Parker looks just like another hyper Statham action-fest, and Statham doesn’t even attempt an American accent (though in some ways that is preferable I guess).

But anyway as I watched these films – The Last Run, The Outfit, The Nickel Ride, Charley Varrick and Harry in Your Pocket – in such quick succession to prep for this blog, it dawned on me that they could essentially take place in the same universe** – Marvel Avengers-style but for ‘70s crime flicks. Granted, they’re all just variations on the genre’s recurring themes and character types. Stories dripping with rampant amorality, featuring hardened, fading anti-heroes, women thanklessly cast as either prostitutes or long-suffering romantic partners who’ll probably get shot before the credits roll, grimy-as-hell locations, and just tons of seedy atmosphere and mood.

What made the whole thing stranger was the six-degrees-of-separation feeling I was getting on a level beyond the commonality of the genre conventions. Weird parallels and coincidences in cast, crew, characters started popping up. For example, the sultry, voluptuous Sheree North appears in The Outfit offering herself to Joe Don Baker who turns her down, but in the completely unrelated Charley Varrick, they end up sleeping together. Jordan Cronenweth shot The Nickel Ride, but he also shot Rolling Thunder which was directed by John Flynn, who directed by The Outfit. The Outfit is based on a Parker/Stark novel, the first of which gave us Point Blank, which had John Vernon, who shows up in Charley Varrick. Linda Haynes, Jason Miller’s love interest in The Nickel Ride, was in Rolling Thunder. George C. Scott falls for Trish Van Devere in The Last Run, James Coburn falls for her in Harry in Your Pocket etc. Even the scores across these films – by Jerry Fielding, Dave Grusin, Lalo Schifrin, Jerry Goldsmith – could come together in a massive composition that would be awesome in their jazzy, propulsive consistency. Okay some of these connections are tenuous at best, and I’m sure not everyone will be on board with the way my mind works, but it’s fun to think about.

Now for the sake of make-believe (more interesting than a boring list) let’s pretend that none of these films are available on DVD, and I’m a cool DVD company with great taste putting these films out for the first time. I’d gather them all in a beautiful ‘70s American crime box-set***. If I had photoshop skillz I could design a 3D pack shot or something****, but I don’t so here’s the line-up – in thumbnail posters – and below a little bit about each film:

CHARLEY VARRICK

Charley Varrick (1973) is Don Siegel’s masterpiece. And I don’t say that lightly, since he’s made so many solid, fabulously tough action/crime/noir pics over the years: The Big Steal, The Killers, Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz etc. But Varrick, based on John H. Reese’s novel The Looters, struck such a perfect balance of the requisite genre elements, it’s pretty much a gold standard of how to make this sort of picture. Taut violent action, sharp writing, smart, compelling protagonist, memorable villain, all set to a crackling pace that never lets up.

The against-type casting of Walter Matthau as a bank robber/independent crop-duster/ex-stunt pilot (!) is also a stroke of genius and his fantastic performance is a huge part of why the film works so well. Matthau is a good example of the kind of lead actor that doesn’t exist anymore to play these parts. He didn’t have the conventionally dashing good looks nor pin-up athleticism of a Brad Pitt or Jason Statham, but most importantly he was first and foremost a great actor who LOOKED the part and had that unglamorous, everyday quality that you could almost imagine him being your dad. Special mention must be made of Joe Don Baker, who’s magnetically vile as the Southern thug Molly who’s sent to track down Varrick.

THE OUTFIT

Like Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake, aka Richard Stark, has been a reliable source for Hollywood to tap for adapting pulpy crime fiction for the big screen. There have been several great films (Point Blank, The Hot Rock), some not so great (Payback, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?), but few have ever “got it right” as far as embodying the voice and spirit of Westlake goes. Based on the third Stark/Parker novel, The Outfit (1973) comes close – the author himself has gone on record to say that Robert Duvall’s Earl Macklin is his favourite version of the Parker character.

I can’t decide if The Outfit or Rolling Thunder is John Flynn’s best film (I might go for the latter for Paul Schrader’s involvement), but The Outfit is a TERRIFIC hardboiled crime movie, all brutal stripped-down business with the unbeatable team-up of Duvall/Joe Don Baker going after mobster Robert Ryan. Downright shabby locations, JDB coldly knocking out a secretary like he does it everday, a top-notch character cast (Richard Jaeckel, Elisha Cook Jr, Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, Bill McKinney),  grungily textured cinematography from Bruce Surtees (The Beguiled, which was directed by Don Siegel, who directed Charley… ok I’ll stop)…good stuff.

THE LAST RUN

If anyone ever asks you, “What the hell kind of trip were Anton Corbijn and George Clooney on when they made The American??”, just point them to this existentialist 1971 thriller starring the great George C. Scott as Harry Garmes, a retired mob driver trying to prove to himself he’s still got what it takes to do one last job. The script by Alan Sharp (Night Moves) features your usual car chases, twists and shootouts, but the film is predominantly a mood piece – and a surprisingly poignant at that – about a crumpled old codger who society has not much use for anymore. Garmes hasn’t worked in 9 years. His wife left him, his son is dead. He lives in a sleepy Portuguese village where he sometimes sees a prostitute (Colleen Dewhurst). So lonely is his existence that when a job offer turns up – to transport an escaped convict (Tony Musante) to France – it blinds him with excitement, much to the detriment of his professional integrity.

Directed with spare, cool-headed precision by Richard Fleischer (Compulsion), it all kinda plays out like Two-Lane Blacktop (lots of ROAD and burning rubber) meets The Mechanic (old pro/young hothead tension), which is a good thing – it’s just odd enough to avoid being your run-of-the-mill crime flick. Best scene: Garmes taking a nap under a tree – weirdly moving. Oh did I mention Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s legendary regular DP, photographed this?

A lot of drama occurred during the production: Fleischer stepped in to replace John Huston, while Scott left his then-real-life wife Dewhurst for his other co-star Trish Van Devere when filming ended! Amazing.

THE NICKEL RIDE

A genuinely forgotten gem in the ‘70s crime stakes, Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride (1974) is low-key, slow-burning, atmospheric, obliquely plotted – almost my favourite kind of movie. Like The Last Run, it’s another tale of a guy who’s been in the business for such a long time that when he realises his time is almost up he loses his cool. Jason Miller (The Exorcist) plays Cooper, a “key man” whose line of work involves organising the stashing of stolen mob goods in warehouses and fixing boxing matches on the side. When the negotiation of a deal doesn’t pan out smoothly, his boss Carl (John Hillerman) decides to saddle him with Bo Hopkins’ sinisterly chirpy cowboy, which doesn’t bode well for his future employment prospects. There’s very little action or violence in the film, but it’s full of meticulously sustained paranoia that leaves the viewer, like Cooper, uneasy and questioning what exactly is going on. Linda Haynes is quite wonderful as Cooper’s loving partner, adding some heart into this otherwise mostly downbeat noir.

HARRY IN YOUR POCKET

Harry in Your Pocket is perhaps the lesser entry in the set – the odd duck – every box set usually has one right? But it’s a movie I still enjoy a lot watching, primarily because it’s about pickpockets, and there aren’t that many movies about pickpockets around (Bresson’s Pickpocket, Johnnie To’s Sparrow, Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street.. what else?). Maybe ‘cos it’s not as cinematically exciting or easy to portray as a heist or a killing, but I love the untethered, sleight-of-hand nature of the crime – it’s so exposed, almost like magic. Anyway Harry in Your Pocket is occasionally a bit too breezy for its own good – Bruce Geller’s direction could use some tightening – but the ticket here is James Coburn playing one suave mofo of a wallet pincher. Lovebirds Michael Sarrazin and Trish Van Devere are his new recruits, and Walter Pidgeon is the coke-sniffing old-timer who fences their takes. Fun, unpretentious little caper.

* Not claiming to be an expert.
** I’m sure Dom did a blog on this topic but I can’t seem to find it.
*** I feel bad about leaving out Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) but that’s already received Criterion treatment so all good.
**** We have said skillz – Ed.

Here’s another entry in Shelf Life, Aaron’s ongoing series of viewing diaries, where he writes about stuff he’s picked off his shelf, is seeing for the first time, and so on. You know the drill by now, basically it’s a way for Aaron to force himself to clear his ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies… In this blog Aaron reports back on three amazing-sounding films you’ve probably never heard of and, like us, will want to track down pronto.

DEATH WISH CLUB

It happens more than I care to admit: I watch a movie so freaking weird that when the time comes to write about it I cannot actually put it into words, or do it justice WITH words. You just gotta SEE this thing. This is the case with John Carr’s Death Wish Club (aka Carnival of Fools) (1983) . I’m not sure where to start with this one, so I’ll just start by saying two things: (1) this movie has nothing to do with the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish (now there’s an idea: a movie about a club for Death Wish fans!) and (2) this is most definitely not some softcore erotic thriller that the generic VHS cover art makes it out to be:

I’ve had this tape sitting on the shelf for a while now, and been aware of its context in the “trash film world”, having seen Night Train to Terror a few years back where portions of the film were sloppily edited together to serve as a segment in that also-extremely-bizarre and super-cheesy 1985 musical/B-horror anthology. But I was finally moved to watch the film in its entirety after seeing the incredible screenshots posted on Cinema De Meep, which say infinitely more about the film that I probably can:

If you’ve seen Night Train, you might be surprised (or maybe dumbfounded/disappointed?) that it doesn’t really give a good impression of what Death Wish Club is really about. Where the Night Train version focused on its most apparent, exploitable selling point – a group of death-obsessed thrill-seekers come together to play Russian Roulette in twisted variations – the film centres on the loopy love story between “Glenny”, a lanky porn-watching med student (Rick Barnes) and Gretta, a somewhat unhinged Chopin-hating actress (Meredith Haze) who also works as a nightclub pianist for sleazy rich old George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers). Glenny’s in love with Greta but not too taken by her perverse ways, i.e. her Death Wish Club membership, so they break up and she reinvents herself in male drag with the name Charlie White.

Death Wish Club is, believe or not, a comedy, but from the pen of clearly-past-his-prime Oscar-winning screenwriter Philip Yordan (Broken Lance, The Big Combo), it’s a comedy of pain: it’s only funny because it’s so unfunny. Meaning you have scenes like a laaame running gag involving an elderly couple listening in whenever Glen and Gretta are having sex, and an indefensible routine where Glenny’s psychiatrist advises him that he only way to get Gretta back is to use his “weapon” as a “surprise attack” on Charlie. Next scene: he jumps under Gretta’s sheets without seeing who’s actually bed and screws her – then ba-dum-tssh – Charlie walks in through the door. Now imagine all this howlingly bad comedy, accompanied with those Death Wish Club sequences (most inventive use of a wrecking ball in a movie ever), and an exasperatingly manic, wild-eyed, overwrought performance from Haze, and you have one head-scratching whatsit of a movie that may have you hanging onto your dear sanity by the end. Stray thought: I would LOVE to see Brian DePalma remake this – with a straight face.

WOLFPACK

One of the things I love about IMDB user comments is stumbling upon actors commenting on their own film. Of course this doesn’t really happen with big name stars in big productions, but for smaller films and lesser known actors you’ll occasionally find someone from the crew reminiscing on their participation in the making of the film. It’s especially helpful for films so unknown that Google can’t even dig up much info, like this high school obscurity from 1988.

The plot – about a quarterback (Tony Carlin) trying to gain popularity for a student body president election by using dirty tactics – seems like another dramatisation of The Third Wave, Ron Jones’ ill-fated 1967 social experiment which most recently was made into the 2008 German film Die Welle (there’s also a hard-to-find 1981 ABC TV movie starring Bruce Davison). But maybe it wasn’t intentional: in his user comment, Nick Di Archangel, who acted in the film, said once he told Wolfpack’s screenwriter Fred Sharkey (his English Lit teacher!) the plot resembled the ‘81 film, it “didn’t go well”. That’s not exactly confirmation that Sharkey knew of The Third Wave and ripped it off etc, but there’s another fascist tenet that’s explicitly mentioned in the film – John Stuart Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” – which would’ve more likely been his source of inspiration. That, and obviously the Third Reich.

Anyway, I don’t think Wolfpack has the guts to tackle these themes in any thought-provoking or indelible fashion – it’s designed as an after-school TV special, and certainly feels that way, minus the unintentionally laughable weirdness some of them have. Carlin gives a charismatic performance as Jack “Boot”, the power-hungry star quarterback, but Jim Abele, the new dude in school who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his “football is football, politics is politics” stance, makes for a dull, slightly goofy lead. Most of the cast are unknowns who haven’t gone to do much else of note, but Abele’s been working bit parts in TV for the past couple of decades, appearing in everything from 24 to Mad Men.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY

Sergio Martino was probably the most skilled giallo director working in the ‘70s who wasn’t Dario Argento. He made at least four or five gialli that rank among the best of the genre, films like All the Colours of the Dark and Torso which rivalled Argento in style, atmosphere and perversion. I’d place Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) slightly below his better works, but there are enough psycho-sexual depravities, red herrings and hysterical performances here to satisfy seasoned fans of the genre (newcomers are advised to look elsewhere).

A nasty, twisted adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat written by giallo specialist Ernesto Gastaldi, the film stars Luigi Pistilli (For a Few Dollars More) as Oliviero, a sex-crazed slimeball of a failed writer who spends his days in his crumbling mansion abusing and humiliating his wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) and hosting debauched parties with hippies. When one of his young mistresses is bumped off, and Irina’s fetching niece Floriana (bob-haired giallo queen Edwige Fenech) arrives to stay, their batshit relationship goes further off the rails.

Boasting quite possibly the best title ever in the history of cinema, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (aka Gently Before She Dies) is filled with such loathsome, spiteful characters it’s almost off-putting, and often hampered by a low budget (one eye-gouging scene is laughably amateurish). But the narrative kinks to Poe’s oft-filmed tale – and in turn, the overturning of giallo conventions – make this one uniquely off-kilter entry that isn’t starved of lurid content. This includes but isn’t limited to: gratuitous nudity, sickle throat slashings, lesbianism, incest, a bag of sheep eyes, sex in a dove coop, and a cat named Satan.

One of the fun things I sometimes get to do at my day job at Fatso is reading and approving customer film reviews. We have to look out for foul language and other inappropriate material that may not fall within the boundaries of an “acceptable review” (racist remarks, political rants, etc). After doing this for awhile you begin to notice some recurring themes or sentiments that are popular among the customers: “this is the worst movie ever made”, “this movie is too slow”, and – shock horror – “this movie has subtitles!”. For the seasoned cinephile, to warn other people that a movie is subtitled may seem a little odd, but the truth is we’re in the minority here – there’s a whole world of people out who just can’t stand subtitles.

Here’s a selection of the kind of feedback we get on English-subtitled foreign films:

13 Assassins

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mongol

Seven Samurai

Timecrimes

City of God

You get the picture.

So occasionally while there will be that viewer who will actually concede or get used to the subtitles, with minor reservation (“This was subtitled BUT I enjoyed it anyway”), the majority find them a nuisance and a hindrance to their enjoyment of a film, and as if in haughty disgust, will react by returning DVD without giving the film a chance at all. I can absolutely understand there is a type of casual moviegoer out there who’s only after a night of brainless, undemanding entertainment, but I also believe any aversion to subtitles is a state of mind thing that can be overcome. ANYONE with a well-functioning brain in their head can watch and enjoy a subtitled movie. If you can process image and text – something we do on a daily basis without giving much thought – you CAN process subtitles in a movie.

If you’ve never seen a subtitled film in your life for whatever reason, the best way around this is a gateway subtitled film (I’ve been known to state the obvious). I can’t remember exactly what mine was, but I’d say it was something by John Woo, maybe A Better Tomorrow or The Killer. This was around the time Woo was getting a lot of buzz, being championed as action’s saviour, because he was heading to America to make movies etc, so naturally, as a young budding film geek I had to get amongst and what the buzz was all about. But as far as I can remember I have never had any problems adjusting to “reading a movie”. Sure, I would sometimes scratch my head (e.g. characters in The Killer calling each other Mickey Mouse and Dumbo), but I’ve never experienced any sort of revulsion or discomfort. Now it’s second nature that I don’t even think about it. It’s just a matter of: “Okay, this film is in a language I don’t understand – I’m glad it’s subtitled so I can understand it.”

The most common gateway subtitled films tend to be high-profile, talked-about foreign films with large crowd appeal, e.g. an Oscar winner like Life is Beautiful, or something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on a bestselling novel. Generally speaking, moviegoers who would not go out of their way to watch an Andrei Tarkovsky flick will likely watch these films because of their “water-cooler value”: you bring them up in a conversation in the office or wherever, people can chip in, feel comfortable about discussing them. Either that or they’ll just wait until the inevitable English language remake comes out. It’s clear that the issue with subtitles is widespread enough that Hollywood will spend millions of dollars to produce a version for a section of society who don’t like them.

I’ll say this: there are problems with subtitles. It can be tricky to evaluate a lot of aspects of a film that’s not in your native tongue. It’s difficult to gauge the accuracy of the translation, and nuances are often lost. Sometimes they’re hard to read/too fast/too simplified. But I’ll also say this: cinema is a universal medium; wooden line readings, bad plot twists and ugly cinematography are the same and identifiable in any language.

The funny thing is it’s also possible to enjoy a film even if you have no clue what any of the spoken dialogue means. I don’t recommend it as a regular thing, but I have leapt into the un-subbed abyss in the past, mainly to watch Mondo Macabro-type fare where English subtitles are not a luxury that’s available to them. A few Bollywood flicks, no-budget Turkish extravaganzas like Turkish Star Wars and The Biggest Fist – movies so out there, their sheer delirium outweigh any need for translation. As an experiment, for the next edition of Shelf Life, I’m going to review 3 films that are not subtitled and I will probably have trouble understanding. Until then, here’s a taste of The Biggest Fist (fan-subbed!), a film that’s completely enjoyable with or without subtitles:

As promised in my last blog post (I Don’t Go to the Movies to Read), I will review 3 foreign films for this edition of Shelf Life without the aid of English subtitles. Some might call me crazy – to remove one of the most important, basic aspects of watching and reviewing movies, i.e. to UNDERSTAND what you’re watching – but with the following movies (well, at least 2 out of 3), I’m hoping to prove my case that subtitles are not always required.

Okay, so these aren’t traditionally “good” movies, where normal logical/technical conventions of filmmaking apply, but the mindset I’m coming to this with doesn’t so much have to do with notions of what’s good or bad, but that there is so much undiscovered cinema out there, buried in far-flung corners of the world, not having subtitles might not be such a problem if you have the hunger and drive to seek these out no matter what.

It’s both a frustrating and liberating exercise. Exciting even. I’ve never been bungy jumping but perhaps one could make the analogy that it’s like the movie-viewing equivalent of bungy jumping. That leap into the great unknown. Who are these actors? What language are they speaking? What the heck is it about? What IS it?? When everything is spoon-(or force)-fed to us by media these days, sometimes picking up a Malaysian VCD (remember those?) of an Indonesian movie based solely on its cover art can be the most refreshing experience you ever have. The flipside is that the language barrier means that your comprehension of the movie is considerably stripped down. One could argue that enjoying a movie based on its “exotic” nature isn’t intellectually fulfilling or constructive, but I don’t care. To engage in the exercise is stimulating in itself.

NAGA SAKTI

I just looked back at my notes I wrote for this film and it’s some of the most insane shorthand I’ve ever done: “body brought in, still alive?? starts talking family members looking sad/angry, dying telling them to avenge/? what to do after he’s dead? handing over the dagger throne? package take care of it”. Yes, watching a foreign movie sans subs works your brain twice as much; you’re forced to make a lot of assumptions and ascribe broad descriptions to characters and situations. But you’d be surprised how intelligible the story can be after you’ve seen the entire thing.

Naga Sakti is a martial arts/fantasy adventure from Indonesia, made in 1986 – if the title card in the opening credits is to be believed. It opens with an old guy fighting a trio of rice hat-wearing warriors (one of whom has only one arm). There’s a cool bit where they’re clashing on top of water lilies. He’s badly injured and in the next scene is taken back to his home on the brink of death. His family gathers around him, and it’s clear he’s a patriarchal figure of some importance as imparts his last wishes to his sons and daughter. But it turns out that his daughter is rotten, wanting control over the family. She has the other brothers killed, but one escapes – I’ll refer to him as Goatee Guy from now on.

Goatee goes on the run with his pregnant wife and daughter. Henchmen catch up with them and kill his wife and daughter. Oh yeah, the baby’s born at this stage. Years pass and Goatee trains her up to be a martial artist. She’s pretty decent, able to run through the forest and cut down a bunch of bamboo trees with her hands. I’ll call her Bamboo Girl. They’re ambushed by pirates and taken on a ship. But Goatee defeats Head Pirate in a fight and befriends the crew. More fighting with henchmen ensue. There’s another guy after them, whom I’ll call Snake Blood Boy, since he seems to have been brought to life in a cave where an old wizard-like fella beheads a snake and pours blood into his mouth. Basically where it’s heading is that Goatee, Bamboo Girl and Pirate Crew are going back to avenge Goatee’s father’s death. It’s only a bit later that I/we (?) realise that Snake Blood Boy is on the good team, and it’s actually Goatee’s father that brought him to life. As far as I can make out anyway.

Apart from the confusing subplot involving Snake Blood Boy, Naga Sakti has a fairly bog-standard easy-to-follow revenge story. It helps that it’s short (75 minutes), brisk and packed with action. Barely five minutes go by without a fight so there’s never a dull moment. The fights are fast, albeit crudely staged and shot, but what really makes the film entertaining is the combination of weird stuff and spectacular gore. There are no less than 3 sequences where guts are graphically ripped out (telekinetically!), plus at least 3 beheadings and 2 severed hands. One guy gets decapitated, but grows a new head. Not enough? How about a rubbery flame-breathing dragon? Sharks. Laser-shooting eyes. Boomeranging hats. Ninja stars. If you’re accustomed to Indo-weirdness via Barry Prima’s work like The Devil’s Sword or The Warrior, or films like Mystics in Bali, you’ll know what to expect. If not, oh boy…

COBRA

This is another unknown Indonesian movie I bought at the same time as Naga Sakti (reasoning behind purchase: a martial arts film with the title Cobra can’t be all that bad can it??). Its “star” Steven Lee appears to be a Bruce Lee rip-off (complete with Bruce’s nose-thumbing and squealing) and judging by the fashion in this movie, I’d say it was made in the late ‘70s. Again, a routine revenge plot. Lee’s white-bearded master is killed in the opening scene by a villain using a staff with a three-headed cobra. Lee moves to the big city with his master’s daughter, they get married and she’s expecting soon but he’s still jobless. Out looking for work, he stumbles onto a fight where a group of red-jacket, scorpion-insignia-wearing thugs are beating on a bald man in a car. Lee intervenes with his skillz and wards them off. The bald man is impressed and lo and behold – offers him a job.

Unfortunately the job involves going into a life of crime for a cigar-chomping bad guy who’s in the business of moving contraband to and off his island. Lee doesn’t seem to notice but behind Cigar Boss’ table is a huge shield with the three-headed cobra from the first scene. But it doesn’t matter just yet. Lee’s making a bit of money, supporting the wife, effectively balancing his criminal life with being a good hubbie/father. He also has a new buddy in the gang. The Scorpion gang’s still at large though and there are a few skirmishes along the way with the Cobras. But Lee gets double-crossed by Cigar Boss – for reasons that I’m not quite sure of – and his wife is killed and young daughter gets thrown out of a window (!). The rest of the film is payback time.

Cobra is by-the-numbers Bruceploitation, with a few pretty brutal moments to be had (Lee stabbing a guy in the gut with a broken plank of wood; Cigar Boss dunking his girl’s face in a tub of hot bath water). But none of it compares to the death of Lee’s daughter, which is one incredibly jaded and ruthless scene that I didn’t see coming. It’s made even more tasteless by a transition shot to a doll falling on the floor and the film not once, but twice cutting to her body splayed on the ground. Anyway Cigar Boss gets his comeuppance in the end, the identity of the man who killed Lee’s master is revealed, and the film throws in a lame twin-brother twist for good measure (“Oh you think you killed me, that was my twin brother hah hah”).

SHAITANI DRACULA

This Hindi movie made me regret ever doing this. Watching Naga Sakti and Cobra felt like a breeze compared to Shaitani Dracula. At least those two resembled proper movies with relatable themes and tropes. I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies in my time but Shaitani is something else. I wanna say it’d make Ed Wood or Andy Milligan weep or something but I dunno. Seems too easy. Written, produced and directed by Harinam Singh, who should never have been allowed anywhere near a camera, this mind-numbing monstrosity gives trash cinema a bad name; it’s not so much a “movie” but an artifact, a piece of evidence, “for those who think they’ve seen it all”.

I ordered the VCD a few years ago after reading the exhaustive, astonishing write-up by Keith Allison at Teleport City but it’s sat unwatched on the shelf until now. I’m not as enamored by Shaitani as Allison is, but having experienced it, I can attest that it is very close to one of the worst and weirdest films in existence. A very simple outline of the plot might say that Dracula and his scantily dressed ladies are terrorising a group of campers in the forest. But the reality is so much more painfully incoherent and monotonous.

Even when you’re watching a film in a language you don’t understand, you can generally get a feel for the story by recognising plot developments and conventions; you’re shit outta luck with Shaitani. It moves from one scene to the next with a complete disregard for continuity, establishing characters or plot, and looks unbelievably GHASTLY (I swear 80% of the film is out of focus!!). The creature make-up and costumes are so cheap Geoff’s Emporium might even be embarrassed to stock it. You know when you’re invited to a costume or Halloween party and can’t be assed buying/hiring something so decide to put something together with whatever materials you have lying around in the house? Shaitani’s like that.

This is a genuine nightmare on film, vomit at 24 frames per second.. and you can actually watch it on youtube… if you dare:

As much as I understand the purpose of making year-end best-of lists, and am all for them, I always dread doing one. I’m almost never satisfied with my picks. Once I’ve completed the list, the enthusiasm I feel for these films that I’ve decided are the best of the year, is strangely muted.

I think the reason could be as simple as this: I’m bored by the predictability of most year-end lists (mine included). They all tend to be interchangeable, featuring the same films over and over again. I look at these lists and think “Jesus, do I need to see another list with Moonrise Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty and The Master in the Top 3”? There’s ultimately no value in that for me. Yeah I dig the same films, but if you see one list with The Master in the #1 spot you’ve seen them all. Please show me something I haven’t seen. Surely of all the films made in the world, these can’t be the only Top 10 films in existence in the year 2012.

My favourite lists are the ones that make me go WHHAAAT? I’m looking for oddball choices and fresh perspectives. A list that says something about the viewer. That’s attractive to me because it’ll pique my curiosity: “This person likes X movie which no one else has mentioned/seen so there must be something interesting about it that deserves further investigation”. A good example would be this list Alamo Drafthouse’s Sam Prime provided for Badass Digest. Big hitters like Holy Motors and The Master are on there, but also unusual, offbeat picks like 4:44: Last Day on Earth, Turn Me On, Dammit! and Madonna’s universally trashed W.E. Now I’m weirdly curious about W.E, a film I previously had no intention of ever seeing, but which he apparently found “mesmerizing”.

Madonna's W.E.: "mesmerizing"?

The other type of year-end list I’m particularly fond of are the “favourite discoveries of the year” lists, such as the ones over at the Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog. Film fans, writers and programmers send in a list of films they’ve discovered for the first time and loved, and I usually wind up, excitedly, adding more films to my to-watch list. Then there are those obsessive stats-driven posts like this that I can definitely get behind just because I myself am or can be similarly obsessive.

A couple of years ago when I tried to do a Top 10 and struggled to remember what I had seen during the year, I decided to start a film log on Google Docs:

The last time I kept one was way back in the day in a scrapbook that didn’t have the benefit of sortable filters (if you’re wondering, V = VHS, LD = Laser Disc, SKY = SKY TV):

Having a handy film log, I can sleep soundly at night now, knowing I can share the following bits of info with you:

Number of movies watched in 2012: 263, down 13 from 2011.
Seen in a theatre: 58
First movie: A Pure Formality
Last movie: House of Pleasures
Rewatches: 51
Lowest rated (0 out of 5): Shaitani Dracula, Bat Pussy.

…and so forth.

Anyway, I’ve never really had the chance to do one of these “year in review” things on my own terms, so without further ado (and in no particular order)…

TOP 10 FILMS OF 2012 THAT’S SORT OF LIKE EVERYONE ELSE’S

I guess this would be what you’d call the “official” one. Though I’m already scratching my neck and umming at some of the picks. No notes for these since you probably know what they are.

A Separation
Zero Dark Thirty
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
This is Not a Film
The Raid
Searching for Sugar Man
Holy Motors
Killer Joe
Margaret
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

TOP 10 RECENT/NEW-ISH FILMS THAT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE AND COULD EASILY REPLACE ANY OF THE ABOVE

This list in no way represents films of lesser quality to the ones above. It’s a parallel/alternate list. An if-I-could-fit-20-films-on-a-top-10 list.

Road to Nowhere – Elegant, spellbinding film-within-film puzzle movie from Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), his first feature film in 20 years. Hollywood noir taken to nebulous deep end.

Jess + Moss – Clay Jeter’s debut somehow got lost in the shuffle this year (the DVD came out from Vendetta Films here around the same time it was released theatrically in the States!). Equal parts Terrence Malick and Harmony Korine, this coming-of-age indie is a work of warm, decaying beauty that’ll be of interest to anyone into low-budget experimental filmmaking.

Warrior – Brothers duking it out in the mixed-martial-arts ring, a recovering alcoholic father at the centre = one of the most tremendously entertaining sports dramas in ages. Hackneyed material elevated by fantastic acting and the right amount of fist-pumpin’ rah-rah excitement.

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Files – Suitably obsessive doco tracking down the Banksy-esque phenomenon who’s been placing cryptic tiles all over the streets of the US. A British historian, a David Mamet play and short wave radio transmissions are all involved in this intriguing, tantalising, mind-expanding mystery.

Chronicle – Two genres I’m exceedingly wary of – the Found Footage and Superhero – are brought together in smart, imaginative ways. Like Project X with a brain, with enough goosebump-raising moments to make it the best of its ilk since Cloverfield.

Sleepless Night – Best actioner of the year next to The Raid. Simple premise (cop rescuing son from drug dealers in a nighclub), bursting with no-bullshit, knife-to-throat adrenalin. Hand-held camerawork done right.

House of Pleasures – Dreamy, engrossing, richly episodic trip into a turn-of-the-century Parisian bordello depicts day-to-day life of working girls without judgement. Drips with opium den-like atmos.

Arbitrage – Richard Gere’s best in ages. Nothing terribly new thematically – money still corrupts! – but a slick, satisfying, well-crafted thriller that sneaks up on you. Loved seeing Gere playing a retiring rich dude throwing his money around and trying to maneuver himself out of a tight spot.

Pitch Perfect – Comedies rarely make my top 10 lists because I’m generally a moody curmudgeon who finds most comedies out there out of step with my own sense of humour. Basically it takes a lot to make me laugh. If a film can do that consistently, it’s special. Pitch Perfect gets that honour this year. Solid laffs, irresistibly catchy songs and Rebel Wilson.

Beyond the Black Rainbow – Panos Cosmatos’ heady sci-psych-whatsit proudly flaunts its influences: bit of Kubrick here, bit of Carpenter there. But its hazy spell stays in your mind like a bad dream you can’t quite shake, and needless to say there weren’t too many films in the past couple of years that looked and felt like this visually arresting oddity.

TOP 10 FAVOURITE DISCOVERIES OF 2012

Older films seen for the first film that made me go YESSS. This was difficult to pare down ‘cos there were so many.

Camera Buff (1976) – I love Kieslowski but haven’t been acquainted with his pre-A Short Film works until this stunning early feature, about a guy (Jerzy Stuhr, fantastic) who buys an 8mm to film his newborn daughter and becomes obsessed with filming everything. More overtly documentary-like than his later works but it’s as intelligent, probing and profoundly human as anything he’s done, and not to mention, subtly comic.

The Swimmer (1968) – A little-seen, emotionally devastating masterpiece of ‘60s suburban malaise. Exceptional Burt Lancaster performance, and a gut-punch ending that will haunt you for days.

Taking Off (1971) – Previously difficult to see, Milos Forman’s first American film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK last year, and it’s one of his best films, a sharp, thoroughly endearing poke at the generational gap in counterculture America.

Great hippie-folk soundtrack, featuring Kathy Bates (as Bobo Bates) performing a beautiful number.

No Highway in the Sky (1951) – Maybe the greatest film about airplane metal fatigue ever made? To be honest when I first read the synopsis it didn’t sound too enticing but watching Jimmy Stewart as a slightly dotty scientist trying to convince people that the tail of an aircraft is about to fall off was one of the most entertaining 90 minutes I’ve had this year. A gem.

Patty Hearst (1988) – Paul Schrader’s absorbing, stylish, underrated take on the 1974 kidnapping of the newspaper heiress features a great lead performance from the late Natasha Richardson as Hearst, and marvellous support from Ving Rhames and William Forsythe as Symbionese LIberation Army members who took her.

The Other Woman (1954) – The story of Hugo Haas (Czech actor moves to Hollywood to make low-budget movies!) has fascinated me for a while now – he probably deserves a biopic – so I was stoked to finally catch one of his films.

This Tinseltown melodrama is a must if you like your B-noirs dirt-cheap, and it’s much better than you’d expect for someone who’s been called the “foreign Ed Wood”.

Endgame (1983) – Huge Italian post-nuke fan here, and I think I can confidently place this wonderful Joe D’amato movie up there with Escape from the Bronx and 2019: After the Fall of the New York as the best the genre has to offer.

The Door (2009) – It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in The Twilight Zone directed by Roman Polanski or something. Oh yeah, and time travel is involved. As good and mind-bending as that sounds.

The Nickel Ride (1974) – No fan of low-key ’70s crime flicks should pass this up. See here.

Natural Enemies (1979) – Amazingly downbeat drama starring Hal Halbrook as a magazine publisher who fantasises about offing his entire family. Superb feel-bad time. See here.

Aaron’s back with another Shelf Life, reporting on his ongoing efforts to clear his ever-growing backlog of unwatched movies. This time around he unearths some double-crossing jewel thieves, a wasted country singer and a scuffed-up 1940s film noir in three pictures you’ve probably never heard of but now, like us, need to track down and check out.

The Cats

Big kudos to Warner Archives for digging up this 1968 Euro-crime rarity*, starring Rita Hayworth in one of her final roles. At this stage in her career she had definitely seen better days – she’s pretty much in crazy-cat-lady mode here – but at least it’s not as embarrassing and cringey as her fellow ‘40s screen beauty Veronica Lake’s twilight plunge into Z-grade dross like Flesh Feast.

Spending most of her screen time either ranting maniacally or feeding her cats whiskey-laced grub, Hayworth plays Martha, the hard-boozin’ momma of Jason (Giuliano Gemma) and Adam (Klaus Kinski), both thieves who have fallen out over a stash of stolen jewels. Adam has double-crossed Jason, stolen his girlfriend Karen (Margaret Lee) AND left his baby bro with the tendons of his right arm severed. Nice. On the upside, Jason gets a little sweet R&R thanks to Barbara (former Bond girl Claudine Auger), a sexy rancher who nurses him back to health so he can seek revenge on Adam.

Plot-wise, The Cats (a weird retitling of I Bastardi/The Bastard) is very standard, and despite all its romantic entanglements, sibling rivalries and crime-caper duplicities, it’s a dramatically flat movie. But at the same time, it’s dang fun to watch, and just nutty enough to elevate itself from being another disposable B-level melodrama. Italian genre journeyman Duccio Tessari (who co-wrote A Fistful of Dollars) fills the screen with eye-catching psych/pop-art touches, the soundtrack keeps the action chugging along to killer Hammond organ grooves and the New Mexico desert locations often make the film feel like it’s a spaghetti western in disguise. The entire thing also climaxes with a bizarrely random natural disaster that has nothing to do with anything that’s come before, and I kinda love it for that. Gemma’s a bit vacant in the lead, but it helps having the unhinged presences of Hayworth and the reliably creepy Kinski around whenever things slacken a bit.

* previously only available in English via a chopped-down 67-minute Japanese TV broadcast!

PAYDAY

An early contender for my Favorite Discoveries of 2013 year list! Daryl Duke’s Payday (1973) is an exceptional slice of seedy low-life Americana that casts the underrated Rip Torn (Men in Black, The Man Who Fell To Earth) as Maury Dann, a country singer on a path of self-destruction while he’s on tour. Don Carpenter’s script narrows the focus to 36 hellish hours in Maury’s life, and though on paper it has the trappings of a music-oriented biopic, Payday is more about what happens OFF-stage than on. And boy is it unglamorous, reeking of low-rent desperation as Maury reveals himself something of a slovenly, self-servin’, pill-poppin’, egomaniacal creature who chews up and spits out everyone who has the misfortune of being in his entourage.

Torn is mind-blowingly good as Maury. It’s a pitilessly abrasive and irredeemably unpleasant role to play, but Torn’s mesmerizing charisma is such that we can even understand why all these people would put up or want to have anything with him: teenage groupie Rosamond (Elayne Heilveil) who doesn’t seem to care that only his penis gives a shit about her; his loyal “chaffeur” Chicago (Cliff Emmich) who offers to take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit; a young wannabe singer-songwriter who, at the drop of a hat, quits his waitering job in the hopes that Maury will help him get to the big time. Full of great, memorable, well-acted vignettes, Payday might be the least “scenic” road picture ever, rubbing our faces in sweat, grimy sex, grungy motels, drug abuse and a general feeling of awfulness and hopelessness like a bad, slowly percolating hangover.

Warner slipped this onto DVD in 2008, and it can be picked up for fairly cheap online. Also worth seeking out is Duke’s The Silent Partner, a terrific, unsung 1978 crime thriller starring Elliot Gould as a bank teller playing a deadly, twisty cat-and-mouse game with bank robber Christopher Plummer.

SHED NO TEARS

Watching films like Jean Yarbrough’s Shed No Tears (1948) reminds me there’s something entrancing about speckly, scratched-up black-and-white prints of film noirs. Obviously crappy print quality is rarely intentional on the filmmakers’ part, but there is a positive aesthetic side effect to this: the cruddy texture heightens the unease, tension, paranoia of the noir world.

Previously considered “lost” but now rescued by public domain label Alpha Video, this diverting, ultra-low-budget programmer operates in the tradition of barely-over-an-hour noirs like Detour and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, with a brisk plot involving dead-eyed femme fatale Edna Grover (June Vincent) and her hubbie (Wallace Ford) swindling their insurance company of $50,000 by faking his death. Of course, nothing goes as smoothly as they planned.

Nothing amazing here, but noir completists will be stoked that it’s available at all, and if you need an hour to kill in the dead of night and don’t mind watching a bunch of characters scheming and pulling switcheroos on each other, this’ll do the trick. Johnstone White is hammy fun as an eccentric private eye who becomes a devious foil in the proceedings.

Shelf Life is an ongoing series of blogs that see Aaron working through his unwatched pile of back catalogue films, and in this edition he checks out a journalistic thriller starring Christopher Reeve and Morgan Freeman (in his first Oscar-nominated role); a pack of killer dogs running amok and decimating the human population of a small island; and an earlier film called Something Wild that’ll confuse and disturb anyone expecting to see the 1986 Melanie Griffith flick.

STREET SMART

Produced by the Golan-Globus team fondly remembered for their ‘80s Chuck Norris action pics, Street Smart (1987) was one of their few forays into “serious issues”-type fare and made at a time when their winning streak on the wane (two other G-G movies, Over the Top and Masters of the Universe, flopped big time in the same year).

It was also a huge pet project for Christopher Reeve, who only agreed to do Superman IV: The Quest for Peace if they would finance this film. But you wouldn’t think so watching Reeve’s bland, passionless performance as Jonathan Fisher, a struggling, desperate New York Journal reporter who decides to fabricate a sensational story to get back into his boss’s good graces. Reeves is upstaged by everyone in the cast, not least of all, Morgan Freeman (in his first Oscar-nominated role) who kills it as ‘Fast Black’, a murder-accused pimp who’s mistaken for the main character in Fisher’s fictionalised piece.

Street Smart is an interesting, entertaining film with a bit of an identity crisis: is it a seamy, revealing walk on New York’s mean streets or a legal drama about journalistic integrity? It’s the sort of material Sidney Lumet would make a good fist of, but director Jerry Schatzberg – who did much better in the early ‘70s with gritty character studies like Scarecrow and Panic in Needle Park - falls short of bringing it together, causing the film to occasionally come off like a movie version of Fisher’s out-of-touch article that imagines Times Square pimps as owners of condos in Maui.

Having said that, I do like the film a lot, mainly because Freeman’s so terrific; the sequence where he threatens a streetwalker with a broken bottle for shortchanging him (“Your face?? MY face, MY tits, MY ass!”) sizzles with an unpredictable energy the film could use more of. In the supporting cast, Kathy Baker stands out as a heart-of-gold hooker named Punchy. Slimy Perfection Award goes to Rick Aviles (Ghost), whose sleazing all over Mimi Rogers (who plays Fisher’s girlfriend) deserves a mention. Available on Region 1 DVD from MGM.

THE PACK

The ‘70s were the great golden age for killer animal/nature-run-amok films. Think of any animal – or insect – and there was most likely a B-movie making a few bucks off having it terrorise a bunch of dumb humans. Grizzly, Day of the Animals, The Swarm, Frogs, Piranha, Kingdom of the Spiders – and of course, Jaws – etc etc. Then there’s The Pack (1977), directed by Robert Clouse (Enter the Dragon), which stood above the rest because its animal-terror-of-choice – the Angry, Neglected Dog –  LOOKED genuinely vicious and not like some cheap, half-assed, schlocky special effect. Even if the end credits disclaimer informing us that the animal action was “monitored by the American Human Association” provides a little relief, there’s probably no way this level of animal-handling ferocity – whether it’s dog-on-dog or dog-on-human – would be allowed in cinema today.

The film stars Joe Don Baker as a marine biologist (a bit of a stretch, but he’s solid as usual) who must corral the tourists and inhabitants of Seal Island to safety when a pack of pet mutts-gone-feral begin hunting them down. The plot, based on a novel by David Fisher, is fairly basic, and when you stop to think about the scenario’s logic (no ferry for days? really?), things fall apart on the plausibility scale. But there’s enough to admire in Clouse’s lean direction and grisly set-pieces to make The Pack an effective, memorably savage chunk of canine carnage. All the dog stuff is alarmingly realistic: they look malnourished and abused, get jabbed with umbrellas and sticks, and in one startling shot, almost appear like they were actually run over by a truck. Something like the recent The Grey, with its middling CGI and animatronic wolves, visibly pales in comparison. Available from Warner Archives.

SOMETHING WILD

I’m not sure what the programming on MGM and TCM is like now but back (like, a whiiiile back) when I was still a SKY subscriber I used to religiously trawl through the schedule and pick out movies to tape (remember setting your VCR to record stuff when you couldn’t be awake to do so? Ahhhh…). They would show some amazingly rare things that hadn’t come out on DVD yet (The Travelling Executioner! Little Cigars!), or have never ever had a home video release (one of the rarest from memory: the 1972 Robert Blake race car movie Corky). I amassed a bit of collection from all the rabid taping, and true to form, many of these tapes (usually recorded on long play so I could fit 3-4 movies) remain unwatched and gathering dust.

Here’s one I pulled out over the weekend: Something Wild (1961), a very-much-ahead-of-its-time curiosity that’s one of only two features ever directed by the Czech-born Jack Garfein, a concentration camp survivor who became a renowned teacher of Method Acting.

Garfein’s then-wife Carroll Baker plays Mary Ann, a rape victim whose attempt to jump off a bridge is interrupted by Mike (Kiss Me Deadly’s Ralph Meeker), an auto-mechanic who proceeds to bring her home to his dingy basement apartment and keep her there. The narrative then spirals into a strange Stockholm Syndrome-type deal that doesn’t try to address the psychological fallout of rape in any obvious, spelled-out sense – something which perplexed and probably frustrated viewers back then, and would probably today too if you require the comfort of easily plotted character motivations.

The fact of the matter is Something Wild was so far off the beaten track in its day (at least in the US) that no one knew what to make of it. Clearly more a product of a European sensibility, it’s a twisted, bravely ambiguous love story about two lonely, damaged souls, not some message-driven, PSA-type examination of rape and its consequences. Garfein evokes the film’s haunted worldview with an artsy, fairly experimental style, an approach evident in everything from Saul Bass’s striking opening titles to the busy, harried orchestral jazz score of modernist composer Aaron Copland to Metropolis cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan’s starkly vibrant, nightmarish location-heavy shooting. An amazing film – track it down.

33 years after his death, and the spectre of Alfred Hitchcock just won’t leave us alone. Last month we watched Anthony Hopkins don a fat suit to play the Master of Suspense in Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi’s long-awaited biopic-of-sorts. In the yet-to-be-released pile, we can look forward to Brian DePalma getting more Hitchcock out of his system with Passion, and South Korean director Park Chan-wook making his Hollywood debut with Stoker, ostensibly a baroque variant of Hitchcock’s 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt. Hitch-related things are happening on the small screen too: the recent HBO production The Girl was another take on Hitch (played by Toby Jones), and if you think Psycho IV: The Beginning was the last we saw of Norman Bates, A&E is rolling out the prequel TV series Bates Motel. Oh, and lest we forget, it was National Alfred Hitchcock Day less than a week ago.

Anyway I’ve been going through a phase of watching ‘80s movies lately, which got me to thinking about revisiting Curtis Hanson’s 1987 Hitchcock riff The Bedroom Window, which in turn opened up my mind to the idea that I should somehow just acknowledge my fondness for so-called “Hitchcockian movies”… i.e. those movies that either pay homage to or simply imitate Hitchcock. So here’s is a list of good-to-great movies which Hitchcock might have made if he were still around in the ’80s, with the more obvious likes of DePalma and Roman Polanski* deliberately excluded:

EYEWITNESS

The late Peter Yates** has several great, well-loved films under his belt such as Bullitt and Breaking Away, but also some tremendously underrated ones like Friends of Eddie Coyle, and this murder mystery, which is perhaps played too subdued for a wide audience to embrace as an exciting Hitch-style thriller. Penned by Breaking Away’s writer Steve Tesich, Eyewitness (1981) is sort of like an inverted The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring William Hurt as a janitor who stumbles onto the body of a dodgy Vietnamese businessman and knows nothing about it, but to the detriment of his livelihood, pretends to know more to get into TV reporter Sigourney Weaver’s pants (actually much less crude than I’ve made it sound).

If you’re itching for thrills, you may struggle through the film’s extended meet-cute stuff – it chews up half the running time without significantly pushing the murder plot forward. But it’s a film that grows on you as it progresses, featuring many neat character-based moments that linger in retrospect. If anything, it’s better as a post-Vietnam drama than a potboiler, but the fact that it uses whodunnit/conspiracy conventions to relay larger ideas about post-war assimilation and class divide makes it more interesting and unusual than first meets the eye. A really good support cast helps: James Woods, excellent as Hurt’s bigoted war-vet buddy, who appears to be the chief suspect in the murder; Morgan Freeman, as the cop on the case; and Christopher Plummer, as Weaver’s wealthy man who’s smuggling Jews out of the Soviet.

STILL OF THE NIGHT

Robert Benton’s Still of the Night (1982) probably relies too heavily on the kind of dream analysis that many found too hokey about Hitch’s Spellbound, but I’m gonna let it slide – and its other faults – because I really dig this film for the understated, sombre mood it sustains throughout (critics have also slammed it for being too “cold”). Roy Scheider*** plays Sam Rice, a psychiatrist who gets romantically involved with a deceased client’s mistress (Meryl Streep, in fine, alluringly icy form) and suspects that she may be responsible for his death. Expect some really ridiculous set-pieces – an early, otherwise mundane scene tries to make us sweat from Scheider trying to hide an incriminating watch from a cop – but essentially these operate on the same heightened emotional level as the fever dream logic of DePalma’s best films (if nowhere near as showy nor perverse), making up substantially for a screenplay that’s – to put it simply – preposterous as hell. The Birds‘ Jessica Tandy has a small role as Rice’s mum (also a shrink!) adding a layer of Hitchcockian Mother Complex-ity to the film. Handsomely shot by the legendary Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven).

DEAD OF WINTER

If Dead of Winter (1987) isn’t exactly remembered as one of Arthur Penn’s finest films – it’s a looong way from Bonnie and Clyde (and Little Big Man, and Night Moves) to this gimmicky thriller – it is a prime piece of lurid Hitch-schlock. A remake of the 1944 Joseph H. Lewis film My Name is Julia Ross (also worth a look for B-noir fans!), the film gives Mary Steenburgen THREE roles to chew on, the main one being Katie McGovern, a fledgling actress who nabs a part in an indie film production that she soon discovers does not exist. She’s driven to a middle-of-nowhere manor by the casting agent, Mr. Murray (Roddy McDowall, pure ham), under the impression that a screen test will be done by one Dr. Lewis (Jan Rubes). Instead she’s found herself the victim of a sinister blackmail plot. Howling implausibilities and some genuinely bad acting (see McGovern’s husband and his brother) don’t stop this from being an enjoyably trashy and overwrought time, with lots of spot-the-Hitchcock action (The 39 Steps, Vertigo, Rear Window), blizzardy, isolated Misery-like atmosphere and old-dark-house Gothic chills.

THE BEDROOM WINDOW

I liked The Bedroom Window (1987) when I first watched it on tape years ago but rewatching it in its full scope aspect ratio on DVD gave me a better appreciation of the film, which I didn’t realise until now was shot by a seasoned, top-notch cinematographer like Gilbert Taylor (Star Wars, Dr. Strangelove). The casting of Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy) here has always divided viewers who think that he’s much too bland to carry it, and those who think his milquetoast demeanour is ideal. I’m more in the latter camp, though debonair Hitch leading man a la Cary Grant he certainly is not. But his everyman “way-in-over-his-head” quality mostly works for his character, Terry Lambert, who decides that it’s a good idea to tell the police he witnessed an attack on a girl (Elizabeth McGovern) he didn’t in order to cover up his affair with his boss’ wife (Isabelle Huppert), who actually did. Adapted from Anne Holden’s novel The Witnesses, it’s an absorbing, better-than-average version of Hitchcock’s wrong man template – and obviously Rear Window - deftly directed by Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential). Watch for the terrific courtroom scene with character actor Wallace Shawn as a defense attorney who does a great job of riddling holes in Lambert’s story.

APARTMENT ZERO

One of the best psychological thrillers of the ‘80s, Martin Donovan’s Apartment Zero (1988) most obviously echoes the thickly implied homoeroticism of Hitchcock films like Rope and Strangers on a Train and the apartment-dwelling paranoia of Polanski’s The Tenant to fuel its compelling, fantastically dark narrative. First-class acting from Colin Firth and Hart Bochner, playing roommates in Buenos Aires, the former an uptight Brit movie buff struggling to keep his revival cinema going, the latter a hunky, mysterious American whom he grows increasingly drawn to. Meanwhile, a spate of brutal, death squad-style serial killings plague the city… A masterful psychodrama, with creepy, riveting ambiguity, crackling tension, oddball characters, a brilliantly twisted finale.

* I rewatched Frantic not too long ago, and it still holds up as top-shelf imitation-Hitch.
** Yates returned to Hitchcockian territory in ‘88 with the McCarthy-era period piece House on Carroll Street, which isn’t as good, but also somewhat underrated. Kelly McGillis plays a Communist (!) photo editor for Life Magazine who stumbles onto a plot to smuggle Nazi scientists into the US. Features a cool Grand Central-set climax, Mandy Patinkin in a juicy villainous role, and beautiful Michael Ballhaus cinematography. Romance between McGillis and FBI agent Jeff Daniels fizzles though. Written by the blacklisted Walter Bernstein.
*** Scheider a few years earlier starred in Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace, another great Hitchcockian movie that needs to be better known.

Horror anthologies, and anthologies in general, are by their very nature doomed to be uneven. It’s a rare thing to watch one all the way through and unconditionally love every single chapter. Their multi-narrative structure, often bound together by a common theme/concept (the found footage of V/H/S) or an established brand (Tales from the Crypt: EC Comics), usually means fluctuations in tone, style – and yes quality – are expected, something even more pronounced when you have different writers and directors tackling each story.

On the bright side though, they’re a pretty damn cool format for a number of reasons:

1. More Bang For Your Buck
For the price of one movie, you get THREE or FOUR mini-movies!

2. Variety & Brevity
You get bored with one story, there’s another one around the corner soon.

3. Element of Surprise
Like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get etc.

And while I don’t predict a resurgence of omnibus films at the level of popularity they were in the ‘60s and ‘70s, if more filmmakers decide to take advantage of the format to package horror stories, I definitely wouldn’t complain.

Following on the bloody footsteps of last year’s V/H/S, the upcoming The ABCs of Death has the most morbidly fun anthorrorlogy idea we’ve had in a while: using the English alphabet as a jumping-off point for 26 death-themed tales. To get you amped for its screenings in Auckland and Wellington (see: NZFF’s Autumn Events), here are several older films you should seek out if you’ve never seen an anthology horror before (they’re not necessarily the best, but ones I have a soft spot for):

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE

There’s a lot of irrevocable hate associated with Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), mainly for the awful on-set tragedy that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors, and also the fact that it didn’t successfully capture the feel of Rod Serling’s beloved TV series (1959-1964) that it’s based on. To enjoy the film, you really need to push aside the two opening acts – John Landis’ half-baked “Time Out” (which starred Morrow), and Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic schmaltz “Kick the Can” – as mediocre starters, then relish in the main course double of Joe Dante’s “It’s a Good Life” and George Miller’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Awesome creature effects by Rob Bottin (The Thing) grace Dante’s trippy eye-popper about schoolteacher Kathleen Quinlan meeting a boy with an extremely strange family in an even stranger house; Miller’s wildly entertaining entry is powered by John Lithgow’s panicky, bugged-out performance as an aviophobic airline passenger who flips out upon seeing a goblin perched on the plane’s wing. This one nauseated me as a kid.

TRILOGY OF TERROR

Three short stories by the prolific Richard Matheson (Duel, The Twilight Zone), directed by Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker), all starring Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces): what’s not to like? This 1975 made-for-TV anthology provides a tour de force acting showcase for Black, who plays four different characters with zesty aplomb. In the opening “Julie”, she’s an English lit teacher who gets romantically involved with a student, only to find herself blackmailed; “Millicent and Therese” gives her dual sister roles in a perverse tale of incest, voodoo and sibling rivalry; the humdinger of a finale, “Amelia”, pits her against a Zuni fetish doll come to life. At a brisk 72 minutes, Trilogy of Terror is a tidy, well-crafted little set, the restraint of its first two segments easily upstaged the spine-chilling third, which remains a classic of its kind. That final shot: Holy crap! I wonder how many people shat their pants in front of the tube back then.

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

A mixed bag of Edgar Allan Poe stories interpreted by three top-flight European directors of the era: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini. Featuring self-destructive characters going off their rails, it’s a collection that goes for psychological headgames rather than gruesome shocks. “Metzengerstein” is a limp start, allowing Vadim (Barbarella) another chance to listlessly ogle at Jane Fonda, who plays a power-mad 16th century countess who lusts after her cousin (Fonda’s real-life bro, Peter!). Malle’s “William Wilson” picks up the macabre intrigue a bit, with Alain Delon as a sadistic Austrian soldier who faces his doppelganger. But again, as with most anthologies, the most striking is saved for last: Fellini’s “Toby Dammit”, which teems with the director’s trademark visual excess, is an experience as messed-up and drug-smashed as its protagonist, an English actor (Terence Stamp) in Rome to shoot the “first Catholic western”. I actually find myself preferring Malle’s as a piece of Poe narrative, but Fellini has the upper hand as far as arresting imagery goes.

BLACK SABBATH

With no duds, and one masterpiece, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) is one of the best horror anthologies out there, and arguably the most stylishly beautiful. “The Telephone” is a suspenseful proto-giallo with a creepy stalker/caller plot that plays like a blueprint for When a Stranger Calls, which in turn inspired Scream. Based on an Aleksey Tolstoy story, the atmospheric, Gothically charged “The Wurdulak” stars Boris Karloff (who also introduces the film) as a patriarch of a family who returns from a vampire-hunting trip a noticeably changed man. Now “A Drop of Water” is quite something. I’m not easily spooked but this third segment, about a nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) who steals a ring from a dead medium, scares the shit out of me – it’s probably the most perfectly eerie short film ever made. Black Sabbath is an ideal entry point into Bava’s cinema, a masterful demonstration of the sort of otherworldly magic the guy can produce on a soundstage with creative splashes of light and colour.

DEAD OF NIGHT

No anthology list would be complete without a mention of Dead of Night (1945), the great granddaddy of all omnibus films. This was notable for being an uncharacteristic horror effort from Britain’s Ealing Studios, who were primarily known for their comedies, but it’s among their stellar achievements, a supremely consistent, enormously influential vision brought together by regulars from their stable: Basil Dearden, Alberto Calvacanti, Charles Chricton, Robert Hamer. The Chinese box-like framing story – an architect (Mervyn Jones) visiting a country house and sensing he’s already met all the guests there – contains a superb sting which wraps everything up in a satisfactorily bonkers manner. “The Haunted Mirror” and “The Ventriloquist”, the third and fifth tales, stand out for creepiness; “Golfing Story” is an obligatory goof, wedged between the latter two for relief; the first two shorter films are fine warm-ups. A chilling, smart, textbook example of supernatural storytelling.

BODY BAGS

Including this as a bonus pick. A failed pilot for a Showtime series, this 1993 throwback to Tales from the Crypt et al was somewhat out of fashion when it came out, but hangs together agreeably and is irresistibly stacked with horror royalty. John Carpenter’s campy intros – as a rather corpse-like coroner – are lame and terribly unfunny, but his segments are the strongest: “The Gas Station” is nothing new, but a sharply directed slice of slasher excitement, and “Hair”, which stars a hilarious Stacy Keach trying to cure his hair loss with alternative means, is likeably goofy, its satirical touches reminiscent of Carpenter’s They Live. Tobe Hooper ratchets up the gore factor with “Eye”, a descent-into-madness thriller that sees Mark Hamill giving the most over-the-top performance of his career playing a baseball player who loses his eye in a car accident and receives a transplant whose previous owner was a psycho killer. Look out for cameos from Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, and Hooper. Surprised at how much fun I had revisiting this, which I remember as being one of the first laser discs I ever watched.

THE BRAVE

If you didn’t know Johnny Depp once directed a movie, I don’t blame ya – and he probably rather you didn’t know too. To this day, his sole directorial effort, The Brave (1997), has yet to be released in theatres or home video in the States for one reason: Depp was so hurt by the less-than-positive reception it got at Cannes by American critics that he hasn’t allowed to the film to be shown in the US. So how terrible can it be? It’s not unwatchably awful, but it definitely screams “ambitious misfire”; its sincerity isn’t the issue, just the execution.

Based on a Gregory McDonald novel, the screenplay, co-written with his brother D.D Depp and Paul McCudden, clearly means to sympathise with the plight of the Native American Indian dispossessed: its protagonist is down-on-his-luck Raphael (Depp), so desperate to provide his family that he has sold himself for $50K to a snuff film. He has one week left for quality family time, but the bleak countdown to his d-day – mirrored by his slummy village’s imminent destruction – lacks emotional punch, no matter how much Iggy Pop’s plaintive score tries to nudge our tear ducts.

This is due in part to Depp’s aloof performance, and the film’s unfocused, uneven tone. There are early hints things might dip into Lynchian surrealism with the “special appearance” by a wheelchair-bound Marlon Brando, who has one waffly monologue about life and death before vanishing for the rest of the film. Then there’s some cutesy, whimsical Gilbert Grape-y stuff with Raphael building a playground carnival for his kids, and later Depp strives for spiritual import in his scenes with a disapproving priest (Clarence Williams III). I’m not sure what to make of Max Perlich spinning in a human hamster wheel, nor Luis Guizman turning up as a pimp who gets his ear chewed off by Depp. It’s all kinda fascinatingly misguided, and Depp nuts will want to give it at least one viewing.

The Brave is available on DVD in the UK, and it also came out on VHS here, though that might take a bit of hunting around your local video stores to find it!

JESS FRANCO TRIPLE DIP

The passing of Jess Franco recently made me realise how much I’ve neglected the guy I consider to be my gateway drug into the world of European cult cinema. He was a real game-changer – someone who actually altered the way I viewed movies, or my perception of how movies could “work”. What’s great about Franco’s legacy is that he left behind a vast catalogue of films that would, by normal people’s standards (not Tim Lucas), take an entire lifetime to consume (for an analogy in music think the sprawling output of Jandek or Guided by Voices).

One of the joys of watching his films is to watch them in bulk, where they reveal themselves to be weird little variations of his personal obsessions. They’re bloody addictive too, once you’re in the zone, and unearthing a gem from the 956 films he’s made is a reward that I can’t speak of highly enough (finding a turd is another story…). Last Saturday I sat down and plowed through this triple feature:

A rarity that hasn’t made the leap to the digital realm just yet, The Obscene Mirror (Al Otro Lado del Espejo, 1973) is among his better films in the “supernatural erotica”/“horror-tica”-etc type vibe, bewitching, morbidly atmospheric, with the death of his muse – the stunning Soledad Miranda (Vampyros Lesbos) – the year before hanging over proceedings like a heavy-hearted ghost. Emma Cohen plays Annette, a nightclub singer/pianist plagued with visions of her dead sister (Lina Romay) whom she sees having sex with random people in mirrors. At the same time she doesn’t remember knocking off her various lovers whenever sis beckons her to come home.

The Obscene Mirror is signature Franco all the way: floaty, zoomy camerawork, scenic Euro locations, an air of decadence, a feeling of loss and longing, and plenty of jazzy interludes padding out the running time (I don’t mind this; your mileage might vary). And as with most Franco films, several versions abound; I’ll leave the differences between cuts to the experts, but the copy I watched did have giant labias jarringly dominating the screen on occasion so it’s safe to assume it’s the XXX version.

Franco brought together four of his Obscene Mirror cast members – Arno, Lina Romay, Howard Vernon, Robert Wood – again for Countess Perverse (La Comtesse Perverse, 1974), a kinky retread of Robert O’Connell’s often-adapted “Hounds of Zaroff” short story (The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target). A fairly coherent Franco joint, hence less dream-like, it’s still a twisted, nudity-filled sexploiter, about a rich couple who lures girls to their beachside mansion, seduce them, then proceed to hunt them down and have them for dinner.

Characters sit around civilly digging into gigantic chunks of raw meat, sex scenes are of the rape-turns-pleasurable variety, and the positively Amazonian Arno gets her kit off to chase – bow-and-arrow in hand – the also-nekkid Romay in the film’s finale. The most shocking thing in the film, however, is accidental, when Franco’s sloppy camera zooms in a bit too close to Vernon’s nether regions, little of which Mondo Macabro’s superb HD remastering leaves to the imagination. On the flipside, such a pristine transfer also shows how terrific Franco’s films can look, despite the miniscule budgets; the island locations and wonderfully bizarre architecture really pop on screen here.

On the off chance that you might still be reading this, and asking yourself if Franco does anything else other than make shoestring smut, Dr. Orloff’s Monster (1964) is for you. Though it’s a slight step down from its similarly Eyes Without a Face-riffing predecessor, The Awful Dr. Orloff (a good Franco ice-breaker for newbies!), this Gothic horror flick is evidence that he could actually pump out a decent, restrained genre piece that is comparable to anything Roger Corman or Terence Fisher made at the time. Yes it’s creaky in spots, and the script – featuring a mad scientist using an ultrasonic-powered robot/monster/zombie to strangle strippers (or something) – isn’t airtight, but I was engaged and entranced throughout, especially by the elegant, proficient black-and-white cinematography and its predominantly sombre mood. Available on Region 1 DVD from Image Entertainment.