Love & Anarchy Advent Calendar

 

So, we had a Love & Anarchy Film Festival this year as well. I was taking it slow in covering it, but then I realized it was over two months ago. But perhaps by starting an Advent Calendar I can cover 24 movies that were seen at the festival. They had chosen a really good program, and kept the audience as safe as possible in these circumstances. Check back to this post on every day of December to catch up on reviews.

1. First Cow (USA, 2019)
Director: Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt is known for making slow, quiet and ponderous movies, so it's kind of a jump when the new one is basically a buddy comedy of two grifters in the Old West. It's the kind of western that follows on the footsteps of McCabe & Mrs Miller and the like, everything is grey, brown, dirty, flimsily built and wooden. There's no glory or romanticism involved, even if the framing story tells of a modern woman finding out about the history involved.

The movie is a good, multilayered depiction of the friendship between two underdogs, played by John Magaro and Orion Lee. It also has some critique of the American Dream and drive towards entrepreneurship, which proves impossible for even the skilled ones if enough odds are against them right from the start. That's why they have to resort to cheating, stealing milk from the prize cow to improve their cakes and thus bake sales. The film has a cold, unflinching look at nature, which is at the same time utterly ruthless and oddly comforting. we are all parts of the woods in the end.

★★★★

2. Wendy (USA, 2019)
Dir. Benh Zeitlin

 

The impressionistic director Benh Zeitlin with his crew has prepared his follow-up to Beasts of a Southern Wild for seven years. While that one saw wonder and childlike amazement in poor and devastated Southeast terriories, this one takes a jump toward even more fantastic storytelling. It's a reworking of the story of Peter Pan.

The film is again visually stunning, and the locations in the Pacific Islands with an active volcano are nothing short of breathtaking. This time around, Zeitling guides a larger cast of child actors, none of which are as strong to carry a movie as Quvenzhané Wallis was. It also seems that the long production period and kids growing up so fast has made it necessary to tell the story fragmented and disjointed. It may be argued that its due to the logic following children's playtimes, but it makes for a tedious thing to follow. There are some kind of cool reworkings of the Pan story set to a more modern backdrop, but some are basically terrible. Mostly anything to do with Captain Hook and his pirates. Beasts of a Southern Wild was not without its problems, but it had a more clear purpose, now it seems it's a bit too childish and dumbed down for adults and not exciting enough for kids, satisfying no one.

★★

3. Lost Boys (Finland/Thailand 2020)
Dirs. Joonas Neuvonen, Sadri Cetinkaya

 

The documentary film Reindeerspotting made waves a decade ago, and also became a big hit in Finland. The movie depicted a group of drug addicts from Lapland in their daily lives, fighting against their urges, boredom, and the system. From the profits of the film, the real-life buddy group got enough money to fly to Thailand for the winter. After a few months of pure hedonism, sex, drugs and all other vices, only the film's director Joonas Neuvonen returned home. Soon after, one of the group was missing and the first film's main character Jani was found dead in shady circumstances.

The sequel film is of Neuvonen's attempts to recollect, what went wrong and to try to find out what exactly happened to his friends. The material he had for this film were fragmented, some in pooor quality. The reason the film took a decade was that it needed multiple screenwriters, editors and even co-directors to make sense of all this. Considering this, the resulting film is a wonder, a docufiction that is both a horrifying psychedelic nightmare in the vein of Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn. On the other hand, it is also a sad look at the dead end facing the first film's characters. They might get some fleeting moments of happiness late in their lives, but it's all a illusion and the ground is approaching fast. This time around, Neuvonen puts himself more to under the magnifying glass, emphasizes his own bad feelings about the case and maybe his own fractured psyche.

★★★★

4. Radioactive (UK, Hungary, China, France, USA 2019)
Dir. Marjane Satrapi

 

The author of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, hasn't had the most successful career as a film director. His previous film, Voices, flopped in the Stateside, so she has had to resort to having an easy-to-sell biography project made with funding from around the world as her next project. The film tells the life story of chemist Marie Curie, discoverer of Radioactive elements. As it is, Radioactive has many moments of visual intrigue and good acting, but it can't avoid all the major pratfalls of the biography genre.

Rosamund Pike carries the film as headstrong Curie. As Satrapi tends to do with her comics work, she also intercuts the story with asides that show consequences of the discoveries, both good (radiation treatments) and bad (the Chernobyl accident). Those asides however reveal the film's limited budget, even if it's stretched admirably to fit these parts. The major problem is, however, that like most scientists, the life story by itself isn't really that captivating, and showing of all the various awards and stuff seems like reading from a Wikipedia page. The center is the relationship between Marie and Pierre (Sam Riley), but it lacks tension since Pierre is doing his best to share credits and help Marie as much as he can. The adventures in World War I with her daughter, shrugged off in the film's last 20 minutes, would have been more interesting to follow than focusing on the early parts.

★★

5. Nomadland (USA, Germany 2020)
Dir. Chloé Zhao

Director Zhao once again finds a way to make a western that's relevant to the themes for today. And she does it with a docufiction style, having plenty of people with the nomad lifestyle essentially play themselves. It's a touching film about the inability to find one's place in the world, but for once, not through the eyes of a teen or a young adult, but an actual adult, magnificently portrayed by Frances McDormand.

McDormand's Fern is tossed out after the closure of a major factory and an entire town's livelyhood. She does meaningless part-time work for Amazon and lives in her trailer, traveling the Great Plains of USA.  On her way, she tries developing relationships, but everything seems fleeting and avoid her grasp. The film has an anti-capitalist sting, but I feel the film could have had more brutally honest things to say about Amazon's worker practices, which were only alluded to here. It may be due to the realities of releasing such a melancholic film for adults, one can't rule out Amazon by biting the hand that may feed you. It's a shame Zhao herself seems to accept the odd job here and there, since she's moving on to the MCU. I think certain rising talents could produce incredible movies elsewhere, whereas with Marvel they'll probably do something reasonably entertaining but forgettable. But that's late-stage capitalism for you. It maximises profits, not art.

★★★★ 1/2

6. Dogs Don't Wear Pants (Koirat eivät käytä housuja, Finland, Latvia 2019)
Dir. J-P Valkeapää

 

I had actually seen this last year in festival screenings, but since then this movie has become a bit notorious abroad, so it warrants a mention. It's a sort of dark comedy of a man (Pekka Streng) struggling with grief finding a new lease in life with kinky sex and especially with a blossoming relationship with a dominatrix (Krista Kosonen).

Valkeapää is perhaps the most gifted visualist of the new generation of Finnish filmmakers. Here he has some shades of neon noir or the films of the likes of Noé and Friedkin, but manages to do something unique and undoubtedly his. It's a considerable step up of his previous work that had clearer pastiches. It's not as rough and kinky as one might expect, but it's also no surprise that some things get taken a bit far. The key of the movie is in its central triangle drama of sorts with a father being drawn into a sexy underworld, but his daughter also needing him in her struggles.

★★★★

7. My Octopus Teacher (South Africa 2020)
Dirs. Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed

Filmmaker Craig Forster recalls an unusual encounter with an octopus in an underwater kelp forest. Octopi are as intelligent as house cats, so the fil m goes out its way to show how they too can act as personally, gracefully and smartly as any pet, with footage to support it. I'm usually wary of films that make of animal behaviour to be to human-like, and there are some interpretations here that near the line. As it is however, is a reminder that we have incredible species around the world that have their own emotions, and we just can't go on destroying the landscapes in which they live in.  

★★★

Three laughs: Kinjite - Forbidden subjects

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file # 25:
Kinjite - Forbidden Subjects (USA, 1989)

Director: J. Lee Thompson

I know we are still on the edge about police brutality. Yet the cop-on-the-edge trope is one that's been central to a zillion action movies throughout the years. Now, in movies we usually take the cop's point of view, which tends to show that you may have to break a few rules to get to the goal you're reaching. Meaning, it's ok to use excessive violence if it's for purging streets of nasty criminals, who are evil for evil's sake.

But this is why trashy low-budget movies are more honest than their big budget counterparts. They have less to lose so they say what they mean without diluting the statement. Dirty Harry is a small fry when compared to some of the characters Charles Bronson played at films produced by Cannon Group.

At 1989 Bronson was getting pretty old, so the usual action movie tricks, like chases and gunfights were out of the question. That's probably why they upped the ante and made his character a racist who especially enjoys torturing criminals in inventive ways. When a japanese diplomat's daughter is kidnapped, he must find her even though he realizes that the family's father is the same guy that groped his daughter on a packed bus (or "touched her holiest of holies"). 

Now, the film may have some idea that what Bronson is doing is questionable. But he is proven right in his prejudices in the end, and never faces consequences of killing a whole lot of people, so the point is mute. In fact, the entire film is kind of ridiculous in that it seems to contain a message that the Japanese are perverted and should be monitored. Not to mention latino criminals. So, a fair point is to give this film a content warning. If you can't find anything funny about a film that protects police rights to be racist and violent since "they all deserve it", I totally understand. This is one of those films that make me feel dirty for watching, let alone writing about.

 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. Bronsons's cop specializes in capturing dirtbags. The first fight ensues when he interrupts a businessman trying to get it on with a teenaged girl. Now, Bronson's pretty old by this point, so he's never in the same shot with a punch or a kick being thrown, resorting more to stuntmen and quick editing. Where he is, however, is when the sleazebag is defeated and he decides to show him what's what. He grabs a handy dildo from his bag and the scene is cut just as he's about to shove it where the sun don't shine.

2. In another scene a latino crook tries to bribe Bronson in a parked car with a gold Rolex. Bronson takes a look at the watch and tells he's like to shove it up his ass. But since that bit has been done already, he reaches for his gigantic handgun and threatens to blow the guy's head off if he doesn't eat the watch. The face he makes after the gulping is one of the most hilarious things in trash movie history. He also burns his car and threatens to kill him "dead in a gutter -dead".

3. Since throughout the film he's tortured and killed suspects without a trial, one would assume that what he has in mind for the sex-trafficing main bad guy is especially horrible. And it is, but in a totally different way. Bronson locks him up in a cell with a bunch of sexed-up Mexican gangsters, including a young Danny Trejo. As the villain howls as he's impliedly raped, Bronson smirks while walking away and quips "Now THAT'S justice". That's this film's idea of justice, all right.

Sean Connery in Memoriam

Cinema lost another giant this year as the legendary Highlander Sean Connery himself passed away aged 90 in the Bahamas. Now, he might have had some very regressive personal ideas that have been repeated ad nauseum by leftists. But one can't claim that he wasn't a mesmerizing screen star, and also (his constant Scottish accent and lisping s's notwithstanding), quite a great actor as well. This post takes a look at some of his best performances.

From Russia with Love (UK, 1963)
Dir. Terence Young

There are many ways of approaching the Bond series, but it is also interesting to watch the earliest entries where everything was not that set in stone. While Dr. No already had a version of the basic formula, the first sequel in the series took a different path, having a more real world espionage-based and dark sequel. As it is one of the more serious entries in the franchise, I find it also surprisingly underrated.

It's still a Bond film, so there's plenty of ludicrousness. The entire film begins with a scene where Bond is seemingly killed, but it turns out it's just some guy wearing a rubber mask (for some reason) in Red Grant's (Robert Shaw) training exercise. Grant's dark reflection of Bond is one of the reasons people remember this film so fondly, but it has some other good characterizations as well, from the double-agent Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) to the actual main villain Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya), who never even meets Bond face-to-face. 

But Red Grant does, in perhaps the best fight scene of the entire series.

 

Before Daniel Craig came along, Connery was the only actor who managed to get a sense of danger out of the Bond movies. He is constantly in over his head, but his cocky nature and luck also make him come out on top of any situation. Bond is probably the worst secret agent possible, but it just adds to the allure of the character. Espionage is well below his radar after women and boozing.

★★★★

Marnie (USA, 1964)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

 

Late-era Hitchcock films aren't also quite as well-known, and it may seem even surprising that Connery starred in a Hitch movie. Marnie is a exploration of trauma and lies and their effects on a relationship. It also has a Psycho-like table-turn, in which we at first follow Marnie (Tippi Hedren) as she cheats, swindles and steals money from each of her employers. When she gets caught by Connery's Mark Rutland, he takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of her personality flaws and functions.

 

As it was already the 60's, Hitch could have more graphic sex and violence than used to in his films. Connery is more of a hands-on actor than Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant who had problems with their masculinity in Hitch's movies. The central character of Marnie, however, is way too half-baked, a damsel in distress with little agenda of her own. Hitchcock has interesting scenes play out her panic attacks, but is seems he could have grounded the end reveals a bit more with the role of Marnie's mother being almost nonexistant beforehand. I think the film showcases a little too clearly Hitchcock's problems with women, and as a result, it's a good try to have a multilayered psychological thriller, but times had already passed such a chauvinistic view of things. It's not among the best of it's director's standards.

★★★

The Offence (USA, 1973)
Dir. Sidney Lumet

 

Connery made four films in total with Lumet, and as directed by a veteran who leaned heavy on good scripts and getting the best out of his actors, he also made some of the best work in his career. Here he plays a British policeman driven evenly more desperate as a child-murderer's case lingers on.

 

I'd say the bleak outlook on a 20-year police procedure has probably been a major influence on Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder. Lumet, however directs this mostly like a stage play, with minimalist interrogation rooms and very dialogue-heavy scenes. Lumet is interested in a breaking psyche, and the growing desperation that brings a seemingly good police to do atrocious deeds. It covers similar themes than a lot of showier films which is probably why this small-scale movie has had such relatively light attention.

Connery's role, however, is yet another character that takes out his inner anger and frustrations on women, in this case his long-suffering wife. Well, he has violent tendencies towards suspects as well, so he's not entirely likable by any means, but still, one has to wonder why so many of his characters share this woman-beating tendencies.

★★★ 1/2

The Wind and the Lion (USA, 1975)
Dir. John Milius

Milius found a good historical epic with which to tell a story about one of his greatest heroes, Theodore Roosevelt. It wasn't his last Roosevelt film, and Ol' Teddy is restricted here to a quite brief supporting role, though he is the Wind in the title. The Lion, then is Connery's Raisuli, a Berber prince out for glory. At that point it wasn't considered problematic to have Scots portray Arabs. Rather, he is used here to be a world-class lover and a fighter, in the same vein as Rudolph Valentino. 

There's planty of action scenes equal to Milius's later Conan the Barbarian, and a Stockholm sydromish romance with Candace Bergen's reporter, who finds that there's more to the Berber lifestyle than meets the eye at first. Meanwhile, Teddy (Brian Keith) faces pressures on his foreign policy back home, but meets them with his personal philosophies, which isn't nearly as interesting. The seperate stories don't quite click together and the ending is quite underwhelming. nevertheless, it is an enjoyable film to watch since Connery's and Milius's approaches to tell manly men tales are tangentially similar.

★★★

The Rock (USA, 1996)
Dir. Michael Bay

Finally, among the last really entertaining romps Connery made, and also the movie was more or less to blame for many of Connery's late-era woes. The Rock's stunt casting sees him play pretty much a James Bond type that has been kept in a prison cell for 30 years. He's a quippy man of action, but at the same time a mentor too. That the aged Connery happend to fit into a thoroughly modern action movie so well gave the wrong imprsiion to other filmmakers who attempted similar approaches, the bottom of the barrel being 2003's LXG which made Connery quit acting altogether.

 

You can find plenty to blame in Michael Bay's approach. Connery seems to enjoy to play a character that sees things to be as black-and-white as they were in the 1960's, which extends also on his sex politics. He also seemingly kills or maims a lot of innocent people in a very tacked-on car chase, that's nevertheless a great showcase of Bay's strengths as an action director. By contrast, Nicolas Cage's weirdo, modern action man and Ed Harris's noble main baddie are more nuanced characters, but Connery holds his own against these two great performances. Bay has only regressive things to say, but that's only if you try to search anything meaningful in his cavalcade of outrageous plot turns and huge explosions. As a 90's romp, it's still great fun, and perhaps should have been Connery's actual retirement film so he could have gone out on top.

★★★★

Three laughs: Double Team

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.  

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file #44:
Double Team (USA/Hong Kong, 1997)
Director: Tsui Hark

It's been known to come out of my mouth to say that Jean-Claude Van Damme has a surprisingly good filmography. Well, y'know, not good-good, but there's plenty of really over-the-top and silly actioners that are a lot more fun to watch than many of his peers. He also managed to star in both John Woo and Tsui Hark's Hollywood movies.

The hongkong cinema legends became rivals over dispute of the A Better Tomorrow series, directed by Woo and produced by Hark. Initially Hark made the third part without Woo, who became an international superstar in hos own right. It's quite clear which one of them was more talented, but Hark never gave up trying to upstage Woo's style. Case in point was 1997 when they both ran in the competition of who would make the more ridiculous Hollywood action movie. Woo made Face/Off, Hark made this.

The reason this film is called Double Team is first to cash in on Van Damme's previous Double Impact, but it also serves to remind that it's basically two very tangentially related movies in one. One, a gritty circle of revenge between a terrorist played by Mickey Rourke and Van Damme's counter-terrorist agent. The second, a weird ripoff of The Prisoner, where Van Damme is taken to a secluded scifi island retreat for ex-agents and plans for his escape.

And where does Dennis Rodman's arms dealer fit into all this? Basically nowhere, it seems they had a hunch Rodman would be a bigger star than he was, so his short role had to be expanded to be another of a buddy cop duo, with outrageous fashion items, bright hair colors and basketballl-related one-liners. The plot is a mess, the film tries very 90's-like to be cool with off-putting camera angles, endless explosions and cool-for-cools sake sets, locations, effects and visual elements that serve little purpose and eventually don't go nowhere. It all makes for a very entertaining, trashy movie that gets dumber and dumber as it goes along. 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. When Van Damme finds himself on Conter-terrorist Island, he is immideately in a hurry to get out. His lover thinks he's dead and Rourke is out to get vengeance on him, since he accidentally killed his child (it's a weird position for a film's hero to basically be a child-killer). Thus, he begins a hilarious training routine in his motel room that gives fans of Muscles from Brussels what they bought their ticket for. He does the Splits climbing a door frame, punches a bucket full of gravel and lifts a bath tub all the while making pained expressions. He's also doing some MacGyver-like experiments with a Coke can that somehow will help him escape the daily routine later on.

2. Since Rodman can't act his way out of a paper bag, and Van Damme famously has a limited grasp in English, all the buddy scenes between the two play out quite differently than the film's producers probably had in mind. My favorite scene is when the pair of them have to jump out of an airplane in the middle of nowhere (Rourke's base is in the Colosseum in the middle of Rome). They bicker since there was no parachutes, but luckily, Rodman did became prepared. He somehow turns on a giant basketball over the pair of them that somehow shelters them from the impact. Real xXxTREME SPORTS!

3. The overly conveluted Finale is miraclous in itself, since it involves Rourke having dug landmines in the middle of the Colosseum and let out an angry tiger loose. Van Damme and Rodman are platforming around to find a missing baby. It's almost avant-garde how incoherent this all is, but one can't look away. The final coup the grace is when all the explosives are triggered and the pair saves themselves by shetering behind a number of Coke machines THAT CAME OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE! One gets a sneaking suspicion that this film might have been sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company.

Three laughs: Tokyo Gore Police

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart. 

★ or ★★★★★

 

Three Laughs Case File #43:
Tokyo Gore Police (Tōkyō Zankoku Keisatsu, Japan 2008)
Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura

We live at stressful times right now, so a way to make things feel a bit easier is to take some flights of fancy. Like, say, this Japanese film about a privaticed police that leads to major bloodbaths.... Wait, but it's more or less a parody of anime stylings and over-the-top violence in Japanese flicks in a way that's more reminiscent of Braindead with it's firehosing of actors with blood.

In future Tokyo, law-enforcement is left for companies and private entrepreneurs. One of the latter is Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a super-skilled katana-wielder, who's also after the persons who killed her policeman father. At the same time, odd body manipulations and mutations are all the rage in the underground. Someone is using these body-melt technologies to sprout biological weapons to kill cop company workers, though, so Ruka is off to find the culprit.

I came of age at the time where most of the coolness and edge of Asian action movies had started to wear off. But there were still some last gleamings in parodies such as this, which I first saw at my beloved Night Visions film festival. This, along with stylistically similar OTT gore films Meatball Machine and Machine Girl, were one of the starting points of independent studio Sushi Typhoon, with which Nishimura and fellow director Noboru Iguchi made a string of bad taste gore flicks, with diminishing returns. You can't keep up if even before starting the business you've already gone to 11. Still, they managed to fund some of Sion Sono's films as well before closing doors so it was all for art in the end. 

But at this point it was still odd and novel, inventive even, to do a sort of cross between RoboCop, Akira and Tetsuo. The film has its tongue firmly in cheek and offers plenty of surprises and cool practical effects so it has still stayed surprisingly fresh today. 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film begins with a lengthy action scene where Ruka faces off against a guy wielding a chainsaw on a chain. After this we get a pretty straightforward nod to Starship Troopers with a propaganda commercial showing the strength of privatized police forces, who execute a guy tagged to be a murderer of 15 childern on a rooftom by repeatedly shooting him like he's Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. A later commercial features a family using a Wii-like katana controller in order to perform remote executions as a kind of party game.

2. It takes a while to see just how gleefully perverted the movie is, but the auction scene is pretty hard to top in this regard. A cheerful crowd of punks and vampires is presented with a number of female dancers, each with a more bizarre mutilation. The snail-girl with her eyeballs in tubes is already pretty weird and disgusting but what takes the cake is the breathing half-woman-half-chair that squirts a lengthy pee to the faces of the ecstatic audience.

3. The main bad guy has a massive shotgun dick he uses to blast out police officers. That's it. That's the laugh. 

Z is for Zombies

Happy Halloween! It used to be a tradition at this blog to each year take a look at a particular movie monster and talk about movies where they appeared. I never got to do the Zombie one, partly because everyone knows which ones are the good ones. George Romero's Dead Trilogy, Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and the like. I would've liked to do top 10 more obscure zombie pictures, but never had the time to do enough research. But now I can talk about Italian zombies!

Most of the best Italian zombie movies use the walking dead pretty sparingly, as in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. But that's not to say Romero's Dawn of the Dead wasn't really popular, and a major influence that showed how to do effective thrills on limited resources. Italians never really bothered with the light social commentary (we have Demons movies for that), they just liked the zombies as a cheap way of showing blood and gore. So, let's take a look.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2, 1979)
Director: Lucio Fulci

The grandaddy and best pure zombie flick Italians managed to do was marketed as a straight-up sequel to Dawn of the Dead (also known as Zombi). Fulci had the idea of doing a horror movie set on a remote island even before the premier of DotD, but relented in adding New York scenes in the beginning and end that can be seen of tying to Romero's film. One thing to note is that Italian films seem to have a better tie to the origins of zombie mythology in the voodoo culture... but use it mostly just to have insensitive depiction of natives and their savage ways. Zombi 2 is not the worst in this regard, it came later with movies that cashed in both the Cannibal movie craze and zombies, such as Zombi Apocalypse (a.k.a. Dr Butcher, M.D.)

Fulci's film is a rollicking good adventure, starring an adventure seeker named Peter West (Ian McCulloch) and a spunky reporter Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow), who embark on a dangerous mission after investigating a mysterious boat in New York's harbor. Fulci had an excellent eye for set-pieces and planty of them linger on in your memory forever after seeing them, even if they are only tangentially related to the plot. The best among them are an incredible fight between and underwater zombie and (a real) shark, and a woman's eye being slowly pulled towards a sharp wood splinter (eat your heart out, Un chien Andalus).

 

While the zombies in Romero's movie were just cartoonish actors facepainted blue, here they are actually very creepy looking, wormy and worn-down corpses. I think the scene of the dead rising from their gravces is exceptionally creepy, with Fabio Frizzi's incredible score creating the necessary chills. Fulci's best skills are as a visualist, and this film started something of a golden age on his filmography (which we will take a closer look at soon enough).

★★★★

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3, 1988)
Dirs. Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

A lot of unrelated films were sold as "Zombi 3" during the 1980's, but by the end of the decade, the aged Fulci was also lured to do an actual sequel. But the collaboration with the screenwriter Claudio Fragasso didn't work out that well. Due to creative differences, Fulci was let go and Fragasso finished the film with his regular collaborator, Bruno Mattei. Fulci later called the movie as made by "a bunch of idiots".

I think Fragasso was trying to do a more ambitious version of his previous movie, Zombie Creeping Flesh (more on which below) and he needed Fulci's visual eye to achieve this. The end result is actually pretty okay entertainment, even if it's pretty easy to spot the visually nice and athmospheric scenes as being done by Fulci, and the cheaper shots by the Mattei/Fragasso team. Tonally they can't even keep up with what the zombies can do, whether they can run, wield machetes or even speak... at... a.. very.. slow... rate...

A deadly virus gets loose from a research center and the military is employed to stop the spreading throughout Pacific Islands. There's also a group of rich dorks on a holiday that are on the way of the zombies. There's a lot of characters to follow, but never mind, most of them are zombie food anyway. There are some very memorable scenes, as one sees a zombie head fly out of a refrigerator and another a zombie baby burst out of its mother's belly, like a scene from Alien. The entire film is hosted by a radio DJ, who, in the end, is revealed to be a zombie himself. SURPRISE?

There are two other movies that are usually told to be official Zombie Sequels, After Death (1989) and Killing Birds (1988). Both are cheap, cheesy and not terribly exciting in any way, though the first one has a voodoo cult and ninja-looking masked zombies, and the latter some zombie birds attacking people in the vein of Hitchcock (although so does Zombie 3). So that's enough of them at this point.

★★★
 

Zombie Creeping Flesh  a.k.a. Hell of the Living Dead (Virus, 1980)
Dirs. Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

 

This cheapo Virus movie presents something Mattei always excelled at; marrying two very unrelated movies. As a deadly zombie virus takes over a military research center, most of the movie follows a group of soldiers of fortune travelling around Papua New Guinea. The film used mondo movie footage from Akira Ide's movie called L'isola dei canibali, and stole the score from Dawn of the Dead and Buio Omega. It's so shameless one has to give the edge out to it when compared to the more sleek Zombi 3.

But for a film made on such a shoe string budget, it had some ambitious gore scenes such as tearing out a woman's tongue and then grabbing the brain through the mouth with eyes bulging out. Also rare for a Mattei film, the plot moves along surprisingly briskly and keeps surprising the viewer. Of course, most of it is driven by the characters acting like total jerks or making the dumbest decisions the entire time. 

 One has to love Fragasso's ear for dialogue:
"Up your ass. Lt. Mike London, Shit Creek. The year is now."

★★★ 1/2

Burial Ground (Le notti del terrore, 1981)
Dir. Andrea Bianchi

For my money, however, the silliest of Italian cash-grab zombie pictures is this one, which tries to match Fulci's zombies in their creepiness, but just ends up having worm-faced mummy guys crawl out of flower beds and slowly stumble to grab the nearest overacter screaming their lungs out. Burial Ground is something of a morality take, as a swinger's weekend of debauchery in a secluded mansion takes a violent turn.

There's some very fucked up things going on in the family, particularly with the 12-year-old Michael (Peter Bark) who doesn't want to die a virgin so he tries to achieve his long-time dream and nail his own mother before the zombies get to him. It's one of the Italian films that uses the legendary Etruscan people as a source of ancient terrors, but neglects to include much of actual Etruscan culture to go with it. Nevertheless, we get a healthy amount of zombie monks, too.

It's a great film to watch during boozy nights with friends, as the actors themselves seem to be quite relaxed as well. I love how when cast member become zombies, they seem to be quite happy with the development.

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs: Night Killer

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart. 

★ or ★★★★★

 

Three laughs case file #42:
Night Killer (Non aprite quella porta 3, 1990)
Director: Claudio Fragasso (as Clyde Anderson)

Ol' shlockmeister Fragasso is best remembered as the director of Troll 2, as well as having been the co-director of plenty of films by another trash master, Bruno Mattei (such as Rats: Nights of Terror). Whereas Mattei was content on doing cheapo ripoff films for the lowest common denominator, Fragasso seems to have quite a high opinion of himself. Case in point is this 1990 horror movie, which the director himself has compared to the works of Fellini.

Well, to my knowledge Fellini never did shlock that featured a killer that looks like the offspring of Freddy Krueger and the Toxic Avenger.  Fragasso would have wanted to make a psychological movie about trauma with parallel universes and dream-like logic, but the studio demanded him to have a more basic slasher plot. But it seems a compromise was reached, since these two sides seem to battle it out throughout the movie. Insult to injury, Mattei, who Fragasso kept saying stole his credits from their previous collaborations, was hired to add gore scenes to the movie. So the tables surely have turned.

In Italy, the film was sold as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, even though it has even less to do with the franchise than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 did. In actuality, the film features gruesome murders at Virginia Beach where young women are stalked and killed by a rubber-faced fiend, seemingly with his bare claws. The killer has a grander plan for one of his victims, Melanie Beck (Tara Buckam), who has repressed memories of previously encountering the killer.

CONTENT WARNING: The movie depicts sexual violence.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The scene in the beginning with dancers practicing a dumb disco-dancing routine seems almost like a parody of later-era Argento with Opera or his production Stage Fright. The director's beration doesn't make any sense and the dramatic camera movements showing a really dumb Halloween-costume wearing fiend watching in the balcony just add to the bizarreness.

2. In-movie, it seems to fluctuate whether that mask and glove is just cheap plastic or the real thing. For instance, the killer can easily stick his claws through a girl. The most bizarre kill scene comes, however, when he makes a plaster cast for another lady, then proceeds to sex up his own simulacrum.

3. There's maybe some idea of females fighting against the pervy nature of the men around them in the movie. For instance, our lead has a scene where she lures a cat-caller to the toilet, then at gunpoint makes him strip and flushes his clothes. As the guy asks on how to get them back, we get an amazing line:

"Just reach in and fish them out. It shouldn't be anything new to AN ASSHOLE FULL OF SHIT AS YOURSELF!"

I have to mention the film's final moments as they have so many revealing twists that it's hard to keep up. Mostly because none of them make any sense. Anyway, the killer is shot to pieces by the police. But later on, in Christmastime, our lead's daughter gets a mysterious present. It turns out to be the killer's mask and once she puts it on, she wovs revenge. So, the mask was magical, too? Was this a prequel to The Mask (1994)? Either way, the film is SSSSSSSmoking!

Three laughs: Dead Heat

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.   

 ★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file #41:
Dead Heat (USA, 1988)
Director: Mark Goldblatt

How about a reanimator / buddy cop action parody made by Shane Black... 's brother? Well, ok, Terry Black isn't quite as droll a writer of the quips, or creator of ingenious action setpieces, but he has plenty of the same essence that takes you a long way. And it has a GREAT concept for a flick from the golden age of VHS. So, even though Dead Heat isn't quite as good a horror-comedy as you would want it to be, there's still plenty to enjoy, from truly weird effects work to major plot twists the kind you won't see in your run-off-the-mill action movie.

It features one of the final screen roles of Vincent Price, Keye Luke from Gremlins, and although the main pair isn't the most recognizable or generally even likable, they grow on you and the viewer wants to see the knuckleheads, if not succeed, at least uncover some weird shit. And to do a lot of wonton damage around town, and giving total disregard for human lives they may wreck. They may insult their corpses on the way out, as well.

Detectoves Mortis and Bigelow (Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo) run across bank robbers, and general nuisances of stiffs that can't seem to stay dead. There's a bigger plot going on as Dante Laboraties have some bigger plans than to simply resurrect the dead. And you can't keep our heroes down, since the same techniques that bring their adversaries to life also work on them...

At the very least for this time, it's a film that allows the phrase "the only good cop is a dead one" some consideration from the both sides.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film opens with a scene of a crew of jewel store robbers on a heist. When our heroes arrive, they do the normal cop routine of starting fire before asking too many questions. But they soon realize the robbers actuallu can't die from simple gunshots. To get rid of them, one  has to be exploded, one run over with a car.

Cut to the key element of every cop action film: a pissed-off police captain yelling at the renegades for destroying everything around them. But at least they get results, man.

2. I like a sudden appearance of a gnarly monster man, especially as there's been a long while of exposition and getting to show the machinery that is used to bring people back to life. That's why it's a great joy as an obese biker zombie comes walking across an aisle to wrestle our heroes. It also gives the pleasure of seeing Treat Williams being knocked into an asphyxiation chamber and killed (he gets better).

3. One of the greatest special effects scenes comes from a scene best described as Big Trouble in Little China meets The Thing. In a Chinese butcher's shop some electric shenanigans bring meat to life. It means honking duck heads, wrestling with a pig carcass and getting an alien-like slab of meat to the face. As a coup de grace, there's a headless bull torso out to get our heroes. Best believe they make quips out of all of these!

"Zombie duck heads. What a concept."

G is For Gothic Giallo

The golden age of giallo didn't last more than a few years from the late 60's to early 70's. But it was just the latest fad in Italian horror movies. Before all that we had gothic horror movies, as established by Mario Bava. That one used stark visuals on haunted castles, torture chambers and classical melodrama. They cashed in on the popularity of Hammer Horror films in the UK and  Roger Corman's Poe films in America at the same time. Besides Bava, there were plenty of other talented directors working on the subgenre as well. Let's take a look at a few.

Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra, 1960)
Director: Giorgio Ferroni

Ferroni is someone that's a bit controversial in some circles due to his actions in WWII, but you can't say he wasn't a talented and effective filmmaker. This film is set in the Netherlands and in the similar art circles that Corman also sometimes depicted. A young art student travels to a Flemish village to see a windmill filled with stone sculptures of legendary women. He finds a mysterious woman and falls for her hard, but doesn't realize she harbors a horrible secret.

The ominous setting, with the gloomy Holland winter and ominous sound design from the mill's gearwork make the film's athmosphere of foreboding dread quite unique. Color photography wasn't that common this early, so that makes Ferroni's movie shine out compared to his contemporaries. It also emphasizes the meet of artistry and mad science also on display in the story.

 The major downside is the third act that gives a rather ludicrous explanation to all the murder and mayhem. The plot's romanticism also rings a bit hollow. Similar plot points were common in many contemporary movies, so it's a bit disappointing Ferroni couldn't top them in this one too.

★★★★

The Horrible Dr Hichock (L'orrible segreto del Dr. Hichcock, 1962)
Dir. Riccardo Freda

The Italian horror cinema owes a major debt to Hitchcock, of course, but still it's a bit much to use a misspelling of his name in a movie title or a major film villain. The titular doctor, played by Robert Flemyng, takes a new, young wife (Barbara Steele) to live with him in his vast old castle. Taking on the story of Bluebeard, the wife goes on to find out what happened to her predecessor and the doctor's deadly secrets.

 

This is another movie that takes a turn in the third act, but this time to be more outlandish and hysterical. It's a trick Italian horror movies tend to do perticularly well. Particularly as we've endured the uptight and very British manners of Flemyng for the first hour or so. This film was very taboo-breaking for its time since it's plot heavily circles around necrophilia. This started a sort of trend in Italian movies to try to up one another. Still, at this point everything was done mostly in good taste and avoiding explicit scenes of sex and violence.

Steele was one of the great leading women of the period, and she did admirable work here, too. The sets are lavish, gloomy and dark, as they should be, but otherwise this film seems to suffer a bit of lack of suspense being built until the final reveals.

★★★

The Whip and the Body (La frusta e il corpo, 1963)
Dir. Mario Bava

Our old buddy Bava again, with one of his filmograhy's most dark-toned movies. The movie is all dark moors, stormy seafronts, damp cellars and unlit torture chambers. Christopher Lee had a few days to shoot his role for the film, but he was put in good use. After all, in Hammer's Dracula films he usually didn't show up for too long.

He plays a cruel and ruthless nobleman that likes to whip girls. The puritans around him don't much care for him, so he soon winds up dead. Or does he? Something unexplained, perhaps a ghost, begins to haunt the mansion. At the same time his would-be bride (Delilah Lavi) seems to start to desperately pine for him and perhaps develop a relationship with the ghost. The increased scares and bodies beginning to pile up cause and investigation on the matter.

Bava was a filmmaker that used minimal elements to maximum effect, and this is a clear textbook study of that work. His use of minimal light in particular makes his film a lot more eye-popping than any of his contemporaries managed. Then again, his use of sound and music isn't quite as good, and his disregard for reasonable plot development may be a bit long-winded to follow. The name implies for more S&M but it's actually left mostly to our imagination.

★★★ 1/2

Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra, 1964)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci

 A true Italian answer to Corman's Poe films, it also features a connecting opening scene that features the author himself. A rival author bets that he can spend the night at a haunted castle. While there, he enconters various lost souls and is forced to live out the ways they have perished within the castle's history. In the end, the ghosts demand a blood sacrifice themselves.

Margheriti's step to the scene also meant for the genre to take a step more to psychedelia.The film was shot in black and white, but makes the most out of strong contrasts with candle-lit scenes and visible cobwebs in almost every frame. The film's castle is built so as to have a mystery or a secret attached to each room, corridor or nook. 

Legendary western director Corbucci worked as the co-director, yet was not credited for it. Barbara Steele is on top form in here as well, playing a sad remnant of a love lost. It's as melodramatic as they come and the finale takes on for a bit too long, but still, it's one of the brightest spots of the genre.

★★★ 1/2

The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte, 1965)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti

A true historical epic, this one takes place in the 15th century, witch a lover scorned threatening to burn his would-be wife on the stake for witchcraft. Death follows the entire family, until one of the daughters is old enough and the situation is apt to get revenge on the lord. A nice idea is to have everything revolve around the same castle through time, but I guess it's for the cost-effectiveness to limiting sets.

Another Barbara Steele classic that sees her do a dual role. The story and music repeat one another a bit too much with the witch-hunt, paranoia and hauntings going on. The cast of actors is particularly good here, as they manage to find a nice balance between hysteric melodrama and small nuances.   

The morality tale on display here is very Catholic indeed, utilizing the iconygraphy of the Church and basically be about a post-generational vendetta. I think Michele Soavi was very influenced by this.

★★★

The Possessed (La donna del lago, 1966)
Dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini

Shedding light on how the development from gotchicness to giallos came about, we have this slow-moving arthouse movie, shot in black and white. At this point, it feels a bit odd to have this kind of cinematography used in modern setting, though it does help to make the film's athmosphere.

The film is a murder mystery where Peter Baldwin's Bernard arrives for a seaside holiday in order to be able to write. Even as he had spent time therein before, he notices most of the locals give him the cold sholder and act weird. He finds out that Tilde, the chambermaid he had been in love with, had killed herself during the year. But is there something more to the case?

The film depicts the gloom and depression present in neo-realism, with surreal images of leavless trees and the cold embrace of the lake in question. The film doesn't have too strong a pull though, and it's mostly due to the uncharismatic lead turn by Baldwin. Nevertheless, it is a sense of styling that proves you don't need ghosts or spooky castles in order to have some good old-fashioned gothic dread.

★★★