Rock 'N Roll Party Monsters

Movie monsters usually represent the raging id fighting the boring mainstream middle-class values. Thus, they tend to get to have all the fun. Monsters are often sexual creatures, and thus also know how to party. In the hedonistic 70's this was over-emphasized as the growing affection and gentle lampoon of the monster-movies of yester-years grew. That's why the flamboyant, colorful new breed of movie monsters were a clear sexual threat as well as unreliable beings capable of destruction and murder.

Also this was the time when rock music adapted horror movie imagery. It was a clear step beyond the limits of mainstream boundaries, as rock was deemed dark, forbidden and dangerous at the time. It soon was also clear that new monster movies had to adapt rock music vice versa. The combination of the might brought out some very unexpected monsters, sensual and threatening in the very sense of the word. The combining of powers also allowed for some quite vivid and formerly tabu sensual desires to have a new form. It was no wonder several of these rock musicals became beloved cult classics.

Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Director: Jim Sharman

Based on Richard O'Brien's famed stage play, RHPS is a cult film like no other. The devotion the film's fans have over it is almost fanatic and goes way past just knowing the lines and songs of the movie by heart and chanting them aloud. Screening RHPS with the right audience is a pre-packaged party in itself. There are plenty of rules and ways to experience the ultimate Rocky viewing party, but one just can't sit still at one's seat. Much like the maniac mansion it features, the movie has long since left the realm of being "just a movie".



Brad (Barry Boswick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) are a bland, white-bread couple who decide to get hitched. They rush off to announce the news to their friend Dr. Scott, whose science exhibit was once the place where they found each other. But driving on a dark night in a dreadful storm, they get lost and must take shelter on a nearby castle. The odd servants Riff-Raff (Richard O'Brien) and Magenta (Patricia Quinn) allow them in but reveal that the castle is hosting a party for oddball Transylvanians. When the Time Warp dance is on, there's no turning back.

The lord of the manor is Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a transvestite scientist on the verge of creating a new boy toy for him, Rocky (Peter Hinwood). But Frank's sexual appetite is not that easily satisfied, and during the night he manages to seduce both Brad and Janet separately. While Brad tries to still keep up appearances, the experience is a true eye-opener for Janet who has her own sexual revolution. But this may all be playing into the bigger plans of Frank-N-Furter.

As a film, RHPS is actually is nothing very innovative and at times, it shows its stage-bound origins. It's more a cavalcade of macabre style than a coherent movie. But the film has several other things going for it that have clearly fed its cult status. The movie's humour is silly, fast and surprising, often relying on quick-witted dialogue. It seems to have been heavily influenced by the films of the Marx brothers. The simple staging, which often has only a few colors (most often red) as a leading theme, is a big part of the draw. But the biggest asset of the film is its magnificent cast which inhabits their strange roles perfectly, and have their inner workings pinned to even the smallest gesture. It's sad most of them were more or less typecast after this.

What starts out as a parody of cheesy old-time sci-fi/horror films, becomes a fetishist fantasy, and furthermore a bizarre burlesque cabaret. Screenwriters/masterminds behind the entire scheme, Richard O'Brien and Jim Sharman blow raspberries in the faces of modesty and chastity. Like the time it was made, the film features as hedonistic events as they come. The message of the film is to enjoy a healthy sexuality (nevermind the gender of your partner) but not to cheat, force or otherwise become "too extreme". This can be also seen as a call-back to the lost ideals of the hippie movement.

★★★★

Labyrinth (1986)
Director: Jim Henson

Okay, bear with me here. This is not a horror movie or even a musical per se, but it does have monsters and musical sequences in it. Plus, if the sex appeal of Tim Curry in tight leather clothes didn't do anything for ya, we have Sexy David Bowie starring in here. Things couldn't get much more sexy, and though at a surface level this is a children's movie, the theme of sexual awakening is pretty obvious here.

I would've written a Twilight joke here, but I bored myself to death thinking about it.

The early-teens Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) feels threatened by the arrival of a new baby boy in her family. Frustrated and furious, she wishes her loudly crying brother would be taken away by goblins. Thanks to the puppetry of Jim Henson and the Goblin King (Sexy David Bowie), this wish soon comes to pass and Sarah realizes it's up to her to travel to a magical land to get the baby back. But the Sexy Goblin King won't allow here to just come and go to his kingdom. He challenges her to clear his labyrinth, and makes sure every turn is filled with perils and temptations. If she can't make it before midnight, the baby shall become a goblin.

One of these guys, not one looking like Sexy David Bowie.

It isn't until long that Sarah has a party of misfit creatures to accompany her on her quest. The film is really creatures galore, and the vivid imagination of Jim Henson is beautifully realized in the sets and visuals otherwise as well. Too bad the puppetry feels a bit cheap at times. Although the supporting characters are pretty much your basic fantasy/fairy tale archetypes, the world created by Henson has a sort of threatening mood, which makes everyone's loyalty is suspect. As one tends to have in fairy tales, victory can only be achieved when one lets go of selfishness and learns to put others' needs before oneself.

But really, the sexual aspect is the more interesting part in this. The Goblin King announces that he's after Sarah's dreams, and is able to invade them as well. The famous ball-room scene features Connelly staring slack-jawed at smart-dressed Sexy Bowie at his most charming and handsome. The dance the two do is unnervingly alluring, but luckily Henson has good taste and we won't have to see Bowster get his mack on with a 14-year-old. I bet his performance here helped a lot of pre-teen girls reach puberty back in the day. In the end Sarah chooses to party with various-sized goblins, which does feel like an unbelievably perverted choice, particularly when put together with lines such "I learned that I really need you."

Oh, but does Sexy David Bowie sing? Sure.



★★★

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Director: Brian DePalma

When looking for the most colorful, inventive and crazy monster musical, one doesn't need to look further than Brian DePalma's ingenious effort. It just may be the auteur's best movie. Mixing classic gothic horror fiction such as The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Faust, Paradise Lost and The Portrait of Dorian Gray laced with popular glam rock music, satire and the director's own angers with authority and big businesses while also adding a good dose of pure silliness. With these ingredients DePalma was able to create a film so vivid it's hard to digest with one viewing. But it really makes subsequent screenings all the more rewarding and the film just seems to get better and better with time.



Warning, this clip spoils. But rush off to see the movie, I'll wait.
The movies main monster isn't the Phantom but Swan (Paul Williams), the leading record producer in the business and a worshipped musician. He's been on the top of his game for a long time, yet he harbors a terrible secret to his success. He is also a hedonistic asshole, who lives from other people's hopes and dreams yet finds it amusing to crush them. He also invites young girls to his mansion to audition, only to give them to his second-in-command, Philbin (George Memmoli) for sex.

What he lacks in outer sexiness, Paul Williams makes up with a sleazy performance and some magnificent songwriting.

When looking for some new music for the opening of his new rock club, the Paradise, he steals the music of a young aw-shucks musician Winslow (William Finley). The skilled young composer and piano player is a true artistic soul, but timid, shy and adamant to not let everyone else play his music other than himself.

But Swan cruelly cheats Winslow out of his own copyright. When the young artist comes to demand his share, Swan has him imprisoned. A desperate rush for freedom and his rights at Swan's record-pressing plant leaves Winslow scarred, mute and as good as dead. But he manages to rise up and get himself the gear to hide in the back stages of the Palace. There he will fight against the misuse of his music as The Phantom. But Swan is a devious person, and he may find a way to tame even the raging Phantom. A key figure is the beautiful young singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper), whom The Phantom believes is the only one with a voice beautiful enough to sing his greatest work; the rock opera Faust.

DePalma plays a lot with his main themes of voyeurism and the other side of it, reliving life through various medias. The source of Swan's evil is found on the fact that he records everything around him. Swan  He likes to replay the tapes of himself and finds satisfaction mostly from the time he mistreats hopeful young people. The bitter image the film gives on the music industry, which devours its innovators, is quite clearly also something young DePalma felt was evident in the way major studios dealt with oddball young directors.

The film is at times hilariously funny, at times edge-of-your seat exciting and at times heart-breakingly sad. The scene featuring the love-struck Phantom watching through roof window as Swan seduces Phoenix and his cries in the rain and thunder are truly the mark of a tragic monster.

The film something very unique, the only thing even close to this film's mixture of colorful sets, music, the speed and the overflow of unordinary visual ideas, are the rock musicals of Ken Russell. Although Russell liked to have fun as well and throw bizarre visual images into the mix, he never really seemed to have so much substance within the movie as DePalma has. And Brian's script is funny as hell to boot. The scene-stealing flamboyant rock star Beef (Gerrit Graham) and his narcissist, cowardly ways are a laugh riot every time he's on the screen. DePalma had a good eye on what was going on in the world of rock at that time, since glam and stadium rock would only get more ridiculous from there on.

Here's the Beef!

The movie is worth seeing just for DePalma's incredible homage to A Touch of Evil, with a long take from two different perspectives follows a bomb being planted and blowing up a car. It also has the evil version of The Beach Boys called The Beach Bums, who get blown to smithereens. Genius.

★★★★★

HIFF 2012: Animated Dreams

 
We're back with another post about this years Love & Anarchy festival. This time, I focus on the animated movies shown at the festival. As animations go, this year really wasn't among the strongest, since there were precious few titles screened. And from those, even Ghibli's newest didn't really work for me. But there was one absolute jewel among a bunch of average movies, which always makes it all worth it.

From Up On Poppy Hill (Kokuriko-zaka kara, Japan)
Director: Goro Miyazaki

Annually, Love & Anarchy presents Studio Ghibli's animations, new and old. This year's effort is from Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro, who previously directed the ho-hum adaptation of Tales From The Earthsea. But where that movie got lost along its overly complex plotting, it seems that Goro has learned from his past mistakes and is keeping things simpler this time around. His new film represents Ghibli's often-forgotten string of more down-to-earth teenage romance movies. And it's loosely based on Papa Miyazaki's own youth experiences, with the father of Goro and all of Ghibli having scripted the piece. The film takes place in the early 60's.

Umi is a teenaged girl living with her family in a beautiful garden villa on Tokyo seaside. Every morning she raises a flag to the sea to salute the passing ships. Her reasons are to greet her father who was lost at sea during the Korean war, but the message is noticed by an orphan boy called Shun, who lives and works in a ship. He sends a flirtatious poem for Umi to the local newspaper. However, the teens have never met, until their school is facing some renovations due to the upcoming Olympic games. These include the demolition of the old club house of the students. Both Shun and Umi rise up to protest against these plans. And at the same time they begin to fall for each other. But the history of their families has a secret, which may destroy the prospects of a blossoming romance altogether.

The story of two kids from different backgrounds coming together using a common cause as an excuse is nothing new. The old Ghibli charm makes it a hell of a lot more charming, but it is still lacking in the magic and originality so often attached to the studio's work. What's worse is the creepy undertones that the center romance has, which don't feel suitable to a movie aimed at kids and teenagers. But the hand-drawn animation and painted backgrounds are once again beautiful and the film has plenty of silly memorable minor characters to keep it barely afloat. Goro has at least learned to have a better rhythm in his storytelling, even though this is still patchy.

★★ 1/2

A Letter to Momo (Momo e no tegami, Japan)
Director: Hiroyuki Okiura

While Ghibli may have failed to make a Ghibli-quality movie, a former Ghibli employee succeeded in it just fine. Ghibli. Hiroyuki Okiura's first feature animation is one of those animated films where the mundane worries and troubles of a pre- to early-teens girl faces a vivid and magical fantasy world. Story-wise this is familiar stuff. But it still works quite well due to the final touches being so charming.

14-year-old Momo and her mother move to a suburban island near Tokyo. It is the island Momo's mother grew up in, and she has to rely on relatives and friends since she can't afford the rents of the big city any more. Momo is saddened by the recent death of her father, which is made worse by the fact that she had a fight with him soon before that. She is clutching on to the father's final letter that only has "Dear Momo" written on it. She also fears loneliness, since she finds it hard to make new friends. Since Momo's mother goes to work on a boat every day, Momo has to spend a lot of time home alone.

Momo is also scared of her new house and comes to believe it to be haunted. She discovers that three paranormal goblins have moved in with them, the always hungry Iwa, the shy but big-mouthed Kawa and the small, odd and soft-speaking Mame. She is the only person that is able to see these creatures. The goblins cause a lot of trouble with their ravenous appetite, yet they also have a mysterious mission to carry from the afterlife. Unsurprisingly, these three characters steal the movie and run with it. But best animations always have good use for comic sidekicks, and these Three Undead Stooges are really what sweetens the whole cake here.

As in many best family animes, the craft is in the small details. The old house creaks and is seemingly full of mystery. Water surrounds the house and feels isolating at times but becomes more inviting towards the end. The film knowingly does things very traditionally as it stars goblins straight out of old Japanese folklore. The film uses some animation help from computers, particularly in one big money shot towards the end, but it relies much on hand-drawn lines as well. Several scenes of the film feel a bit tacked on. Sometimes this doesn't matter (like in the superbly rapid wild boar chase), but it could at least have one less ending to avoid The Lord of the Rings syndrome.

★★★

Le tableau (France/Belgium)
Director: Jean-François Laguionie

Possibly the most innovative animation from this year's program, this is a new film from a true animation auteur. Laguione is a somewhat obscure French artist who often takes years to perfect his vision. This is his first film since 2004. And it concerns the inhabitants of a painting.

In an unfinished painting, the occupants aren't living as equals. The fully-painted Alldunns live in a luxurious castle, throw parties and frown on Halfies, the people who weren't quite finished and still have unpainted body parts or clothes. The Halfies have to live in a forest, but even they have it better than Sketchies, the people who were left as mere sketches and are persecuted and hunted by Alldunns. The Halfie girl Lola is an adventurous sort, and wants to venture far into the desert, where no painting has gone before. At the same time a forbidden love causes Lola's best friend Claire and her Alldunn lover Roma decide to run away together. But they are discovered and soon separated. Running for their lives, Lola, Roma and a Sketchie sentenced to death join together. The trio ventures beyond their limits and go to search for the artist of their painting. Lola hopes the artist could finish painting everyone so they all could live in harmony.

It's probably not a very big spoiler to tell that the trio finds new painting which to visit. The resulting film has no clear parallels, but reminds a little a classic Looney Tunes short where Daffy Duck visited various paintings and their inhabitants as well. The film utilized various different painting styles and thus each painting does seem like its own world. A war painting's world is grim and aggressive, a painting featuring the Venice festival is vast with surprises lurking behind every corner, and the artist's self-portrait has grown grumpier with years passing, alongside its creator.

If this was all achieved with beautiful hand-drawn animation, I would love it to bits. But budget limitation (I guess) mandate that this is mostly a computer animation, using Flash to create movements. It undermines the diversity of different styles and the message of the value of the art quite a bit.

In the end, the artist figures his most successful works should have a life of their own. He's not an angry god, but a gentle father, allowing his works to sort everything out by themselves. It's an exciting animation with plenty of creativity, but it also would've needed a bit more of a personal touch to its animation as well.

★★★

Pablo (USA)
Director: Richard Goldgewicht

This documentary about the legendary movie title credit auteur Pablo Ferro isn't actually an animation as such, but it does feature lengthy animated sequences. It's entirely reasonable that a movie about someone who does a lot of drawing for a living would be animated. Sadly, the film seems to be more surface than heart or information.

Ferro is best known for his typography used in credits. The films which include his signature style include Dr. Strangelove, Stop Making Sense and Men In Black. But Ferro wasn't limited to just lettering, he is a cracking visual artist to boot. He did the entire title sequences for such films as Psycho, Bullitt and The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!. He also did some ground-breaking commercials, such as the pre-music-video fast-cut trailers for Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange.

You might remember him from this.

The documentary, narrated by Jeff Bridges, goes through the life of the Cuban-born visualist, which has seen a lot of hedonism and bohemian vices, but also poverty, divorce and being left unrecognized for his work. His friendship with director Hal Ashby is in a central role, yet there are a few amusing anecdotes about Stanley Kubrick as well. In modern day setting, Ferro is suffering from achy joints and is recommended a sauna bath.

Even though Ferro has done so many iconic movie titles, the film just glosses over them quickly to tell about another party Ferro was having or a girl he once picked up. This decadence is shown to be kind of cute (due to it mostly being in animation). For a serious film fan, the fact that they don't go deeper into how Ferro got his groundbreaking ideas, or even how he created them, is a serious flaw. Big Hollywood names are brought to sing his praises, yet it never really dealt with, how much Ferro's work changed the face of movie titles or commercials.

Fortunately, Ferro is presented as laid-back and easy-going as they come. One wouldn't dare to nit-pick the movie while watching because his company is so enjoyable. Only afterwards does one realize that after watching the film, one didn't really learn much about title sequences after all.

★★

Wrinkles (Arrugas, Spain)
Director: Ignacio Ferreras

Remember the one really good animation I mentioned in the opening paragraph? I referred to this one. As one can guess from the title, this Spanish gem deals about growing old. But at the same time it also has a warm, melancholic look at human lives, dignity, and the value of memories. So it's a kind of a sibling piece to Michael Haneke's magnificent Amour. But it has two key differences. First, Wrinkles deals with an institution and how it suffocates little people, a little in the vein of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Second, it places much higher value to friendship, pulling together through hard last years, and doing whatever one can to make life better for people trapped in a corner with no easy way out. All in all, it's not cold and analytical in the way Haneke tends to be but warm and compassionate.

Emilio is a former banker, living with his grown up son and his family. But Emilio is getting more and more absent-minded and at times thinks he's still working at the bank.After having enough of this,  Emilio's son decides to put him in a retirement home. There, Emilio is horrified to learn that many of the inhabitants are demented to the pint of madness, reliving their old days without any idea of what goes on in the outside world.

He befriends his roommate, the Argentinian Miguel, who is one of the few people in the home who has kept his mind together. But Miguel isn't above cheating some of the inhabitants and staff of the house to gain items to sell, or some money to gain. Nevertheless, Miguel gives advice on how to avoid being put to the upper floor hospital department, where the most vegetable-stated seniors are put to. But Emilio's mind starts to crumble and he also starts to lose his own possessions, of which he suspects his new friend.

The film is based on a comic book and its style resembles the stark lines and panel framing of one. The animation is still gracefully done, since with animation it's easier to mix the real world and the version of the past many old people go through in their heads. Mist is a notable element of the film and is featured in many key scenes and transitions. As a symbol, it could be taken to mean various things. One action/chase scene is also fitted to the film, which it could've also done without.

The film makes one ponder about how we treat the elderly, who are seen more or less as a nuisance, in our societies. It forces the viewer to put him- or herself in the position of not realizing what is happening around him. It's a stark message, but the animated style helps to get it across without being melodramatic or pushing the issue. It is also a buddy film, with the best pair of buddies I've seen in a while, going even back before Pixar started out. But most importantly, it works as a metaphor of being between a rock and a hard place in life. Happiness is found not through rebelling against the inevitable, but concentrating on the important things in life. This helps one go on.

One of the whole festival's best films.

★★★★ 1/2

A Tribute to the Classic Universal Monsters

A recent (like, a year ago, tops) discussion with some fellow film fans revealed that not everyone thinks that the classic monster films of Universal in the 1930's and 40's are as cracking as I do. Sure, those films are iconic in their imagery and widely recognized as essential building blocks of horror as a genre. But their sometimes slow-moving pace and theatrical acting don't appeal to everybody.

Since we celebrate the studio's 100th anniversary this year and Halloween's a-coming, I'll take a chance to say a few words about why I dig these movies. True, it's mostly due to several brilliant directors such as James Whale and Tod Browning, but there's just something about Universal's horror movies in general which appeals to me.

Bela Lugosi's Dracula is a perfect mix of fascinating sexuality and the underlying threat of that.

True, the films are somewhat old-fashioned. But in that lies also their greatest strength. For the basic thing about Universal's monsters are that they are films about being different and out-of-place. It is easier to sympathize with the monsters, often expressing some pretty human desires and goals, than with their narrow-minded, old-fashioned conservative mindsets. When the crime of being true to oneself and just wanting some love gets the monster destroyed in the end, it's not too far-fetched to see some of these stories as much like Greek tragedies.

A gifted hero grows too ambitious, goes mad and to his downfall, like Claude Rains's Invisible Man.

Of course this was also at the point where movies serialized and every subsequent effort either undid the emotional punch of the first ones, or went to really weird and unexpected places, such as the Frankenstein sequels. But I'd rather take brain-switching antics and Ygor over House of Frankenstein-style ill-advised anthologies.

As mentioned, the sexuality of the monsters is also a strong underlying theme. One of the reasons so many sequels were so boring was that censorship, too much political correctness and understanding made them wishy-washy. The real classics pushed the limit as much as was available to hint during those chastise days. The Bride of Frankenstein even has a fair amount of hinting at the society's handling of homosexuals, which is a radical idea for the time. And it did it with much more grace than any X-Men movie, trying out similar metaphors.

Dr. Pretorius is as camp as they come.

As a child, of course the major draw to these movies was the iconic look of these monsters, replicated, redone and slapped into memorabilia since time immortal. It's hard to imagine Frankenstein's monster that doesn't look like Karloff nowadays (Everyone picks him over Robert DeNiro for a good reason). This look was created by a string of very talented artists (in the case of Frankenstein, make up artist and stunt man Jack Pierce. How's that combo for a balance of the masculine and the feminine?). As a contrast, nobody remembers what the zombies looked on the contemporary, also smart horror film I Walked With A Zombie, for instance.

This bolt-neck however is one of the most iconic characters in the world. Up there with Mickey Mouse and Angry Birds.

If I went into the films to see iconic characters, I stayed for the gothic athmosphere. Lonely castles on hilltops, misty moors, gypsy caravans, mad doctor's lairs. These things basically created your basic horror imagery from scratch, and even though they are clearly studio sets, this creates a sense that something is afoul and a bit wrong in the worlds of these films. a it should. Sadly, the budget for the sets and props also diminished with time and a lot of stuff was recycled from one movie to another. As you may guess, the films that created new things were the ones that stuck to my mind.

Universal's films are frank and theatrical, focusing on the main attraction and building everything around it. Plot-wise, the films adapted some very famous horror novels but cut a lot of corners in their storytelling. While it's sad that a proper adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein still lets fans await for itself, Universal's loose version is a true corker, and a true classic to boot. At it's core the Universal movies are easy morality stories, with a good, a bad and an ugly character duking it out. Often there are curses, magic or other supernatural forces that prevent or limit the lives of the characters.

Karloff's Mummy only appears like this for one scene. But the horrible magic that brought him back to life is apparent in every scene.

But the ideas are certainly not hard to gasp by even the youngest viewers. Since the scariness of the stories has long since vanished, they even work as a sort of gateway drug to horror enthusiasm, as dozens of gifted filmmakers born since the 1930's can testify. Come for the cuddly creatures, stay for the gothic worlds.

While the main plot was simple, the subtext was heavy and the visions strong. The high-quality workers on the job of these movies gave life to films by even lower-quality directors, such as the original Wolf Man or The Mummy. Sets, lights, make up, costumes, the right mood and character actors salvage a lot. For major studio films, Universal's horror pictures still feel artistic in their dream-like visions told.

Karloff's Frankenstein with some much appreciated me-time.

In the end, Universal cranked out the films maybe a tad too many (one idea can only last so long) and usually the more sequels got made, the worse they got. But the studio did show to be creative with their large back catalogue of iconic characters until at least the turn of the millennium. Say what you will about Hollow Man, but having Paul Verhoeven remake The Invisible Man as an erotic thriller was a ballsy move from the studio. It's sad to see they've lost their touch, churning dreck like Van Helsing and the new Wolf Man nowadays. But still, the old monster movies of Universal should be watched and appreciated by film fans still today.