Bloody Vikings

Vikings has very rarely gotten their due in cinema history, which I find it a bit odd. Even though a complex Nordic culture with interesting gods and a drive for both exploration and pillaging in early Medieval settings might seem like prone for exciting historical adventure movies, more often than not, something goes awry with these. Anyway, let's take a look at several of the more interesting ones.

Erik the Viking (UK/Sweden 1989)
Dir. Terry Jones

Freed from obligations from Monty Python, director Jones was free to do whatever he wanted. His interests in medieval history, comedy and children's books met with an adaptation of his own book. He should have aimed the film more obviously for children. As it is now, the film has problems with its tone, as there are parts where there's too few jokes to be a comedy, and parts where the adventure doesn't advance at all. As a visualist or a mythic world-builder, Jones is clearly secondary to Terry Gilliam and doesn't quite get how to work his more fantastic ideas into the story properly.

The worst thing about it is that the comedy itself is often lacking. The movie opens with some rape humor which certainly hasn't aged well. Jones seemed to have made the same mistake as Graham Chapman with Yellowbeard thinking that rape is a good source of laughs. It does introduce us to the timid lead character, but it is a bit of a cheap way to get sympathy when he has performance issues during a pillaging event, and have him turn on some of the more rapey vikings.

Tim Robbins does do a good job, and there are some actual good laughs to be had from Tim McInnery's childish viking complaining about sitting arrangements to John Cleese's cheery sociopath order people getting flayed. The contrast between the awfulness of the violence and people might have worked better today as a kind of parody of Game of Thrones -like sadist entertainment. Jones himself pops as a clueless leader of a lost continent. I admit I have a soft spot for the film and have seen it a lot more times than its actual qualities would warrant.

★★1/2

Erik the Conqueror (Gli invasori, Italy/France 1961)
Dir. Mario Bava

Bava's historically inaccurate film sees Vikings clash against the Brits in the 8th century. This is contrasted by having one of orphaned twin boys being raised by the Brits and the other by Vikings. A fate of countries laying on the schism between siblings of course has been seen used from the Book of Moses to New Gods by Jack Kirby. It is a reasonably epic, if not terribly original way of presenting conflict.

As is often the case in the director's works, visually it is purely stunning, with elaborate color lights and psychedelia. There are many Technicolor epics with a lot bigger budgets that never were this inventive in their visuals. The film was mostly shot in a studio, but several battles are also shot on location with natural light and the landscapes a Medieval Nordic adventure warrants. These scenes bring a little contrast, but are just as good-looking, with merciless natural powers highligting the brutality of the warriors fighting on the same canvas.

But Cameron Mitchell is not a very interesting leading man, and in the film his voice is in fact dubbed. I like him better on 80's trash movies phoning it in while visibly drunk.


★★★ 1/2

Knives of the Avenger (I coltelli del vendicatore, Italy 1966)
Dir. Mario Bava



Bava did another viking picture, with his star Cameron Mitchell also attached. As the audience's tastes have swithed from large epics to smaller, more spaghetti western -like character studies, this one is more akin a western set in the viking era. The obvious comparison is 1953's Shane from which the movie's plot is pilfered. A disgraced viking warrior becomes a protector of a woman and her child when a group of more violent warriors come calling for his past mistakes. If the previous film was about brotherhood, this one circles again around family, with its themes finding redemption in adopted fatherhood.

The film's look is decidedly more down-to-earth in tones and settings than his previous viking film. Nevertheless the gloomy athmosphere is strong and Bava has a knack for keeping things interesting with some wild camera angles and a nice sense of misé-en-scene. A lot of the action is set on limited sets, darkly-lit farmhouses, taverns and even caves. The pacing is quite slow and one does get a bit bored in the meantime, whereas Erik moved along quite swiftly.

I feel Mitchell has a better role here, having him act more of a stone-faced loner with undelying guilt and growing warmth, is more suited to his talents, as he manages to give his character an air of mystery. In action scenes, though Bava can still play gritty and dirty even if its not quite the blood bath that would warrant such a title in my opinion.

★★★

Viking (Russia, 2016)
Dir. Andrei Kravchuk



With several popular tv series set on either the viking era (Vikings) or a mythical age quite similar to it (Game of Thrones), there has been several small-budget films that have tried to capture that same audience. Some of them are laughable (like 2014's Northmen - a Viking Saga), and many of them have a similar boring gray scale, predictably boring plots and nothing interesting to say. From modern viking films I remember Nicolas Wingding Refn's Valhalla Rising to at least try a little as compared to most of them.

I feel the Russian Viking is a case in point. I would have wanted to like this a lot more since it took seven years to make, and expected more of a Russian flavour to the story, as opposed to just do the same thing everyone else is. It sells itself for being historically accurate, which is itself a very dubious claim, and doesn't really do the boring story any favours. In many parts it is confusing and goes off in rails when compromised would have at least made the plotline somewhat understandable. Plus, it's nearly 2,5 hours long so there's an extra hour of suffering through this when compared to most other films on this post.

The title in and of itself is false marketing. While it takes place roughly in the Viking era, it is more concerned with the goings-on in Russian Novgorod in Prince Vladimir's reign, his brother, the warlord Kievan Rus and the Slavonic wars during that era. The virtues of the film are firstly to generate interest in Russian history, and secondly of its (very expensive-looking) battle scenes, which are in parts very impressive looking. If you really want to see the movie, read up on history before viewing, so the logic between characters making decisions and the context of many actions are more easily understood.

★★

The Raven Flies (Hrafninn flýgur, Iceland/Sweden 1984)
Dir. Hrafn Gunnlaugsson

My favorite Viking film comes from Iceland, which I feel is the best-suited country in the world to tackle the history, since most of the country's occupants are descendants anyway. I wouldn't call this any truer to history, though, even if more care than usual is made to the Medieval costumes and armors. The film is basically a spaghetti western revenge story, with tiny ponies instead of horses, and I love the film for it.

The film captures the dark and gloomy nature of Nordic countries in a way a film like Knives of the Avenger attempted, but didn't quite feel genuine. Life is hard, cheap, brutal and over in an instant. Blood feuds reign from generation to generation. Yet the film concerns ways of trying to break a never-ending cycle of violence. It sees a Celtic underdog prevail by using his wits and knowledge of viking's superstitions against his enemies. With plenty of close-up shots and ugly glances.

The genuinety from the actual settings makes this feel a lot more down-to-earth and less exoticized than most viking movies. It pays a lot to show the real Icelandic shore line and the right kind of houses so it doesn't feel like a general Hollywood epic. One can practically feel the cold wind and the dread of the upcoming winter.

The film spawned a number of sequels, none of which I have sadly seen.

★★★★

Three laughs: Street Trash

 
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 watvh 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.

Three laughs case #13:
Street Trash (USA, 1987)
Dir. Jim Muro

Some trash films are meant to be funny, but are so nasty and unapogetic in their approach that most people just think of them being vile. I don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" as such, but there certainly are some movies that might give a bit of a bad impression of you if you go around proclaiming your love for them. Especially today.

Well, I believe thet you can recognize something has problematic ideas and still enjoy it for its other aspects, especially when it comes to humor. Just try to not apply that dirty worldview to your own everyday life. Case in point is 80's trash classic Street Trash, which is certainly dark enough for my sense of humor. But I would never mistake that it is in any way a fair and reasonable portrayal of the homeless and underpriveleged and neither should anyone.

Maybe you could go deeper and see that it carnevalizes some stereotypes and general tropes attached to the lowest of the low. I wouldn't call the film a very fine satire, but it certainly takes some of the 80's ideas about poor people being trash to its extremes. The film depicts a bum's life as a struggle to live on a postapocalyptic sense in a very 80's trash movie style. There are hierarchies and power struggles even when living in a city dump and they are even more dog-eat-dog than you would find in the rest of the society. It is cartoonish and gory and totally ridiculous and that is enough for me to really enjoy watching it.

TRIGGER WARNING That being said, there's some sexual violence against women in the movie that is not funny in the slightest and that I can't condone.

Three laughs:

1. A lot of the beginning of the movie sees a new batch of Viper bottles arrive at a suburban liquor store and a stolen bottle switch owners from bum to bum. Finally when one of them takes a swig at a port-a-potty, we get the  money shot of him melting into a screaming pile of blue goo.

2. A really culturally insensitive, yet a funny scene comes when a psychotic Vietnam veteran dreams of vampiric Southeast Asian monsters stalk him in the night. The hysteria of the overplaying is a good fit for the genuine creepiness, both of the scene itself and of the mindset of one of the movie's many very unlikable characters.

3. The most immature laugh of the movie comes when an overweight wino gets his johnson cut off and it gets thrown around from bum to bum in a game of keep-away. The best part is when the film cuts to the shots of the dick flying through a clear blue sky.

Three laughs: Starcrash

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 watvh 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.

Three Laughs Case #12:
Starcrash (Italy, 1979)
Director: Luigi Cozzi (as Lewis Coates)

I was surprised I had never written anything about this Star Wars ripoff in this blog, since I have loved it for years and years. Luigi Cozzi is a director very prone for the Three laughs -treatment, since many of his movies are bursting with weird ideas and their so-so realization. I guess he would have wanted to make adventure and peplum films like Jason and the Argonauts, to which there is an obvious "tribute" or two in this film as well.

The lovely Caroline Munro plays Stella Star, a skimpily-clad intergalactic outlaw, that gets caught up in a major war between good and evil. If Star is a gender-swapped Han Solo, then the equivalent of Princess Leia is played by none other than David Hasselhoff as a missing space prince whose absence kicks off the plot. Some of the other most memorable of the film's characters include a whiny chauvenistic Southern police robot L and Maniac actor Joe Spinell as the latex-clad and overplaying baddie Zarth Arn. Many of the characters flip their allegiances multiple times.

The film had a rocky and sped-up production and as such, it's good to marvel how good-looking the miniatures and sets are. They serve their daydream-like quality. I think the film works on multiple levels. If you showed this to a small child, they might not realize how cheesy the acting is and how incomprehensible the plot. They would be just excited that Cozzi throws a weird scenario after another, even if at points the slow miniature shots last for quite a bit too long.



Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. They somehow tricked Christopher Plummer into starring as the Emperor of the Galaxy in this. His performance is something to behold. I can't tell if he's drunk or just holding the entire production in huge contempt. He does chew the scenery, and I really can't tell if he's trying his hardest or just amusing himself until he gets his paycheck. But he does deliver lines such as: "You know, my son, I wouldn't be Emperor of the Galaxy if I didn't have some powers at my disposal. Imperial Battleship, halt the flow of time!"

2. As the characters bumble out of the fire and into the frying pan, it's impossible not to laugh when L exclaims "Look, Amazons on horseback!"  Their horses have been painted pink and have some sort of lizard masks on them. What follows is a rather amazing girl-on-amazons fight scene. The film also has giant robots, killer cavemen and sword-fighting stop motion statues.

3. One revealation shows that one character can see into the future. When asked why he didn't help out with this ability before, he answers, "You would've tried to change the future. And changing the future is against the law!" Can't argue with that.

Make Mine Mondo

I was thinking I should do a good old-fashioned movie post every month or so. Mostly just to spread word of movies, usually obscure or anything I have a few words I like to share. I try to keep it casual, though, so as not to taint my writing with too many expectations, as I usually do.

This weekend I saw some special films courtesy of the National Film Archive. The most precious of these was a very rare film never before seen on Finnish cinemas, and probably only screened in Italy before this. The films were of the notorious "mondo" genre, an Italian offshoot of documentaries which feature sensationalist subjects and usually short vignettes. Many scenes have been staged and the truth value of these mondos is notoriously low.

Dove non é peccato ("The land without sin", 1969)
Director: Antonio Colantuoni

These were the reasons why it's been such an incredible thing to actually find a mondo film depicting Finland from 50 years ago. Us Finns are superbly curious on what anyone else thinks of us, and since Sweden got its own propaganda piece (about more of which later) it's been popular among Finnish movie fans to think about what this sort of thing could actually be like.

As it turns out, as a mondo it's not particularly nasty, sensational or moralizing. Plenty of what is depicted has since become obsolete so it's a lot like watching historical documents home. The exception, of course is the Italian voiceover, in both male and female voices which tells us what to think about stuff we are seeing. It also has a patronizing, even racist outlook on Finnish people and cultures. For example, when talking about the Winter War with Russia, the camera lingers on a coat of arms depicting a caveman with a mallet. The narrator suspects Finns can't handle weather changes in one place, and in one depicts -25 degrees celsius to be an abnormally warm spring weather. And when some customs seeming strange to Italians are pondered on the voiceover to "perhaps be the legacy of habits from the far eastern plains of Mongolia". In other parts Finnish customs are mocked for having such a short history (probably compared to Italy, which has better historical records).

The film is particularly interested in Finnish drinking customs, having a long scene of students celebrating May Day with a strong punch, and women's place in the society. One expects plenty of nudity in these sensation movies, and thus it's a bit of a surprise that this part is quite minimized to a single (obvious) group sauna scene. The most ridiculous scene is four young women chasing a man through the countryside with the attempt of gang-raping him, before he dives into a lake to get away. This seems like a carbon-copy of the depiction of Polynesians and their mating habits in Mondo Cane, which probably is as staged and far from truth in there as well.

Since all the interviews are dubbed, one must assume that the words being put in the Finns' mouths are totally invented as well. For film fans, it is fun to see the film expert Peter von Bagh as a young man doing work in his Civil Service. Animal cruelty depicted is reserved to some seals getting shot, and some reindeer getting castrated.

★★ 1/2

Mondo Cane (1961)
Directors: Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi

The film that started the entire genre is the documentary by the trio of notorious filmmakers, that would wreack cinematic havock through much of the 1960's. For mondos were very sensationalistic, and contained a lot of racist and misogynistic messages right from the start. On the other hand, they belonged to the time when the world was still a large and wonderful place where everyone didn't have any idea on how people actually lived and what customs they had around the world. It has a sort of humanistic curiosity towards these, though it comes from a place of ignorance and projected superiority.

The film's central thesis is related to dogs. Much like the poor pupper in the opening scene, we are being dragged around by Jacopetti & co. and thrown to the mercy of a lot of threatening situations. The filmmakers say that the habits toward dogs are a good window whith which to see the differences in our cultures. In America, rich fools pay good money to bury their pets to their own cemetary. Meanwhile, in China, dog meat is a delicacy entire restaurants revolve around.

The messages, such as there are, are heavy-handed and play the viewer's emotions like a cheap fiddle. To document what nuclear waste has done to the ecosystems in Bikini Atoll, the film shows a lengthy scene of sea turtles losing their sense of direction and heading toward dy land after laying eggs, instead of the ocean. It's difficult to watch the dying struggles, but it drives the message across, whether its actually true or not. Plenty of filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and David Attenborough have since then resorted to this kind of "nature's alarm call" footage.

In the name of antropology, the filmmakers also go around the world showing plenty of tits & ass. I mentioned before on how the Polynesians are depicted. Likewise, the camera lingers on female bodies in places such as Papua, Reeperbahn and gives silly sound effects to the bouncing flesh of larger-sized women in American weight loss institute's various machines. The Chinese are depicted particularly viciously racist, and the most tasteless scene is probably smuggling a camera to a house in Singapore where the terminally ill and elderly are prepared to die.

Even though its hard not to find the film in generally poor taste and borderline pornographic in its racist hunt for ethnographic violence, it is not without its cinematic merits. The editing, cinematography and musical score (by the great Riz Ortolani) in collaboration frequently also give out scenes of eerie beauty and serenity. It does create a picture of a large, wonderful world, even though the means of which it does so were highly controversial even in its own heyday.

★★★

Mondo Cane 2 (1963)
Dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi

As the mondo format went on, it gave out the way to ever more staged scenes. The more "fake" these documentaries are, the less a modern viewer has to take account on how vicious the racist motifs behind the camera might be. Thus, I prefer the second Mondo Cane, which is also a sort of answer to the controversial parts of the first one.

It even begins with a similar dog pound, only this time the dogs have been silenced (Jacopetti & co. seem to be very much like the modern populists that resort to shouting they are being silenced whenever they are being criticised). For animal lovers, they give out a disgusting scene of a vetinary operation with all the gore and guts audiences hungered to see.

The sequel is more interested in the festivities and other performances of togetherness around the world. Not all of them are very probable or truely depicted, with the Italian Festival of Hard Heads is particularly bizarre. It does touch upon some truly shocking areas such as African slave trade, which was the subject Jacopetti & Prosperi later took and made some of their most notorious films about.

As said, I enjoy the inventiveness of the obviously staged scenes a lot more. The final scene of the movie features a concert which is done by slapping men of various heights to the face. The dramatic milking of the close-ups whenever the hand hits faces marks another one of case in point that these movies were not done by clueless filmmakers, but highly skilled professionals. With a quite sick sense of humour to boot.

★★★ 1/2

Women of the World (Donna del mundo, 1963)

Dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi

On the same year as the Mondo Cane sequel, the directors also had another film come out that focused on the women of the world. The reason why they were able to go around the world so quickly was that they also reused some footage shot for television stations. This film was supposed to have been made in collaboration with a journalistic series by Oriana Fallaci, but they couldn't come into terms with the filmmakers. It shows how it could have benefited the film a lot to have a female point of view instead of a bunch of peeping toms from a macho culture.

The film takes all it can out of the "madonna and whore" -themed bipolarity, and exoticizes anything non-white. Though it has a theme of breaking traditional gender roles, it tries to give out proof that this dichtonomy is still valid. Thus, female israeli soldiers are shown to be camera-hungry and vain, and a female priest from Sweden to be the only one of her kind.

The most disgusting parts include secretly shooting footage from prostitutes or a mother freed from her child's murder charges going about her day. The most exciting parts come near the end with a lady collecting shells in a war-torn shooting range. One would not go as far as to think these are in any way truthful, but in certain parts, they are somewhat interesting peeoping holes into how at the start of the sexual revolution, certain things seemed.

★★

Sweden: Heaven and Hell (Svezia, inferno e paradiso, 1969)
Dir. Luigi Scattini

Lastly, we'll get to the sensational mondo our western neighbour Sweden got, and we can once again be jealous. Not that the film gives out a vibe that Sweden is better, but since director Scattini's style of string moralizing and borderline mad misanthropia is so hilarious when applied to as harmless a country as Sweden. It's a totally hilarious movie, if one can find the funny side of it.

In the swinging sixties', Sweden was world-renowned for its liberal attitudes toward sexual liberation. The aim of this film is to show how all this progress is bad and good-hearted catholics can shun it all together. Of course, the moral heart isn't so pure as to avoid ogling young women's bodies in a sauna scene, for instance. The film tries hard to find stuff worth moralizing, but basically people just go about their day like usual, and the narrator has got to spit out the venom. A lot of footage and explanation thereof is bizarrely out of sync, and for someone from the Northern Europe who can easily see how much the film is putting you on.

Viewing today, the contempt shot at relatively innocents things such as a night club with women dancing with each other or sex education for children is so dated it seems like a wonder this used to be a problem for people at all. The film works as a viewpoint on how far the general attitudes have gotten in 50 years. Even the worst Conservatives nowadays don't seem to be as crazy as Scattini. In wagging its finger at footage of consuming pornography, the film is at its most hypocritical double standards, since itself is a piece of softcore for raincoatted men in the first place.

The film is also famous of its soundtrack. Piero Umiliani's song "Mah Nà Mah Nà" became a children's show favorite after it was used in a classic skit in The Muppet Show. The music has a sort of playful side which is more or less the exact opposite on what the actual movies is trying to say. It's been a long time that European countries could be exoticized by other European countries. It seems preposterous that even back in the day, people could be fooled by such obviously staged scenes such as blind orphans diving for stolen property in the bay.

★ or ★★★★★

The Road Movie (Doroga, 2016)
Director (editor): Dmitrii Kalashnikov

Are there any modern mondos? One could say that viral video footage from certain parts of the world can create a similar exoticized view. Case in point is Russia. Some of the footage shot through the cameras attached to the windshield of every car in the country are so wild, they were put together for a documentary film.

The film doesn't give context, or moralize. It has a lot of real traffic accidents, sometimes with such destruction it looks like it's from a video game. One can't know if someone actually got hurt. Likewise, it shows Russian prostitution, criminal gangs and mentally issued citizens in less than flattering light. If you think about the morality of all this, it soon becomes clear that this is not really any better than the mondo movies.

But what it is is constantly surprising, weird and funny as all hell. I don't know if it deepens prejudices toward Russia, or gives them a little more understanding. It is a huge country with endless roads, some horrible weather conditions and a certain mindet attached to these. That's why it gives out footage like this. And some truly terrible, terrible drivers.

★★★★

Three laughs: ETV - Extraterrestrial Visitors

 It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of themselves, and it is an even better pleasure to find some trash that keeps surprising you than watching most "quality" films. 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.


Three laughs Case #11:
ETV - Extraterrestrial Visitors (Los nuevos extraterrestres, 1983)
Director: Juan Piquer Simón

One of my favorite trashy directors is the incredible Spanish hack Juan Piquer Simón. He started out by making an actually pretty good and creepy Exorcist rip-off Escalofrío, which opened doors for him to copy out whatever films were popular at the time and put his own twist to them. I've talked about the Dick Randall -produced slasher classic Pieces before. Coming hot off its heels is the ET-copying Extraterrestrial Visitors.

I think Simón started out by trying to do a horror version of Alien and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Too bad an even bigger Spielberg film came out in the middle of the shoot and the producers demanded that Simón switch out his plans and make a family movie that cashes in on the lovable little alien, ET, and his friendship with a suburban little boy.

That's why this film is such a mishmash of two different flavours. It's pretty hilarious that the aliens are at the same time judo-chopping ALFs and magic-powered slumberland friends for every boy of a certain age. The film has two sub-plots, and the other features a group of teenagers in the woods getting killed one by one. The budget has got to be minimal, they didn't even have the dough to pay for blue lenses for night-time scenes, or sound effects to point out it's supposed to be stormy outside. Mostly there's just smog. Lots and lots of smoke.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. As an apparent meteor falls into a forest, we have three dumb-as-rocks hunters examining the wreckage. One of them finds a batch of glowing pink eggs in a cave. He proceeds to smash them with a big stick for no reason. But then he hears the soft growl of an off-sceen creature that apparently kills him. Rather than being a blood-curdling roar, the sound is more akin the Nurse Bear from BoJack Horseman waking from a nap. The weak sounds these aliens make never ceases to be hilarious to me during the movie.

2. Once we see the creatures about 40 minutes into the slow-as-glacier movie, they are basically midgets in fur suits with ridiculous dickfaced and pinheaded masks. One of them wanders to a campfire with the burly poachers, who try to capture the creature first by luring it closer with a charred rabbit's leg and then throwing a net over it and shooting it with a crossbow. It turns out that such mortal instruments have no effect on these Extraterrestrial Visitors. The hunters are done for.

3. But of course only the adult aliens are vicious. One hatches from a child's egg and turns out to be a deadeyed wannabe-ALF, and is named Trumpy by the ridiculously naive kid. To project its friendship, the alien proceeds to show off its magic powers by solving a puzzle in stop motion, making shoes dance in an astonishingly inane display and enhancing the kid's spyglass to show archive footage of African lions.