Smoke and Flesh (1968)

From http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/b3/cb/fd/b3cbfdeef9fc1281e49fc28ad742b668.jpg

Dir. Joseph Mangine

Ah, to dig further into an area of cinema that you truly know little of. Full of surprises, films that you don't know the basics of fully let alone the true obscurities like Smoke and Flesh. This film nicely connects itself between counter culture, sexploitation and softcore, drug films and American underground cinema of the time. What I wasn't expecting was how good this film is technically and altogether knowing that these films are usually scrappier, the reason many are loved. Usually these films are campy fun, but this knocked my socks off in what I got and for what it is. The first few images included freeze frames of urban city bustle, a female voiceover describing how life stops in the day in work hours, a clock heard ticking away, already setting up a veneer of gloss and boldness unexpected for the film as I started viewing it. Night comes, and you are hit by sumptuous black-and-white photography as a masked motorbiker travels on the inner city streets of New York City. It intercuts with an old, balding man and his younger, sexy wife planning about a party. Then the film is set-up - a night at said party held by the youth of the day, with liberal pot smoking and lots of intermingling between the genders. The motorbiker is the friend of the house owner/party planner whose brought the weed with him. The old man is actually a professor who with his wife go to these sorts of parties frequently to bask in the lifestyle. From here, this is less of a plot driven film but almost a slice of life drama that is as sexploitation as you can get.

From http://www.dvddrive-in.com/images/a-d/aliceacid8.jpg

Plot strands do take place. The professor, sexually impotent, allows his wife to sleep with any man she wants as long as he can watch and take photos, spotting an appropriate hunk at the party. People hook up and mingle. The closest to a dramatic plot twist happens in the last quarter when the party thrower Turk's girlfriend is followed home by a group of hoodlums, one who feels she cock-blocked him from her and leads to the potential for a fight taking place at the party. Aside from this, the film just follows various characters partying. Almost plotless, but for seventy minutes, it's enjoyable to merely follow the characters get high and become intimate. It's certainly softcore for the large amount of sex and female nudity, which won't disappoint most, but its casual, realistic, aimless tone adding a greater amount of entertainment in how it nearly veers into the experimental "talky" dramas of the time. A matter-of-fact breeziness, far more legitimately respectable in content because of it while being much more erotic and fun at the same time. For one of the first, and maybe only times, someone can write that they've seen a game of strip Scalextric, and I can add that it never comes off as one of the embarrassing examples of these modified versions that exists in films - I've been reminded of Strip Ouija board of Terror Toons (2002) the same day I was writing this review for example. The romance between a white guy and a black girl, the later probably the most beautiful of the female cast and charismatic, starts with them having the munchies for a giant, and I mean giant, tub of ice cream, and ends with kinky shenanigans with whipped cream, probably one of the most sexually arousing scenes I've seen to be completely honest, something to applaud when usually you piss yourself in laughter at the stereotypical  tackiness of softcore cinema and its abuse of saxophones. While made to titillate, the film is easy going from every perspective seen, adding a great deal.

From http://pics.imcdb.org/290/smokeflesh53.jpg

Also despite being a counter culture film of its time, it never comes off as dated, naive hippy/hipster preaching of a better life. Little is made of anyone having fun like this, and even the plot with the old professor, while getting a little weird with the extreme close-ups of his teeth, is seen as bringing him and his wife closer, the third person getting as much out of it too. The marijuana smoking is not languished over, never celebrated or criticised, only the waste of an entire roll of  kitchen paper, as its thrown in the bin for the cardboard tub to be used as the inhaler, being offensive. There is an LSD freakout, done with visual manipulation and extreme close-ups of eyes, that's closer to typical drug films, with the actor shouting maniacally as it fully kicks in, spiked into their drink in case the worse happens as a semblance of a plot takes place, but aside from it this is far from Reefer Madness (1936) as you can get.  That plot transition, where the hoodlums introduced separately very early on end up in the house, takes on more of the vibe of an exploitation film, threat to the girlfriend of Turk and to anyone else involved. Aside from it though, the film is so laid back it never mattered that it hadn't the narrative of most sexploitation films, the right length to avoid dragging and too interesting to dwindle. And the content in it, minor details are inherently memorable. Perspectives from inside a fish tank. Shots on a motorbike in a tunnel. The strip Scalextric scene where the loser of each race has to take off a piece of clothing.

From http://www.dvddrive-in.com/images/a-d/aliceacid11.jpg

The film's great visual quality, such a jaw dropping surprise to see in an exploitation film like it with a limited budget, furthers the virtues of it, alongside the late sixties psychedelic rock score that gets you in the mood. It never takes itself seriously, nor makes excuses for itself existing. The result is just cool in tone. Unfortunately its director only made one other film. Surprisingly its Neon Maniacs (1986), one of the odder creations from the eighties horror boom, far from the best but still a hell of a lot of entertainment. Together with this, its shows someone in Joseph Mangine who would've contributed some very entertaining and different films to cult cinema if he had done more work as a director. The end of Smoke and Flesh finishes with returning back to daytime, back to work and the clock back up and running, ticking away. A snapshot of an interesting night that just happened to be part of an exploitation film. A memorable viewing experience.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - None

Very little in the film gets close to being unconventional in tone. Even the LSD freakout, while great, stays in the conventions of freaky strobing effects.

Personal Opinion

Again, another dip into American grindhouse cinema for this month that has been rewarding. For any flaws this might have, it nonetheless makes up for them, providing a snapshot of a very alternative slice of American cinema waiting to be scrutinised. It was a joy just to have my expectations surpassed from a b-movie like this.

From http://www.imcdb.org/i529509.jpg

Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965)

From http://images.moviepostershop.com/bad-girls-go-to-hell-movie-poster-1965-1020199011.jpg

Dir. Doris Wishman

I've seen a few grindhouse films, but this one enforces the fact that concepts of political correctness, good taste and conventional strands of filmmaking are jettisoned in their desire to exploit. The fact that these original films have not really been made available over here in the UK - not the irony or throwback of Grindhouse (2007) which plays within modern day attitudes and aesthetics, or those easy to market to this mindset - made viewing this one, despite being very chaste, very shocking in its content. Once I explain the plot, it's up to you whether you'll see the film. A young wife goes out of her flat to dispose of the garbage, only to be raped by the predatory janitor in the corridor stairway and blackmailed by him for more sexual favours. This doesn't last long as she kills him with an ashtray to the head, fleeing to New York to avoid murder charges under a false name, going door to door for places to live. Unfortunately every male she encounters is a sexual predator. Belts hit flesh, and in a film meant to titillate as well as be nasty, the result lingers on these tribulations like a voyeur. This is my first encounter with a "roughie", softcore American b-films with an added domination theme over women, literally, being roughed up. Immediately, this is not something you get around our British waters on DVD, and is something that, unless you've already dived into the muddy waters of exploitation cinema, is still surprising to see even if you've seen some of the most violent and nasty films of now. And what adds to this surprise is how such a film is: a) very chaste baring this lurid content, with no actual nudity baring tease and occasionally female buttocks, and b) is one of the most well know, by title at least, films of a female director.

From http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/bad_girls_go_to_hell.jpg

A cheapie production, nice looking, from the mid-sixties, but the name Doris Wishman holds a lot of significance in the area of American exploitation cinema. The Queen of American Sexploitation in fact, worshipped by John Waters, one of the few women in this morally dubious field to have a large, prolific career, and someone, despite the expectations of the content, was adding her own idiosyncrasies to films like this because she was self taught, produced many of her own films, and likely had the personality to get these films made. (I have only seen this and the infamous A Night to Dismember (1983), but the later showed how determined she was as a person, making a film regardless when most of the original footage shot was destroyed by a disgruntled lab technician even if it meant creating a strange, collaged and post-synched oddity). Bad Girls Go To Hell is the sort of film that would make feminists uncomfortable, and for a male like me who likes exploitation cinema but is concerned with progressive attitudes to feel a moral quandary, regardless of what one thinks of the technical quality of the film. Yet the fact that Wishman, a woman, made this film inherently complicates the issue of what gender is,  what "Political correctness" in films is to actual, real life attitudes one may have. It puts a spanner in the arguments, and surprisingly, causes one to ask more serious questions about gender and sexual politics than a morose, serious drama on the subject. Not bad considering, were it not for my concerns in these areas, the film is in the end complete and utter camp, juggling an unbelievably nihilistic view of life, even if it's meant to titillate, with a naive kitsch.

From http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgw2toQABV1qc42blo1_500.jpg

Only over sixty minutes long, shot in stark black and white, its set around cramped rooms and brief glimpses of the streets of New York, against shop windows, taxis, from the ground looking at peoples' feet. Scored to soft jazz, rooms decorated in chique objects and furniture, the layering of a silly, fun film. Were it not for the fact I've only seen my first of the "roughies" in this, that silliness would've been more pronounced from the beginning. As an exploitation film, its narratively simple, fragments tentatively put together actually, the morals against scuzzy thrills, cutting to the chase with its content rather than tease it out. For its low budget, its well made and has a tone to it more realistic than other films in that it feels lived it, and shot in real buildings and exteriors. Editing occasionally becomes very jagged for moments of chaos and nastiness. The dialogue is also post-synched, an eeriness matched by the charmingly wooden acting of some of the cast. The cast itself is far removed for the Barbie dolls and Ken dolls of softcore, women who look like women, real figure, people who'd meet on the street, even compared to now, and men who look grizzled and drink whiskey all night.

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If there is a defence for the morality of the film, it's the fact that the men, including married ones, are not seen in a good light for the most part at all, lust filled potential rapists with no redeeming value to them whatsoever. There is a stereotypical predatory lesbian character, but the resolution of that segment has the problem being the protagonist not being able to want to continue the relationship and leaving despite the comfortable living in the room, where love and doing handstands in her underwear claiming she's an acrobat would be how she'd spend her time with the older, body stocking wearing haired woman. If it wasn't for the scenes of undressing that are tantalising, the scuzzy thrills aren't actually sexual, the roughie aspects just sordid.  Everything surrounding this content, while not of good taste, is pretty inexplicit and tame compared to the films of now. It's just the roughie content is probably a greater taboo now because of how the complicate history of gender politics have developed over the many decades. The film eventually takes on an (intentional/unintentional?) meaning in that our protagonist, completely innocent, murdering the janitor by accident in self defence, is stuck in a continuing nightmare where no one is on her side. A cyclical one where it continues with no escape. It's an odd mix, this nihilistic tone with very lurid, jarring content that would've been innocuous and naive to anyone else but me who've viewed more of these films and been desensitized. As a film being viewed from a view of abstract cinema, it certainly qualifies. The contrasting tonal differences between it all, mixing the camp with material that would be scorned over, although the contrast is as much the result of me, as a person, being wrapped up in cotton wool from these sleazy genre movies. Distant acting, drifting along the scenes aimlessly as hot jazz plays over the images. A goofiness that is met with a very negative view of humanity that somehow exists in a low budget film like this. It perfectly sums up what an American grindhouse film is as I watch more of them from this era.

From http://cinenthusiast.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/bad-girls-go-to-hell.png

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/Non): Low

The shock of seeing a film with material that is more controversial now adds a personal effect on it, an oddity, in complete honesty, from a very different time because of how it's made and acts. It's shocking in ideas, but there's not a single bared breast in the film, adding a peculiar paradoxical air to it. The obvious kitsch, the suave furniture choices particularly, adds to this. It's from an era a company, Something Weird, entirely devoted themselves to, the transition between the fifties b-movies to the trangressions of the seventies, trashy cinema on scratched celluloid that yet feels innocent at the same time.

Personal Rating

Is there virtue in the film or something to defend? Possibly if one avoids lapsing into hypocrisy. To know the difference between a lurid film and misogyny taking place in real life. Baring in mind the campiness of the whole work.  And that a woman who controlled most of her career, in an area few women were involved with, made this film. The result makes it much more complicated morally, fascinating as a cult film. The film as entertainment? Rough, no clear direction in the way it's going, utterly compelling as scrappy exploitation. The Queen of American Sexploitation making an enticing offer to view her other films after this one, and somehow managing to bring out real questions about my social politics rather than an apparently serious work. That's a great way to get further interest in Doris Wishman if any.

The Mansion of Madness (1973)

From http://images.moviepostershop.com/
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Dir. Juan López Moctezuma

"The lunatics have taken over the asylum..." sung Fun Boys Three, in an entirely different context, but still appropriate for this Mexican film inspired by the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Far from spoiling the twist of the narrative, where the patients of a mental hospital overturn the doctors and become dominant, it's very obvious something will be amiss just from the title, or the alternative one Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, and that when the protagonist, a journalist sent to research the innovative techniques of a psychological hospital, arrives, along with his travelling friends, he's met by armed guards in period French military uniform aiming muskets at them. When Dr. Maillard (Claudio Brook), who runs the hospital, appears, he looks like Napoleon in his choice of dress, vaguely looking like Peter O'Toole and with his English voice dubbing reminiscent of Criswell. From there the journalist is taken on a tour of the asylum, of patients building shrines to the "Electric Sphinx", a chicken man, and the dungeon deep below, increasingly clear this Dr. Maillard is insane. The friends, a woman and another doctor, find themselves jumped upon by inmates while trying to leave.

From http://goregirl.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/mansion-of-madness2.png

If there's an immense flaw with The Mansion of Madness, it's that the film is too dependent on a generic plot structure and narrative despite moments that live up to the madness of the title. The narrative could be found in any horror film, baring occasional details, and really doesn't more into interesting tangents with it. Some of the asylum is seen in tantalising detail, then the truth is revealed and the film immediately jumps to its final act without more to linger on. It's briefly discussed that the inmates have invented a new religion represented by a spiral, and that they've developed an isolated society from the rest of the world, to live freely and create machines that don't work but keep minds occupied, something that would've been great to see more up close than it was. It evokes Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), the infamous Terou Ishii film that culminates in the island of the titular individuals, a film which is head and shoulders above this one in terms of the delirious content and how vast it is within it. An alternative take on the same story is found in Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy (2005), which makes the ending of The Mansion of Madness, where good wins out, very conservative and flat, Svankmajer's adding a more subversive and questioning tone to his. In The Mansion of Madness's flaws is that it sticks to conventions for how it turns out to be too much. A shame, because chunks of it are vastly more interesting than my review may paint the whole film as.

From http://bcmh.cryptonarrative.com/wp-content/uploads/
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On the plus side, this film is what happens when a work is directed by a person with considerable talent visually. Depth of field, front and background, is something you'll notice in this film, in terms of content onscreen, when Dr. Maillard takes the journalist around many parts of the hospital. Large expansive sets with many extras, and despite the crippling nature of the plot structure, the content can break past it, as suggested in a flash-forward into the narrative, shown in the opening credits, done in bleeding, psychedelic reds. A naked woman riding a horse. People huddled up in glass boxes in perfect rows. The chicken man, who acts like a chicken, living in a room full of poultry. Extras in the background or the middle of the screen acting out in exaggerated frenzies. Plainly surreal images are depicted, such as a female character, naked, laid on an alter outside in the wilderness covered in grapes and various fruits surrounding her form. There is a giddy, unhinged nature to the entire proceedings, everything immediately off-centre of normality from the beginning, fed by the heightened voice acting in the English dub. The result is entertaining.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image12/madmansion2.jpg

The regret is that this content is not supported by an interesting narrative through line. Still entertaining, but far from the reputation the director is said to have with a film called Alucarda (1977), a movie that is even more enticing now because it suggests director Moctezuma had less compromise in that one instead of here. That is not to say The Mansion of Madness has no virtue. It looks interesting, is rewarding for what it is, but there was more that could've been done and its left to be somewhat standard as a cult film goes. Sticking to a conventional structure like it does tends to make it very difficult to say a lot about it because convention lacks real interest for me as entertainment or art. I would have to write about the entire narrative progression, which is not appropriate to avoid spoilers, because there's more after the obvious twist that takes place, but also because narrative cinema should be about the effects of the narratives, not the mere mechanics of said narrative. Moments suggest what could've been. The niece of the apparent doctor performing an ancient dance in a trance only for something to arise that gives the truth away. The centrepiece of the dark, underground dungeon, with direct Christian imagery and stark use of shadows over the central image that shows the atmosphere and effect this film could've had in a better form. The hordes of extras acting in elaborate pockets of insanity, or pulling along railed carts or, in one case, merely passing by with sheep following her, character being built of the denizens as a mass. Giving the journalist a heart attack by moving a rope ladder while he's still on it or banding together for a debauched celebration scored by distinct, off-kilter salon music on string instruments. The regret is furthered in that this isn't made a backbone to the film, but like a Hammer film, merely a outside threat to normality while time passes in the film length that should've been used better. It was good while it lasted, but I can't write as enthusiastically as I hoped for. It's worse when, viewing it, Horrors of Malformed Men and Lunacy came to mind, not helping its case either.  It feels merely like an interesting time waster.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Ultimately the dependence on a conventional narrative arch can effect a film in terms of tone and content. Very few, and rare, films can be very conventional in story arch but be utterly strange in what you see. Usually, despite the conventions of the script its moving to, films that are strange or unwordly in tone have cracks in the veneer of conventions, a metaphor apt in the concept of a haunted house which looks like any other but has pockets, no matter how small, that look out of place from anything else. It's obvious that if a film is not going to stray, even a little, from convention, such pockets won't be found, and in many cases, which The Mansion of Madness thankfully avoids, the results are unbelievable dull and morose to sit through. The mansion itself however has been cleaned of most of its alien underbelly sadly baring a few cobwebs and naked men in glass boxes.

Personal Opinion:

Fun while it lasted. Memorable? I'll see if it comes to mind in the months that past. In a year. Many years. The difficult in given a final opinion is the problem of how unreliable first viewings can be and how the viewer's mind, even if not writing amateur blog reviews, can be fickly to an extreme and jump between opinions like they're lovesick. I did expect more from The Mansion of Madness, seeing eye widening clips of it in an awesome YouTube compilation of surreal films from the birth of cinema to now, a guide to what to see if ever there was one, those brief glimpses at something spectacular stuck with aspects that were merely derivative. From the films that have been officially released to English speaking film fans, it leaves Alucada, the director's more famous film, the female film to this male one, to give Juan López Moctezuma another shot at impressing me. It would be great to add a Mexican entry or two to this blog catalogue, so I really don't want my encounter(s) with Moctezuma, depending on what happens, to be damp disappointments.

From https://24.media.tumblr.com/fc6ad1a4a8d7fbab50ec3b338a95a88b/
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Cowards Bend The Knees (Or The Blue Hands) (2003)

From http://images.moviepostershop.com/
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Dir. Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin is an experimental director yet he is also not stereotypically avant-garde. Experimental because, despite being very narrative obsessed, he depicts them in a trademark style completely his own with a willingness to be absurd. To have films in monochrome, or specific colour styles, to having intertitles instead of any spoken dialogue. To draw on obsessions and material almost dreamt of and not soften to seem conventionally rational to the viewer. To purposely undercut narrative conventions with non-sequiturs, absurdity, and to use his own allegory of the grandmother who tells you a bedtime story, to look at the grandmother as well as be swept up in the story she tells. He's not a stereotypical avant-garde director not because of his narrative driven work but how he depicts them. Because his influences, while dismissed as curiosities in some quarters, and fodder to cineastes and the curious in the other, were once populist work in most cases. Silent films, melodramas, hyper realistic soap opera. He has a grounded worldview with the lofty, where the normal meets the fantastical, including the autobiographical. Humour. Perversity. Very kinky sexuality because sex is real, kinky and sells. Lots of ice hockey references. He is what avant-garde filmmaking, if you were to put him in that box, should be in its true form, upholding the desire to break conventions, but for the open minded, it turns out that he does so by breaking every stereotype of a pretentious artist to pieces with his deadpan personality and making diverse, creative films.

From http://pixhst.com/avaxhome/2008-02-01/cbkspot2mu.jpg

Originally an installation piece made more candid as a peepshow exhibition, of chapter chunks like the ten the sixty minute epic is split into, Cowards Bend The Knees has Maddin drag Maddin through dirt. Literally, as Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), an ice hockey player, leaves his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) to die of an illegal abortion to lust after Meta (Melissa Dionisio), the daughter of Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle), owner of a hair dressers that's a bordello at night. Meta wants revenge on her mother and her younger lover Shaky (David Stuart Evans), the captain of the ice hockey team, for murdering her father, loving to her and his hands blue because of the dyes used in his hairdressing work. Planning to have her later father's persevered hands grafted onto Maddin, only for trick ones to be given to him by Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin), she tempts him into murdering her mother and Shaky with the promise of her body, his hands seemingly possessed by the ghost of her father despite being his original ones painted blue. Veronica, despite dying, comes back as a ghost and is having a relationship with Maddin Sr. (Victor Cowie), Guy's father. Somehow, in only sixty minutes, this perverse, blackly humoured work juggles between intentionally falling off the rails and being tied up in a cohesive structure. Maddin deliberately goes against the notion that any event has to be the same as the rest of a story's structure, letting the events dictate the structure instead, including those that go into the completely absurd and goes against conventional rationalisation. In terms of "conventional" rationalisation, that which is would soften some of the material to not feel like a film is jarring between different moods and tone. Maddin goes against this but keeps the appearance of the film in one consistency in style. The content exists in its own logic, that of lurid and unpredictable cinema from a yesteryear. A yesteryear that doesn't exist and comes from its own plane of reality. In cinematic terms, Cowards Bend The Knees is not your ordinary murder revenge story, particularly when it's the tale of a murder-revenge with ice hockey museums in the lofts of the ice rink full of wax mannequins of dead hockey player, out-of-left-field sexual practices not even seen in some porn, and blue filter, in a black and white film, to show the majesty of blue hands.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhczFkl8OnmEjMd7MXak6T1OTHvj6hK_vK8SU1W9ahsza3Vb7idnR1Hn52fKAgY131YQQUqub3VUHLWKC2swdgUkV5z4mAC2GWdLEQQsD0DvcczTCQcojPc3KfuBaRlsjJCALvpzZtWAIo/s1600/Screen+shot+2014-03-03+at+18.32.48.png

His work is an ode.  Not only to the film making techniques of the past, arcane rather than nostalgia, contacting once dead cinematic practices, which went further to the director currently holding recorded séances for lost films, but also an ode to the lack of pristine gloss. The concept of viewing films scratched up and with jittering frames. It's sad to see old silent films battered, and we prefer them restored and almost brand new, but there is something irresistible to seeing them with scratches too, textures that makes them unique compared to other films. Cowards Bend The Knees, the images shown through a circle surrounded by complete black, of its peepshow origins and very old silent films, is made to look like a blurred and damaged film print Maddin discovered in a basement of a Canadian home, sordid hyper stylised thrills that would've gotten the scissors on it by censors back in granddad's day, frames moving and the actors at points distorted into figures of pure grain as they are clear and beautiful in portraying these exaggerated archetypes. Entirely silent, with intertitles, it charges ahead with its content in quick, sharply edited images clearly learnt from Soviet propaganda cinema. The content itself manages to be shocking and surprising, yet this style wrangles it all together into one cohesive whole.

From https://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/FilmAssets/000000/00000048/scaled/4819.jpg

What does it say as well about the director when he names his less-than-great protagonist after himself? It may be fantastical in tone, but the ecstatic truth, to quote Werner Herzog, is that in doing so, clearly Maddin admits with Maddin the character - spineless, a coward, a killer - failings he might have encountered in himself or other men subconsciously shown through the scenarios shown onscreen. Then there are the autobiographical aspects. Maddin's mother in the role of Meta's blind grandmother. That he grew up with ice hockey, his father coaching an actual hockey team, as well as hairdressing as an aunt ran such a business. He would later go on to make the poignant and funny My Winnipeg (2007) which directly examined his titular Canadian homeland and his life, but in placing his own memories within content like this with its killer hands, Elektra based influences and perversions, it's far from undermining it but using the absurd and perverse content to amplify and examine the effect these reminiscences. By way of dreams and the logic of a b-movie cum German Expressionist influence horror movies. Bringing a subconscious confession to this film, even through psychotronic, erotic murder melodrama and literary meanings, is still bringing the personal level to the work and having a greater truth as a result. It helps as well Maddin has no censoring of the content in his head. Gender balancing in the poking of the male body as well as the female, which actually does happen when a large pare of buttocks is confused for a doorbell. Scrutinising masculinity even to the point of a large close-up of Maddin Sr's penis as he used a urinal, with Maddin Jr next to him using it too, it eventually becomes a film that views the failings of masculinity in such a hyper exaggerated work. Maddin Jr.'s lust leads to Veronica being abandoned on the abortion table, left with a corset wearing, drunk surgeon, who looks like Udo Kier's down-and-out cousin, and is why he's forced into murdering someone with what he believes are no longer his own hands. Starting with sperm, shown in a magnifying glass, to be ice hockey players, the idea of sexually charged, macho men is given a ridiculous light. Eventually its revealed that Maddin's abandonment of Veronica, hopelessly chasing after her ghost who'd rather be with his father, and falling for Meta, is as much cowardice for not wanting to be a father as it is lustful stupidity. The film doesn't end happily, which is felt because the director still takes the material deathly serious in tone, but still looks at what happens with a gallows humour laughing at the stupidity of the protagonist for sealing his own fate. That he's named and based on his own creator Guy Maddin suggest the director/artist is open to admitting that he's done the same mistakes as his character has even if not as serious, an honesty one wishes was more common and done more in such an intentionally bizarre work.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): HIGH

Fed on Sergei Eisenstein levels of editing, including the use of multiple replays of moments and even Eisenstein's montage of attractions, images out of narrative reality to emphasis metaphors, and the horror films of the black-and-white era, all of which seen in the most cut-up, cobbled back together film prints possible, yet beautifully lit and shown, Cowards Bend The Knees is an impressive work. The result as well is undoubtedly his vision and one you'd never see in any other context, the fact that you can recognise his cinematic influences if you've studied pre-1950s cinema showing how powerful and effective the use of classic techniques are. The closest thing to Guy Maddin's work was La Antena (2007), a Argentine silent film homage which went further into science fiction pastiche. Heavily dependent on CGI to depict its world, and very much made with modern sensibilities, rather than a director purposely restricting the material they can use and getting the mood of a period mindset for the content, it's no way near the film Maddin's work is and is a very different creation as a result. Maddin's vision is perplexing in equal measure to being intentionally playful, making sure the content is taken seriously whether it's absurd to the audience or intentionally shocking. In this regard, this will not be the last time Maddin's mix of the down-to-earth with the camp and fantastical will likely hit the highest rating for this scale. And that's not even considering that short films can be added as well as feature length work, which Maddin has made as many if more of than his feature work.

Personal Opinion

Wonderful to return to. Now with a greater relish for the perverse but also personal in filmmaking, the divisive and the unexpected too, Cowards Bend The Knees works perfectly more so now for me, the border between the completely engaging story to its heightened sixty length, full of bombastic content, suggesting that in a better world, Maddin would've done a David Lynch and briefly been welcomed into the mainstream of cinema without compromising his vision. Like Lynch, he'd had probably made a film that completely divided audiences and thrown him further into the unconventional and "difficult", but it would've been great to see. In a less than perfect world, Maddin still exists, which I won't complain about, only in the lack of his work available to us the British on DVD. He is a director where the auteurist theory is fully proven, although I don't think the late Andrew Sarris's writings have involved any auteur who'd have a fisting scene as Maddin does and nonetheless make it giggle inducing and tongue in cheek. Again, as above, Maddin is bond to appear in this blog more than once, and may have to start picking out furniture as he is more than likely going to live in the highest rankings of the abstract scale.

Videotape Swapshop Review: Devil's Wedding Night, The (1973)

From http://www.impawards.com/1973/
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Dir(s). Luigi Batzella (and Joe D'Amato)

Since I've transferred my attentions to this new blog, my previous work of adding links to my Videotape Swapshop reviews will continue here, particularly as many of the films I cover on that site fit the context for this one. Starting off, here is some Gothic Italian horror - The Devil's Wedding Night Review . The advantage this new blog's format can have is that I can add additional material to my existing review considering whether the films qualify under the Abstract tag or not. So for example, going from the film covered here...

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Pretty conventional horror film. Some unconventional moments take place as the evil entity the protagonists encounter plays with their minds, but nothing truly surreal.

Personal Opinion

As in all of these cases, I would want the reader of this to follow the link to the original review. I thought it was fun for what it was, and you can find out why following the link above. Controversially, I find something like The Devil's Wedding Night far more interesting than my country's own Hammer horror films for the reasons stated in that original review, a subject for another time if Hammer films are brought up again on this blog.

White of the Eye (1986)

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Dir. Donald Cammell

The films I've found myself obsessing over now are those that cannot be easily defined - by genre and/or tone. They can have clear things to them that can simply categorise them, but the content is far more complicated. They are usually more profound, regardless of being lurid genre films, because they impact you with more potent takes on political messages, allegories or depicting anything from sex to violence. They don't need an actual political message - as mere entertainment or provocation, they can still touch uncomfortable or misused topics through mere cinematic pleasure (and displeasure). White of the Eye is a deliberately peculiar film. At odds with its standardised serial killer plot - someone killing women in violent rituals - by only having two murder scenes shown and by concerning itself with Paul White (David Keith), a sound system technician who is made a potential suspect by the police, and his wife Joan White (Cathy Moriarty), whose romantic view of him is slowly turning. Considering its made by The Cannon Group - a company which undercut its American Ninjas with films like this - a film that is mostly a drama of a family unit falling to pieces turned into a psychodrama of the most elliptical and unsettling of ways is something very different that what cinema usually is.

Again, most of this film could be the same as a made-for-TV weepy about a family falling down. The wife suspects her husband is having an affair, which is the case, and she had once had a violent breakup with her first lover Mike Desantos (Alan Rosenberg) over him, complicated when Desantos appears again. A daughter is between them all who could be harmed by this. What the film does however around this content is it this with a serial killer story, using perversion of such a story in a way much more intellectually rewarding while leaving me on edge for the whole film. Filmed in the eighties - prosperity, ridiculous perms on both genders' heads, slasher films - it misses the real meat to merely say it's a critique on American ideology when it can go further. With his co-writer China Cammell, warping a novel he hated into this adaptation, it nonetheless reminds the viewer, more powerfully,  that in our apparent bliss, regardless of era and nationality, regardless of how much our kitchens cost, people can be wonderful human beings but also psychopathic. Flaws can be found and grow if not treated. That you can literally find the worse nightmare in your bathroom, in a scene that I'm never going to get out of my mind involving a thread. The landscape outside is wonderful, from dunes to vast plains, but the city the film is set in, no matter how big it is, is swallowed up by it. The worst in human beings can exist in the apparent complacency of public, commercial life.

Very little violence is shown. The most gore shed, reminiscent of Dario Agrento's Tenebrae (1982) and his fixation for pale, white walls and blood, is a tomato sauce being splattered, the change still vile in suggestion of the brutality shown. A reminder of Peeping Tom (1960) that horrifies. Everything is ready to break into said violence without explicit mutilation. Paul White is not what he's expected to be, his wife showing her rage openly when it feels he has betrayed her, and Mike Desantos was violent before, released from jail and with apparent mental illness, talking about a TV in his head. Flashbacks to the original relationships between the three bleeds into the current day, slowly complicating and showing the grim reality of the situation. And then the film goes insane on purpose. All these years, I thought a character actually strapped hotdogs to themselves thinking they were dynamite. Actually seeing the scenes, they are dynamite, but the heightened tone the film enters means they still reminded me of hotdogs. In fact it adds to the terror of that final quarter this quirk of mine, absurd but horrifying in how far it goes. It takes the delirious tone of a Andrzej Żuławski film, like Possession (1981), where the organised chaos of the tone that White of the Eye develops into still conveys the most animalist in people even if the content is silly on paper. The acting has a rawness throughout, worth praising especially from Moriarty, turning into a madden frenzy when that finale takes place. When logical reality is replaced with the notion of heightened emotions affecting that reality, it has an immensely powerful effect. The result, far from ridiculous in an undermining way, is adding to the disturbing nature of what takes place.

The film switches through time periods with a fluidity that blurs them together. The editing, a trademark in Cammell's small filmography, breaks scenes and moments to lingering pieces when needed. Cammell, in both scenes of violence and out of them, examines objects in extreme close-ups, adding a layer that makes them new. A police officer's teeth in close-up, using floss, no connection to the narrative, is made alien, new, to the viewer as well as unsettle by seeing any wire, regardless of being dental, against human anatomy. The film looks like a glossy eighties Cannon Group film, going against the content inside. Night scenes are intentionally grainy and vague, creating a tone to even love scenes by the fire where it's all not it seems. The flashback tale is intentionally washed out in tone. The music by Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason adds as well to the film, atmospheric and adding a ghostly edge. The result, on paper, feels like a film anyone could make. The result, onscreen, called White of the Eye isn't. Its leaves with the aftershock of what has happened. As an expression of the failures of the family unit, it uses its distortion to startle.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): MEDIUM

Cammell still follows a narrative style you find in many films closely, but how he does so is drastically different. It's as much a credit to all the people on and offscreen who worked on it too in how the film effects you as it does. Tragically not able to build a filmography beyond four films and an unfinished short, Cammell's safest chance at the highest ranking is his famous co-directed film with Nicolas Roeg....Performance (1970).

Personal Opinion

Shell shock. I've waited years to see White of the Eye, and it was even more than I hoped for. Praise for Arrow Video for releasing it finally in the UK in early 2014. I have to calm my nerves after seeing it now.

Cinema of the Abstract

This blog is written by a fan of cinema and the medium of motion picture art who is frustrated with reading websites and even official publications dedicated to ‘weird’ and ‘para’ cinema that, for all their applaudable dedication and level of detail, felt conservative and lackadaisical in complete contradiction to the films they were reviewing and making notes on. I am merely a film fan whose university degree was history and American Studies, not psychology, philosophy or sociology. I did well in Film Studies in college, but didn't go further than it. Nonetheless, I find myself baffled that the people wanting to write about this sort of area of cinema, combining art house cinema like Jean-Luc Godard with the likes of anime etc., with some wonderful, inspired exceptions, do not try to understand the difficult films they lambast, even if afterwards they still hated them, and instead cry "the Emperor has no clothes on", and do the equivalent of running into a brick wall instead of looking for a way over it.

 

This is not the first time I have done this. The ashes of an older blog Region Incognito - [link here] - have been used for this one, based on a project I had on a film site, with the same title and concept, but taken further and entirely devoted to. The original guidelines will be built on, broken down in areas and taken further than before. Like before, I want to understand my reactions to films, good and bad, and ask why. I'm sick of trying to write reviews like professional critics do, because they don't work for me. Instead I'm more concerned with asking about the point of this kind of cinema. It's also fed by an increasing disinterest in mainstream but also acclaimed cinema. Honestly, a work with the widest popularity possible, to be curt, tends to be overspread in content to be able to do this. The problem exists in art house cinemas as it does for multiplexes. Not all the greatest works will be able to be added onto here. Those that can have one purpose, a new one to fix the mistake I made before. I am not looking for the peculiar anymore, but the unconventional that breaks away from staled convention. To paraphrase dialogue from Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1914), which would gladly qualify for a similar project dedicated to literature, you can dress an actress as a milkmaid, and someone who has no humanity would start blubbering when seeing them act, only to not care for humanity aside from themselves again after the performance is over. None of the films in this, even the badly made ones with no political message, can be easily batted to the side and ignored.

Personal Guidelines

The cinema that I would include is that which evoke the following words…

·         Coarse

·         Distorted

·         Disturbing

·         Embracing

·         Meditative

·         Phantasmagoria

·         Provocative

·         Oneiric/Dream-like

·         Raw

·         Still

·         Surreal

·         Taboo Breaking

·         Time Manipulating

·         Transcendental

·         Uncanny

·         Unconventional

·         Unease

·         Weird

For my criteria, it is not - 

• Extreme gore and rubber prosthetic effects. Someone's head coming off is not enough, it's how you use it.

• Fantasy, science fiction, horror or animation, as a concept or a genre, on a whole. Having space ships or anthropomorphic animals is not enough for me to have the effect I am looking for. The most distinct or analysed films in these areas, such as the classic Looney Tunes cartoons or horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, have their own unique logics to them that make them stand out above the rest.

• Ironic filmmaking. I.e. pathologically lazy and insincere filmmaking.

• Zany. It's just annoying.

What I have added to the criteria has expanded from before however. It now includes

• Animated and "handmade" cinema. The creation of representations of our thoughts is inherently an unconventional and more powerful idea than per usual live action filmmaking.

• Avant-garde and experimental cinema, which, in most cases, is inherently abstract in trying to break from convention.

• Films that subvert social norms. For example, a film that celebrates and eroticises pansexual bodies, because society is still dictated by heterosexual, patriarchal norms, is going to have an effect on some viewers because, even if they are very progressive, they may not encounter it as much as the conservative norms, producing surprise. Anything from feminist essay cinema to pornography is capable of having this effect, to flip social customs upside down or demolish them.

• Films or works that try to have strange premises or feel ‘unconventional’ in plot or in technical production. Weird for the sake of weird doesn't necessarily work, and usually fails miserably. But those that take a real risk, even for their creators own amusements, is something special.

• Follies. Attempts at introduction controversial politics or spectacles in cinema that fail are alien to conventional cinema because the expectations are vastly different from the results, creating a gap that drastically effects the film. So, depending on the films themselves, if I ever see them, the infamous adaptations of Atlas Shrugged might, just maybe, in a hopeful world, get their foot in the door regardless of my own politics.

• Taboo and Transgressive cinema. Unlike before, when this was not included, I realise now that the breaking of taboos and good taste is just as effecting in the ways I am talking about because of how the individual viewer reacts to the material. But mere attempts at shock is not enough to qualify, because a film that tries too hard to shock me just disgusts me in its laziness and offensiveness, not because its leaving scars in my thoughts. So there is a line that still needs to be kept with these films.

• True depictions of reality. Not "realistic" cinema, but those that are reality shown, like the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, which feel abstract paradoxically because we are not shown reality in documentaries and biopics, only very edited down works from Michael Moore to a Lincoln biopic that removes the contradictions and the unexpected things that happen to real people.

• Works with unique traits. A softcore franchise over many films long and has the same continuity, rather than starting afresh, is inherently different from conventional cinema. Film serials, now gone in cinema, are the same. The genre blending, 3 hour epics of Bollywood could apply, depending on the specific films, as can five hour avant-garde cinema.

Films
I will be strict on what I include on this list and write about even if the quantity of entries suddenly expands rapidly. I will not be lazy about why I choose certain choices and include reasons in the notes. If anyone wants to make an argument for certain films to be added, I encourage you to try and influence me. Aside from that, any work is liable for inclusion…

- All nations of cinema
- All eras
- All genres and types

…provided the rules I’ve placed for myself are kept to. Also I will include any work that is a motion picture creation. TV series, short films, music videos, even commercials, if it fits the criteria outlined, it will be treated with as much consideration as the other entries.

Scoring

There will be only a basic system of ratings for each entry. No complicated scoring systems, as what I write will be of more importance. It is…

Abstract Rating: High/Medium/Low

High (Completely Unique) – Works which play with mood, structure, music, style, content or as many factors existent in film/motion art as possible on purpose or by accident. They are films which create their own rules for themselves, even if they rift on the conventions of genre or areas within cinema’s canon such as cinéma vérité, and manage to be alien and yet familiar at the same time. They certainly are almost impossible to forget afterwards even if you hate them.

Potential Examples – Satantango and the later films of Bela Tarr; Once Upon A Time In The West; Guy Maddin

Medium  (Break Conventions) – Those that saddle the border line between films of genre and ‘non-abstract’ cinema but manipulate their own forms to the point that, cutting through the flowery sentences, pull the rug from under viewers’ feet expecting the films they’ve seen before being repeated. They are not on the level of the ‘High’ entries, whose abstractness is fully embraced, but the ‘Medium’ entries still push themselves to unexpected areas, and that doesn’t even mention the unintentional creations that manage to dumbfound the viewer by their accidents and mishaps.

Potential Examples – Tarkovsky’s Solaris; The Holy Mountain; Riddles of the Sphinx

Low (Manipulate Conventions) = Films that only exhibit some traits of the ideas I am exploring with this list. They are genre films, they are possibly experimental, they can be any type of film, but many ‘weird’ and ‘abstract’ films and work will not be added to the list while these have. They may be great films, terrible films, but the ones that managed to make my biased list for clear reasons above the rest.

Potential Examples – A Chinese Ghost Story; Ichi the Killer; Lady In The Lake

There will be entries for films that don't make the cut but nearly did. I will not however review films that don't really have a chance even to get here, and life is too short for every boring, uninspired one that I cannot have passion to explain why I didn't include them. I admit personal opinion will dictate my choices, but many of these films have fans and acclaims for good reason.

And with this, I hope to start this project again, a new and better blog than before, with a goal to strive for rather than wander aimlessly in my writing, which no matter how endless it is, still has a distance in sight which I can learn from. Let the entries be added...