Thursday 30 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Wild Zero (1999)

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/
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Dir. Tetsuro Takeuchi

Returning to this means returning back to about, say, eighteen or so, at college and discovering cult cinema in between study. I'm not nostalgic for the period. I can't remember exactly what the viewing experiences were like because, honestly except the films that stuck with me, positively and negatively, I was more concerned with the discover of films rather then how, and with getting my A-levels done. I was also a miserable sod in hindsight who hated a lot of films that I now love, and a few of the films I saw on old DVD released have never been re-released, now out-of-print and not easy to even rent. Wild Zero is in fact a film I've never returned to until now, and I appreciate second hand stores more so than any nostalgia for viewing experiences because barring those which had importance, the films themselves are of greater concern then where I acquired a copy from and what the mood was like viewing them. When Blockbusters could have some decent gems hidden in their second hand bins. When Blockbusters actually existed...anyway, a meteorite hits Japan, or what is perceived to be a meteorite as its established for viewers to be a UFO. Around the crash site in a tiny Japanese town in the countryside are pulled in various individuals, all of which regret being there when the UFO has led to a zombie outbreak taking place. Amongst the individuals is protagonist Ace (Masashi Endô), a huge fan of the (real life) band Guitar Wolf who, after a prologue scene, is given a whistle to call upon them if things turn bad for him. There's Tobio (Kwancharu Shitichai), a potential love interest with more to her then meets the eyes, a trio who regret wanting to see the "meteorite" crash site, a female arms dealer and the criminals who wanted to purchase equipment from her, and a man in golden hotpants called Captain (Makoto Inamiya), a sleazy music manager who wants the heads of former employees Guitar Wolf. Guitar Wolf themselves - the titular Guitar Wolf on vocals and lead guitar, and Bass and Drum Wolf, march in to help deal with the zombie threat when beckoned and look cool. Unfortunately I've never seen KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park (1978), so I can't really make a joke about it in comparison to this. That and the fact that along with American greasers, I suspect The Ramones may have been an inspiration for the Japanese rock band instead.

From http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/ojrVPeTonELLNjCuyi3kNvlZxZo.jpg
Of importance for me viewing this film again is this belongs to the small but pronounced sub-genre of Japanese zombie films. The Japanese cremate their dead, so the concept of the zombie would be difficult to do in terms of logic unless aliens, curses or bio weaponry is involved, which places the films into a hive of self referencing other films by proxy unless a very different take was done on the concept. They've only become common within the Millennium or so, over live action and anime, and it wouldn't be coincidence that the obsession with them grew as zombies became a pop culture phenomenon in the West too, George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1985) and his zombie films in general leading to this massive fad of everything brain eating and decayed. As is the case with manga and anime High School of the Dead (2010), it doesn't jar against titillation either for the Japanese entries. The Japanese films I've seen since this nearly started as a fad have had a distinct personality to them, although it's now apparent, revisiting this one, that a lot of Japanese pop culture what've I've encountered from the Millennium, or at least the late 2000s, has been created by individuals who are film geeks like in the West and also possess the concept of irony. A lot of the films I've seen are by people who have been directly referencing films like Romero's or The Evil Dead (1981) in some way or form, which Wild Zero does at one point too. In a peculiar circumstance this film seems to predict what would happen in Japanese cult cinema over the next ten years or more, made in 1999, the Sushi Typhoon movies evoked watching this that seem to have ran with what this one had in mind in terms of tone and presentation. The ironic films of such studio seemed to replaced the working directors of before, and Wild Zero is a predecessor of this movement, becoming the cult films for English speaking countries from Nippon.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o5-KOm3C2U0/T_vJdkqA_ZI/
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It's difficult to elaborate on the plot of Wild Zero because it's an incredible mess. There are moments and a plot thread or two that exist - Ace needing to overcome the zombies and hang-ups around Tobio's secret through the virtue of rock 'n' roll, Captain wanting revenge on Guitar Wolf for missing fingers and a wounded pride after a prologue shootout - but mostly its inconsistent and rambles on. This is the sort of film that teaches me that complete randomness is not actually surreal or unconventional - one cannot create a weird sensation through being deliberately trying to be weird. It's not just because its irritating instead, but also the paradox of surrealism as an idea - it suggests complete automatic randomness, but to actually work it needs a controlled logic. It's got to make sense to be senseless, which is why a truly weird film has a meaning to allow the weirdness to exist, or is bouncing off the rubber walls and creating a meaning from the gibberish that has an external logic to it. No idea is too random in a perfect weird film because someone has done it on purpose or, if it was an accident, they've let it be absorbed into the content or been forced to only have one take or stuck with a producer's son whose wooden acting. Wild Zero is aiming for the later clearly but is being deliberate, trying to catch lightning in a bottle, and doesn't have the logic or the madness to work. It's not trying to be deliberately bad, thank God, but its trying to be intentionally dumb returning to it, cool but also being laughably silly at itself. It's a film, as a result, that does things just because, not for a payoff that it'll milk for humour, cool scenes or something memorable, but just because in an inconsistent way. The zombies are just there, which is an immediate symbol of this fatal flaw, barring to chew down on characters who aren't given a real reason to be of interest. The aliens are there to explain the zombies but don't play an important part as the villains of the piece, just cheap CGI. Zombies just chew up a female characters clothes while she's having a shower just for the sake of her wearing a tartan one piece costume for the rest of the film, but the film never really uses the sexy tough female character its introduced at all or isn't actually interest in sex and nudity of any kind either after that scene. There is a difference between self indulgence and empty indulgence when the later means a ridiculous event may happens but is never registered and ran with.

From http://www.mortado.com/mortado/movies/wild_zero/zero-02.jpg
The jokey tone makes the film suffer more, not taking itself seriously to the point that you don't care about any of it at all. The result is actors mucking around, which would've fun while filming it, but without context of that fun, the merriment in context of being on the film set, makes the film hollow. Wild Zero, in its speedy tone, could've worked if you were able to savour the contents. The goofy nature of the characters against the situation taking place. The music by itself, not in terms of a score. The fact, the thing I remembered the most from the film, that an incredibly progressive love story exists in the centre of it just for the hell of it with an irrelevance, Guitar Wolf appearing as Ace's conscious to belittle him for not following the path of true rock 'n' roll, and not make a maudlin, patronising song and dance about it. But the film doesn't stretch and take advantage of these virtues and best aspects. Instead its ADD, hyperactive filmmaking all about quirkiness, incredibly loud and all over the place visually. Audibly too, the songs in the score good by themselves but not with the images; as a heavy metal fan, it's the same problem with heavy metal in most films in that the music is too fast to properly synch with even a quick paced sequence in a film fully, creative an audio-visual sludge expect for the rare cases a film maker has managed to get the synch of image and music right. The entirety of it baring bright spots - the fake CGI headshots, the screaming characters, the abrupt plot additions - is in fact a sludge, never synching up into something consistent either, without a clear concise tone to it to be entertainingly ridiculous. Instead its tiring, the climactic battle abrupt with no payoff or amusement. You don't get satisfaction with the film like you might've if a Takashi Miike of the 1999-2000 period was directing it.

From https://scumcinema.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wild-zero-2.jpg
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Wild Zero would qualify as a weird film for others. For me, it's not. There is nothing unconventional about any of the content in this in the truest sense. It may be strange when you first encounter it, but to be truly unconventional is not just stick things together that look intentionally "weird" but the subtle, minor details that catch you off guard. It's a further problem because of the whole issue surrounding the "weird Japan" mentality a lot of fans of Japanese pop culture, including myself, are in danger of encouraging. For everything that is legitimately bizarre that has come from Japan, even having never stepped onto the country's soil, we should take a pinch of salt and realise that there is normalacy, people going to work every day like in the West, and country villages and small towns with populations that mostly don't care about such strange material, nor even know of the existence of low budget zombie films like Wild Zero. The film never feels like it would baffle those who've encountered the truly strange in cinema either. This film, and I could so easily get into snobbery with this statement, is surface level weirdness which isn't any deeper, defined by surreal by someone who hasn't read what surrealism actually means.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kKF0Vxzm5KE/TfO8yUWMCII
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A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
No, because disappointingly, it's turned out to be the stereotype of the film that I am bored with - cult films all about laughing at their own silliness and without any meat to them. If you get used to a lot of odd, weird films, watching a lot as I have, not a professional expert on this subject, not someone who claims to be better and know more than anyone, but having watched so many and read up on appropriate subjects connected to this topic, this isn't remotely going to be on the list. Sadly films ran further with this in Japanese cult cinema, not just Sushi Typhoon, and I've been there watching movies that I have not found any real entertainment in baring an occasional chuckle.  

Wednesday 29 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Devil Story (1985)

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UK7Y7SEv_lc/UJ_N9_qAJNI/
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Director: Bernard Launois
Screenplay: Bernard Launois
Cast: Véronique Renaud, Marcel Portier, Catherine Day, Nicole Desailly, Christian Paumelle, Pascal Simon

[April 2016 Update]: Due to the unfortunate end of the website Videotape Swapshop, I'll have to replace certain links that I had to reviews for the site with the whole article, unedited but possibly with footnotes if need be. For these reviews, which were written differently, I'll have to create a Frankenstein-like hybrid that will be structurally ugly but is the only way to get the whole of the necessary content together in one page.]

After viewing Devil Story, it'll be possible for a staunch hater of Jean Rollin to appreciate his work. Even Zombie Lake (1981). That's not to dismiss Devil Story - I can no longer say horrible things about films, including those I hate, for their literal existence, knowing more of how difficult it is to make films, and Devil Story was a complete and utterly baffling hoot in hindsight. But you're going to scratch your head wondering what the hell is going on upon viewing it. It's impossible to create a cohesive narrative outline, so instead I'll give you all a sketch of events that take place. A malformed man - who strangely looks like American comedian Steve Wright after a bad day and inexplicably in a Nazi uniform jacket - is killing people and being hostile to camping tents, but after ten minutes or so, this is pushed to the side, the man a side character in a different plot with his mother. A couple end up stuck in a countryside mansion where things are amiss. You know things are amiss because Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach plays whenever something sinister is afoot; an instantly recognisable piece, it's also modest in telling you that things are going to get spooky.

The man of the house suggests the sinister happenings are to blame on a black horse, standing in a field and trying to blow it's head off with a shotgun, with unlimited shells and standing out there all night to turn it to glue. The woman of the couple wanders off in the night, meeting Steve Wright's unfortunate doppelganger, evoking Zombie Lake for me in his uniform jacket and Devil Story being a French film, striking fear in others for these reason that remind them of Zombie Lake. He tries to kill her along with his mother as they are in the middle of shenanigans in a graveyard with their late sister/daughter. A mummy appears. A back-story of a shipwrecked boat and lost treasure is brought up earlier in the running time. The mummy brings the Steve Wright lookalike's dead sister back from the grave, played by the same actress who plays the main female character, but in a bed sheet and giant oversized wig. The man of the mansion keeps missing the horse, which we see through various rapidly edited shots galloping around in multiple directions. The mummy walks slowly to an unknown destination - evoking John Landis in the TV documentary The Perfect Scary Movie (2005)1 wanting a character in a mummy film to shout "Walk away! Walk away!" whenever one is in danger of the Egyptian dead. Apparently the mummy is the bringer of pure evil, for unknown reasons, but the man is far more concerned with lining the horse with shotgun lead, which we don't see an onscreen conclusion of. The shipwrecked boat suddenly appears, thus signalling a tentative final act to a film with borders onto a narrative rather than actually have one. The film is seventy two minutes long, a very obscure genre film from the continent that is a series of un-connecting content. It certainly has the material within it for a film of interest - killers, a mummy, a creepy mansion, a graveyard, a fight between a horse and the Steve Wright lookalike where the horse lands blows Riki-Oh would be proud of - but the combination is so intangential altogether that it's amazing Devil Story actually exists in its form. Even as a film from the eighties, it's far more vague in its content than arty horror films, and far from dismissing the film, liking it actually, it's still something I scrutinise with my brow raised high in puzzlement.

How does one review hammy dubbing acting? How does the same minimalist style of Jean Rollin, about mood, become this odd, vague mass of mere scenes? Why isn't the bonus materials for a French DVD - as even an obscurity like this that will divide many gets a cult around it, logically in its home of origin - translated and made available so I can find out how the film came to be and what the content means? It's clearly in the tone of dream logic horror film, but it doesn't have the sense and mood of a dream, rather the sense instead of floating through various events that merely happen. Bernard Launois prolongs inconsequential moments for other films for lengthy minutes. You will see a lot of long moments of characters groaning in pain and losing blood, even when they're already dead, the film cutting back and forth to the groaning and bleeding as another moment takes place around it. The gore is really a centre piece, though it feels closer to the Herschell Gordon Lewis school of organs plopping out or pieces dangling off. Around it are these lengthy scenes of time passing and off juxtapositions taking place that create a misshapen combination between the two sides of the film's personality. Openly, I wonder what the heck I've seen, and see that this will a very unexpected film for many to sit through, including people who watch films of this ilk.

Devil Story has an ending that repeats to the beginning, a Möbius strip, and it's not a spoiler because it will baffle many further. Large parts of Devil Story are repetitious. Or characters fumbling around or trying to attack each other. Or realising they've used all the spare gasoline to touch someone ablaze. There is a lot of memorable moments in the film's favour. Also the entire perplexing nature of the film is memorable in itself. And I ask myself, viewing a film like this, just how further and obscurer I can get into European horror cinema. France's horror output is more prolifically known for within the last decade, and through Jean Rollin and Jess Franco's occasional co-productions. There's a great film called Baby Blood (1990) too. But there was little I knew of aside from these originally when I was getting into European cult cinema, and now knowing of Devil Story's existence and various films scattered throughout the country's cinema sporadically, I wonder what low budget oddities of a French type are hidden online or on a multi region DVD player somewhere else. I can only look at Devil Story, writing about it here, with perplexity and admiration for the director and everyone involved for doing something I never expected to see.

From http://media.paperblog.fr/i/588/5885433/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
Just because a film is random and has no plot doesn't mean it would get on this list.  They could be tiresome instead. This is really an issue with films that try to be deliberately atonal and don't care about a logic to any of its content, thus leading to many films that, as I view them, I want to gouge my eyes out with a pencil. This is different for how compelling random it is with an internal logic of its own, a series of events that just happen and never becomes tedious but more compelling in its ridiculous lack of meaning to me. It's speaking in some form but I cannot understand what it's saying It's Jean Rollin if he lost his mind, which is amazing to think exists.

From http://www.spoutnik.info/uploads/1382803290_devil-story--3--copie-5.jpg
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1 A Channel 4 documentary I grew up with that, even if it was pretty glib in tone, did do a nice job in trying to catalogue horror cinema over the decades from Dracula (1931) to Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Its effect on me having recorded it off TV and rewatching it multiple times in terms of being a horror fan cannot be ignored. 

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Dracula in İstanbul (1953)

From http://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/
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(aka. Drakula Istanbul'da)
Dir. Mehmet Muhtar

Noticing a gap in the decades covered, all there was left were two. The 1910s and early cinema since its existence, which is a vast area that does need to be uncovered for myself, knowing well how much of it has unfortunately vanished never to be seen again, and how much is not available from what has survived. The other is the 1950s. Giant creatures, aliens, the Kaiju growing as a genre or commie scare stories. Not a lot of it looks like its unconventional, but at least be quirky. A potentially rich era are for me more for gazing at the flying saucers on screen then discuss unconventional editing techniques. So let's cover a Turkish Dracula film instead. One story, three reviews for this season - Dario Argento's, a camp and now fascinating misfire; Francis Ford Coppola's, how you adapt it as a film; now for Mehmet Muhtar's. The Jonathan Harker figure, as in the previous two covered, goes to the castle of the Count for the purpose of negotiating a deal on estate, Dracula taking inclination for the female population where Hawker has come from and their blood, especially his fiancée Guzin, the Mina character.

From http://www.spookyisles.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/drakula-istanbul-da-main.jpg
It's the same Dracula plot but set in Turkey. Technically, it's an adaptation of a novel by Ali Riza Seyfi from 1928, though what exactly is different from Dracula the story is up to debate. Mina, as Guzin, is now a dancer and performer, there is no Van Helsing but an old male doctor instead, no Renfield, and only one female vampire briefly in Dracula's castle like with Argento's adaptation. From here Dracula prays off the Lucy stand-in and eventually takes interest in Guzin. I unfortunately have to cut to the chase, hoping for an entertaining Turkploitation film when I started watching it, and say that this was a tedious viewing experience. Some of the film has amusement. Admittedly the subtitles were a part of this, but considering how battered the film looked in the version I viewed, maybe too obscure to have a DVD release, I can appreciate any type of subtitle that at least let's me understand what's going on. I can appreciate Dracula's male servant at the castle, with a giant, bushy moustache and going against his master's wishes by purposely helping Hawker to protect his neck. The few moments of supernatural powers of Dracula are depicted including crawling down a wall are watchable. And anyone can appreciate a fake bat transformation. But a lot of the film is tedious for one very simple reason - the pointless, unnecessary interest in dialogue. Here, with Dracula In Istanbul, I have proof that, unless it's to do with the subtitles and language barrier, that no one should attempt lengthy dialogue scenes unless they are good at them, and stick to action and events happening instead. So many genre films are clearly created by people who think it's better to have lengthy dialogue sequences which add no character development when you actually stop and think about them. The word, the monologue, conversation, is seen as immensely important in cinema, and for every example where it proves to be true, the rest of the time it's a holdover from theatre and a little bit from literature, though we only realise with the latter when you read a novel that dialogue is not necessarily the backbone of them compared to visual world building. Dialogue is only good when its good or hilarious.

From http://bocadoinferno.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dracula-in-Istanbul-1953-4.jpg
Characters talk in Dracula In Istanbul talk. They talk a lot. Of their relationships and about Dracula, and none of it is needed. Most of it isn't funny intentionally or not, or interesting baring an occasional line. Some amusement is found in it, some interesting, one case where even in Turkish Dracula you have the famous "Children of the night" quote. But most of it is white noise, comparable to the many, swarming scratches and scars on the film on the version I saw, but at least the damage visually was registered, while at times I suddenly fell out of physical awareness of what was going on when characters started talking I admit parts of the film are blank in memory while I was watching it in real time. Only moments directly related to its supernatural story woke me up, connecting tangentially - those from the original tale or whenever Dracula is involved, like canoodling with a female victim by the sea in full sunlight (?!). This led to the film being a cut-up of sequences which I drifted through, registering only as vaguely interesting bits. This should be interesting for me, who references surrealism in these reviews and dream logic, realising in a film a vague connection of sequences thought-up in a haze, but here I felt the long drags even if it was in a stupor where the images didn't register.

From http://images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.com/image/png/
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Viewing this film forces me to realise that a big percentage of cult cinema - the space between appreciating a film for its flaws and "so bag its good" - is mostly worthless to me. Dare I say it, I'm growing up and realising that I cannot stand sitting through shonky overlong dialogue no matter what nationality it was originally written for. The first film covered for this season Things (1989) qualifies in this category of cinema, but movies like it are an exception because its beyond the merely incompetent on the technical level that most "bad" films are, which is why I like that film. I immediately think of the film that really does need the tag "Turksploitation" on it, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam aka. Turkish Star Wars (1982), one of the most technically incompetent films I've seen but it's not just another movie with risible production. Most bad films, like Dracula In Istanbul on this viewing, are bloated, over wordy, don't actually deliver anything of interest. Turkish Star Wars is, in a perverse way, the more technically accomplished film in terms of incompetence for its haphazard editing, its music, its content and set design, and most importantly not for scenes of actors mostly talking but actually giving you the goods in terms of memorable scenes. It becomes a good movie because of its memorable content and energy regardless of its technical imperfections.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CoxQJpFjDHM/Tuo1xxNquxI/AAAAAAAABe4/S7WTuNlRiDw/s320
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Dracula In Istanbul, despite the battered version I saw, was clearly a respectable film. It seems bad in fact to have used "Turksploitation" in context to it because barring the fact it's Dracula, it's the kind of mainstream horror movie for a big audience in tone, with romance, an opening quarter in a gothic castle, scares and even dance numbers. But its lifeless, with people sitting around or standing, talking, rather than events of interest taking place. Even the horror content, when you get to it, has no power to it. No fright, no tension. Dracula is not menacing or seductive here because he's not allowed to be. He's allowed a funny moment glaring at someone whilst  laying in his coffin because they've smacked him in the head with a shovel, but this isn't a role where the titular being really gets to terrify Istanbul at all. Baring the fact that a minature Koran, rather than a cross, is used to ward off Dracula, there's little in terms of interesting cultural additions with this, more surprising when Dracula's real life inspiration, Vlad the Impaler, was an enemy of Turkey, which should've lead to fascinating additions along with the religious and cultural differences from other Dracula adaptations. At the end there isn't even a climatic duel. It involves suddenly going into a graveyard, borrowing a blade and getting out after before someone is arrested, which is an exact part of the dialogue in the scene after. The remaining characters talk about life getting back to normal, completely casual and nonplussed, barring the fact one never wants to see garlic again. There is no jubilation, just as if a mosquito has just been swatted. Nothing has a weight and the result is dreary.

From http://images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.com/image/png/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Don't expect anything remotely unconventional here. A dance sequence gets ghoulish, keys on a piano moving on their own fruition, but that's it.

From http://bocadoinferno.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dracula-in-Istanbul-1953-9.jpg
A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
Inherently, a Turkish Dracula is, because Turkish genre cinema is not really talked about. Turkish art cinema is talked about more  for obvious reasons, genre films looked down upon especially when they borrow music by John Williams. Only blogs and websites that really dig deep cover Turkish genre cinema, and I know that as a fact as, shameless plug, I write for a site called Videotape Swapshop that has many an entertaining Turksploitation review from my colleagues. This one I've covered would probably test a lot though, and I speak as a Turkish Star Wars fan. In tone and actual content, it's not a film for the site, a pedestrian and utterly dull movie that really shouldn't be here. I realise with a film like this that I need to put away my toys and act like an adult, to use the phrase, because this material was and never will be of interest for me. The closest to this that I love are films that are bizarre even placed next to similar films, and they are rare exceptions when the delight many get in these films is the overlong dialogue and bad fashion, which is not of interest for me. Only the curious should view this, and it's amazing now Dario Argento's Dracula (2012) is a peek above this in terms of quality even if it shares similar flaws.

Monday 27 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Long Weekend (1978)

From http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/
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Dir. Colin Eggleston

A couple Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) go to a beach to spend the time together. Their relationship is fraught, a tension due to a recent event causing divide between them. Tearing at each other emotionally, there is a far greater concern the longer they spend the time at the beach. Something is amiss with the wildlife. Something is wrong about the environment. The animals are vicious and hostile baring Peter's own dog Cricket. Is nature itself at war with the pair, trampling and destroying anything in their hostilities to each other, ignorance and open destructiveness, closing in on them? We can thank filmmaker Mark Hartley for what he did for his country's genre cinema; with Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), he brought attention to Australia's lineage of genre films and created a new retrospective genre name within the last ten years called "Ozploitation", some of the films already known internationally but many brought to light or reappreciated. Long Weekend was one of the films mentioned, with an extensive segment, in the documentary, and amongst strong films this was one that was placed as one of the true pieces of art amongst a good bunch. It fits into a kind of cinema I love the most, difficult to create a sub-genre name for because it tends to flirt with countless tropes and fluxuates between genres depending on the film. Movies, either blatant or subtle, where perception and what is real is suspect, the environment and situation always changing when the protagonist(s) thinks they have cleared the fog away from the route ahead. So I've gotten into David Lynch. So Takashi Miike's Audition (1999) hit me perfectly as one of his first films I saw, and Shinya Tsukamoto beyond Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) was enriching. So I could jump from Bela Tarr's Hungarian art films to a genre film like The Witch Who Came From The Sea (1976). If it was possible to tie it all together as a genre, it would be my favourite.

From http://www.cultreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/lwgun-500x281.jpg
As Long Weekend plays out, it is trying to balance between the idea that nature is striking out against the couple and that it's all a coincidence, a result of their paranoia and heightened emotions. It becomes obvious as a viewer it's the former taking place, becoming far too fantastical at points in its menacing dread to be a psychological drama, but the film still retains a question of what exactly is nature's revenge and what is merely a trick on their minds. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) comes to mind, as the ecological horror is completely connected to the frayed relationship of the couple, beautiful performed by Hargreaves and Behets. The film is entirely balanced on their shoulders as well as on the film making behind it, and it's a complicated, rich relationship between the characters that makes it more compelling. While not necessarily part of my wide genre of perception distorting films, some of the best have been about human emotions, the land around them, even if independent to their behaviour, keeping up to their discordant emotional states. Of course, this is the perfect moment in this review to praise the director Colin Eggleston and everyone making the film behind the camera, be it camera operators to animal wrangles. From a foreign perspective, yet to set foot in Australia, it's still obvious how, along with the urban communities, the wildlife is explicably close to it, making the clash of suburbanites here, with their conflict straight from a theatrical drama, with nature more suitable to be depicted there. Stunning yet claustrophobic natural woodland and a beach which is separate from the rest of mankind. The trees may literally be moving around as the couple drive in circles at points and, whether it's fully an attack of Mother Nature on human beings or not, the isolation especially as the more surreal and blatant incidences take place stands out more. There's as much to say this is not even a real environment or separated from reality, as the only other people we see don't even really know of the beach the couple are going to or say it's been abandoned, abandoned to the trees and animals as their own. An exact plot vanishes, like many of my psycho dramatic films become, more of series of connecting events, dreamlike, which are structured on the emotions and the final outburst of them then an exact conflict by way of an A-B-C plotting.

From http://theladysrevenge.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/LongWeekend.jpg
It looks beautiful as a film, but creeps under the skin with its quiet, planned out tone. It's a film that makes possums scary, a silly sentence on paper, but to make the apparently "cute" and innocent of nature capable of violence, like Hitckcock's birds, is a virtue of the film. Mentioning directors, Werner Herzog's obsession with nature being destructive and dangerous would make this one of his favourite films, but kidding aside, with a film like this or Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright (1971), you see how the landmass called Australia, where the middle is not populated at all, and it's wilderness is completely removed from the cuddly view of nature most have. Even fairytales obsess over how nature can be dangerous as well as magical. The use of an eco-horror tone for what is more about the crippling anxiety of its two characters is apt, the land's revenge for truly deplorable acts of vandalism reflecting the base and raw emotions that get revelled in the last quarter between the couple. Sufferance to say, it gets nasty how the film ends, one which didn't go down as a box office hit when it was first released in cinemas.

From http://www.cultreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/lwharpoon-500x281.jpg
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
This is a tricky one, because I would place a film with the same tone like The Birds in the Medium rank above it. Probably why this gets a Low is that it is creepy and unnerving, not delirious or evoking startling questions about what you've just witnessed. It's a character drama cum nature horror film first, psychodrama making up pace behind. But that doesn't stop it getting on the list. It does as well help define where the bridge between getting on the list or not is set - trying to be weird or wacky purposely is empty and becomes normal, while a character drama which takes a psychological or metaphorical spin is capable of pulsating with a greater sense of unreality even if grounded in tone. Emotional tenor is capable of creating a heightened mood, not surface wackiness.

From http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i33/shannymaldonado/STILLS/LNGWKD16.jpg
A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
I regret not having as diverse a selection of films internationally, especially compared to last year on my old blog, for this year in hindsight, but after viewing Long Weekend again, this doesn't matter when the film is this good. As many more films from around the world will be covered on this blog, this one marks a great start for Australia. 

Sunday 26 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Videodrome (1983)

From http://professormortis.files.wordpress.com
/2011/04/videodrome.jpg
Dir. David Cronenberg

So much couldn't have been predicted thirty years later from the first images we and sleazy cable-TV programmer Max Renn (James Woods) see when one of his techs comes across a mysterious signal, possible from a Malaysian satellite, of Videodrome, a static camera in a red room as women are brutalised and tortured by masked individuals. The obvious comparison to now is there, that the internet has gone further than anything television could do, beyond Renn's softcore sex and hardcore violence to the worst of humanity, especially when I had in mind the recent moral campaigns in my country of Britain over such content and internet regulation over the likes of "Revenge Porn". The way I see it, the motto of Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), a being who only exists on television who Renn needs to meet to figure out what Videodrome is, has to be modified, paraphrased, as 'the [visual] screen is the retina of the mind's eye'. Now the computer screen and the iPhone are conduits of the mind's eye, and it's significant that the idea in the centre of David Cronenberg's film, of mankind inexplicably linked to technology and the potential for it to effect their sense of reality, is less the evil of the technology or the content, but goes back to the whole issue of the human subconscious. As much as I support the morals of the campaigners that want to protect the world from the worst online, I heavily suspect they haven't the courage to think about the fact that all of this stems from the human mind itself. As Videodrome makes explicit, in what is effectively Cronenberg's paranoid conspiracy thriller by the way of sci-fi and body horror, the television is merely a conduit for the hallucinations Renn experiences that completely distort his sense of reality. Without spoiling the film for those who've yet to see it, which I heartily recommend, Videodrome is revealed to not need the torture show Renn gets addicted to work, possible to hide in a test screen, and it didn't materialise by itself but through human creation.

From http://www.revistacodigo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/videodrome-1.png
What I've now added to the film from my perspective is that recent issues with censorship and moral campaigns around the internet have pierced reality completely. The Dangerous Cartoons Act passed in Britain, which means illustrations or a mere drawing can quality as child pornography, in particular has completely questioned the notion of reality as, not only is there a dangerous of art being censored, but has also meant that people have been taken to court for thoughts rather than real acts. It's a truly Cronenbergian concept, one straight from this film, where a mere idea has more reality than a real crime itself, breaking the barrier between the real body and the mind. What makes this more distorting is the place the mind has in the middle of this, the centre of any thought, obscene or not. Later on in the film, someone tells Renn that no sane person, as he legitimately wanted to schedule Videodrome on his channel believing it was faked, would want to watch torture. Now that is up to debate with how some people clearly would watch this, adding troubling questions of human society, but it also means that the real problem in obscenity and crimes like this, that no moral campaigner I've read of wants to dare tackle, is the human mind and its desire for this sort of thing regardless of any censorship imposed.

From http://media.cinemasquid.com/blu-ray/titles/
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Pretty heavy stuff to begin with, but David Cronenberg has always been a filmmaker where it is impossible to not think of the content in such complex thoughts. He managed, in films that could be seen as schlocky and enjoyed for their body horror, to pull from his scripts and ideas implications of such issues of obscenity, the mind and the subconscious that are difficult to merely digest. This is a film that is as much about televisions pulsating with flesh and vaginail stomach slits but the hardest, most striking horror within it is how the ideas are even stronger now even if the technology shown is obsolete. It makes the situation where Cronenberg is now more disappointing to me, apathetic to almost all his recent work. I had a chance to see his latest, Maps To The Stars (2014), at a cinema but decided against it with disinterest, more than happy to see it on DVD even if it was years later. Cosmopolis (2012), infecting itself in my mind like one of his many parasites in his films, has an enticement to be back to his best work on a rewatch, a ghost-like alien that may be able to connect the director's decision to make dramas with the heady ideas of the previous films of his. He has made dramas since The Dead Zone (1983), but they were never inherently dramas in the conventional sense up to Eastern Promises (2007), which is where I started to feel disinterested in him as a current director. The nature of drama as a genre is that it's probably the least able to give directors artistic creativity and the ability to ask real questions - it's a bourgeoisies, middle class thing of art films that feel immensely bland and not forcing you to think about their content. Crash (1996) or Dead Ringers (1988) are so far removed from what drama is now as a cinema genre. Even his depiction of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (2011), which should've been a true excursion of the human mind, came off as merely okay, bland drama with no real questions and memorable thoughts in its skull. In hindsight, it's the least respectable, dirty little horror films that have more to say, Videodrome reproaching it after so many years causing me to think of all the issues with obscenity and the underside of the internet, from extreme porn to the disconnect from reality said of it, throughout watching the film.  It causes me to wish alongside his underrated sequel-of-sorts eXistenz (1999) that the third film in the trilogy about the web was to exist to complete the chain of thoughts. I can be thankful that the short film, The Nest (2014), that was made available to see on YouTube, gives the potential for him to return back to his roots without necessarily compromising what he wants to do now as a director, but anything could happen.

From http://altscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Videodrome-1.jpg
I'm admittedly hesitant to try and review this film because, so well known, it's been written about by professional critics in greater thought and much more time than I have in this season to compose thoughts. The film itself is still great returning to it, a film I saw as I got into paracinema that I loved immediately back then, when a lot of films I would love later would divide me, and now has greater power now I can appreciate films that don't follow conventions. It's surprising though how small this film is on scale - in terms of actual locations the narrative takes place in, the small cast of characters, how quickly events happen - especially when I've learnt of how small the production was and of how much content from the original script and Cronenberg's ideas were excised from the final film. He's been viewed as a cold filmmaker, but that's far from the truth. When he does depict emotional content, he creates some of his best work; no one would dare call him a cold director is they watched a film like Dead Ringers. The thing is that his subjects are alienating for many. Characters in this film can openly talk about television being the third eye for mankind without any hesitance to their voice. The urban environments, especially in his Canadian productions, are claustrophobic modern works of architecture that become science fiction landscapes of the mind decades later, more part of the characters' psyches than real places. The film is very simple narratively, James Woods in a great performance as a man who is sucked into becoming a tool for a sinister group, or caught between two groups depending on your attitude to Brian O'Blivion's daughter Bianca O'Blivion (Sonja Smits). I wasn't kidding in saying it was Cronenberg's take on a political thriller, becoming it fully in the final act, but it's through the idea of what would happen if television could corrupt you, not through the programming itself but through the interaction of the human mind through a conduit. There is enough content here for two films. A sadomasochistic romance with radio broadcaster Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry of the band Blondie). Technology that can induce and even record hallucinations. The possibility to existing after death through Betamax. Psychological freak outs where reality is subjective and body horror gristly depicted through Rick Baker and the practical and special effects team who worked on the film. I could go further talking about the performances, Howard Shore's menacing score, the practical effects or the production design, but honestly it's all the ideas that the film generates that turns it into the great work it is.  

From http://s.mcstatic.com/thumb/8382352/22321712/4/
flash_player/0/1/videodrome_1983_torture_show.jpg?v=4
As a film which depicts the dark side of human desire, it also depicts it as a transgressive progression. His feature debut Shivers (1975) showed the line between conservative and transgressive mentality that has been carefully balanced between in Cronenberg's work. It means I can start a review talking about the sombre ideas at the beginning, but can also see in Videodrome a fetishishtic film too. Of Renn and Brand becoming a couple where she likes burning herself with cigarettes, letting him pierce her ears with a needle for orgasmic pleasure, Videodrome's torture and electrocution on in the background as a turn-on for both of them. As worse as human desire can be seen to be, there is a confusion by moral campaigners too where they are looking outside through the window pane of how complicated it also is, frightening to them but between consenting adults, particularly with bondage and fetishes. That doesn't mean the film doesn't question this too, brought to mind when Brand, on a TV interview show where she meets Renn, talks about human beings being over stimulated in their lives. Crash (1996) would push these questions even further, while not necessarily damning the actions of the characters, which is why the film was briefly banned by Westminster in England. For David Cronenberg, the issue of desire and fantasy are more complicated than morality would want it to be, sometimes for the better, but also with a concern about it as well, a judged view that is never heavy handed. This is of course the director who found beauty in disease, in cancerous sores and body mutilation, viruses and parasites. The deformations here, through the practical effects, have a lingering delight in them as well as being repulsive, not to mention scenes like James Woods probing his stomach vagina with the phallic nozzle of his gun, something which doesn't hide its metaphors at all. The films after A History of Violence (2005), the last film to stand out on first viewing, unless Cosmopolis grows in quality, have little of this sense of complex layers, contradictions and prying into sides unexpected in such themes. Far from childish nihilism, it feels matter-of-fact, informed by the director's atheism and view of science, which accepts death and decay and tries to see it as liberating as life is. Videodrome was a premonition for the underside of mediums like the internet, but it doesn't just come off as a condemnation, accepting the complexity of these issues through a cultish horror film. Rarely can you be this detailed with horror films that flirt with said ideas.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EQtHBj-z3KM/TKQFQ9SV2yI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/
7Yb-FHd1H9A/s1600/Videodrome-(1983)-2010-09-29-20h24m57s38.jpg
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
As with a film like Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), the films are very conventional but reveal their abstract natures if one stops to think about the implications of what happened. The basic structure of Videodrome, for all its hallucinations and weird imagery, is not strange inherently. Icky, perverse, indeed weird on a surface view, but not strange as a movie existing against conventions of structure or tone. It's the ideas if you think of them, and place the thoughts you have onto the film again, adding what you've considered, that makes it unconventional. It's not seeing a character kissing giant lips on as pulsating, aroused television that is unconventional, but someone offering in this scene the notion that sexuality exists in the technology itself as well as the content, more so now as concepts as Skype that didn't exist back in the eighties are common for us, and have the potential for such "perverse" sexuality in them in ways the film never even thought of.

From http://alphabeticalfilm.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/videodrome12.jpg
A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
David Cronenberg is not only one of my favourite directors, still despite my apathy with the current films, but it's pretty obvious he'll be talked about here, many times from a large list of potential reviews, many of them possibly getting on the Abstract list. The thing is now, revisiting Videodrome, that it's not necessarily the content itself but the tone and implications of the content which will make the films much more interesting to cover for this blog, and be the influence on where they place, if they place, onto said list. 

Saturday 25 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Ring - Kanzenban (1995)

From http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/8016/
1579/1600/KANZENBAN%20VHS%20A.jpg
Dir. Chisui Takigawa
[Spoilers throughout]

Anyone reading this may have an inkling of knowledge on film called Ring or Ringu, about a cursed videotape where, after watching it, you'll die seven days later. Those who don't, don't worry it'll be explained. Ringu/Ring (1998), (I prefer the original Japanese title Ringu, not out of hipsterism, but because of how I like the sound of it for a horror film title), is one of the most important horror films of the nineties. From director Hideo Nakata, it had a profound influence on where Japanese horror cinema, not all of it but the mainstream cinema, would lead to, of ghostly apparitions from folklore and older films given a new breath of life. And it's been a profound influence on Hollywood as well, as they saw films like this and thought they could have a slice of the pie, remaking Ringu as The Ring (2002) with Naomi Watts. Most people off the street will likely think of the American version first, which I don't mind, as having not seen it for over ten years since it first came out, I need to actually watch the film again. And as this review attests to, my attitude to remakes has been strengthen. Once I tried getting an online petition up to stop the US remake of Let The Right One In (2008), without having actually seen it, like the dumb, over passionate young adult I was. Now, I don't care about the remakes, the only grievance I have left more to do with laziness and a waste of money rather than the concept. It's not like the old Hollywood of the forties or so that would suppress the original film, even their own older films like the season reviewed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), merely an irritating aspect of cinema baring the few successful ones. The complaints film fans have with remakes is pointless more so when you get to non-English cinema - not just the countless rip-offs from the likes of Bollywood, but the complicated franchise that like of Ringu actually are. It has sequels, a TV series, a Korean remake, and of course the American remake series that counts as part of its DNA. And then, reading Flowers From Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film by Jim Harper, I learnt even Nakata's original version wasn't the first either. Originally a novel by Koji Suzuki, Harper's book talked about the true first adaptation, a 1995 TV movie. My mind was noticeably blown, which is why I'm covering the film here. I intend to write about this film as well so other film fans learn about the pointlessness of complaining about remakes when even a seminal Japanese horror film has an odd place as a remake of another film and its own mother for a bigger franchise.

From http://www.obrasilero.com/ring/images/kanzen01.png
The plot is the same as Nakata's Ringu, and from vague memories, the American version too, but with a male protagonist here, rather than a female character in the others, a disgraced journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa (Katsunori Takahashi), discovering the coincidence in four young people, including his niece, dying the same night as each other from heart attacks. He ends up, investigating how the four got together, seeing a cursed tape in a hotel, now doomed to die in seven days after viewing it unless he finds a way to life the curse. Instead of a husband in Nakata's version, he gets the assistance of a controversial professor in paranormal studies, Ryûji Takayama (Yoshio Harada), the one that got him knocked down to proofreading other's articles in fact, the pair investigating the origins of the tape and a young woman named Sadako Yamamura (Ayane Miura), the individual responsible for the curse. It's identical in beat to the 1998 Ringu, the same basic plot points and scenes. The difference are smaller. The first is that this is a much more faithful adaptation of the original book with additional plot points, particularly aspects about Sadako that will be touched upon later in the review.

From http://houseofgeekery.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ringukaz2.jpg?w=640
The second is how unfathomably bland the film is. Moments of flash cinematography aside, including an upside-down camera swing clearly taken from The Evil Dead (1981), this is a very static film, which follows the dreaded stereotype I always have in my mind when the phrase "TV movie" is brought up. Very padded out in tone, lengthy conversations rife in expedition - not even interesting expedition or that which adds a gleefully convoluted sense of fun to the material - and some incredibly dated effects that, are admittedly my catnip and I pore love over, will cause other viewers to groan. There's no atmosphere, most of the film in the day in bright locations. The music is a worse offender, continuous and trying to always be exciting or intense miserably. This is so far from what the theatrical 1998 version would do;  not just as a higher budget but the drastic differences - almost bleached out in terms of visuals, atonal music by Kenji Kawai and use of quietness, a slowness that is purposeful than dragging - that make it a great work. It's perverse to watch this film having seen the most acclaimed version, and see the cheaper interpretation, only available to me in a soft VHS rip, and know it came before the other just three years earlier. If one thing does amuse me about this, barring those special effects and some of the flashy camera tricks, this does at least have its own version of the cursed videotape's content, which you get to see properly after the end credits of the version I saw. All psychedelic colours, overblown and with images of volcanoes and dice. Bright colours and, within the plot, an aspect of it that bafflingly reminds me of Videodrome (1983), Brian Brian O'Blivion uttering in my head 'the television screen is the retina of the mind's eye', wondering about the fan fiction of him encountering this version's cursed videotape as I write this.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nvYCRbkaUuQ/UHWR0SbdpKI/AAAAAAAAAfs/
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The other drastic things to this version all tie around Sadako. The first is, bizarrely, this has tinges of a pinku softcore film, with lurid sex scenes designed to pander to the male audience with female nudity. It's not a large portion of the film, the TV film released in a "hotter" version for video and laserdisc, but this is a big trait to this version that is unique. In fact one scene goes further to needing digital pixilation of gentials, as required for Japanese censorship, one up to even some theatrical pinku films in explicitness. It's all surprising to see a Ringu adaptation this steamy and scuzzball in tone when it's supposed to be about a cursed videotape and atmosphere. It's made more jarring as the centre of the titillation is Sadako herself. Yes, Sadako who is in the long lineage inspired by real mythology of long haired ghosts, whose face in the 1998 Ringu film is a horrifying close-up of her eye only and is depicted as a drowned woman with her hair covered over her face and grey skin. Here, played by Ayane Miura, the back-story added for this version of the character also includes many scenes of the actress getting her kit off. This is like there being a version of Friday of 13th where Jason Voorhees was an oiled beefcake who frequently ran around in just a thong......a mad, baffling juxtaposition, equalled in a real version by having the frightening figure of Sadako, crawling out of the well, next to her curvaceous, sexy doppelganger who we get to see frequently nude, including as the ghost version of her at the end claiming her victim. The additional plot, not able to go off the original novel for comparison, makes this even more absurd, including an eyebrow raising subplot about her openly having sex with her father. Yeah, take that in for a minute and how it's never looked down upon, something I'm just surprised about just for how blatant that later part actually is in dialogue at one point. This, the back-story, the fact Sadako is for the most part sweet and innocent, only to snap and use her psychic powers to kill, all of it is head scratching even by itself. Then there's the briefly introduced point about Sadako being a hermaphrodite, an intersex individual, for a key scene but never of importance for the narrative itself, which is from the novel and makes you realise how much an adaptation can be superior by cutting out tasteless and dumb ideas like this.

From http://www.obrasilero.com/ring/images/kanzen03.png
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None  Low
For myself, it's a Low because of comparing it to the 1998 Ringu, but to be sane, it doesn't quality. It's strange, even without being compared to the known film, for all the plot it throws in with the Sadako character that is insane. It's strange for its abrupt moments of softcore sex, especially the first with an abrupt transition, originally for me presuming the main character and his wife were having a sex scene until it became clear it wasn't. I never mentioned the wife did I? Well oddly, she takes the place of the mother's son in the other Ringu, and while the way to break the curse is the same, the references to babies that happens at the end is ridiculous as well. The film is so wrought with drama yet crams into itself a positive spin on incest, the meandering tone and static dialogue,  establishing shots of local Japanese villages and towns on bright days like a commercial, nineties digital effects and unexpected plot points, including one guy getting off scot free for murder, that it becomes more peculiar than it comes off originally as when you think about it.

Actually, scratch the original score, this gets a Low rating regardless.

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/6ORBwhr24bQ/0.jpg
A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
It's such a peculiar cultural artefact that it does. It's poor, and I speak as someone, revisiting Hideo Nakata's Ringu this year again, who thinks it's one of the best horror films from the last two or so decades, a simple and oppressively quiet spine tingler. It's greatest virtue is spinning what is a folklore tale through urban legends and creates a film which is great as a ghost tale but plays with the notion of how the ancient curses of our past, in a still very spiritual country, can still exist amongst technology and modern society. Ring: Kansenban was thankfully not the last we'd hear of this franchise, but now seeing it, it's poorness still doesn't mean it should be lost in obscurity. It should be preserved as a reminder that, for all the whinging about remakes and reboots, film is a mad web of adaptations and sequels especially when the films involve straight-to-video releases or TV movies. If someone had the balls to have this as a restored DVD extra for one of the Ringu films, I would buy even if it's terrible.

Friday 24 October 2014

Halloween 31 For 31: Repulsion (1965)

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ACG6lH-LdJA/TIvbfe-1MlI/
AAAAAAAAAsA/1s5lkZhOXnE/s1600/repulsion1.jpg
Dir. Roman Polanski

A partial thread for the season has been as much about the position of a director in making a film. I am someone who follows the auteur theory, that a director creates a film through their desires for what it will be, but along with the fact that 1) some films I've seen have been made with their director clearly asleep on their directorial chair, and 2) that all the members of a film production crew have an effect on the final work, I add a modification of my own. That like a the captain of a ship, they have the final decision, the control, but everything that can affect the ship internally and externally can have a lasting effect of as much. It also means for me, even a greatly compromised or job-for-hire film production can still be connected to an auteur's traits because they represent instead them as people and their interactions with people like producers, adding layers to their creative web usually ignored or dismissed as going against such theories. This is a pertinent question here, for this season, not for a cerebral reason, but for a simply concern as a hobby - what films and their directors are more than ones I find to be good and view as my best, particularly when one always worries about wasting time on something merely average instead of something that's great.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9L8ziXhRbXc/UM9u4Ka7uhI/
AAAAAAAAAOY/oaVDwdfe7yU/s1600/repulsion1.jpg
This is skewered further because, when I develop an admiration for a director, in most cases I have a quirk where the least appreciated or obscurer films are the ones I gravitate to, to the point in some cases I find the most acclaimed and well known films for a director's filmography are the least interesting, even though I may see them as great films still. Barely seeing any of Roman Polanski's filmography, I'm in a position here rewatching this film where Repulsion is one of his most well known and acclaimed films, which could lead to a very different attitude to the film after viewing it. It's certainly a film with a strong artistically minded director behind it, but what did I think of the film by itself?* A young woman Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is living in late Sixties London, and it's apparent that something psychologically is wrong with her. There is a literal repulsion, a disgust in her for men that is worsening alongside a complete disconnect and hallucinations, becoming harmful for her state of mind. When her older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) and her boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) go on holiday, leaving her along in their shared apartment, Carol's paranoia and fracture is released fully, leading to horrible results.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ACG6lH-LdJA/TIvbrI654yI
/AAAAAAAAAsQ/ROxAfefD-Ls/s1600/repulsion3.jpg
For the first half of the film, there is an odd sensation of watching a late sixties British film, which is a  psychological horror movie, that is very much a British New Wave film like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a documentary influence and emphasis on characters like such films apparent here too. It's odd only in that the film is mostly known for its most delirious scenes, when the actual tone for the film has a drastic change on the content for two reasons. One, how this feels significant different from other Polanski films I've seen in tone but not in his obsessions, which shows the flexible plasticity of a director throughout their career, the other because Repulsion is not a  full blown horror, but a significantly different film between the two genres that has an effect on the material. The emphasis on drama, and a very realistic tone, makes the horror when it reveals itself to be more abrupt and more alien from reality, an added unreality to the mental breakdown that happens to Carol.

From http://www.best-horror-movies.com/image-files/
repulsion-coming-out-of-the-wall.jpg
From here, the film dives into completely nightmarish territory while still having a foot in its realism. The apparent incongruous meeting of the realistic drama against hands coming out of the wall is vast yet a perfect melding here, ripe with tension as the trauma Carol has becomes more apparent. The sexual nature of the repulsion and most of the hallucinations is obvious, the terrors Carol experiences of a man materialising out of thin air in her bed and raping her like an incubus potentially suggesting this is a trauma of a sexual assault victim if depicted in a tone of a nightmare, if not that then at least a trauma heightened by how men, even the sympathetic potential love interest, leer at her or view her as someone to be protected. It never feels like a crass psychological study but something much more disturbing in how fearful she is of her environments, or cut-off from it, as much seeing it through her mind as from the outside at her. As she disconnects from the outside world, a testament to Deneuve in suggesting so much in her acting through little, the transition to her being completely isolated in the apartment, claustrophobic and decaying with a rotting skinned rabbit and disarrayed furniture, turns the film as far as possible to the abstract. Deneuve's performance, while with a solid cast with her, was absolutely vital to get right, and the porcelain beauty she has in the character, the quietness, the (frankly) virginal side to her against a clear, explicit sexuality  creates a character that is a completely three dimensional female protagonist anyone can put themselves into. More so as the trauma she feels becomes so obviously horror based and actual death is involved. The drama is kept of as much importance to add to it, still sewn into the horror, the down-to-earth tone adding to the heightened, unsettling content. In how quiet and casual the film is, only for moments to break the reality, and how reality goes against the unreality completely. A blatant, startling crack in the wall that appears in front of Carol, abruptly taking place, may be the best scene in the film for me at this point, a mere jump scare compared to other moments, a minor second of film, because of how this juxtaposition suddenly comes to be and how the film returns back to normalcy, adding to the skewered dread of what is happening to the protagonist. The film succeeds in creating a logic, real character profile but willing to go and create images that, in a bad tone, would be comical but here are disturbing.

From http://michaelklingerpapers.uwe.ac.uk/projectimages/repulsion/8.jpg
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
The nature of the horror against its drama, with consideration, adds to a greater effect on the material, which by itself is already unsettling and unconventional in use and effect. By the end, it is subjective what is real for Carol and not baring a few things, the worst things to have taken place for her, adding to the darkness of the film. She becomes more sympathetic for it, by the end, as everything we see is through the perception of her being confused and disturbed by everything around her. From mysterious, threatening phone calls to a meeting by the landlord, the film escalates in its tone, mixing the realistic and the completely fantastical with full balanced between the two.

From http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7ioxdCYIe1qdx4k4o1_500.gif
A Cinema of the Abstract film?
Repulsion does feel like it was created with immense consideration from Polanski, the question that is next being how the other films I'll see of his, for the first time, will match against this one. If I become a fan of the films of Polanski's will Repulsion be one I hold up as one of the best? Right now, I find it to have been a great viewing experience, able to appreciate it more than I ever did before. Certainly a film for this blog, one which is far more appropriate for it than I originally thought, about to give it a Low rating until I actually stepped back and considered how the subtlety masked how explicitly dark and unsettled the film really is. It's a film, in hindsight, that is now crawling under my skin, not through the viewing, but thinking of everything that transpires within it.

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*(In this case, I do have to mention the obvious controversy with Roman Polanski, because of the mid seventies rape charge, which was at the back of my mind even if it has nothing to do with the film watching it and purposely pushing the thought back at one point, not connected to anything on screen, but the unfortunate fact that it'll come to mind just thinking of Polanski himself. Aside from this, I can separate the man from his work, though he liked to bring in his own life into the tone of his work which will bring up some serious questions about some of his films when I get to them. He is an immensely complicated individual in his history, not to trivialise the issue in question, but we also forget how many controversial and sordid aspects of artists we tend to hide under the metaphorical carpet, not realising the human beings have sides to them which are immensely difficult to think about even if they've done good things not just in art.)