Wednesday 30 December 2015

1000 Anime Crossover: Catching Up With 2015 Reviews

With 2015 nearing its end, this will be the last post for the year for the blog, covering everything I've reviewed so far on my other blog 1000 Anime which hasn't been linked to or rated by the system on this site already. From now on, these 1000 Anime review tie-ins will be monthly and will combine all the anime reviews from that month into one tidy block.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/
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#12: Lensman (1984)
Directors: Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Screenplay: Soji Yoshikawa
Voice Cast: Toshio Furukawa/Kerrigan Mahan (as Kimball Kinnison); Chikao Ohtsuka/Michael McConnohie (as Peter vanBuskirk); Katsuya Kobayashi/Gregory Snegoff (as DJ Bill); Mami Koyama/Edie Mirman (as Clarissa MacDougal); Nachi Nozawa/Steve Kramer (as Worsel); Seizo Katou/Tom Wyner (as Lord Helmuth)

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

An incredibly weird debut in hindsight for Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Known for his realistic character designs, dark and moody atmosphere, and lashings of violence and sex in his cinematic work, this drastically contradicts with the perceived viewpoint of him, an adaptation of a popular Western sci-fi novel series turned into a Star Wars rip-off. Even if he's made anime that goes against his public image, this is very alien and belongs to a period before Akira (1988) burst internationally that'll be disarming for some anime fans, lengthy and sometimes expansive animated blockbusters from a period in the early and mid-eighties that is different from anything made after Akira. Barring some trippy three dimensional animation from early eighties computers, Lensman is very un-abstract. It's certainly not the LSD dream that the theatrical Space Adventure Cobra film made two years earlier was.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE.

From https://asianflixs.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/roujin-z-screenshot.png
#13: Roujin Z (1991)
Director: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Screenplay: Katsuhiro Otomo
Voice Cast: Chisa Yokoyama (as Haruko Mitsuhashi); Shinji Ogawa (as Takashi Terada); Chie Satō (as Nobuko Ohe); Kōji Tsujitani (as Mitsuru Maeda); Hikojiro Matsumura (as Kijuro Takazawa)

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

Growing into a personal favourite of mine, Roujin Z is also a very underrated nineties anime. It's not however abstract in the slightest despite its unconventional narrative, about an elderly man being a guinea pig for a nuclear powered care bed that goes amuck. Wacky with a heart to it is an appropriate description of the feature film instead.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE.

From https://avvesione.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/gatchaman_crowds-01-
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#14: Gatchaman Crowds (2013)
Director: Kenji Nakamura
Screenplay: Kenji Sugihara, Shinsuke Onishi and Toshiya Ono
Voice Cast: Maaya Uchida (as Hajime Ichinose); Daisuke Namikawa (as Jō Hibiki); Ryota Ohsaka (as Sugune Tachibana); Aya Hirano (as Paiman); Ayumu Murase (as Rui Ninomiya); Daisuke Hosomi (as O.D); Kotori Koiwai (as Utsu-tsu); Mamoru Miyano (as Berg Katze)

Abstract Spectrum: Pulp/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

A drastic reinterpretation of the famous Gatchaman franchise, this urban set series which is as obsessed with the effect the interweb has on people as it is heroes fighting bad guys has a very deliberate, bright tone that's different for other anime, a fun series with some very intelligent ideas casually thrown at the viewer with greater subtlety that other works. It's a pretty straightforward story for its twelve episodes however. The really interesting prospect is if I see  director Kenji Nakamura's previous 2007 series Mononoke, a period set occult and horror themed work that has been described as having very unconventional (and beautiful) animation and at least one story within its various ones that's incredibly weird. A further tantalising prospect is that the anime and live action screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka, an auteurist voice known for very unconventional gems like Serial Experiments Lain (1998) and Malice@Doll (2001), wrote some of the scripts, which gives the series a huge chance of getting on the Abstract List knowing of his writing trademarks.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE

Wednesday 23 December 2015

Music of the Abstract: Mr. Armageddon by Locomotive



It has been a while since I've completed a Music of the Abstract article, so to compensate for a lack of a main review during Christmas week, I offer a sample of lush psychedelic rock. Heavy use of orchestra, no lead guitar and very memorable lyrics throughout the album contribute to something that, going through it for the first time, manages to skirt the twee that I find in a few British albums from between the late sixties and early seventies without losing grit to it.

Unfortunately Locomotive only released the album Mr. Armageddon comes from, We Are Everything You See (1970), never to create anything beyond it. For every band that managed to do well in the seventies, even as a cult group, many are left with a sole shining gem of an LP only before they vanish. Thankfully these one-offs, including Locomotive's, can even be found on Spotify.

Sunday 13 December 2015

Death Powder (1986)

From https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/7/6/4/0/9/76409-
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Director: Shigeru Izumiya
Screenplay: Shigeru Izumiya
Cast: Shigeru Izumiya; Takichi Inukai; Rikako Murakami; Mari Natsuki; Kiyoshirô Imawano

Synopsis: In an unknown time period in the future, three individuals preside over a female android called Guernica (Mari Natsuki). Two of them, a man (Takichi Inukai) and a woman (Rikako Murakami), must contend with the third, an older man played by the film's director Shigeru Izumiya, who has become protective of Guernica to the point that he will harm his compatriots immediately on sight. Mutants are after them as well, and when Guernica projects a white powder from her form over one of the central trio, it induces mutation and hallucinations culminating, once the body becomes too weak for the growing consciousness, to a horrifying transformation for the whole trio.

2022 Writer's Edit: This is not the only feature made by Shigeru Izumiya, contrary to the original review. There is at least one credited before Death Powder on IMDB, called The Harlem Valentine Day (1982), so this review has this correction.

Death Powder is the only feature made by Shigeru Izumiya, who is more well known as a political and very prolific folk singer who also acts a lot, including voice acting in the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko (1994). You don't expect, say, Bob Dylan to create a cyberpunk predecessor sandwiched between the early films of Sogo Ishii or Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), but it wouldn't have been a surprise if Izumiya created a film entire for his own desires, the result of which should prove him proud in how confounding it is. There is a caveat however to this review which in its own way adds to the mysterious tone of Death Powder - the version I had access to, as for many, doesn't translate everything with English subtitles, confounded by the fact there's passages that were subtitled in Japanese either because the dialogue wasn't audibly clear or it was a directorial choice. Because of this I had to watch the film not fully grasping it all, thrown in fittingly into the deep end of a mood piece with material not in my grasp, where sperm are superimposed over cityscapes and later when the hallucinations kick in.

From https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e8/
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The issue for the viewer will be that the film jettisons its reliance on a plot very early into itself. Death Powder is only sixty minutes long, and while back-story and plot threads are constant, a large percentage of the film is consumed by rapidly interchanging sequences. Once one of the central trio is contaminated by the titular powder, the film is mainly a collage of actors being filmed in various positions and post production visual effects. For some viewers this'll be a terrible movie because it doesn't really gel into a narrative feature with a framework, at a cut-off point after the set-up turning into a series of segments and images. (Baring in mind the lack of subtitles for me in some places), one is left with many questions unasked even after viewing the film twice. The use of sperm imagery, or actors superimposed in front of numbers and mathematical equations. When the female protagonist is named Norris of all things, or the point of the powder existing in the first place. One is meant, especially in the version I saw, to detach oneself from a rational frame point and enter the film by its terms, for others Death Powder having the potential to be rewarding as it perfectly captures a fever dream in presentation.

From http://www.filmbizarro.com/screenshots/deathpowder/deathpowder2.jpg
One thing that is perfectly clear is that through the powder created from Guernica - who's name pointedly is the same as the famous Pablo Picasso painting representing a bombing during the Spanish Civil War (although whether the reference was intentional for any reason is unknown) - induces a higher form of consciousness on the person infected by it, causing them to have their faces shred their top layer like fruit and for a drastic mutation to take place. The end result is not necessary of a positive thing, but an evolution takes place, where people become one giant individual consciousness; imagine Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) only taking place in an abandoned building with a mass of eyes and facial features being created, one including irregular shapes and a flicking tongue that is both comical and disgusting. The Japanese cyberpunk films made after this one including animation like Akira (1988) were just as likely to depict concepts like body horror and transcendentalism as they would the tropes of corrupt government or dystopian cityscapes; from a foreigner's view, Japan is half some of the most advanced metropolises in the world and half its history including mythology and spiritualism, both of which can still be found in films like this in how the mind is just as much a concern as the physical environment.

Plot points do appear. The mutants, consisting of a patchwork mask wearing man in a wheelchair, one near the beginning and two stretched rubber face goons, briefly appear at times to become a problem for the central trio. There's also the origins of Guernica, where her creator Dr. Loo (Kiyoshirô Imawano) has a music video for a flashback sequence and gets to tell another person to not try to make sense of the events around them, as pointed a choice of dialogue as you could get for the work's mindset. Baring these and some moments of sudden violence, including a rubber hand being cut off, Death Powder spends most of its length under a single, prolonged hallucination where creation and death intermingle through a series of images. This'll be drastically different for anyone who is a fan of other cyberpunk films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man as this feels more like an experimental film in its desire to not follow plot points.

From http://i45.tinypic.com/2d9cnpw.jpg
Technical Details:
A low budget work, Death Powder emphasises the run down urban environments that are important for Japanese dystopian films very well, even to the point of just filming an ordinary and well kept street outside in the day. Far from a deterrent, many of these films like this or Rubber's Lover (1996) are greatly helped by warehouse rooms, corridors and city streets being the only available locations, the claustrophobia of the former and the lack of fantasy of the later adding a grounded tangibility to the content. The film also includes the (almost) required scene for any Japanese cyberpunk film of having an outdoor scene shot with real bystanders nearby.

Makeup and prosthetic effects are sparingly used but are suitably unsettling. In most Japanese genre films, even kaiju movies like Godzilla (1954), there is a very unique and vastly wider sense of the manipulation and changing of the human body than from other countries, where mutation to the fantastical all have the potential to be depicted in truly imaginative ways which cause one to re-evaluate the original object (or limb or person etc.) in a new light. (Only Canadian cinema has such a consistency to match it). While the content is minimal, Death Powder shares an occasional moment of such unpredictability, the malformed consciousness of many people at the end the most extreme example. Less impressive are the eighties video effects, including actress Rikako Murakami punting a frame of the film shrunk down into a box across a room to represent another character being kicked the same direction. I'll admit its memorable but alongside the computer added text in the film, which evokes American shot-on-video films from this era, it does betray the movie in look.

The music is also strange. Whilst some of it does work, I do wonder about the juxtaposition of the grim ending with such jovial end theme music, whether it was intentional for irony or not.

From http://www.filmbizarro.com/screenshots/deathpowder/deathpowder5.jpg
Abstract Spectrum: Expressionistic/Psychotronic/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
A unique issue with rating Death Powder is that I have viewed it twice without the ability to speak or read Japanese and making up for that which wasn't translated. The fact we even have access to the film with English translation is worth being grateful for, but I have to wonder if more knowledge of what takes place in the film would be available to me if I have access to what wasn't translated. Besides this there is a debate however, from what is there, whether it's the mood or the visual effects which are why Death Powder is an abstract film, this sort of cinema meant to take a viewer to unchartered waters rather than rely on surface appearances like the post production effects.

There's plenty of unconventional moments crammed into Death Powder to justify its rating, from the superimposed images of sperm to the constant transitions into various realities, delivery employees being absorbed into a mass conscious to its dreamlike tone, so this isn't an issue. I will admit that a film like Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Rubber's Lover however have a greater intensity to their tones which make them the more abstract of this sub genre. For the simple reason that more happens in them because of their longer length is a factor, as if the kind of content in those films. In Death Powder's favour, the effect of watching the entire sixty minutes if you can engage with the tone does effect you, a disorientating effect that works in lieu of the lack of a fully formed narrative.

From https://cinemasatori.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/deathpowder19.jpg
Personal Opinion:
Whatever my opinion on Death Powder, as one of the first Japanese cyberpunk films made its worth my hat to it. This subgenre is only small but it's been one of the most rewarding for me of Japanese cinema, with a distinction to it from that nation is contrast to sci-fi from other countries. Death Powder is amongst the grubbiest in tone, not just for having to watch a VHS rip, but for how it was clearly made for its own sake with what resources were at hand. Death Powder also opens the door to an even obscurer area of Japanese genre cinema to me, that of films even lower budget than underground films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man which didn't even last over an hour, usually splatter horror films from the eighties which grew out of the VHS boom. Most are unavailable, but the internet exists and I wouldn't be surprised if I explored any I could get my hands on.

As for Death Powder itself, it's far from perfect, having needed a bit more to its bare boned form to be better. Not necessarily more plot either, but an additional thing to have helped it stood out more. What is there however, was suitably disorientating and volatile, and those are virtues hard to accomplish in any film.

Monday 7 December 2015

Liquid Sky (1983)


From http://i.imgur.com/B1gLP5C.jpg
Director: Slava Tsukerman
Screenplay: Slava Tsukerman, Anne Carlisle and Nina V. Kerova
Cast: Anne Carlisle (as Margaret/Jimmy); Paula E. Sheppard (as Adrian); Susan Doukas (as Sylvia); Otto von Wernherr (as Johann); Bob Brady (as Owen)

Synopsis: A flying saucer perches itself on top of a New York apartment complex roof.  The size of a dinner plate, its occupant has found the perfect narcotic high in the chemicals found in the human brain at the height of sexual orgasm, the extraction process for it to claim these chemicals killing the victim instantly. A German scientist Johann Hoffman (Wernherr), in the apartment of an older woman Sylvia (Doukas) who tries to flirt with him, keeps an eye on the saucer with concern. Model Margaret (Carlisle) is victim to this alien, perched above her apartment, killing everyone she has sex with to the point she finally believes she is the one killing people herself. Amongst drug addicts, her abusive roommate/lover Adriane (Sheppard), a gay model who continually berates her (also played by Carlisle) and various night clubbers and photographers, she slowly becomes more and more disillusioned with her life in the city and becomes more curious about the alien.

After all these years building up an image of Liquid Sky, you find yourself as for others that a film can be drastically different from the picture you built in your mind. The eighties sci-fi movie I painted in my thoughts is actually a low-fi drama in the scope of Paul Morrissey's work with Andy Warhol like Trash (1970), sunk in the bottom of the gutter but with a lot more hairspray involved. The screenshots show how the early eighties aesthetics are fully entrenched in the film's personality, with lots of neon and unconventionally shaped costumes but beneath this style is a gritty drama involving heroin addiction, date rape and struggling socialites hiding their angst behind glow-in-the-dark face paint, cocaine and constant nightclub dancing. Despite a style that predates Lady Gaga, the perspective on life is pretty dank for the most part, almost all the characters more concerned about finding drugs or insulting each other than making the most of their lives. If the seventies marked the death of the hippie dream - of free love, art and peace - than Liquid Sky feels like the prolapsed dirge afterwards into the early eighties. The central character Margaret is an outsider in her own community; a girl who ran from her home town to New York, turning herself from the pretty small town lass into the peroxide blonde figure who hides herself in her exaggerated dress sense. Rather than a camp tone, Liquid Sky is a suitably grotty movie where a character tries to find herself under the context of an alien related story. It's not dissimilar to Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), where the sci-fi narrative is a layer over a realistic depiction of a young adult trying to find them self in an urban city environment.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8_XAY1kNfiU/UizX1OTBNUI/AAAAAAAAeSk/xAbamoIp
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Like the Morrissey films and various underground movies from the USA, it breaks rules on the notion of how characters should act in films, where unlike mainstream films you can find them acting drastically different and with a greater realism and/or an exaggeration seen as too "raw" for commercial product. They tackle subjects like drug addiction and sexuality with an incredible bluntness that you don't find in most films. Then there are ideas like Liquid Sky casting Margaret and Jimmy with the same actress, the later with Anne Carlisle lowering her voice and looking like a New Romantic in a suit and slicked back hair, the trick of having the two being able to communicate with each other (and for one to perform oral sex on the other in one scene) pulled off with considerable success and simple ideas. The fact the director Slava Tsukerman - was a Russian emigrant who made films in his homeland, before the difficulties with making films in the Soviet Union forced him to leave, means that he would've had considerable experience with film production; for this to meld with the type of cinema that usually suggested improvisation and working with limited resources leads to fascinating results.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DMT9SbnvRzo/TONs0FVALQI/AAAAAAAAFNw/
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His willingness to tackle taboos is also commendable as if he was finally unshackled from the restrictions he had before, particularly with how the film blurs sexuality and gender continually. Alongside Carlisle playing a male and female character, the film co-written by Tsukerman with Carlisle and Nina V. Kerova has the central character express displeasure at romance being dictated by gendered anatomy and various other characters have dialogue the plays with gender. Sexuality itself is as much a victim of the ennui the film has, scenes of sexual orgasm mostly depicted in infra-red from the alien's point-of-view before it kills the person involved, the human face and body distorted by the reds and rainbow colours of their body temperature before a giant circle swallows the image up.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8i6Cl2YNI6c/TIljJ9EX6vI/AAAAAAAADlM/
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Technical Detail:
Liquid Sky is a film held up by a series of character scenes where anecdotes and events rather than plot points take place, and a distinction this film has to other similar films of its ilk is how it intercuts up to three different scenes within the same time frame together. The result isn't dislocated at all, instead adding a pace that interweaves all the characters into each others' lives as most of them eventually meet each other.

The most well known aspect of the film is its score. Partly composed by the director himself with Brenda I. Hutchinson and Clive Smith, it's a crude yet evocative thing, its limitations in sound as much a part of its virtues. The music is a huge factor in the film's character. Especially when it gets to its central theme, its mix of almost guttery pipes and machinery fits the New York locations and avoids coming off as cheap synth because of the texture of its sound. Also worth mentioning is a musical number by Adriane with a machine that uses her heartbeat for percussion, her song about her musical box memorably blunt in the lyrics.

From http://static.wixstatic.com/media/91db61
_935742a07c5d5e873156d8bb0186acb4.jpg_512
Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Barring the archness of some of the dialogue and the main plot thread, Liquid Sky is far from an unconventional work. The aesthetic of the sets, the cloths and the neon lights is a considerable part of the movie's personality but it drastically contrasts to the reality just around it. It's a gritty drama that feels grim and melancholic at the same time as it can be quirky, using practical visual effects to add to its charm, to the point that behind the costumes and music its very subdued.

Personal Opinion:
As long as you go into the film knowing that it's far from the cartoonish work that its aesthetic suggests it is, Liquid Sky is a very engaging cult film. 

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1pth4P1sifI/Us8JqVWdXaI/
AAAAAAAAIPw/S3xFKH2LoVc/s1600/liquid-sky+2.jpg

Monday 30 November 2015

Freaks (1932)

From http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/wp-content/
uploads/2014/10/freaks-poster.jpg
Director: Tod Browning
Screenplay: Tod Robbins
Cast: Wallace Ford (as Phroso); Leila Hyams (as Venus); Olga Baclanova (as Cleopatra); Roscoe Ates (as Roscoe); Henry Victor (as Hercules); Harry Earles (as Hans)

Synopsis: Within a travelling carnival and its sideshow "freak" attractions, the owner Hans (Earles), a midget, falls in love with the Amazonian trapeze artist Cleopatra (Baclanova). Unfortunately Cleopatra is in cahoots with the strongman Hercules (Victor), and the pair as well as being cruel and abusive to those within the sideshow have a plan for Cleo to marry Hans and poison him to claim his financial inheritance. However, as a carnival barker who bookends the film states, the sideshow "freaks" including a living torso, a bearded woman and "Pinheads" live by a code. In a world where they are discriminated against, they have their own community where they protect each other and deal with their own foibles; those from the outside who befriend them, including animal trainer Venus (Hyams) and Phroso the Clown (Ford), will be treated as equals, while those who trespass against them will suffer horrible consequences.

A lot of cineastes will know of Freak's notoriety. Banned in the United Kingdom, causing outrage in its country of origins, sold to Dwain Esper to be churned out on the grindhouse tent circuit until it was critically revaluated, living with the reputation as a thirties horror film that still surprises. More so today with political correctness, the film from the title to some of the words in the synopsis will be even more uncomfortable without having seen the film, and even to the cast it was a film both championed but also damned for its depiction of those with physical differences. As someone who grew up with a learning disability, autism, whilst I cannot compare to someone like Prince Randian, the living torso, who had no limbs to speak of, viewing Freaks more and more since I saw it the first time in college film studies has a different perspective for me as someone not part of "normal" society even if it's not because of a physical handicap.

From http://breakfastwithplato.com/wp-content/uploads/
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In testament to the film, Freaks never mocks the titular individuals. While in broad brushes depicting the lives within a circus, the brief snippets of a community are rich as they stand. Tod Browning did run away with the circus when he was young and throughout there are many aspects to the film that couldn't be seen in anyway but heartening. A community where everyone helped each other, married and had kids as the human skeleton and the bearded lady do in one scene, and whilst the film is fictitious the normalisation of everyone's lives and letting actual sideshow attractions act is a huge virtue. The rawness of amateur performers is matched by the charisma of everyone, from Schlitzie the pinhead (actually a man playing a woman) to the already mentioned Prince Randian, who only gets one moment but shines just from showing how you don't need limbs to light a cigarette. That the film was cut down to only around an hour does mean a lot was probably lost that would've been exceptional to see, but what snippets remain are utterly inspiring and subversive in seeing these people be filmed having meals and merely gossiping between themselves. This is where even someone like myself with a mental disability can embrace this film more beyond a love of the movie, where not only is there solidarity between the sideshow, but also how it shows how ordinary they are even if their lives travelling could've been exciting and full of gossip. The film's in the same vein of the Universal horror movies of the thirties that it was meant to capitalise on, a lurid carnival drama also in the vein of the decade later Nightmare Alley (1947) where deceit and murder plots bubble up. Barring a finale where people crawl in the mud during a rainstorm with knifes ready, the horror movie moment, this exists in-between dramas as a pot-boiler which straddles the line between respectability and being offensive. The film for me is the former, but it still gladly provokes taboos. Just before the Hays Code, which was already created, finally clamped down on what it perceived to be morally offensive material, you had films in the early thirties which still stand out for how brazen and quite progressive they still are. Hans is openly wooing Cleopatra, hinting of an eroticism that is still not tackled in cinema a great deal, and more openly subversive is to be found the subplot with real life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton playing sisters who are planning to marry their respective suitors, one of the funniest parts of the film for imagining how the arguments with the sister-in-law is going to turn out like but also hinting at more when both sisters can feel the sensations of the other.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/freaks1.png
You can easily connect Freaks, even though it was and always will have meant to be a horror movie to scare, to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998) and Ulrich Seidl, all of which have prodded the taboos of either (or both) physical and mental disability, Freaks by possible coincidence being an ancestor of them in disregarding the safety bubble used around the subject. Whilst no way near as explicit as those films, and not in their cult/art cinema environment, this still does everything those examples do - showing the disabled as human beings, far from perfect, passionate and even having sexual desire. This doesn't detract from Freaks being a fun film, with a proto-Tales From The Crypt twist that's nasty, but the humanity is still worth relishing too.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Freaks-2.jpg
Technical Detail:
The one flaw with Freaks that I've finally overcome, but must be bared in mind, is that as an early thirties movie, it had to grapple with the introduction of sound and how films would now have to be made, visible in its basic cinematic structure. Browning was said never to be comfortable with sound - Dracula (1931) is an utterly sluggish and misshapen creation even with Bela Lugosi - and Freaks is a quietly put together work as a result of this. The content is what Freaks succeeds though, not elaborate technique you can find in another great film like Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This was why it took a while for me to fully embrace Freaks over all these years, superficiality no longer a bias.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WeC8r2kZajo/maxresdefault.jpg
Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
The term "grotesque" could've been used but for me that would be utterly offensive to the people in the film. There should be a distancing of that word away from connotations of physical deformity and disability by itself barring the extreme realms of body horror and its fictitious exaggerations. Grotesque for me should represent exaggeration and transgressive material like taboo sexuality or the worst in mankind's behaviour. I could use the word for if I cover an Ulrich Seidl film. Another work based around a carnival "freakshow", the notorious anime Midori (1992), could also qualify for the word as would Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), a film banned in its home country exactly for the concerns of it being offensive to the disabled but firmly entrenched in a truly strange reality instead.
Aside from this, Freaks isn't a weird film at all. Barring having real sideshow performers play themselves rather than using practical effects, nothing is unconventional from other movies. Nothing is abstract and there is no cinematic techniques which effect the content. Having the performers be real sideshow attractions is confrontational, causing people to react and if the legend is true it caused a violent reaction at its original premier. The rest of the film is a melodrama with lots of dialogue, mostly if not all shot statically without anything to baffle. Now if what I've heard is true about Tod Browning's silent films, where dialogue wasn't an issue, films like The Unknown (1927) which made his name with Lon Chaney could be awesome and utterly strange too.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
freaks-1932-001-two-men-in-the-rain-car-detail.jpg?itok=7KR2ZtNt
Personal Opinion:
This was and still is a unique film, still utterly provocative to a modern audience, and despite its technical limitations, the boldness of the premise is still strong. It could be seen as sad, it would still be shocking, but firmly on the side of the titular characters, it champions them as much as it would offend others. This is also a film which doesn't fall into the annoying convention of the normal defeating the outsider evil. Here instead it's the outsiders who are the good people and the apparently normal people are evil, a simple idea far and away more relevant and more entertaining now in a fun film than most horror movies that do the opposite.

Saturday 21 November 2015

The Black Cat (1981)

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
en/8/8a/The-black-cat-1981-poster.jpg
Director: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Lucio Fulci and Biagio Proietti
Cast: Patrick Magee (as Prof. Robert Miles); Mimsy Farmer (as Jill Trevers); David Warbeck (as Inspector Gorley); Al Cliver (as Sgt. Wilson); Dagmar Lassander (as Lillian Grayson)

Synopsis: In an English village a series of bizarre deaths start to place, leading to a London police inspector (Warbeck) being call to help in the cases. American photographer Jill Trevers (Farmer) however finds that the culprit could be even more bizarre than the deaths themselves - an evil black cat that exists in the home of psychic medium Prof. Robert Miles (Magee), who uses recording technology to document the voices of the dead.

For any director or individual who has consistently contributed to "Abstract Cinema" as almost a patron saint, it's appropriate to cover their obscurer films to see how their work transferred over their career per entry within the filmographies. Lucio Fulci had a length career so naturally there's quite a few films within his that are obscured by his more well known horror movies. Quite a few of the obscurer ones I've watched have as much an incredibly dreamlike tone to them, and while The Black Cat is a lesser work compared to the films bookending it - City of the Living Dead (1981), The Beyond (1981) and The House By The Cemetary (1981) - it's still cut from the same cloth in terms of quality.

From http://www.dvdactive.com/images/reviews/
screenshot/2015/10/blackcat2_original.jpg
The film has plenty of loose plot threads - of why the murders are taking place in terms of motive, how the evil cat exists - alongside details that are never built upon beyond surface dressing like Miles' ghost recordings. But if you're comfortable with the illogical nature of these sort of Italian genre movies this is far from a problem. The unpredictable tones of these films have always been amongst their greatest virtues, The Black Cat a nice and spooky horror yarn where the questions left answered are actually appropriate for the style it has. The film's free improvisation on the Edgar Allen Poe short story means it's not an adaptation at all, despite taking moments from the story, but set in England (with English on-location shooting alongside Italian sets) it does have an appropriately Gothic tone worthy of the cribbed source material. It's also appropriately more driven by the mood than its plot as Poe's stories usually emphasised. Lucio Fulci had a tendency to stray off conventional scripting for his horror films and even when the stories where very structured there were aspects, side details, that would lead to brief diversions taking place that take up large portions of the films, not connect to the central plot inherently but rewarding detail. (One here, involving a levitating bed from a haunted house film, was forced upon him by the producer and also shows, when it's not like the former, it nonetheless is entertaining despite its incongruous nature). These aspects thankfully became a great part of his work becoming part of the films' personalities and their overall quality.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CmL6UbsDO8w/ViGLouG99tI
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This specific film benefits from those working in front and behind of the camera as well as much, its cast in particular even if dubbed in post-production suitably strong in charisma to guide the narrative along. An actor like Patrick Magee, able to dub his own voice as well, adds an entire level of quality to a film just by himself, as he psychically acts with such tremendous resonance in his sullen looks that the material improves inherently even if the premise is silly. He makes the idea of a killer cat that lives in his gothic home and mauls him occasionally sincere, and the menace he also shows is intense from his use of facial expression. David Warbeck is the same even if he doesn't get as much screen time as a viewer may expect from his character - one slight change in expression when he gets a speed ticket from a village policeman is one of the best moments of the film alone. Out of the trio of main actors, only Mimsy Farmer feels behind the other two but only because the two men are so distinct. Especially as this is one of Fulci's less violent films of this early eighties period the quality in everything else helps boost the movie as more of an unconventional supernatural drama. That said, do expect some gristly cat attack sequences and possible one of the most dangerous looking house fire sequences I've seen in a while, a nastiness still prevalent even if its dialled down from the films that surrounded it.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P890PLRt4wc/ViGLgfsB4YI/
AAAAAAAADqQ/fYstPrMkSkM/s1600/blackcat.png
Technical Quality:
Even if the plots made little sense in many of them, the Italian genre films still succeeded the likes of those made by Hammer in Britain when it came to technical quality. At their highest in quality, they trump most horror films in mood made in around the world during this era barring a few exceptions. The cinematography is impeccable by Sergio Salvati, clever and inspired camera angles and movements throughout that are nonetheless subtle and not merely for showing off. Fulci himself also likes extreme close-ups of eyes, be they feline or human, which has a boldness as a trope for this film as well, and other trademarks of his like the slower pace adds to the prevalent mood. Only his obsession with fog machines is sadly absent. The use of first person for the titular cat, far from silly, has a grace to it that is matched by the cue from Pino Donaggio's score in having a suitable tension to it, as the frame crawls on the floor stalking victims.

Having Donaggio score the film is a huge advantage for The Black Cat, and the result is incredibly lush and tranquil with moments of almost sarcastic grimness to parts of it. The score is the kind that is severely underrated and also boosts the quality of the film around it up altogether in how elaborate it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
If I let the film onto the list, as I am, there might be at least one or two films I need to re-evaluate from my blog's back catalogue of reviews. But there're cases where you forget, as someone who watches a lot of cinema, that a film like The Black Cat could have create a stronger reaction from people not used to watching such films. A die hard Fulci fan is going to miss the less obvious but still immensely "odd" aspects of this film compared to his more well known and dreamlike films like The Beyond. While the plot here goes from A to C easily, so much if left unexplained that I have to step back and think carefully of it whether it makes sense or not. That I tend to ignore this completely with each viewing of the film and go along with its atmosphere instead is as much a factor of it being "abstract".

Fulci's films are some of the most atmospheric of Italy's golden era of genre filmmaking, with only Dario Argento and Mario Bava having a consistently large enough filmography of films that are similarly moody. Set in England, he managed to avoid the clumsiness that could've happened with a lack of knowledge of another country, but like The Beyond with Louisiana its an England entirely of its own existence out of time. A warehouse of storage palettes becomes a maze of strange, jagged patterns straight out of Orson Welles' The Trial (1962), a backdrop merely for a drunk fleeing from a single cat that is yet with great seriousness in the moment. Mimsy Farmer when she's introduced photographing ruins suddenly enters a crypt and one is taken into a Gothic location from one of Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations briefly until she climbs back up into daylight. An attempt to escape a home suddenly ends up becoming a random rubber bat attack that Fulci had a bizarre obsession with.

From http://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/wp-content
/uploads/2014/04/The-Black-Cat-1.jpg
This isn't even bringing in the reinterpretation of Poe's original Black Cat story. The cat here can here teleport and duplicate itself to savage a human victim or hypnotise them to stumble out in front of a car. He can coordinate suffocating a couple in a locked room where the door was closed on their side. That the cat is even considered a murder suspect is strange, baffling the characters themselves as an idea. How the Poe story ends is inherently surreal in the content of the original story prose, Poe willing in his depictions to exaggerate his ideas on perversion, despair and evil with literal concepts such as talking ravens and bladed pendulums. Placed in the context of this murder mystery, the ending's nightmarish nature is even more apparent.

Personal Opinion:
It could be seen as tenuous how abstract The Black Cat is, but especially in his horror films and certain other works like Conquest (1983) and A Lizard In A Woman's Skin (1971), he's so partially entrenched in the illogical with many of his movies that I can't simply dismiss it. As for the film in terms of entertainment, it has plenty especially in its artistic virtues to appreciate. 

Sunday 15 November 2015

Music of the Abstract: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen



Out of all the hits and well known songs in their canon, enough to fill three compilations, I've always had this as my favourite Queen song. Part of it is the darkness of the lyrics knowing that after the album this comes off, Innuendo (1991), Freddie Mercury would die of an AID effected illness in what was and still is seen as a tragedy, knowing that he could've been making music still to this day. Yet I'm Going Slightly Mad, especially seeing the music video above with the song, is hilarious at the same time, a darken humour that's very droll, a very English sense of wit. The disorientated, almost backward played, guitar solo in the middle reminds me of a very trippy song back from the Sixties.

It shouldn't be strange that Queen should appear in this article as, even as they hit the mainstream, there was still an unpredictability to them, a willingness to bring a variety of genres together into a single album let alone over a span of them. Bohemian Rhapsody, their most famous song, isn't exactly a conventional three minute pop song, a rock opera with an a cappella in the centre of the track that is as indulgent as you can get and loved for that reason. Even on Innuendo itself, while with more conventional hard rock and pop songs in comparison to other albums, there's still a flamenco guitar passage in the title track and another song about Freddie Mercury's beloved cat amongst them. 

Friday 13 November 2015

Zardoz (1974)

From http://www.cartelesmix.com/
carteles/carteles/letraz/zardoz04.jpg
Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: John Boorman
Cast: Sean Connery (as Zed); Charlotte Rampling (as Consuella); Sara Kestelman (as May); John Alderton (as Friend); Sally Anne Newton (as Avalow)

Synopsis: In 2293, the world as we know it has long vanished. Mankind is divided between those that are the have-alls, including immortality, who stay in their own society and everyone else, the Brutals.  Some of the Brutals are partially controlled by a god named Zardoz to be Exterminators, who follow the decree of "the gun is good, the penis is evil" and kill off their fellow Brutal. One such exterminator called Zed (Connery) however manages to get into the Immortal's homeland, and whilst Immortals Consuella (Rampling) and May (Kestelman) argue whether he should be studied or disposed of, Zed himself may be the giver of death to the Immortals as well.

Zardoz as a film, if one wants to get past Connery wearing red bikini briefs, has so many ideas vying for attention in only a hundred minutes or so that it does overwhelm the viewer with a lot to take in. As a narrative it's a lot more concise than its reputation suggests, but there's a lot that's absence in the synopsis above of what Zed witnesses and is part of, some of which has only a few minutes of time to be brought up causing one to be continually barraged with concepts. Boorman, unable to adapt The Lord of the Rings novels but having success with Deliverance (1972), had the moment in his career that thankfully still happens today when producers give a director carte blanche to make whatever film they want. Even if it's a little unconventional or flat-out strange, no one has thankfully learnt from the mistakes of the past. They're a divisive subgenre, but from Richard Kelly's Southland Tale (2006) to Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), they're some of the most interesting entries in a director's CV, where for every mistake that might be there, every overlong and indulgent aspect, there's plenty of ideas being thrown out and plenty of inspiration to burn.

From http://theslaughteredbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/zardoz2.jpg
Zardoz is about the perils of class, of the community authority over individualism, masculinity against femininity only to suddenly put the macho Connery in a wedding dress and skewer the gender politics. For me as well there's a surprising mood of this representing the sixties counter culture dying slowly and excruciatingly as well, turning into a repressed and emotionally numbed society in the Immortals, melancholic to the point some have become like somnambulists cast away into the outskirts. These sorts of films flummox one in terms of their politics. Case in point for an example, it would be understandably seen that Zardoz is misogynistic as the macho former James Bond overpowers a land ruled by women and men who can't even grow a beard like him, one having to make do with drawing it on and thus proving a felt tip pen still exists in the future. But then there's, again, the image of Connery in a wedding dress. Gender seems useless to the Immortals anyway where they're utterly asexual, no sexuality be it hetero or gay, where its explicitly stated the men cannot have erections anymore. The macho barbarian meanwhile develops humility, wisdom and kills his old self metaphorically in a hall of mirror sequence. Like other films like this overstuffed with ideas the creators, while creating something that's give the producer a heart attack about trying to sell, manage between every  muddy or half-finished idea to create plenty to be interested of in this conflict in their prickliness.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mpBGa4P5jUo/TOxm3OehuEI/
AAAAAAAAF7A/cU0kUAwLVTw/s1600/zardoz4.jpg
It helps that there intentional humour in Zardoz as well, a willingness to find absurdity in itself as well as purport serious ideas. Like Nicol Williamson as Merlin in Excalibur (1981), John Boorman can appreciate a magnificently succulent piece of ham, be it Niall Buggy as Arthur Frayn opening the film with a monologue from his felt tip marked mouth suggesting the audience are puppets like him, to John Alderton with his odd high voiced intonations as Friend, eventually doomed to be alongside the Renegades, those who still cannot die but are punished for thought crimes through rapid aging and senility. Connery himself despite his original costume, which is more ridiculous for the ammo belts and ponytail than the bikini briefs, is the anchor that stops the film from becoming silly, not continually asking questions about the world around him but the usually silent witness to the strange behaviour of the Immortals. While the shadow of the Bond films, not long before Zardoz, makes Connery's casting even stranger and unpredictable, the result is less an embarrassment but an odd and curious sight from a decade of cinema where this sort of unpredictability was more common.

From http://lh4.ggpht.com/_pQyvcBbJ0Fs/TJY0wY4chuI/AAAAAAAACn8/
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Sadly the film does betray itself to gassy philosophy and Connery trying to fight (wobble through?) the mentioned hall of mirrors, which is the only part of the film where it lives up to its notoriety. It suffers in these parts from the vagueness that exists in modern spiritualism outside the cinema even today, where ten words are used instead of only one. Barring this, Zardoz acquits itself to sci-fi and fantasy ideas which, ironically, are still pertinent now.

From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7t27aChMq1qluw2co1_500.png
Technical Detail:
A low budget film shot near to his actual house in Ireland, Boorman could've easily made a film entirely of its time, one in look that would've dated badly even if that sort of aesthetic appealed to me anyway. This isn't the case however as the aesthetic is instead one of its best aspects, beautifully put together. It's a mashing of mashing of naturalism in the outdoor environments infused with available buildings, cottages and barns, and poppy acid infused costumes and colours from the sci-fi films from this era. Everything that is of its time - from Connery's bikini briefs to the candy coloured peasant garb of the Immortals - is intentionally exaggerated and within the confines of a visual template that's very carefully considered. It's a colourful film, but not just in terms of its more unconventional sets but also natural colour in general, from a struggle taking place in a sewing room full of multiple colours of thread to the strange sight of green bread being broken at a dinner table.

When you do get to the aforementioned unconventional sets, they're something to behold. Images of amoeba and primitive life printed on the back of an interrogation room Zed is being questioned in. Nude bodies of Immortals, preserved in glass tanks like living wallpaper, being re-grown and cultivated. An archive of the Tate Galley's paintings and corridors of statues of what Friend tells Zed were god and goddesses who died of boredom. No matter how indulgent and erratic these passion projects can be, production design is rarely terrible for them and Boorman has shown a great deal of artistic inspiration in the films I've seen of his, shown here especially. Even if you still find Zardoz gobbledegook, all the content visually is used to carry on the ideas rather than leave them behind. A testament of this is the sequence where Zed is taught an entire world of knowledge, a mix of languages and references spoken aloud as in a meticulous way various images are superimposed on actresses' and Connery's bodies like tattoos. It's an exceptional moment, poetry and mathematics intertwining into a tapestry but uses it to tell a story or mood, one of many moments where the campiness can be pushed back and the serious artistic premise of the film does shine through.

From http://www.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/
uploads/2015/09/40A-600x302.jpg
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
The only real disappointment one might find in Zardoz is that it's quite conventional and concise in its themes if you strip away all the arty language. It's not a film that enters into unconventional plot structure or fully evokes the mood of an esoteric film like those made by Alejandro Jodorowsky. As a result, contrary to what some might think, Zardoz is one of the more "normal" films I've covered on the blog, where when you stripped the flourishes away it's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) skewered into a strange direction.
What does get it on the list are ultimately the flourishes that even back in the seventies, before I was born, would cause people to scratch their heads, a giant floating head moulded from Boorman's head but looking like Karl Marx the first amongst them, gliding along with an airless grace in the clouds. A young Charlotte Rampling musing about the male erection as a naked Connery is shown erotic images to induce one. The Renegades, elderly and senile men and women, in a perpetual party in dinner suits and night gowns rampaging around a dilapidated hotel. The madness of the end, where there's chaos, orgies and eventually a mass genocide welcomed by the victims wanting to die. That the films still manages to be utterly serious and profound makes these moments even more strange and qualifiable for the Abstract List.

From http://rowereviews.weebly.com/uploads/1/2
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Personal Opinion:
Revisiting Zardoz is significant because I saw the film when I was young. Like director Ben Wheatley on the extras of the new Arrow Video release, I encountered Zardoz on television. God knows when but in hindsight, I wonder whether this was the film responsible for turning me onto the oddball cinematic tastes I have now. I could recount, while not the whole monologue, the line "the gun is good, the penis is evil" perfectly in my head for decades, and the final image, of a time lapsed metaphor for life to death, was burnt into my memory for that length of time. What stands out seeing the film again after all this time is that, weren't it not for the moment the dialogue becomes more esoteric and New Age by the end, Zardoz is quite a sombre story which has a lot more going for it that being an utter disaster. Whilst not as poetic as Brave New World is depicting someone in an alien, oppressive environment, what you get is a film that's on the cusp of campiness but that can be taken seriously.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

1000 Anime Crossover: Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990)

From http://media.senscritique.com/media/000006544034/
source_big/Cyber_City_Oedo_808.jpg
Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Screenplay: Akinori Endo
Voice Cast: Hiroya Ishimaru (as Shunsuke Sengoku); Kaneto Shiozawa (as Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa); Tesshô Genda (as Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru); Emi Shinohara (as Remi Masuda); Kyousei Tsukui (as Versus); Mitsuko Horie (as Kyōko "Okyō" Jōnouchi); Norio Wakamoto (as Juzo Hasegawa)

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Kawajiri makes his debut on my anime review blog, and whether his work could qualify as abstract or not, he's someone who has contributed a lot of imaginative and shocking images in his career. Cyber City Oedo 808 is one of his more lighter toned action works, without a lot of the more darker and mature content - a lot of gore but none of the transgression of works like Wicked City (1987) - and while it couldn't qualify for the list, it does make up for it with some of its more exaggerated story content choices.

Personal Opinion:
To read the full review, click on the link [HERE].

From https://classicanimeblog.files.wordpress.com/
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Sunday 8 November 2015

Music of the Abstract: Nocturnal Fury by Satori



Sadly due to the work I needed to complete for the Halloween 31 For 31 season, I had to neglect the following series, more irritating as I promised a series of seasonally appropriate choices for the weeks covering October. Now that Halloween has finished, I can thankfully bring this back starting with a track I was originally going to bring up during the month. It's rare to catch a band or artist you've never heard of and fell swept away on first hearing, especially if you don't live in an environment where there's record stores and have to rely on the radio and its Top 40 tracks and songs. Even if they are good, you've heard songs on the many times before or had advance warning of the terrible ones. With Satori I have nothing in terms of context for them baring the album Nocturnal Fury comes from, Kanashibari (2008), and only some basic information, a British group that has existed since the late eighties and has fluctuated in the musicians it had since its creation. I merely heard an ominous mix of pure noise and sounds coming from the speakers of a second hand book and music store in Sheffield, and in a moment either of rashness or desire, asked to buy the CD that being played itself. I have no regrets and this would not be the only time I bought a CD from that store in the midst of it being played, causing one to wonder what the store owners kept thinking of me forcing them to have to switch albums for the rest of the day's work.

Ambient and electronic music which has no big beats is an area I've yet to even dip a toe into, not even the work of Brian Eno explored by me. It is both perfect background music, not a dismissive comment at all, but also can be fully immersed in. Listening to such hair raising electronic groans and screeches as in the chosen track in a music store pushes one into a certain heightened mood from the moment a track or whole album's worth of them start, and it's not surprising the album cover for Kanashibari is a replication of The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. Itself a potent piece of art, the attempt to replicate such imagery in the darkened and ethereal music with the CD is done with commendable hard work.

Saturday 31 October 2015

Halloween 31 For 31: Inferno (1980)

From http://www.qwipster.net/inferno.jpg
Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento
Cast: Irene Miracle (as Rose Elliott); Leigh McCloskey (as Mark Elliott); Eleonora Giorgi (as Sara); Daria Nicolodi (as Elise Stallone Van Adler); Sacha Pitoëff (as Kazanian)

Synopsis: Continuing on from Suspiria (1977), Inferno builds up the mythology of the Three Mothers, three powerful witches who control the world. Mater Lachrymarum (The Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (The Lady of Sighs) and Mater Tenebrarum (The Lady of Darkness). Mater Suspiriorum, who occupied Germany, was central to Suspiria, whilst Mater Lachrymarum, who appears briefly in this film, occupies Rome and is central to the 2007 Argento film Mother of Tears. Mater Tenebrarum, who rules New York, is central to Inferno, as the information of the Three Mothers is being suppressed violently through bloody murders. Music student Mark Elliot (McCloskey) travels to the USA after learning of the distress of his sister Rose Elliot (Miracle) upon discovering the knowledge of the Three Mothers herself, and finds himself on route to meeting Mater Tenebrarum himself.

From https://myownpersonalhellblog.files.wordpress.com/
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Inferno overcomes probably one of the biggest issues with a genre film in structure. A narratively driven film can fall foul of being merely dragged along by the plot exposition and having to cover the narrative beats far too much. They desire to explain everything rather than let you drift through the film by your own intuition. Inferno's solution could be bluntly described as dream logic, but it's different from this. A very simple, concise plot unfolds but both enough is explained to the viewer whilst plenty isn't, leaving one to travel through the events with enough knowledge to grasp it but a lot more being discovered alongside the characters. Splitting the film up into situations following different characters has a pronounced effect. Everything connects together but the segments unfold as their own narratives, usually leading to gruesome death. While Mark becomes the lynchpin to keep it all together, events can unfold without him as well, having a drastic effect on how the film is watched. Every character introduced not only stands out but many get central focus for many minutes. As a result you get plenty of incredibly memorable sequences but also an unpredictable tone.

From http://www.timeoutdubai.com/images/content
/inferno_1980/innerbig/92Inferno_1_innerbig.jpg
There's plenty of moments in Inferno that stand out, all of which interconnect under this loose plot completely seamlessly. You being the film with a standout and elaborate underwater sequence in a submerged room and it gets better from there, beginning the movie with an appropriate sense of anything being possible. Since this is a Dario Argento film the murder sequences are extremely stylish and heightened, but since Suspiria was a supernatural horror film, its sequel follows in the unconventional and fantastical mixed with symbolism from his down-to-earth giallo thrillers. Not only do you have the grand guinol of the more conventional murder sequences, brutal and unsettling, but you have sequences like people being savaged by cats or eaten to death by rats, all of which manages to be both beautiful but utterly foul and horrific. Unlike other Italian genre films which come off as cheesy, Argento's from this era still sting when it comes to depicting the deaths and the morbid nature around his films in general has retained a potency from this.

From http://screenmusings.org/movie/blu-ray/Inferno/images/Inferno-163.jpg
With Inferno you have the same heightened tone that is shared with Suspiria, very artificial set around an elaborate apartment complex where the evil is centred yet fully immersive at the same time. Genre filmmaking should effortlessly flow. It should use it's narrative to lead the viewer through a journey, especially if the film is entertainment first, having the virtue of effecting a viewer's emotions directly if done well. One of the best virtues of the Italian genre films in their heyday was their dreamy tones which allowed one to accept the irrational, thus avoiding distractions of logic in semblance to the real world that break the visage. Cinema is inherently an unrealistic medium, and unless one attempts to be as realistic as possible, it should negate the stumbles and falters as much as possible that take place when exposition and plotting block the steady flow of time. Inferno doesn't attempt to fully explain what's going on but this is for the better, as a quick witted viewer can build up enough from what they see onscreen and instead worry about the labyrinth of turns and abrupt ends that takes place for the characters, as much a film about travelling through various layers as one finds out the apartment complex has secret pipes and entrances within itself. Various strands from petty greed to the Three Mothers mythos interlink tentatively, and as various memorable casting choices like Nicolodi and Alida Valli pass onscreen, the film is able to work as a tense, eerily aired horror movie whilst ditching anything that would drag the film down into a mere plod.

From http://i263.photobucket.com/albums
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Technical Detail:
Suspiria was an exceptional film just for how its use of colour and lighting took the viewer into a supernatural world, but Inferno's aesthetic manages to go even further in some ways by becoming even more coloured and bold in its look. This would one of the last things the great director Mario Bava worked on before his death, behind the optical and visual effects, and in many ways, as a tip of the hat from Argento to the innovator who helped build the Italian genre industry, this film reflects the bold colours of his work like Blood and Black Lace (1964) incredibly. Like Suspiria, terror is not just to be found in the darkness but in colour itself, at their brightest and lurid during the most unsettling incidents. With Argento's work during his golden period, the colour saturation (or lack of colour as in Tenebrae (1981) fully envelops and becomes one with the haunted moods of his films.
Instead of Goblin, the music changed for this film, with Keith Emerson from the prog band Emerson, Lake and Palmer as composer. That band's an acquired taste, but Emerson's film scoring career is a cult following still waiting to happen - alongside Inferno you have the notorious anime blockbuster Harmagedon (1983), Nighthawks (1981) with Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer, and Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) amongst other films. While many of these films aren't available in the UK, it's not surprising that prog rock fans can buy a compilation of Emerson's scores, the one for Inferno a great addition to Argento's musical canon by itself. Far more hysterical and on the cusp of absurdity with its choral chanting than the Goblin score for Suspiria, it helps push the irrationality of the film further with its alarmed, drastic tone.

From https://www.acheronbooks.com/img/cms
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Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
Inferno is Argento's most unconventional film, more than even Suspiria, rejecting the plot heavy narratives that his giallos tend to have completely. It follows a logic of its own that drifts between various characters and never gives priority over any specific one, Mark Elliot merely a grounded figure for the events happening to circle around. It's a filmic world where one can go to a library in Rome and, going downstairs, find oneself in an alchemist's laboratory. It's a film where events such as a total eclipse suddenly happens only to disappear; I don't complain about this sudden inclusion and abrupt end to such sights because the canvas of the film allows the moment to soak in regardless. So much more terrifying in films for me, like in Suspiria, is irrationality, that deaths can happen abruptly or events happen without being signposted, and as this desired template stands, Inferno is one of the strongest examples.

From http://photos.bravenet.com/272/478/925/3/E829847AD5.jpg
Personal Opinion:
Finishing off the Halloween 31 For 31 here with this the 31st entry, it's been a lot of written blog pages but aside from the fun of it, is there anything worth mentioning about it as a whole? Like the years before, once this is over some films I even praised highly will disappear from memory, not because they'll suddenly become bad but because my tastes are very selective. Some will grow in memory with the possibility of ones I gave less than stellar reviews of growing in stature. Others were too fun to even care about this. But there's a certain type of cinema that appeals to me, something that can sometimes be directly linked to a dream logic, which are very loose with structure plotting allowing the viewer to fill in the space, or merely have a unique personality to them of their own.

Inferno is one of the my favourite films. I don't care if the plot's ridiculous, makes no sense rationally or that like Suspiria another building of evil gets set on fire because of an accident at the end, far and away more appealing for this reason than countless horror films that are so heavily plotted you're stuck sitting through exposition scenes. The mythos built here helps give the film a greater atmosphere, building up a background that fills in what is not dealt with; unfortunately it seems, yet to dare see it, that Mother of Tears ruined the trilogy, but what is created here is a lot better than other horror films. With this film I'm not thinking of its logic or letting the world it creates become ruined by over thinking about it, instead an experience where, unlike a rollercoaster, everything presented onscreen is felt. Every death is painful, every jolt is startling, but the moments of quietness are just as effective. When the power goes on and off in one scene, causing a classic piece of music on a record player to jump, it lifts the hairs on the back of my neck, and more absurd scenes like death by rats have a phantasmagoric ickiness to them that's still effecting. Rather than coming away from Inferno as another horror film padded out with attempts to rationalise everything, the completely lack of this adds to its mystique, leaving it at the end with the same level of intensity felt as with Suspiria. Together the duo are incredible examples of Italian horror cinema, but I confess I may love Inferno the most.