Blood Freak (1972)

From https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/
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Directors: Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes

Screenplay: Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes

Cast: Steve Hawkes as Herschell; Dana Cullivan as Ann; Heather Hughes as Angel

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #151

[Spoilers Throughout]

Synopsis: Herschell (Steve Hawkes) is a God fearing, everyday Joe and former Vietnam vet who just happens to be tempted by Ann (Dana Cullivan), the beautiful pot smoker who is less interested in the Bible than he or her sister Angel (Heather Hughes) is.  Her attempt to bring Herschell closer to her, with a special extra addictive narcotic, backfires as it mixes with an experimental chemical used at his new turkey factory job, asked to eat a sample turkey. The result leads to him become a half-man, half-turkey who has to feed on the blood of freshly lit up drug addicts.

"We live in a world subject to constant change. Every second, of every minute, of every hour, changes take place. These changes are perhaps invisible to us, because our level of awareness is limited..." If there was a statement appropriate to borrow as the blog's mantra, co-director/co-writer Brad F. Grinter in his constant Greek chorus narration within the film has material like this to work with. Even scrapping the bottom of the barrel as I do here, it's either coincidence or a universal thread that connects everything in art, where even z-grade material like Blood Freak speaks the same language of debating one's rational perception of reality. Especially when F. Grinter himself, eventually on an anti-drug and anti-chemical rant, having smoked throughout the filming of these scenes, starts to cough his lungs out to such a violent extent he cannot continue, the sort of legitimately uncomfortable moments most films would not include in the final print but he must've been stuck with, his black tar lunged retching adding to the strange circumstances of his conspiracy/environmental monologues.

The real weirdness to Blood Freak is not its reputation as a bizarre Christian anti-drug splatter movie but really its whole existence and what the director-screenwriters were trying to create here. These monologues, honestly, are the only truly weird moments of Blood Freak because they feel like they're directly from its co-creator's mind. The rest is far from the bizarre film I have read it to be.  You have to wait almost an hour for any gore, and baring one gristly leg removal involving an amputee actor and a prop table saw, most of it is generic neck slitting with the screaming looped for so long one of my relatives asked what I was watching from the other room. The anti-drug message is like any older (weirder) anti-drug films. And there's barely any truly Christian message to the material. Yes, there's a half-turkey man on his knees praying for salvation, there's not even scripture quotes and only the outline of redemption through Christianity. In fact I have to consider Blood Freak's reputation as a weird film really only comes from sceptics and atheists mocking its contrived take on faith.

That does need a tangent. Regardless of my own faith, spiritually inclined Agnostic who has never had resentment to Christianity as a belief system, I find especially reading some of the reviews of Blood Freak online really problematic for how snarky they are, an elitism that is compounded by the fact I seriously doubt anyone watched Blood Freak until Something Weird Video released it. Even a more infamous example of this type of seventies self produced Christian cinema - those produced by Baptist minister Estus Pirkle like If Footmen Tire, What Will Horses Do? (1971) - feel like the odd sideshows you cannot argue a whole nation's or whole world's Christian views on, like evaluating an entire zoo based on just the howler monkeys. The kind of films which are frankly used to depict American Christians like a sideshow freak show when its significantly more diverse than this, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to Pacific International Entertainment releases, make some of these reviews a glib view in dire need of more focused one or just accepting the bizarre existence of a pro-Christian turkey-man premise that doesn't live up to that sentence's promise. Holy Ghost People (1967), a document of real American Christianity, this is not and its suspect what made a monster splatter movie the right idea to convince people off drugs. It's likely an excuse just to cash-in on the Christian productions of the time. but for every Church that might've booked this to screen, there's countless ones back in the seventies who'd looked at the distributor like they were insane.

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It's far more interesting for me as an extreme example of American independent cinema of the period, one of the least defendable but still strangely sympathetic. It certainly was the case lead star/co-writer/co-director Steve Hawkes only contributed to the film for the money, paying off medical bills for a severe burn incident on a Spanish Tarzan film. F. Grinter I have no idea on in terms of his idea behind the film baring the fact he had Veronica Lake in her last role trying to preserve Hitler's body. Its real claim to fame is the failed decision to create a premise from three different areas of independent cinema from before and around its time. Anti-drug films were around at least from the thirties. Splatter films, which started in the sixties from Herschell Gordon Lewis, ironic considering main character is also called Herschell. And then the Christian film, which have been around in American cinema since the medium's beginning. This mix comes to us thanks to prolificacy of regional productions, still with us in the modern day, but with an advantage that you could still have celluloid film rather than cheap digital to film these oddities on back in the day. I've hesitated from speaking of the film in more detail yet as, to now use a cooking analogy, this is what happens when one uses stale ingredients and there's not even enough to reach the required weights needed for the final product. As a drug warning, it saddled against its turkey monster plot, adding absurdity before you get to the horrible image of Brad F. Grinter nearly dying from his coughing fit. The gore only comes into the last act, which is a long wait with the film's wooden acting and slow pace. The religious aspect is not that impactful unless just to be seen as a joke, which is not enough in itself and problematic as mentioned above.

With that last sentence in mind, with all the failure that is Blood Freak, left out in the Florida sun for too long, its compelling for me for the reason I'm watching these American exploitation films now. Feeling more like a dated exploitation movie dragged kicking and screaming into the seventies with bolted on gore and flares, I've never been interested in gore or sleaze but how with these films they're creators are clearly replicating the old Hollywood films of yesteryear but with budgets smaller than even the poverty row features. Most of them are the most threadbare of melodrama or old pulp genre if you examine them closely, this one definitely the melodramatic here. There's  humour in the papier-mâché turkey head Herschell eventually ends up wearing but what's more compelling is how, even before he starts grabbing people just after they've taken drugs (from weed to heroine) to bleed out, Herschell is treated as a victim of a horrible accident. Ann completely pushes Angel off to the side as she becomes his love interest, trying to rehabilitate him, even having a dialogue sequence where she wonders whether she would ever marry with him looking like this or how the children will look.

Whilst it follows a template of redemption that's stereotypical, it also means compared to other anti-drug films from before like Reefer Madness (1936) and Alice in Acidland (1969) this is so much more sympathetic, imagining Herschell as an already damaged war vet whose medical prescription turned to illegal drugs, and Ann after her severe mistakes redeeming herself, the pair becoming a happy couple. People will scoff with how contrived it is, but consider how absurd and cruel Reefer Madness was for its characters just smoking pot, Blood Freak is surprisingly humane for a contrived message movie. The fact Herschell's turkey man transformation is revelled just to be a dream caused by the mixing of the wrong chemicals is actually to the film's favour. Not only does it led to the only technically well made and inspired moment - which unfortunately means an actual turkey's head being lopped off off-camera, but with the surreal suggestion of Herschell being killed and eaten for Thanksgiving - but it emphasises a sense of redemption. When even this z-grade mess can have a heart it inexplicably brings out some sincerity even to something as hopeless as this, as the creators could've easily had a hellfire and brimstone ending. It begs the idea that such a folly like Blood Freak probably is a better snapshot of its creators' minds than anything remotely so-bad-it's-good, too sluggish and unrewarding expect for this.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

If it sounds absurd to find slivers of sincerity in pure exploitation, that's because Blood Freak is the type of American indie cinema where it's strange creation forces one to think where it came from. Too normal to be truly strange, next to other oddities dug up by the likes of Something Weird Video, but too weird in premise to have sanely been show at churches. Instead - for a Christian splatter film not dogmatic enough, nor gory enough - I found more reward in the film for being a bizarre hodgepodge. For others who don't normally watch these films, just avoid.

From http://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/wp-content
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Antiporno (2016)

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Director: Sion Sono

Screenplay: Sion Sono

Cast: Ami Tomite as Kyōko, Mariko Tsutsui as Noriko

Synopsis: Kyōko (Ami Tomite) is a psychologically disturbed novelist/painter who one morning decides to start tormenting her older female secretary just as a group arrive at her apartment for an interview. Then a voice off-screen shouts "Cut!" with the camera panning to a director and film crew....

Knowing how Antiporno, within the context of Nikkatsu's recent reboot project of the Roman Porno line, is the one that is getting the most vocal interest and critical critique, I cannot help but roll my eyes at the idea this is meant to be a philosophically important film on misogyny in erotica. I intend to revisit Antiporno, and likely to rewatch it, even if this review is still the same in the future, out of fascination of more esoteric and unconventional film making which is my preference. But not only is it embarrassing from a director who was capable of better, but it's also from a film written and directed by a man a retroactive step back in terms of erotica critiquing itself. It's a self critique this Roman Porno Reboot project didn't need, a bigger concern which should've been tackled that there were no female directors chosen for any of the films. A film as obvious and unsubtle as Antiporno is galling as, whilst misogyny and erotica is still problematic, there's a growing source of women actually dominating and creating their own erotica. Photography, literature, comics, even pornographic films. Even pinku, whilst full of utterly offensive work, has its own actresses from the golden era championing their work as progressive and liberating. A film that names itself Antiporno feels like a betrayal of these women who have decided that a more constructive way forwards is to not just keep criticising the past but take control of the pornographic and make their own work surrounding women's desires. Against this Antiporno is not only irritating for me because Sion Sono should be better than this, but also its patronising view on a medium better off from women themselves taking it over, not such a bloody obvious and badly told message.

But God help us if Antiporno, screaming with no indoor voice, is seen as a clever feminist subversion of pornography when it feels like Sion Sono losing more of the qualities he had in his earlier films, effectively making a pretentious remake of a much better film in his early canon called Strange Circus (2005). He encapsulates a strange set of circumstances in modern auteurism where a lot of cult directors who gel the art house with exploitative genre machinations are actually not that different from each other technically or aesthetically - the bright colours, the use of fourth wall or alienation techniques, the extreme levels of violent and sex - and it's to debate whether they actually have anything original to their transgressions when I step back and really question them. As with Park Chan-Wook and Nicolas Winding Refn, Sono dangerously compares himself to earlier era subversive genre directors, even a peer like Takashi Miike, and is in danger of being found wanting.

The problem is the art house sensibility. It should equate meaning. Love Exposure (2008) was such a film. Even a messy film like Suicide Club (2001) is helped by the fact its origins, in Japan's history of churning out genre films in the nineties and early 2000s, films that were inventive and contrasted their naturalistic paces and locations with bizarre events, and were open to idiosyncratic and unpredictable flourishes from their directors. Now after Love Exposure every film I've seen from Sono, even with virtues, feels too deliberate and too serious. Too predictable and increasingly obvious. The violence in films like Cold Fish (2010) became too grim next to their contrasting tonal shifts, Guilty of Romance (2011) whilst a good film too front loaded with cliches, and with Antiporno coming off like a farce. Even if it's a deliberate moment of humour, when an actual cake is pulled out for lead Ami Tomite to smash her face into, whilst making philosophical comments on the sexism of Japanese culture, you get the nadir of Antiporno being something you can take seriously.

From http://filmanias.com/uploads/posts/2017-11/
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The simplicity to Antiporno's screed on sexuality is the worst aspect, something that a sensible person would've figured out without the film. Wet Woman in the Wind (2016), the other film of this reboot series given as much distribution, does have its problematic moments in terms of its view of sexuality being aggressive and violent at points within its sex comedy plot, but it was also a film where the female protagonist beat up the male one and forced him to comply with her whims. Antiporno's premise and message is so simplistic that, once you brush past its dreamlike structure taken heavily from David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), it's a whoring of old clichés. A young woman whose parents were puritanical about sex but sexually active themselves. Whose younger sister, never given any depth, committed suicide and plays a one dimensional bright spot for the lead. A life as an artist that is empty and bitter or, depending on how the twists in reality suggest, an assistant for an older, bitter female writer who tormented her as her character in the first scene does to the older woman. All of which feels asinine. An old view on transgression in film for sexuality (a character forced to crawl around like a dog while sexual insults are thrown at her) that feels utterly at odds with the modern day, something post-Salo which feels more like the acts of dictators than libertines. More so as a neglected pinku film like Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988) from Nikkatsu is so much more better made and thoughtful about transgression.

It also doesn't have the overlong first sequence of Antiporno, a cacophony of screaming and torture of the older female secretary as the lead spouts philosophical platitudes. An uncomfortably homophobic taste in how the group of interviewers include stereotypical butch dykes, one of which rapes the secretary with a strap-on until she enjoys it. Sono critiques this as being inherently problematic by being set within a film set, a world within a world where off-stage Tomite's character is a nervous woman tormented and even slapped about by co-stars and the male director. But its stained in a patronising air in how because its meant to be a critique the aggression of the content feels more pointlessly done. Antiporno doesn't deserve being seen as superior because its critiquing this type of scene because its idea that pinku is corrupting, the lead joining a pinku production because she wants to debase herself, is juvenile. In fact its in its own la-la land considering that we live in a world where Hollywood is a hot bed of horrifying sexual harassment and casting couch incidents against actresses.  When the message is obvious, the way Sono also tastefully depicts Tomite laid on a bed with her underwear just peeled under her buttocks or walking through a longue completely naked, following the Reboot project's rules of a sex scene every ten minutes, is such rank hypocrisy.

From https://www.ica.art/sites/default/files/styles/banner-landscape
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As with Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden (2016) being somewhat useless as a critique of pornography for its one dimensional villains and gorgeously shot sapphire sex scenes between the feminist heroines, Antiporno is somewhat useless as a pinku critique when there's surely better examples. The comparison to Takashi Miike is especially pertinent. His 1999-2001 works were amongst his most controversial and criticised for their extreme content, especially Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001), but those films for all their problematic depictions of rape, violence and even necrophilia never treated the content as pleasant, even if there was a sick sense of humour, and always repulsed the viewer. There was always a clearly defined and bitter taste which alongside the complexity of those two examples in how they affected the viewer - the return to a happy family in Visitor Q, how Ichi the Killer deprived viewers of an easy ultra-splatter end fight and reduced its two male anti-heroes as disappointed, psychological messes - which Antiporno doesn't have the courage to do. Whilst his earlier nineties work has some un-defendable content, the stuff Miike made from Audition (1999) onwards makes something like Antiporno amateur in provocative ideas of sexuality including its dark side and gender politics.

Aesthetically Antiporno is interesting. It feels like the uber low budget version of Seijun Suzuki's Taisho trilogy between 1980 to 1991 (Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji) in their open artificiality. Moments of Antiporno do stand out, such as Kyōko being surrounded by versions of her younger self, but its unfocused symbolism which is not used to its fullest and expanded upon with other connecting symbolism. The bright colours also do not amount to anything but being a superflat postmodernism, a shallowness as deliberate artistry that instead accidentally brings up the film as empty. The political phrases used - such as ”1. This nation’s men are shit! 2. The freedom they created is shit! 3. The world they dream of is shit! “, statements made after Kyōko has her face in the aforementioned cake - are as shallow, the tone suggesting Sono is mimicking Godard for sharp, bullet like statements but forgetting Godard could also become introspective and elaborate with a vulnerability in his language. Its language of an obvious hardcore punk album, not rich enough as a feminist statement. A truly feminist statement has to be lengthier and as willing to wound a feminist back as it would damn misogynistic patriarchy.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Expressionist/Grotesque/Mindbender

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

Personal Opinion:

A embarrassing experience and a potential Emperor's New Clothes scenario if it gets a lot of critical praise. A critique of its own erotic film project aiming for the wrong target, not well done if pretty to look at. From a director like Sion Sono, seeing more films like this from him against his superior older films is a dire warning against directors becoming self aware of their critical recognition and trying too hard to appease that crowd.

From http://i.imgur.com/E29oAny.png

Postcards from the Zoo (2012)

From https://patriciadwi.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Edwin

Screenplay: Edwin, Titien Wattimena and Daud Sumolang

Cast: Ladya Cheryl as Lana; Nicholas Saputra as The Cowboy; Klarysa Aurelia as Young Lana

Synopsis: Lana (Ladya Cheryl) has been brought up in a zoo since she was a child. She will come to see the world outside the zoo when a cowboy magician (Nicholas Saputra) walks into her life.

This was something of a disappointment after all these years of wanting to see the film...Edwin, he with only one name, made some pretty inventive and idiosyncratic short films before this feature, from slice of life realism with a hazy sheen similar to Apichatpong Weerasethakul to an odd silent film, mythological tale hybrid. From these shorts, any chance for there to be an idiosyncratic filmmaker from Indonesia would've been welcomed, as long as he either honed his style into a distinct one from these vastly different sources or just made a great feature. As much of this is a desire to be a celluloid tourist of the world, that cinema should spring up from all the countries of the world, even the most obscure former colony islands, and have individuals within them who produce films uniquely of their own heritage and styles. Indonesia in particular, considering its exceptionally large cinematic output, is talked about with more interest (and availability of the films) in terms of cult audiences, from the crazier films of the eighties or so like Mystics in Bali (1981) to Gareth Evan's work with films like The Raid (2011). Considering the size of its industry, it's bizarre you only hear of films in detail with a festival review, rarely accessible for the common folk. In fact only Postcards from the Zoo has really had any extensive availability in terms of Edwin's work.

That said, Postcards from the Zoo is not the film I wished for, having waited years to finally see it. Those shorts Edwin made were wildly varying in their stylistic influences, and sadly this feature is an unfocused mess of influences, one which manages over ninety minutes to not have any real interest to it. Thankfully we live in an era where films from the furthest regions of the globe can be made with greater ease and presented to someone in a far away country...unfortunately, there are also films like Postcards from the Zoo structured around the homogenised version of post 2000s art house aesthetic, where the camera rarely moves and realism means there's little sense of individuality to these films, less about a person's home land and possible to switch geographic location of with little impact to the string bare plots. For every director who has used this style to create their own voice - from Weerasethakul to earlier directors from beforehand like Tsai Ming-liang - there's also those which cause me to reconsider and realise that the rushed and hurried genre films churned out from countries like Indonesia actually more rewarding as cultural artefacts as they are more entertaining.

From https://s3.amazonaws.com/filmlinc/assets/uploads/comment/
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It's quite dumbfounding how little actually happens in Postcards.... With its chaptered structure based on dictionary explanations for words that would be discussed in a zoo-based environment, metaphorical of the female lead's change from a young girl who grew up in the zoo to the giraffe obsessed, Amelie-like pixie she is as an adult, there's little that actually happens in terms of her plot or any events that happen within the film. Neither is there a fully fleshed out sense of this being merely a slice-of-life story of zoo keepers which would've been as rewarding, especially as the few slivers of joy to find in the film surround the zoo animals. Be it a keeper trying to convince a tiger to eat, role playing its fear of killing and eating chickens, to the film camera merely shooting a live hippopotamus, these are the only periods where a real sense of pleasure comes from the film. The story of this young woman we follow could've been a fascinating mix of naturalist slice of life (especially as the zoo follows both zoo keepers and unofficial staff who live on the premises in tents), zoological facts, and magic realism but the final work is none of this.

Edwin does tries to have a plot eventually, but with our heroine joining a cowboy magician, a plot thread that never reaches anything remotely interesting in itself, the film never committing to it as a plot and having become too wacky as a result of this plot thread to change directions. The material surrounding this - the woman suddenly dressing like a stereotypical Native Indian maiden and being his assistant - is strange with no connective tissue to the story before. Neither does her transition to working in a message parlour that also offers sexual favours, when the cowboy disappears inexplicably, reach anything of interest as its also unfocused and like Audrey Tautou's Amelie, the heroine is completely in her own world of whimsy even in those circumstances, undermining the sharp transition.  Neither strange and whimsical, continually returning to an animal theme playground with rides, neither realistic and adult with anything of interest to say.

Abstract Spectrum: Magic Realism/Whimsical

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

Personal Opinion:

In the best of esoteric art cinema, you will be surprised to find the best directors even with their slow, minimalist styles can have levity, lightness and even full blown playfulness, the cultural vegetables of the medium as they're unfairly described having a surprising amount of sauce and flavour to them. Postcards from the Zoo is not one such work. Neither one tone or another, just a cobbled together creation that I sadly anticipated for years to see.

From https://www.berlinale.de/media/filmstills/2012_1/
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Non-Abstract Review: Wet Woman in the Wind (2016)

From https://pbs.twimg.com/media/
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Director: Akihiko Shiota

Screenplay: Akihiko Shiota

Cast: Yuki Mamiya as Shiori; Tasuku Nagaoka as Kosuke; Takahiro Katô as Yuzawa; Michiko Suzuki as the Theatre actress; Ryushin Tei as Kubouchi

Synopsis: Reclusive playwright Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka) finds his imposed isolation from the modern world, in his self sufficient hut in the woods, transgressed by a very sexually active woman named Shiori (Yuki Mamiya) who refuses to leave him alone. Add to this her previous relationship with the owner of a coffee resturent and an actress at his former theatre appearing with four male acting protegees and a shy female secretary, and Kosuke is forced towards Shiori and her almost primal sense of carnality.

So Nikkatsu have re-launched the Roman Porno line for a celebratory event, commissioning five directors to make five films under the line's original guidelines, that as long as there was titilation every ten minutes and that they were under eighty minutes, these films were very liberal in what their directors could do. These films were their savour in the seventies until its end in the late eighties, started as a way to survive the decline in Japanese cinema box office. However the Nikkatsu line like the rest of the pinku (erotic) films from Japan have a high reputation to them nonetheless. For every one that's probably offensive in the modern climate and every one that's probably terrible or a cheap softcore porn film like their Western counterparts, pinku cinema from Japan has a lustre of great artistry to them. Even the European erotic films of the past can fail to have what they've always possess, as whilst they could be more kitsch or fun genre schlock, the pinku can be anything from fun comedy, serious drama and potentially inspiring in their artistic concerns, all because of the rule that as long as there is sex and nudity in them, even the lowest of budget works can have carte blanche in their ideas. There can be anything from Akio Jissoji's spell binding Marquis De Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988) to Takahisa Zeze's dank but compelling drama Dirty Maria (1998). Even pure silliness like The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine (2005) can be a delight in how a lack of budget doesn't stop them from being playful and emotionally concerned for their characters.

Now originally this was going to be a more negative review of Wet Woman in the Wind here, but the real issue at hand isn't that this film isn't fun or rewarding. It's a film which has slowly burnt in quality over the days I've watched it. The issue is that it's not the barnburner you'd expect from this Roman Porno reboot project. However in light of Sion Sono's Antiporno (2016), whilst not the best of this genre of films from Japan, I have to admit Wet Woman in the Wind is a lot more rewarding as I've reflected on it. Not helping is that there's fives of these films in this reboot project and there's no word of the other three in the project being released in the United Kingdom - Hideo Nakata's White Lily, Isao Yukisada’s Aroused by Gymnopedies and Kazuya Shiraishi’s Dawn of the Felines (all 2016). A project like this needs all five films to be freely available as a packaged deal, which hasn't happened irritatingly in the UK. Even if the project was ultimately a failure, this idea as with all ambitious one-off concepts like it needs all the parts to be visible or one is not going to get the full picture, a full picture that would've helped considerably add various shades of new colour to the other films.

Premise wise this is pretty simple. A modern man attempts to get back to his roots, living in the woods in his own hand built hut and sustaining himself on basics, even drinking distilled rainwater, only for true enlightenment not to come from his attempt at a very modern and masculine concept, to cut oneself off from modernity in a Walden-like isolation, but from sensuality and passion for life. That's immediately where Wet Woman... is deceptively simple because that is actually a pretty thoughtful concept to play with, all the men in the film frustrated and with pretensions to themselves whilst a figure of literal carnality like Shiori can yank them from these traps through sex. It's a concept that could easily be dismissed as crass, as Shiori is an archetype of the sexually active female figure who liberates others through herself. Then there's the complexities like the restaurant owner having left his wife for her, which has to be resolved, to that even the two other female figures of the actress and the secretary have to go through their own disregard for their previous issues to arrive at a better place emotionally. That it's played through a fluffy sex comedy which is light in drama and broad in its sex, between farcical camper van group sex to a threesome where two women kick Kosuke out the hut, is the most disarming aspect because it suggests a pinku film that's more about the softcore than any deeper thoughts.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/B3vXnkkIgQA/maxresdefault.jpg

In the context of the Roman Porno reboot series, it's pretty normal with the weight of expectations against it unfairly. When you consider the ballyhoo behind this series of five films, you expect a film like Underwater Love (2011), one of the best modern pinku to be released in the West. Admittedly that was a one-off musical pinku with cinematography by Christopher Doyle, but that's what you'd expect this project to be full of. And yet, considering how very obvious and ultimately overrated Sion Sono's Antiporno, trying to have its cake and eat it by being important but transgressive, literally having the female lead slam her face into a giant cake as if to extract urine at itself, Wet Woman in the Wind is actually more rewarding in hindsight. It's efficient and ordinary erotica in tone, but that's actually to its benefit. It's eroticism in particular is a virtue, never viewed in a sinful and destructive light, any drama found in the worst in people (the older man who has left his wife for the heroine, the playwright trying to isolate himself off from the world only for that to be more a regressive act than actually liberating) that is eventually healed through sex, the kind of rampant sex that's absurdly prolific only in these sorts of films but manages to work within the world's logic. A tone which openly embraces absurdity from the beginning when Shiori's introductory scene has her making herself known to the protagonist by riding her bicycle into a river.

It's playfulness with this erotica is for laughs, never overtly absurd but with passion literally bringing a house down in the end for good measure. The eroticism is helped by the restrictions in Japanese censorship in fact. Ironically, whilst it's been the cause of the more problematic content in Japanese pop culture in terms of sexuality because creators have had to work around the restrictions of even showing actual pornography without blurring, this law is actually to an advantage for pinku like Wet Woman in the Wind to have to be more creative, becoming more sensual and titillation in tone as a result because you cannot show anything below the waist from the front because of censorship. As much as I admire the Borowczyks, Rollins, Francos etc. of Europe, European and American softcore from the seventies to the modern day, with far less restrictions, can be some of the most dated and embarrassingly tacky material you could ever sit through, their greater allowance for luridness also meaning any Tom, Dick and Harry could churn out material as long as it has full frontal nudity and sex without thought to what's on camera. Even a sex comedy like Wet Woman..., rather than some of the more aesthetically ambitious examples of the genre, has to rely on their style instead. That many of these films were made by talented working directors and production crews, or were the first films for great future talents in their industry is fittingly paid tribute to by the individuals who were chosen for this reboot project.

That the film feels pretty conventional is as much its failing as it is a virtue, a severe double edged sword if there was any for this material. To kick-start a legacy again like Roman Porno is one that's always going to evoke the issue of whether it's going to live up to its origins, especially as this is meant to be five films only, not as yet a continuation of the series. Within what feels like a bold artistic project, it's nice to have a light hearted sex comedy in the midst, it's just unfortunate that that also means Wet Woman in the Wind is going to be unfairly compared to a work like Antiporno, which screams and flails its limbs around, making the biggest noise proclaiming itself to be IMPORTANT whether critically justifiable or not. Whilst played as a comedy, Wet Woman in the Wind does have a lot of admirable moments within it that seem considerably smarter. How its view of sexuality is carnal and beyond any crass surface, the leads biting each other at one point in consensual role-play. That there's little plot details - the lead's male friend who is an bad amateur poet, that there's a strange creature in the woodlands that is only heard - which weave in and out like screwball comedy beats and add to the playfulness. The farcical nature of the four young actors (having to replay the same ghost story narrative over and over in one scene) looking like Kosuke and how Shiori, part of defining her character's greater sense of freedom as a person, starts mimicking dog noises to be sarcastic, all  of which having a greater subtlety.

In imagining the film as a take on repressed male sexuality, and having so many scenes I'm looking on for their humour or just being sensual, this has been slowly burning in the back of my mind as time has passed viewing the film. As a result this is such a better viewing experience than I previously thought and in Wet Woman's favour, probably the kind of film you'd rather want from a project to resurrect old style Japanese pinku as it feels closer to the ethos of erotica. That which was originally made by Nikkatsu wanting to make erotic films which could yet still be viewed by couples, men and women a target audience equally, which were playful and with whit.

From http://eigabouei.com/eigabouei/wp-content/
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Non-Abstract Review: Permanent Vacation (1980)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/
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Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Chris Parker as Allie; Leila Gastil as Leila

Synopsis: Allie (Chris Parker) is a youth who is frustrated, bored and effected by insomnia to the point he dreams awake. Desiring to see his mother in a mental institution, he goes on a trip where he encounters a mentally scared war veteran, bored cinema employees and John Lurie is a cameo amongst others.

Jim Jarmusch's debut, before he'd immediately catch peoples' attention with Strangers in Paradise (1984), feels like a first attempt. A sketch of where he'd go with a proper film, rough and imperfect in its construction. Even under eighty minutes it ebbs and flows between interest and disinterest considerably, but the result is still of immense reward if you are patient with it. One of the more interesting things to consider with this film, as it shows Jarmusch's style already in primitive form, is what would've happened if he instead of Quentin Tarantino became the poster boy for American cinema with an idiosyncratic interest in the past in culture. As much as I appreciate Tarantino, he's only started to mature as a director in terms of his later films. If that's a strange thing to say in terms of these films which usually have a lot of violence in them, then its only with the likes of The Hateful Eight (2015) that he's played with his unconventional plot structures beyond the surface, and only really with a film like Jackie Brown (1997) where there's also an emotional current. Jarmusch, even when he made more overt genre based films like Dead Man (1995), was always concerned for his characters since his debut. He would take a few films to be as idiosyncratic as he is known for too, as Permanent Vacation comes off as primordial and unfocused, but the traits of his style are here nonetheless.

Even if it's unfocused, the context that Jarmusch was very young when he shot this does sooth some of the teething issues here Permanent Vacation, coming from a huge creative bubble of the era within New York State, in the midst of the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements, is still a damn good snapshot of local New York City of the period regardless of the more sluggish moments of the tentative plot. With Chris Parker as our lead, when he walks through the empty back streets there's still a reward in seeing what the environment was like as Jarmusch was shooting what was around him with little change to it. The film can survive its problems entirely because, thankfully, for his first attempt at a feature the director-writer made the film a series of encounters with random characters. This means that, as his protagonist is our stand-in in meeting the people he crosses, there's never a chance that one segment can be too long is underdeveloped. Also far from tedious, I've found myself growing tired of the commonality and over repeated plots of most fiction cinema. Suddenly two characters, one cinema refreshment stand employee and a customer, the former preferring to read her book rather than hear Parker try to ask her about the Nicolas Ray film playing is more interesting for me with its improvised dialogue and pauses from non actors. As much as I appreciate well written dialogue in films you can see in most cinemas, I now have a soft spot for this as well, even when far from perfect, as well. This era of extremely low budget cinema is becoming far more rewarding for me even outside of their plots, that their textures and incidental detail are as rich for me.

Even when Jarmusch coxes his work with references to high brow art, film and cinema, its always been painted with this interest in ordinary life intersecting within it. If anything it's a film worth seeing for this reason. For the lengthy final shot looking at the Statue of Liberty as it passes further and further away from the camera. If anything it's worth it for the darkly humorous anecdote, told entirely by monologue, of a jazz musician who considers committing suicide, never becoming cruel even with a punch line involving Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Moments like this make up for any issues with the structure of the film, it least feeling like the beginning of where Jarmusch would find his virtues. Where his characters would be the ordinary person off the street or outsiders. Some of it is exaggerated to a deficiency, the Vietnam vet merely an actor in the weed covered ruins of an old building rambling incoherently, but when Jarmusch does succeed the genes that would lead soon after to his films is found. At its best is when Permanent Vacation is more closer to this than the more arch, absurd material its struggling with, the style of the film and its era both a blessing and more appropriate for this as the lingering memory for me is more about those streets of New York City. 

From https://punjenipaprikas.com/sites/default/files/
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Nightmares Come at Night (1970)

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mV-Mn8YB8AY/maxresdefault.jpg

Director: Jesús Franco

Screenplay: Jesús Franco and Josyane Gibert

Cast: Diana Lorys as Anna de Istria; Paul Muller as Dr. Paul Lucas; Colette Giacobine as Cynthia Robins; Jack Taylor as Cynthia's Lover; Andrea Montchal as the Neighbour; Soledad Miranda as the Neighbour's Girlfriend

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #150

Synopsis: Anna (Diana Lorys) was once an erotic dancer until she met Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), living together in a romantic relationship. Now however she blacks out repeatedly and swears she's killed people. Cynthia is now more callous to her and only a doctor Paul Lucas (Paul Muller) is remotely sympathetic to her plight. Is she going mad?

In the world of Jesus Franco, there is frequent repetition. The plot of his Liechtenstein production here would repeated over into Voodoo Passion (1977), a Swiss production which effectively re-imagines I Walked With a Zombie (1943) by way of softcore. The quality of individual films can be erratic for a director as prolific as him, particularly with his habit at this period of his career to make multiple films a year and even have multiple productions at once running. But Franco shouldn't be dismissed as lazy for reusing characters and plots. He was erratic in his output but not lazy, the jazz connoisseur clearly someone once you see many of his films prone to taking motifs and constantly playing them out over and over like a jazz musician plays notes in a certain order over and over, twisting and distorting them into new contexts. This is definitely a good context to appreciate Nightmares Come at Night as, one of his lesser known films, its entire value for a viewer is tapping into that hypnotic repeating rhythm its built around.

Genre seems arbitrary with this film in particular, as it itself feels like the extreme distillation of horror, crime and erotica to the point it's hard to argue what genre itself is specifically barring a Franco film. Not a cheap comment to make as Franco, for any questions raised of his artistic virtues, was an auteurist figure whose films you can never confused for any other. The plot for Nightmares Come at Night is thankfully a minimalistic one, helping Franco to an advantage as it's a small scale psychodrama featuring only three main characters and a handful of side cast. One where the exposition usually found in other examples of this Euro-genre cinema have been purposely removed. The result is built around the viewer's emotional reactions like the best of Franco's cinema, felt rather than with his lesser works trying to be more conventional and were tedious as a result. Here it's a semi-conscious daydream which is his trademark.

As much of this was due to the circumstances Franco found himself under. Eurociné, who produced this, made exceptionally low budget quickies and managed to find a director in Franco who built his idiosyncratic style from the extremely low budgets and short production times he usually worked with. Their style could easily led to a half remembered recording in a dream diary - especially with their trope of reoccurring actors, tendency to recycle plots and use of the same of locations to represent different sets - before Franco morphs the plot here into his own phantom time and pace. Its apt that our lead, the raven haired Diana Lorys, was once an erotic dancer whose act had to last an entire night's show, stripping in nanosecond narcoleptic pace, the film around her following suit in a deliberately slow, teased out structure of a very simplistic plot. Teasing, even if sex and nudity is rife throughout, playing with the viewer for a long period of time and only giving you your desired plot conclusion immediately at the end, abruptly, forcing you to experience the film within its own sense of plotting.

From http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/8618_2.jpg

It's also worth asking how much of Franco's style is as much like the ingestion of classic Hollywood cinema distilled into these elliptical, haze ingested experiences. For a man who is as notorious for his camera panning in and out of the most intimate areas of his actresses' physical forms, he started in the late fifties and early sixties originally making comedies to musicals in Spain before his first horror films. It also doesn't take into consideration, as his attitudes to women as beautiful and powerful has been reappraised by critics and fans, how much all his actresses at least in the early seventies work feel like they've stepped out from cinema of the past.  Colette Giacobine in particular is effectively a bisexual blonde femme fatale, whose eyes are used in appropriate and reoccurring fashion by Franco, as editing compacts time outside of chronology, as if she's a witch with supernatural control over Diana Lorys. This is not even invoking Soledad Miranda, in a minor role as part of a pair of neighbours eyeing up the Anna/Cynthia home, at least for a chance for Miranda to drift onto screen in her full beauty. Even if his sexuality could be outright lurid, and he eventually made pornographic movies, his work is a lot more sensual and arguably glamorous than what one finds in more explicit modern erotica, because even at his grottiest there's always the lusciousness of the clothes chosen, the appearances and manner his actresses act in, how he's an equal opportunist for male and female nudity. And especially for his music, as in Franco's world he still scores this material to a Bruno Nicolai work  and tinges everything with a dreamlike tone. It's actually his more "respectable" films, when they tried too much to also be more accessible, which feel the most dated in their sexuality and tacky.

The real reason I'm drawn to this film and feel in love with it is this emphasis as a mood piece than a plot. There's no explanation to the cause of Anna's apparent loss of reality. Money? Revenge? Unknown, as is why Miranda and her beau is eyeing up the events from a nearby home with any particular interest. And yet that in itself doesn't detract from this state of dreamt reality but emphasises it, where one strings together a rational series of events but the exact details are merely perceived than understood. The haziness even excuses what could've become dubious in any other context, Lorys dressing in faux Indian dress with a bindi spot on her forehead, stripping a lot of immediate danger of having that for the style within a film which is utterly disconnected from reality. The entire film plays out in an isolated world where, even when taken out into the countryside, the world outside is completely separated, the events and aesthetic inside a decadence fed from the feverish nature with Anna's home of numerous mirrors and corridors. Suddenly falling in love with a man (Jack Taylor) who she just saw having sex with Cynthia is not irrational in this film but playing within an unnatural reality, where the film stops to let the two have a philosophical flirtation that bonds them together even if it's only happened over a few minutes and will end in tragedy.

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Hypnagogic/Mindbender/Psychotronic

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

Personal Opinion:

With Franco, his work feels like an obsession with pulling pulp cinema down into a state of threshold consciousness and sleep, which is not a pretentious statement to make when one sees the films he was making in this period like Vampyros Lesbos (1971). What might feel like a minor work compared to the heavyweights in Franco's career at this time doesn't diminish my love for Nightmares Come at Night.  The title is perfect for explaining what to expect, so deceptively simple with its almost absurd obviousness in its English form, but tricks you with its oblique phrasing of how oblique and sensual it's obvious plot will actually go. 

From http://www.rockshockpop.com/screencaps/NightmaresNight/15-1.jpg

Cafe Flesh (1982)

From https://fanart.tv/fanart/movies/30824/movieposter/caf-flesh-52de83126b05c.jpg

Directors: Stephen Sayadian (with Mark S. Esposito)

Screenplay: Stephen Sayadian and Herbert W. Day

Cast: Andy Nichols as Max Melodramatic; Paul McGibboney as Nick; Michelle Bauer as Lana; Marie Sharp as Angel; Tantala Ray as Moms; Dennis Edwards as The Enforcer; Kevin James as Johnny Rico; Dondi Bastone as Spike

Synopsis: After World War III blows everything to smithereens, the world becomes divided into the Sex Negatives and the Sex Positives. The Sex Negatives, due to nuclear fallout, are physically unable to have sexual pleasure, even erotic contact causing involuntary nausea. The Sex Positives, those rare few who can still have sex, must perform real sex acts for the Sex Negatives across the nightclubs in the remaining United States. At Cafe Flesh, one such club, one Sex Negative Lana (Michelle Bauer) finds she may be becoming a Sex Positive again whether her boyfriend Nick (Paul McGibboney) is comfortable with the fact or not.

If it was easier for the films of Rinse Dream, aka. Stephen Sayadian, to be seen his cult would grow more than it has, which is significant considering how that cult is already pretty large full of those who know his work and have managed to see them. That his career is mainly within pornography is a huge disadvantage to him, both in terms of attitudes to the medium in any artistic meaning and also in terms of availability in good versions, particularly an issue within the United Kingdom as, due to the view of pornography and laws of selling, it's impossible for older works to be commercially viable to rereleased let alone be taken seriously as art, the best you could get in the few licensed sex stores retro compilations rather than whole films. And why Dr. Caligari (1989), his non-pornographic sequel to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), has neither been released despite being a great cult film is puzzling. Its saddening as Sayadian can stand talk as a truly individualistic filmmaker, one helped in Cafe Flesh by talented people - co-director/storyboard artist Mark S. Esposito, writer Jerry Stahl (aka Herbert W. Day), costume designer Polly Ester and cinematographer Francis Delia - but also someone with a very unique style. A bold artistic style, one as with all his films fed from a previous career creating eye-catching art for Penthouse magazine and film posters like for Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill (1980). Idiosyncratic dialogue, co-written with others, and a sense of the funny and perverse to his work. His three most well known films, which I've managed to see, are the work of someone able to make films within the eighties that were very unconventional and inventive as long as an aspect was marketable within them all, giving him carte blanche at truly odd, artistically imaginative creations.

Dr. Caligari is great. Out of the two other well known works, Nightdreams (1981) is a hardcore film which I am split on. It's full of weird and aesthetically rich moments, but is difficult in terms of being to appreciate it as it's a compilation of sex scenes based around a threadbare narrative of a woman having her erotic dreams experimented on by scientists. Whilst the dreams are vivid and perversely erotic, you do have lengthy passages of merely an eighty minute work which is the hardcore sex, which goes on and on to the point that, whether one a turn on or not, can result in finding the film almost trance-like or boring due to its slow pace. Cafe Flesh in vast contrast manages to find the right balance in both having to be a pornographic film and a rewarding cultish object, Rinse Dream's most well known work for a reason. The plot's pretty simplistic, restricted to only a couple of sets and based around like Nightdreams a series of bizarre hardcore scenes. These scenes can almost be off-putting for some viewers, but are wrapped within a rewarding little plot that's as interesting and full of memorable characters. The script's a godsend, written by Sayadian and Stahl, only matched by Dr. Caligari in terms of Sayadian's trademark of deliberately artificial and manned lines, word play and individual characteristics in each actor's line readings with are sprinkled with humour and a biting sense of mockery of ordinary culture. Effectively imagine a punk attitude filtered through arty, neon intoxicated mannerisms and that's his dialogue style.

That this is a porn film is not a lynchpin to trap the film, Cafe Flesh as interesting if it was softcore. That there is real penetration does however have a strange effect to its advantage. The morality a viewer can have on pornography is subjective, whether you feel its justifiable to have real sexual acts filmed entire to your opinion, but in terms of this film whilst it could've easily worked as softcore, the hardcore moments feel as much part of the overall aesthetic, a sense when you enter the world of the nightclub Cafe Flesh. A place within the last of the remaining civilisation after nuclear war where most of them are effectively sterile mentally, feasting from afar at depictions of the acts they can no longer have as Sex Negatives. The complex emotions a person can have viewing pornographic images with real people - usually watched isolated, let alone issues of cultural and gender politics being involved as they watch the images - makes the sudden transgression in art cinema when it includes real sexual acts in explicit detail puncture the false reality. This is important here as whilst Cafe Flesh was originally meant as a pornographic product, it's clear from the start the creators of this made the film wanting to create something else, merely dressed in the clothes of porn and using this fact as part of its own ideas and style, the theme of sexuality as possible to do in Dr. Caligari as a mainstream film but taken advantage of here nonetheless.

From https://vanshawe.files.wordpress.com/2012/01
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This also means Cafe Flesh openly transgresses the line between being meant to be erotic and repulsive. Sayadian's artistic eye is incredible, the colourful day-glo neon of the era, apt that he was the one to reinterpret Dr. Caligari as his work takes German Expressionism with its artificial sets and use of shadows but plunges it into full vibrant colour, moodiness also exaggerated by the way his characters dress and move with mannered choreography. Nightdreams was ambitious already - any porn film with a kitchen set musical number/sex scene where a housewife gives a man dressed as a Cream of Wheat box a blowjob whilst anthropomorphised toast is playing a saxophone nearby is both the last thing you'd expect in pornography and yet depicted onscreen with such carefulness technically. But Cafe Flesh manages to up the stakes in artistic ambition and weirdness. The sex scenes performed onstage within the film are both too weird to find titillating yet can also still be erotic. The film's first performance already warns the viewer of what to expect within a fifties styled kitchen set with two Sex Positives as a housewife and a milkman. Striking colour and aesthetic style stands out immediately even in the worst copy of Cafe Flesh you could see, but with the milkman in a prosthetic rat man costume with a enormous tail, who just also happens to be a milkman, and men dressed as babies at the back rocking back and forth as the main performers have actual sex for the Sex Negatives and us the viewer. The extremity of this style - turning the performers on stage into caricatures of Americana by dress and appearance - is throughout Sayadian's work, as he depicts anything from the stereotype of eighties erotica, introducing the ultimate of male hunks wearing sunglasses in a dark room and a leather jacket, to even including a musical number with military symbolism that intercuts between sex.

The sense of the truly bizarre involved throughout is striking, as pencil headed men getting it on with a secretary completely goes against the perceived concept of pornography being a turn on for a viewing. However as with Nightdreams and even Dr. Caligari there's a pronounced sexuality helped by his attitude that contrasts this. That his women are always strong and in this case with Lana becoming a willing agent of her rediscovered sensuality, all always gorgeous and lovingly photographed whether they are dressed in the style of the era but with a dominance, taking the furthest in his most well known work with Madeleine Reynal as the titular Dr. Caligari, dressed in deliberately striking and an almost angular fashion to show her physical prescience. Sexuality in his work is always powerful, transgressing against conventional morality but ultimately a force of virtue. In the midst of the post apocalypse, the lead of this film eventually becomes liberated within this environment, contrasted against a lead male character in her boyfriend who is so morose to be practically hateful.

It helps as well that Cafe Flesh, in terms of plot, is just as compelling when there's no sex with dialogue, that it's also a fun film that just also has explicit sex scenes. Actor Andy Nichols in particulate is a virtue just by himself, one of the actors who doesn't perform in the sex scenes but is absolutely vital as Max Melodramatic, the charismatic and dickish host of these performances, someone as capable of acidic wit but also can be castrated by the female owner of Cafe Flesh, Moms (Tantala Ray), in front of a crowd. Humour is found throughout, from Max Melodramatic's line readings to some of the monosyllabic comments made by Sex Negative patrons, helping a viewer into its grungy, multi-coloured world by having the delicately sense of the absurd there, the grotesquery in the sex scenes purposely broad and ridiculous as well.

Abstract Spectrum: Erotic/Expressionistic/Grotesque/Pop Art/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

A film like Cafe Flesh feels like a work which skewers the medium it's in and absolutely in greater need of recognition. The golden age of pornography is known to have feature films like this which undermined the stereotypes of porn, slowly being recognised finally. But as the stereotypes of older pornography are still being shrugged off in retrospection, and the accessibility of films like this are exceptionally difficult to see countries like the United Kingdom with backwards attitudes to sexuality, a work like Cafe Flesh really needing to be more readily available as a result, an example of a work which has been placed in the genre of pornography but is so much more vibrant, strange and imaginatively twisted than the presumption of such a medium usually is.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i0E_VwIaDj4/UU7eTJnEEJI/AAAAAAAAAqE/
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Weekend (1967)

From https://www.filmonpaper.com/site/media/2017/08/Weekend
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Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Mireille Darc as Corinne; Jean Yanne as Roland; Paul Gégauff as the Pianist; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just; Blandine Jeanson as Emily Brontë; Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb; Juliet Berto as the Radical

Synopsis: Both of them have separate lovers and are planning to bump the other off, but married couple Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne) nonetheless have greater concerns as they need to make sure Corinne's dying father leaves his fortune entirely to them even if it's by force. The journey to and from her parents' home however over one weekend in the French countryside is significantly more complex. Outside on the long, sprawling roads the world is entirely stranger. Endless, unexplained car crashes on the side of roads. Characters from history and literature wandering through the woodland and fields, sometimes played by notable actors of French cinema. And a cannibalistic, extreme left wing terrorist group in the forests who pick on tourists and bourgeoisie.

My relationship with the film "found in a dump" as it proclaims itself has been a hate-love relationship. First seen in university when one has access to the library's extensive DVD collection and a sudden interest in diving into everything within it book or disc in general, I hated Weekend on my first viewing with a passion. A violent, blackened passion. Pretentious and disjointed to my younger eyes. And yet I had an obsession with what critics found in the film and rewatched it over and over again despite still hating it. Over five or six times I saw the film, the same old Artificial Eye DVD I probably borrowed more than anyone else, until a mutual acceptance of its virtues was reached. On this viewing, I understand why I eventually admired it.

It's a poisonous film in mood. From his debut Breathless (1960) to Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard was a trendy, popular filmmaker amongst the French New Wave group. Even amongst them, a whos-who of legendary filmmakers who are still held aloft now, his work in its unconventional and openly introspective was idiosyncratic but also what led to the most parodies of what French art cinema  in reflection of. Loose stories filtered through political and cultural monologues, the manipulation of the structure of filmmaking, everything onscreen and in its creation visual and audio to be manipulated by him. Yet the films he made between 1960 and 1967 were still in an area of popular culture, making a lot of films just between those years, just for the fact he had named actors and still kept the material for the most part in stories of some sort. By Weekend however, you get a pissed off spiteful Godard who'd give up on cinema in the populist sense and start an even more prolific increase of productions, entirely in political documents and video experiments in the seventies until his first "proper" theatrical feature with named actors and fuller plots came in 1980.

It's only a year before the May 1968 riots that shook France, so it can be argued Weekend is a prophecy of a breaking point and an apt time for Godard to dive headfirst afterwards into "difficult" essay work after. Here he decides to mix satire and Alice in Wonderland with a tale of two utterly loathsome figures, stereotypes of the worst of upper middle class French bourgeoisie. Dumped into a surreal netherworld of the French countryside, we see all the political concerns played out in absurd scenarios, already warning of the chaos about to be witnessed before the couple get out of their driveway, an argument with another family that involved intentionally hitting a car bumper with your vehicle and tennis balls used as ammunition. Slapstick but the humour's a little too dark.

It's still twisted to this day. Moments of Weekend feel even more transgressive now despite Darc and Yanne playing central characters you'd never defend. Roland willingly lets a hobo rape Corinne in a roadside ditch off-screen, for the most extreme example of this, only to intercut this between failed attempts by Roland to hitchhike undercut by wrong answers to political questions by the people in the vehicles, humour that could make the scene utterly tasteless if the film wasn't already a film of the bleakest kind. One with few redeemable figures and willing to break taboos beforehand. There's a warning of what to expect, parodying a sexually explicit monologue from Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), set to ridiculously bombastic music, as Corinne describes a profusely pornographic descriptions of sexual acts with the blankest line readings possible, including an  egg being used George Bataille style. The film from then on goes to include the likes of a whole family being massacred, cannibalism, to even real death of animals by the techniques used by real slaughterhouse workers, only done in the middle in the woods rather than in their work environment, material that can be debated whether its defendable for artistic purposes or not but still shocks the viewer. If the film's still disturbing it's that Godard at his angriest has managed to made such a vicious film still to this day, and that inexplicably it's also capable of being one of his funniest too like two perverse sides of the same coin, both existing and jarring intercutting into each other for sharp, discomforting effect.

From http://altscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/
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It's important to realise that, proclaiming this to be his last "real" film, Godard would indeed leave theatrical cinema for his diegetic era. Baring Tout Va Bien (1972) with Jane Fonda, which does have a narrative, he'd form the Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin to make very left wing essay work over eight long/feature length films, then proceed to make various feature length, short and television projects which were extensions of his thoughts. Godard's films were already experiment and clashed with their need for a narrative structure since his earliest work, but Weekend feels like the literal car crash between both sides where things will change. Aspects of this do succeed perfectly. Some work for the humour too. Some work for the absolutely nastiness in its veins. There's also one moment which still is an issue for the film - a prolonged political monologue by two garbage men (one African, one Arab) which is of its time, one I still drifted listlessly through switched off completely as I did on that first viewing back in university. The sequence will be a major issue for any viewer of the film, but this is a rare case where a scene that would destroy other films cannot undermine everything good before and after it. It's merely now part of the demonically charged tone of a film purposely trying to attack the viewer constantly even if it's by boredom. Hell, it could've actually been intentional knowing the rest of the film, learning of a contemporary review where that was the scene recommended for viewers to leave in the cinema to go get a coffee before heading back.

The good in the film is the madness that takes place, Godard using his habit of even manipulating the film's title sequences to embrace the absurd and sickly humorous. Whilst Weekend is a vicious film in tone, it nonetheless has snippets of pure silly humour too, intercut within the same scenes to add to its darkness but also show Godard can be whimsical, the last thing people normally associate with him on the surface. Where suddenly Emily Bronte and Tom Thumb appear and, even if tragically Bronte is set on fire and burns to nothing, she still gets to ask nonsensical questions the lead characters aren't appreciative of. Where Jean-Pierre Léaud both gets to play a historical figure in Napoleonic era military costume and also a man who sings his phone calls with considerable skill and talent in a phone box being pestered by the leads. And there's plenty of the more darker moments of humour which are as surreal. The number of car accidents seen almost become post-apocalyptic in their reoccurring images, and then there's the legendary tracking shot over a traffic jam that begins the series of bizarre incidents for the anti-heroes, arguably the best moment in the entirety of Godard's cinema. Technically complex, done in a perfect one shot over a long space of time and full of sight gags - cars the wrong way around, an elderly couple playing chess in the middle of the road - before ending with the first of many gristly road accidents encountered.

It helps Godard's technical awareness of the structure of cinema, and the kind of skilled production crews he used at this time, were always of incredible quality. By this point with Weekend, his earliest style drastically switched from the raw, on-the-fly virtues of Breathless to full colour, heavily orchestrated films that are luscious as he uses their look and style to dictate his political concerns. A primary coloured, bold aesthetic washed over his last films of this era which used striking compositions to catch the viewer's eyes and make them think about what was onscreen. The use of sound and wordplay, which would continue onwards whether on film or video in his career, is playful and purposely keeps the viewer on their toes. And brilliantly he does use his deconstructive style for humour, the film reel literally coming of just before the leads end up totalling their car in reckless driving.

As a result Weekend is actually a good film to get into Godard's more difficult work in spite of its more nasty, poisoned streak. This is ironic considering how much I once hated this film, but alongside some of the cruellest moments of Godard's filmmaking, material which will make viewers uncomfortable and should be approached with caution, you yet also get some of the openly funniest and inventive which leads to a paradoxical situation that it's still the better way to get into his deeper filmography in spite of its more darker moments. It's a film as much a document of its time and something beyond. Of its time as the sixties would die miserably and, predated by the cannibalistic left wing terrorists, revolutionary factions would get far more extreme and even un-defendable in morals in the late sixties and seventies (the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Red Army in Japan etc.). It feels beyond its time as, whilst the world no longer looks like this film, sadly its twisted jokes still resonate. An encounter between the rich and the poor - when a farmer crashes his tractor into a trendy sports car and kills a man, leading his girlfriend (an early Juliet Berto role) to get into a screaming match with him - ends with both sides siding together in an anti Semitic comment at the fleeing central characters. Much of the humour in this Bourgeois in Wonderland scenario sadly has not been lost in the modern day but it means the humour's still scathing and keeps the film alive.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Surreal/Transgressive

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

Personal Opinion:

A hard film, one I have had a complex relationship with for over ten years with. I've despised Weekend and now I admire it. Appropriate for a film that can leave some viewers feeling like they need a shower afterwards from. 

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