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.

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Non-Abstract Review: Permanent Vacation (1980)

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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. 

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