The Headless Eyes (1971)

From https://img.reelgood.com/content/movie/
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Director: Kent Bateman

Screenplay: Kent Bateman

Cast: Bo Brundin as Arthur Malcolm; Gordon Ramon; Kelley Swartz; Mary Jane Early

Synopsis: After a bungled home robbery leaves him without an eye, artist Arthur Malcolm (Arthur Malcolm) goes further off the deep end as he secretly kills women for their eyes, using them for his plastic mould sculptures.

The father of Jason Bateman and Justine Bateman, Kent Bateman among directing a few films and television, and producing Teen Wolf Too (1987), also made and wrote this dirty little film named The Headless Eyes. Knee deep in the American independent genre industry in 1971, which writer/musician Stephen Thrower has famously chronicled beyond just that year in the book Nightmare U.S.A., this feels like the weird uncle of Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979), also filmed in New York City. Ferrara's mainstream debut* was a grim-fest where an artist eventually loses his mind and goes on a kill-frenzy with a battery powered electric drill; imagine that with an artist who is already insane here and replaced Ferrara himself in that role with Swedish actor Bo Brundin, who in a really odd but interesting detail learnt for this review got a few mainstream roles from the late seventies into the eighties, one-off roles in major TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and The A-Team. Not bad considering here, with his thick accented English and looming insane look as a deranged eye patch wearing killer who rips eyes out for his art, this is as weird and grimy a movie to appear as you could get as an actor, the kind that with one look at it would cause someone to want to be in the other room for you. As I'll get into later on, that's not a cheap joke at Brundin's expense; instead, it feels appropriate the entire viewing experience that you feel uncomfortable even the how the lead acts.

The film immediately lets you in on what's going to be witnessed in the introductory scene - Brundin's character is introduced over a woman in her bed, with intentions to rob her, only to get the King Lear treatment and have an eye spooned out. The soundtrack from then repeats the same screaming of his, as he flails himself out of her apartment into the street in front of bystanders, the same sound bite over and over again about his eye ad nauseum. This makes one aware as well a larger part of the film's weirdness is it being a very low budget production where logic was a subjective thing, budgets were low and experimentation was encouraged, even if not sure of what it was doing.

Filmed in New York City, the environment itself is part of the feeling of needing a shower immediately after the viewing. A run down metropolis, utterly against sixties idealism already from a few years before just in the atmosphere felt, the hippies long drugged out and in-between claustrophobic rooms to tacky living room aesthetics a sense everyone's trapped in a confined space, something that'd seep even into big Hollywood productions through the decade. Our lead Arthur Malcolm himself, in the middle of this, is already a distinct figure, pronounced accent and forcefulness in his performance alongside the giant black eye patch. The character's also already mad when he starts, after the eye gouging introduction, and whilst it's a series of clichés from past and future films, obsessed with preserving beauty and clearing away "filthy" women, paranoid and proto-Driller Killer angst as an artist, Brundin's performance is legitimately creepy and freakish as he rambles to himself. Partially as much of this is accidental, as I suspect a lot of the film is post-synched in sound, but as much of it is because, whether he could have been a varied actor beyond this one film, he fits here looking and acting like a legitimately deranged person.

Arguably the film's a directionless mess - most of it is lengthy scenes of Arthur Malcolm pursuing victims, eventually becoming obsessed with a blonde female actress which lasts a long time and is the only backbone to a work which feels like a lingering nightmare instead. The film only shows some sense of progression a few times only to uncut them in the lead's sense of isolated psychosis - such as when his girlfriend appears, a middle class figure whose class and his neurosis created a wedge between them, or a young woman who wants to learn his art he tries to distance himself from. Structurally The Headless Eyes is a screenwriting class's worst nightmare as a result. Eventually concluding with the killer finding himself in a meat locker, being creped out by dead animals staring at him when he accomplishes a gruesome murder and eye gorging, the cheap gore and animal eyes certainly gross, the film ends with an anti-climax. A legitimately cold experience unless one was prepared for the ridiculous in odd films like this.

In general, production wise, The Headless Eyes befits this material even if it's a grungy, far from perfect work. Something shot by chance, with "stolen" shots or whatever was available. The music itself kept me on edge too, a druggy seventies mess of post psychedelia and what I expect would be the audio equivalent of taking crack, not since Psyched by the 4D Witch (1973) the burn out of late sixties music felt and staining my ear canals. It's a dishevelled mess which argues that, whilst an ugly mass, technical sloppiness if implemented again on purpose could add a greater sense of creepiness that cannot be mustered with a professional orchestral score exception in the best cases. Here in its accidental form it provides a lot of freakishness even if the material can be unintentionally hilarious.

Abstract Spectrum: Disturbing/Grotesque/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

In lieu to the long anticipation I had for The Headless Eyes, it's not an American oddity in the truest sense, and I'd advise caution for a film like this one. It's at times a film even at a short length for a feature feels too long and out stays its welcome, but it makes up for it in what a mad experience it is if you can tolerate it. For us who've willingly dived into the currents of US independent made horror, it's a fascinating scuzz fest, one of those films which tap into an actual dark subterranean of their culture at the time.

From https://www.mondo-digital.com/headlesseyes5.jpg

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* Note that Ferrara's first feature length film was the porn film 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). Whilst rumours exist of an actual Western re-release, nothing has materialised in 2019 yet.

Non-Abstract Review: Cry Baby Lane (2000)

From https://hiddenhorrors.files.wordpress.com
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Director: Peter Lauer

Screenplay: Peter Lauer and Bob Mittenthal

Cast: Jase Blankfort as Andrew; Trey Rogers as Carl; Larc Spies as Kenneth; Frank Langella as Bennett; Anne Lange as Ann Weber; Marc John Jefferies as Hall; Allison Siko as Louise; Jessica Brooks Grant as Megan; Sheri Drach as Kathy; Gary Perez as Gary; Steve Mellor as Dick Weber

Synopsis: In a small town, there is a tale of a pair of conjoined twins who, when they died as infants, were severed from each other, one buried in the cemetery and the other buried at a place called Cry Baby Lane. Andrew (Jase Blankfort), and his older brother Carl (Trey Rogers), have a mock séance at a grave to exploit this with a group of girls, only to release an entity that is significantly malicious.

The story goes, like any good spooky tale, that on October 28th 2000, a TV movie was shown on the American channel Nickelodeon that was deemed inappropriate for its young audience, and buried never to be heard of again. Over the decade or so that would follow, this work directed by Peter Lauer and originally meant to be a theatrical release, costing $800,000, was even questioned in terms of whether it actually existed. Some suggested, on the other side of the spectrum in a form of Creepy Pasta (online created urban legends) that it was suppressed for having incredibly disturbing material onscreen. Finally in 2011, a viral Reddit thread lead to a user ugnaught¹, who claimed to on the "lost" film on a VHS copy, uploading it online. Having seen the original broadcast version, which began with an introduction by Melissa Joan Hart, who I grew up with watching Clarissa Explains It All (1991–1994) and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003), I can attest that such a film did exist and, when that leaked VHS copy came about, Nickelodeon played into the hype by showing Cry Baby Lane again, claiming it was a "banned" film and then eventually showing it at Halloweens over the 2010s, particularly in a nod to a 90s nostalgia boom.

The fable of the horrible things said to exist in the film - as Creepy Pasta have included a SpongeBob Squarepants episode that was created by a psychologically disturbed figure which horrified the producers, or a cursed Mickey Mouse animation - is probably more horrifying than the actual TV movie, but it itself in the context of a one-off for a young audience is still weird, gruesome and frankly creepy in implied metaphors even for a crowd (like myself) who grew up on Goosebumps. Beyond the initial story told by the undertaker character Bennett (Frank Langella, who director Peter Lauer originally wanted to be played by Tom Waits) - where two conjoined twins (one good and one evil) die in infancy and are sewn away from each other - there's still a film here where which plays into a dark and fascinating premise. That, once the evil twin is accidentally released as a malevolent spectre, he infects people in the central town and makes them destructive and evil, particularly a group of girl scouts who become sadists, building off as well a central theme of our young male protagonist Andrew (Jase Blankfort) and his fears of puberty and masculinity.

And no, that's not between the lines either in the text, as he's shy and hates how he's scared all the time, at point confessing this and accusing his mother for having caused this by being over protective. His older brother Carl (Trey Rogers), obsessed with being macho and a diehard pro wrestling fan (1999 WCW and WWF merchandise on the walls), constantly picks on him and calls him a wimp, all whilst their father is a fascinating character, laid back and sardonically charming, also with one gag about him implying so much complexity when, watching monster trucks on the TV when his wife's in the room, one scene has him switch to coverage of supermodels on a catwalk when she's out the room.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xaz5GrH_-WI/Vh_YkulS3uI/
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Andrew's life is complex as he has a crush on a girl, who unfortunately is among those scouts possessed and becoming evil, among those tormenting him alongside his eventually possessed older brother and even trying to harm him; it reaches the point mid way through of him being stripped to his underwear, nearly being gored by a bull, and having to flee for his life half naked. Then there's the threat to kiss his beloved, whilst she's possess and threatening this or "chi chi", involving a significantly bigger and gigantic girl looking at him as if she'll easily break his spine in two. That's without his mother not believing him and even the adults, like a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, becoming possessed, where police will try to run you off the road, farmers with trying to run you over with a combine harvester, and guys for shits and giggles with beer will blow up their own boats in madness.

The eccentricity grows as a virtue. Whilst it would've been interesting to see Tom Waits in the role, Frank Langella, the major actor hired, also happens to be a great character actor who in his mere presence raises the material up. More so as, part of the film's sick sense of humour, he's openly a bad undertaker who will even replace coffins of those about to be buried with cheaper ones, as scummy as you can get despite still being a good, moral man at heart. His assistants include a stoner, (well an implied stoner who just acts sleepy), and another who digs the graves who pretends to always be ill but, when no one is looking, dresses up as a cowboy listening to country music in his home and prepares the dining table as if he's about to have a date there, never seen or even hinted at for a weirder twist. The production is as much like this, even if it evoked my childhood of watching shows like Goosebumps, with its moody atmosphere on such a low budget and the instrumental surf rock theme sounding like it's going to break into a song by The Cramps.

The result, appropriate for a more mature young teenage audience, is one I really liked and wished was more easily available. Yes, I admit the mythos is fun and there's something really rewarding in seeing old American commercials - alongside probably one incredibly weird and inspired mock "news report" that, barring one cringe worthy reference to Mexican food, is from a reporter inside a young boy's intestines, interviewing the staff within it just before it's about to blow with potent gestated fart gas. But, again, it'd be something great to see a proper release of just to learn more of its background - just to have witnessed a film which, far from below my expectations, provided its own interesting and blatant subtexts to its horror was enough for me to admire it.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODQ4YjExM
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1. https://archive.is/20130204104051/http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/08/13/081311-tech-news-crybaby-1-2#selection-345.12-345.20

Non-Abstract Review - Amethyst: Princess of Gem World (2013)

From https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/2/24/Amethyst_Princess_
of_Gemworld_%28Shorts%29_Episode_Level_3_Random_Encounter.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20130728141857

Director: Brianne Drouhard

Screenplay: Amy Wolfram

Based on the comic book series created by Gary Cohn, Ernie Colon and Dan Mishkin

(Voice) Cast: Sophie Oda as Amethyst; Eric Bauza as  Pegacorn; Keith Ferguson as Prince Topaz; Grey Griffin as the Frog Mayor; Tara Strong as the Frog Prince; Nicole Sullivan as the Jalapeño Vendor

Synopsis: Amethyst is playing a video game, a high fantasy adventure, only to be sucked through the hand held console screen and turned into a princess of this weird little world.

Here's a work that'll be difficult to elaborate on but not by fault of its director Brianne Drouhard or any of the production staff* - the issue is that, with what they were given before this micro-series was cancelled, this DC comic property only consists of seven episodes which are only two minutes or so long each. Thus it's effectively a short film or a test project when put together; something clearly worked hard on in what creativity is still at hand, but handed an ignoble fate of a lack of length, where even micro-series from Japan of more limited animation and ridiculous premises like talking farts can at least get over twenty minutes if you combine all the episodes in a marathon.

The work was part of a series of projects called DC Nation Shorts, small shorts based on obscurer DC Comics properties which were shown between their other, more conventionally long animated work on Cartoon Network, such as DC Super Pets, inspired on the time Batman and Superman had their own animal sidekicks in the Silver Age of comics, or imagining Batman villain Riddler as voiced by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Reading up on them, including one animated by Aardman Animations of all people and a live footage version where real life professionals demonstrate the equipment of these characters in practical reality, it's an inspired idea and I want to see all of them. As much because that, whilst I got bored out of my skull by the modern Marvel Studios superhero film template, I am still fascinated and growing in fondness for these types of characters. If I could afford American comic books at a price closer to their Japanese counterparts, in terms of value for money, I'd be less inclined to read more famous creations like Spider-Man or Superman either, but delve into comic book history's strange oddities and cult figures. Some are legitimate cult icons - like Swamp Thing, the living embodiment of nature who became a greater figure in DC Comics when the legendary comic writer Alan Moore had a hand in changing him drastically. Some are misbegotten - like Man-Thing, Marvel's swamp creature now unfortunately living as the poor man's Swamp Thing. And some truly ill-advised ideas I read up upon and still want to read - like Marvel's U.S. 1, a truck driver hero with a cybernetic brain, which could pick up CB radio transmissions, and armed with a super-equipped big rig truck

Among these, Amethyst is also intriguing in a positive way - from 1983, the era of My Little Pony and He-Man, it was clearly meant to be a high fantasy story for a female audience; here, from a female director and a largely female production crew, this premise was re-tweaked for the modern era. In this version, Amethyst starts off as a bespectacled nerdy girl who, once transformed into Amethyst the heroine, finds herself increasingly baffled by what she encounters, immediately from the village of frog people proclaiming her a heroine of the realm, and yet using her smarts to succeed, including the idea that peppers in video games are really, really hot. This leads to the fact the series would've taken the piss out of high fantasy and role playing games, immediately evoking for me a Japanese straight-the-video anime series which tragically only had two episodes before it also got canned, Dragon Half (1993), which ran with its high fantasy setting into utterly ridiculous and hilarious consequences. The reference to anime isn't far off either, clearly influenced by it in aesthetic and also that the first joke is a parody of the magical girl genre, of female characters who transform into heroines like Sailor Moon, where the costume change sequence found in them takes place here in mid-air, not bad for Amethyst until the dimensional pocket said transformations always take place in disappears and one is still falling down in the sky.

Sadly, and this is a justification for typing an expletive as it perfectly sums up the situation, the creators of this production were given a shit deal in that, even without the factor that Amethyst was cancelled, they only had enough time for a tiny little plot they had to quickly resolve. Sadly, a project like DC Nation Shorts, whilst absolutely compelling as an idea, can become its own worst enemy in terms of how short the projects within it could be, as was the case here. What you get here is only a minimal plot - which Amethyst must face an evil male character named Dark Opal - and a little of the world to see including its denizens, worst as you barely get to meet characters like Prince Topaz, the last person to take on Dark Opal only to be left a living skeleton, found in a cave and suffering from chronic apathetic depression and a lack of confidence in himself. It's not a lot in all honesty to work with as a viewer.

But thankfully, there are still signs of what could've been, and Episode 3 is the best episode to show this. Whilst needing to wash, she finds herself encountering a very perverted living tree, one who is watching her bathe, as well as there being the incredibly dark humour of living flowers nearby who argue among themselves who'll be eaten by her horse and reveal in their devouring by the steed. It's a clear sign that the series, if it existed in a longer form, would've still appealed to a young audience but would've had an eccentricity that appealed to adults. The best thing is that, by all accounts, those great gags were directly inspired from the source material, an obsession in the art with even rocks having faces and therefore being alive. This is a great argument for the virtues of adapting source material, even the strangest details, as with this example you get a great idiosyncratic aspect of this fantasy world that would've been used further. The same applies as much to those pastiches which, rather than the dreadful Family Guy style referencing style of merely referencing something for a joke, it's implemented in a way that still works without getting the references.

Sadly, this is all we have, less than ten minutes. We barely see this heroine or her worlds, which was why the review was going to be originally more middling, not a criticism of the show but a wonder if there wasn't enough to get a lot out of from bad luck. However, with hindsight there was a lot still to like, even if having to intricately dissect from what little was there. It's just a shame, in this significantly more positive review, there's just that much left to actually watch.

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* Without any hesitance, this review references back to a podcast episode for the show Cancelled Too Soon, which covered this micro-series with Drouhard herself, so I'll include a link HERE.

From https://www.dccomics.com/sites/default/files/video/
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The Endless Film (2018)

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWRlNGEzNDktYmE5ZC00ZTAyLTkzNzgtZj
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a.k.a. La película infinita

Director: Leandro Listorti

Screenplay: Leandro Listorti

Synopsis: Director Leandro Listorti creates a film here from others, the unfinished productions preserved at the film museum Pablo Hickens Ducros in Buenos Aires. The resulting project combines the curious obsessions of a man over Leonardo Di Vinci's drawings, an animated sci-fi film, softcore images, and even a previous attempt at adapting the novel Zama from 1984.

I wished The Endless Film had been restructured. I will praise Listorti's project as an inspired and worthy project that can continue in any form, all in terms of rescuing unfinished film reels and allowing them to breathe in some form. I think however just how this particular example was put together could've been changed for the better.

The devotion in the project however is something to admire - even the original Argentinean title, a better one frankly, suggests the really rewarding nature of this film as it translates not to "Endless" but "Infinite", evoking new connotations of a far vaster creation, one where there's no attempt to remix the original source material, which can vary from outtakes to imagines without sound, scenes where the clapper board is seen at the start or what remains. A series of progressions are found as, innately with patience, plots are to be found as a viewer will automatically try to make sense of the material, more so as it comes off in structure as the most subtly made of anthology movies. This is something Listorti could've used to deal with that issue of mine I've going to mention, in terms of its structure not being fully formed, in that he could've played off the anthology idea of separate smaller stories but by way of these half-completed apocrypha.

A sense of much welcomed weirdness is also to be found as a result even if not always in every fragment used. One, in monochrome, follows a man fixated on Leonardo De Vinci's the Vitruvian Man, drawing a circle on the floor at one point in the existing footage and lying within it spread out. That footage abruptly leads to a figure locked in upstairs in a bathtub, arms tied around their back, head jerking under the bag over the head, the footage suddenly turning into a David Lynch film and thus becoming legitimately disturbing, a film that would've been wonderful to witness in full form just to figure out where it'd go. The animated sci-fi film, with a man with a fifties ray gun against floral extras from Fantastic Planet (1973), was a loss to cinema too in its charming limited animation and vibrant colour, whilst the politically charged drama of a woman willingly prostituting herself out becomes the most prolonged tale of the group, beginning with her trying to find a missing figure only to end with her assassinating a man in an archive with fish tanks. Poignantly, a first attempt at adapting a novel Zama by Antonio di Benedetto is also here, which was finally completed by the great director Lucrecia Martel. A mirroring is here, a vibrant almost Technicolor ghost, where in the damaged film we effectively see test shots where little happens, someone walking from one side to another outside, and yet succeeds in effect.

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Sometimes it's even broader, a gag of a hit man passing off as the end member of a line of female divers in the midst of jumping into a pool, a couple of takes shown one after the other with him with gun wearing a black swimsuit and wig to match, or the idyllic scene of an older man painting his birdcage bright shocking pinking, the paint dripping onto the rural ground and rocks beneath. Sometimes there are merely little pieces with no explanation, including almost an intermission of technical diagrams and explicit nude photographs of women. The problem is that, again, this footage whilst great in itself isn't fully put together as a work with a clear structure, pacing even at less than an hour the real flaw alongside its tonal shift problems. If it had be reorganised, without even changing the material used in the slightest, than it would've been in the same ballpark as Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room (2015), only not a séance of lost films remade onscreen but using the existing footage from various time periods.

And that's a shame as this type of cinema exists already - Joe Dante's six plus hour The Movie Orgy (1968) was based on pop and trash culture but is also said to be structured both around certain films and the notion of being like an all night binging of television he grew with - so the precedent for an example which resurrects and makes use for these forgotten projects has weight alongside a nobility to it that is even more virtuous. The Endless Film as it stands was still a rewarding experience, but its flaws are made more painful knowing that, for me personally as a viewing, it's entirely just one aspect (the structure of the footage itself) and nothing more which undermined the finished work.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie/Odd

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

Personal Opinion:

The Endless Film should be a project that exists in multiple types per different countries. This Argentinean version certainly evokes a lot of its history just through cinema - both the changing landscape but also bold evocations their history such as with a discomforting propaganda film being used, one which promotes the virtue of authoritarian rule and immediate evokes the country's dark past. It's a shame that, feeling like a project that could just do with a re-edit, the fullest potential just from what exists here without more or any further tampering doesn't feel as fully evocative as its little moments within it do. The result leaves it a fascinating experimental work but a flawed one.

From https://www.berlinale-talents.de/bt/pf/000/278/278295_medium.jpg

Keep An Eye Out (2018)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/
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Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde as Commissaire Buron; Grégoire Ludig as Fugain; Marc Fraize as Philippe; Anaïs Demoustier as Fiona; Orelsan as Sylvain; Philippe Duquesne as Champonin; Jacky Lambert as Franchet / Carine Lustain; Jeanne Rosa as Narta; Vincent Grass as Daniel

Synopsis: In a police station being questioned for a suspicious death by Commissaire Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde), main suspect Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) is in an even worst predicament when another gristly incident happens and figures start to invade his ongoing testimony to Buron.

[Some Major Spoilers, so be wary]

It's been a long while since I've seen a Quentin Dupieux film, since his debut (and influence on the blog) Rubber (2010), and it's been too long. Unfortunately whilst his work was still being released in the USA, it stopped in the UK leaving many films like Wrong (2012) and Reality (2014) out of reach. It's a shame as, since a film about a sentient rubber tire with psychic powers, Dupieux here plays a subtler game indebted to the final period of Luis Buñuel's career with the films he shot in France.

Initially it suggests a farce as a half naked man conducts an orchestra in the park, quite well in fact as he could've taken the job if he merely wore trousers, before the police chase him off. Afterwards it becomes a tale of Fugain, who finds himself being questioned by Commissaire Buron for an inexplicable body being found outside his apartment complex. Recounting his side through an ongoing testimony, Fugain has a further issue at hand that there's now a dead cop (by accident via a triangle protractor and an open filing cabinet drawer) being hidden in the room, deciding not to try to admit to an accident but hiding him in a cupboard.  

Keep An Eye Out is a small tale, one which is entirely about this incident whilst Dupieux punctures it with moments of strangeness. Buron has a hole in his chest, for example, from being shot which is brought up when he smokes, or when an oyster (plus shell) is eaten. All is played for deadpan humour thankfully, the absurdity found in it breaking the normalcy set up; it's particularly a good choice in lieu of the film being shot and designed as having a husky, deep coloured aesthetic with minimal camera movements, feeling like it is set in the seventies at points but clearly in its own world. Even when the cast is broad - a one eyed officer very enthusiastic about his police badge, Buron being the lacksidasical cop who takes a call for a casual meeting in the midst of an interrogation - there is still the sense of its own form of naturalism in contrast to Rubber which deliberately, in a meta text, played with the notion of "just because" with cinema's absurdities.

The thing that stands out here in contrast to that film, rather than openly riffing on its own artificiality, is that, even if it does raise questions about the logic of the film itself, Dupieux decided to have a film where the reality is constantly being manipulated without it being a deliberate meta text. Instead, Fugain's testimony of the night he found the body becomes the prime aspect of the narrative - starting with telling all the amount of times he went out his door one night, all watched over by a nosey female neighbour, alongside details such as the improvised cockroach spray he uses malfunction, all of which Buron immediately finds boring and openly says to him.

Then figures invade the testimony (including the dead officer Fugain is trying to hide) demanding questions and setting him off tangents in time, including a stint not part of the testimony talking to the officer's wife about how he'll meet him in the future outside the testimony, and even Buron himself becomes a bystander within it who can see everything visually. This is why I made the Buñuel reference. The film does have an overt moment of farce with this structure - the pair sharing false memories they can actually see, Buron stuck on an desert island starving, Fugain having a childhood memory of letting the dog free and sticking the dog collar (plus chain) on and sitting in the dog house outside - but the flashbacks in general become closer to Buñuel's work. Films in his final French era of cinema, famously The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), played with dreams and reality being constantly subjective to each other in layered plot structures; even before Fugain is forced on tangents talking to intruders, the entire fact that Buron is prodding these testimony scenes as not being particularly exciting have their own gleeful sense of the perverse to them in unfolding the reality itself.

From here, it's literally a chamber piece, apt as whilst it does have moments which might have some logic gaps, it does play into where the film leads to when its pulls the carpet from under the viewer's feet and the world is a literal stage. It's an obvious twist if you were open minded, but the joke is that Fugain is still stuck in a scenario which now becomes Kafkaesque when it ends. And ultimately Keep An Eye Out feels like, as a compliment, a small project for Dupieux, a sketch in filmic form going from his ambitious mad debut, the sketches' in a filmmaker's career capable of still being worthy and here in particular showing his flexibility. In fact, the earnestness of the cast and the film's style even enforces a greater weirdness, their good solid performances adding emphasis to the moments of true bizarreness whilst the production and technical craft, subdued, creates a level of its own rules of reality to work from. Just so that, when that aforementioned oyster is eaten whole, it feels of the world even down to a look of sheepishness when a trickle of blood is on the eater's lip, admitting whilst it was a nice oyster it cut their mouth as if a minor inconvenience.

Abstract Rating: Absurd/Playful/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

It was nice to see Quentin Dupieux again; excessively long since the first encounter and arguably he's matured in that time to an advantage whilst still being incredibly silly, which is also a good thing. The result is a nice, efficiently made gem which makes one wish Dupieux was actually better known so I can see his films.

From https://vanyaland.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/keepaneyeout.jpg

Plastic Neesan (2011-2012)

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Aka. +Tic Elder Sister

Director: Tsutomu Mizushima

Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima

Based on the manga by Cha Kurii

(Voice) Cast: Mari Kanou as Iroe "Neesan" Genma, Marina Inoue as Makina "Makimaki" Sakamazaki, Yumi Uchiyama as Hazuki "Okappa" Okamoto

A 1000 Anime Tie-In*

Synopsis: Neesan, with her friends Makimaki and Okappa, sets up a model making club at their high school; instead of actually making models, they spend their time over twelve episodes, two minutes each, exposing their hatreds for each other, encountering weird students, and learning of the mating dance of a female gorilla.

Let's delve into some weird anime, and particularly in the 2010s, anime comedy became a vast untamed jungle of such material, more so now as the limitations of a very low budget or restrictions on a certain length per episode no longer applied. Direct to online material and even tiny minute long projects shown on television have thrived, and they have a wider audience now anime has streaming services like Crunchyroll that can make them available in the West too. So instead, I choose a "micro-series", my own coinage of these tiny series of tiny episode lengths and full duration, which is an obscurity at the start of the 2010s, before this structure was fully available and has fallen into the cracks of availability.

Plastic Neesan, as well as not being properly available in the West, has another factor in that its director/screenwriter is Tsutomu Mizushima, a lesser known but prolific animation director who has entered the mainstream (at least for the anime community) for titles like the horror series Another (2012) to his forte in comedy like the Girls und Panzer franchise. However, it makes sense he made Plastic Neesan now as, in his past alongside this frothier comedy and his dabbling in other genres like horror, he was notorious for some truly misanthropic black humoured creations. His most infamous is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan (2005), in which a cute female angel with a monstrous spiked club is assigned to male high school student to prevent him from becoming the ultimate pervert who creates a way for women never to age after their teens, infamous for its crudeness and (with that club and resurrection involved) extreme gore. I myself have seen the obscurer but still twisted Magical Witch Punie-Chan (2006-7), which envisions the young female heir of a fantasy land dictatorship, as sadistic as her parents, coming to Earth and still gladly using magic and pro wrestling moves to put down anyone trying to rebel against her kingdom. Both were written by Mizushima too, and considering his horror titles, Blood-C (2011) for example, are as notorious for their over-the-top violence or being ridiculous (such as the critically panned The Lost Village (2016)), he's got some quirks to say the least.

Created as an "ONA" (original net animation, so made to play over the internet), Plastic Neesan immediately runs off in a shambolic form, a grab-bag of jokes initially under the pretence of being about three girls who run a model making club, even to the point they have replicas of their favourite models permanently on their heads, such as Makimaki (the "rational" one of the trio) having a tank on her head with a living little man helming it.

Most of the series instead of gleefully misanthropic; Neesan (the mascot and the tiny, really hyper blonde one with a castle on her head), Makimaki (brown hair, a tank on her head), and Okappa (quiet but secretly a demonic sadist with a train on her black haired head) may be friends but they will gladly slam each other into a wall enough to make a decent person sized dent into it. Or, in the case of Okappa, go further like shove Neesan up in a basketball net, when pissed off with her, to the annoyance of the basketball team itself. This isn't different from a lot of anime in structure were it not for that added sense of darkness, Neesan a ball of weirdness in herself even next to other series' oddball female characters; she's mad enough to take a friend's bag and twerk with it between her knees until its night and everything's covered in sweat, entirely exhausted, just to make a point.

The ironic thing is that, for an outsider to a lot of anime, Plastic Neesan is weird, and even in the anime community I learnt of this ONA work through a "Weird Anime" list among strong competition, but in a medium where unrestrained anime comedy is commonplace, it's pretty conventional even in its weirdness, the carte blanche to be weird, such as the internet favourite show that trolls people Pop Epic Team (2018), actually a normalising effect that undercuts a work's strangest unless you really try harder. Really the more interesting thing about a show like Plastic Neesan is less it truly being weird but just the inventiveness in such little running time even in this commonplace style, at least in terms of this type of comedy providing its voice actors (actresses here) the room for vocal gymnastics and the staff to be unpredictable.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w780/cHk2O8BExRkSLwZ1QhqLFtrU2l9.jpg

From there the series goes for various bizarre whole series gags. One of the most infamous, appearing in memes online, has to be a male class mate of the three protagonists who, "rescuing" two male students from a pair bullies, explodes his clothes off to reveal he's wearing a full set of female underwear, turning in a perpetual crotch thrusting machine moving towards any of the four others involved. It is, in description, deeply homophobic but the execution is stranger, even if it's a case that of a viewer like myself completely pulling the material away from the director/writer for my own interpretation; that something else is at hand in the epilogue, where he's in in the back of a cop car (not arrested but as a witness), draped in a blanket with a look of existential serenity that shows something much weirder in this one-off character's mind. Mizushima in general, from the little I've seen, is strange even when it comes to his characters and their various pathologies when allowed to create them, such as the cute animal mascot in Punie-Chan actually being a member of a race enslaved by her kingdom, planning to murder her constantly and having an entirely war flashback sequence parodying Platoon (1986) and The Deer Hunter (1978).

Among others include two twin girls with pink hair forced, in a classroom, to feed a giantess, and another character who could be argued as being deeply offensive too but in execution can (by accident) be viewed in a different way, that she is in reality that stereotypical vain pretty girl but here is a plump figured girl who in incredibly terrible at tennis and with a farcical sense of grace. Again, really offensive in premise, but the tone of the material (and her voice actor's actual grace) can easily reinterpret it, especially as with her legitimately luscious blonde hair and grace when she's paired to three absolutely miscreants whilst she posits her desire for beauty in an egotistical but energised form. Hell, you could rewrite one joke as her deliberately missing serves in a tennis game just to screw with Neesan's head, which would've been hilarious as a touch.

And this mis- or reinterpretation of Mizushima's work is not just myself own weird personal view either as, notoriously, his anime horror work has always been viewed as being too gory or ridiculous for its own good, even his most well regarded Another setting the tone for farce with the first death, falling literally on one's umbrella, and turning into a mass farce by the finale blown over proportions. Whilst Plastic Neesan is considered sane in the delirious waters of anime deep cuts, where true weirdness plays with the form and expectations of the medium, the more interesting detail is this obscurer but prolific director's very peculiar career has this twisted side to him whenever he was ever allowed to get away from it. Aside from this, Plastic Neesan is modestly animated with the obvious appeal of cute girls being utterly twisted in personality (or wearing skimpy bikinis in the final episode, when trying to follow the example of a female gorilla, with a mating dance, to get a boyfriend).  Not by a long shot is it truly the weirdest thing you can encounter in anime - ironically, for all its infamy online, this is just a regular day at the office for me - but its definitely memorable.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mean/Misanthropic/Silly/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

Plastic Neesan is strange for anyone who would've never seen an anime or transition from a mainstream success (insert Pokemon/Sailor Moon/Attack on Titan here) without any prior warning, but in the vast catalogue of anime production, and especially comedy, this deliberately strange type of story is actually far less weird than you'd think by not taking itself seriously. Arguably as well the micro length, under thirty minutes to watch, and it's entirely sketch based style is also a shield from a greater abstraction. Instead, the dark sense of humour, nasty depending on your view of some of the jokes, is really the curious thing to experience.

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* Which you can take a look at HERE.

From https://ikilote.net/Galeries/News/
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Pity (2018)

Director: Babis Makridis

Screenplay: Babis Makridis and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Yannis Drakopoulos, Evi Saoulidou, Nota Tserniafski, Makis Papadimitriou

Synopsis: With his wife (Evi Saoulidou) in a coma, a lawyer (Yannis Drakopoulos) is dealing with his grief. However, it becomes apparent that, through the attention he gets and the effect it has, he's addicted to pity, making his life awkward when he doesn't get his own morbid way.

At the beginning, Pity comes off as a morose, dirge-like story about death - a man whose wife is near death in a coma, coupled with black screens filled of bleak tragic odes about morality. Something's amiss though, and when it becomes apparent the text's the obsessive ramblings of our, the structure of the film even playing with the viewer, then things go amiss. It's not surprising really, being a Greek Weird Wave film from Yorgos Lanthimos' former screenwriter Efthymis Filippou and director/co-writer Babis Makridis, so something was bound to become perverse. It's a film that feels not as bold as those films before in this movement of Greek cinema, but unlike Chevalier (2015) which really felt like this movement repeating itself, this particular entry is still an intriguing curiosity.

That sense of the films of before in this moment being repeated is clear. The minimal camera movement and long takes a common reoccurrence among the Greek Weird Wave films; Greece's atmosphere, I realise, of bright Mediterranean light has the unexpected effect on white, modernist environments of a septic plainness, as much the ill ease you experience from these films the unexpected fear found in Dulux pure white or light cream wall paint. Banal everyday interaction is turned into a breeding ground of uncomfortable recesses in people, in this case this central character needing to be grieving to function, or probably the truth, an egotistic addiction for despair. He, even when his wife is okay, midway through fully recovering, will deliberately lie to the guy at the Laundromat for pity that she's at death's door, and after a female neighbour did the kindest of things by giving him and his son cakes in pity to every morning, he starts being the creepy stalker neighbour back at her door demanding more cake.

It is a lot more subdued for the most part than other Greek Weird Wave films. The lawyer's vindictiveness is found in pettier ways even next to compatriots in films like Dogtooth (2009); upon hearing one of Mozart's joyful piano sonatas, sabotages his son's piano so only discordant cords can be played, preferring his own joyless and portentous dirge about death instead. It does end more conventionally, bloodshed as he even dumps the pet dog in the middle of the sea, which could be seen as the one moment that the film does fail when it could've been a better work by taking another direction. Everything before that point plays into a perverse mocking of a patriarch whose melodramatic attitude to the ritual of grief is a dark one, particularly as, barring the one influence he has in power as a lawyer, he's a little man who Yannis Drakopoulos plays as a quiet, somewhat pathetic figure in his thick rimmed glasses and manner, only a problematic one in how obsessed he is. Even early on, when you still view Pity as a serious film, how he describes how crying in films is rarely real and talks about an American boxing film, there's an inherently obsessive air to his monotone which becomes both hilarious in a sick way but gives way to an actual psychosis.

The other question to ask is Pity's point. Alongside this parody of patriarchal behaviour, there is a disturbing notion that death and tragedy can be relished in modern culture its clearly stabbing at - some arts do so for transgression, but Pity surprisingly can be compared to the American horror-comedy Tragedy Girls (2017), as the older father to a movie where two women perpetrate murders whilst playing traumatised bystanders whose grief makes them online sensations. Babis Makridis' film is a stranger version, as the character has literally become an addict and one who already seems to have been with psychological problems beforehand, one of the various figures screenwriter Efthymis Filippou has written who have pathological obsessions. A lawyer, his obsession is worse as he can grasp onto a client's grief over her father being murdered, the first twig of Pity having a black humour fully when he tries to see if (with the help of his female secretary) whether a blood curdling scream can be heard over a heavy metal song. From changing his office picture on the wall to a ship wreck to an egregious, spiteful act of injustice in court, his need afterwards when things don't go his way becomes more insidious as he now harms other. It makes the actual bloodshed for the ending, referencing one talked of involving a BMX bicycle at the crime scene, unneeded as it already reached an absurdity that could've gone in a different, unique direction. (Besides, if a broad moment to be included for the film, using tear gas on himself in a closed room to cause himself to cry is unique to say the least). That doesn't detract from the film in the slightest, merely a sour note to Pity's virtues.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

There is a danger that the Greek Weird Wave of cinema is going to fall into clichés and predictability as it continues, but even a lesser film like Pity still continues the sickly humorous, uncomfortable satire that made the moment originally. Even as Yorgos Lanthimos somehow now had an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Rachel Weisz spouting obscenities, those still in his homeland are finding (probably disturbingly) a lot of festering wounds in human behaviour to still pick at.

From https://www.slugmag.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/
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Non-Abstract Review: Occidental (2017)

From https://cdn.cinematerial.com/p/297x/gorqtsym/
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Director: Neïl Beloufa

Screenplay: Neïl Beloufa

Cast: Anna Ivacheff as Diana; Idir Chender as Antonio; Paul Hamy as Giorgio; Louise Orry-Diquéro as Romy; Hamza Meziani as Khaled; Brahim Tekfa as Karim; Françoise Cousin as Sophie; Pierre Rousselet as Christophe; Brune Renault as Vanessa; Geoffrey Carey as M. Dubreuil

Synopsis: At the Hotel Occidental, in the midst of a riot in the streets, two men claiming to be Italian (Paul Hamy and Idir Chender) book a room only to be held with suspicion by the hotel manager Diana (Anna Ivacheff). A series of turns, questions of perceptions and secrets are found.

Under eighty minutes, Neïl Beloufa's Occidental is nonetheless a dense production, whose entire form is a constant shifting form where everything changes. Fittingly it's set in the midst of a night time riot, France's history from the French Revolution to the 2018-19 yellow vests movement with constant conflict, aptly used as the exterior to a film where perceptions are constantly being broken and remade. Two men who enter a hotel are viewed as immediately suspicious; they may be gay, though Giorgio (Paul Hamy) has already wooed the female desk clerk Romy (Louise Orry-Diquéro), whilst there are secrets about why his partner Antonio (Idir Chender) has already made hotel manager Diane (Anna Ivacheff) even more nervous around him than to the pair of them together. Perceptions of racism and culpability play out as, barring the exterior shots, it is entirely within the neon drenched hotel building.

From there, there are a few main characters, including male desk clerk Khaled (Hamza Meziani), prone to fainting in tense situations, alongside a group of drunken British men on a stag party and an older man with a younger woman. Throw in the police briefly, and it's a conference of divided opinions and sides crossing all around little details. Where a pink handbag is, why someone is drinking a two cokes when they have a full bottle in their room, absurd to write on paper but in context played with humour and a game of little tensions. On a second viewing (seen twice for the review), it does work as a series of characters in mind games with each other.

From https://frieze.com/sites/default/files/landscapeoccidental.jpg

It helps the acting is good, the script with each character clearly defined. Romy 's immediately on the two guests' side, lovingly preparing cheese between slices of cooked bread when food is refused to them, Giorgio in his yellow coat wooing her at the beginning only to be left beaten up  by Diane in the midst of the tensions and her undercover investigations among the rooms. Even the language itself is played with, thankfully picked up in the subtitles I had but probably even better if the viewer was bilingual in the languages involved, between bad incomprehensible Italian and when it's perfectly spoken in an emotional scene. The only one constant, where even the old man and the woman (his daughter? A lover?) vary, are the drunk, boorish British guests, which as a British viewer I can accept as a good swipe at a poor side of ourselves. The rest of the cast in comparison move and change until it leads to the literal burning of their environment, only the slightly jarring CGI explosion involved a flaw in the film's production.

Against the dialogue-heavy drama is a distinct aesthetic from Beloufa with the help of cinematographer Guillaume le Grontec and the composers of the score Grégoire Bourdeil and Alexandre Geindre. At the end of the 2010s, the eighties throwback aesthetic has finally become tiresome for me, but only because of when it's been used as a cheap aesthetic, where here in Occidental instead I am reminded why these tropes of neon colours and synthesizer scores are still vibrant and still worth using, it's brightly coloured (but subtle) look even including how the costumes like Romy's canary yellow jumper add to the characters' personalities. The score is pulsating without being over-the-top, whilst the distinct typeface of the credits, whilst a slight detail, adds to its distinct personality too. The result ultimately succeeds to adding oomph to the material which is also with depth; when it finishes, the rioting crowd in a series of Chinese whispers over elaborating the incidents inside the hotel, the theme of misdirection Occidental plays with becomes precise, witty and ultimately clever.

From https://cine-vue.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/
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Poison (1991)

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Director: Todd Haynes

Screenplay: Todd Haynes

Cast: Scott Renderer as John Broom; James Lyons as Jack Bolton; Edith Meeks as Felicia Beacon; Millie White as Millie Sklar; Buck Smith as Gregory Lazar; Rob LaBelle as Jay Wete; John Leguizamo as Chanchi; Anne Giotta as Evelyn McAlpert; Lydia Lafleur as Sylvia Manning; Ian Nemser as Sean White; Evan Dunsky as Dr. MacArthur; Susan Gayle Norman as Dr. Nancy Olsen; Marina Lutz as Hazel Lamprecht; Barry Cassidy as Officer Rilt; Richard Anthony as Edward Comacho

Synopsis: Poison is a triptych of three tales - "Hero", "Homo" and "Horror". Hero is a mock-documentary exploring a tale of a young boy who murdered his father, only for the image of him to drastically change as more is learnt. Homo follows a male prisoner in a 1930s jail, his erotic experiences with another man in the past rekindled when that person is transferred to his jail. And Horror follows a male scientist who, having found he can extract the compound of the libido into liquid form, accidentally consumes it and unleashes a virulent STD among the populous.

Poison wasn't Todd Haynes's debut; it was his first theatrical length production but the first was the acclaimed by infamous Superstar: A Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an innovative depiction of Karen Carpenter's life by way of Barbie dolls which got into trouble for using licensed songs by The Carpenters without permission and likely pissed off her surviving brother Richard by showing him in a very negative light.  That film now lives in a legal limbo which nonetheless hasn't stopped a copy being preserved in The Museum of Modern Art and the production to mysteriously be available online; Poison, whilst with acclaimed from the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, was just as controversial. The spectre of the AIDs crisis and a repellent homophobia marked the era; Todd Haynes, as a gay man, isn't hiding any of his anger and frustrations from his perspective. Horror, his monochrome sci-fi horror segment, is openly a metaphor about infection and pariah status and that's just a piece of the whole puzzle.

From https://fqtemporary.files.wordpress.com
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Poison's structure is different as effective it's a three part anthology where the three segments are very different in style and intercut between each other, openly references an influence of French author Jean Genet (alongside Genet's only attempt at directing a film, Un Chant d'Amour (1950) which Poison does explicitly take visual iconography from). Haynes was making films this unconventional even when he went mainstream, like I'm Not There (2007) dealing with the problem with trying to portray Bob Dylan by casting six actors (one Cate Blanchett) as him in vignettes, but there was a period I merely viewed him as having settled into a comfortable niche, probably because his most successful work (from Far From Heaven (2002) to the mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce (2011)) have been conventionally plotted melodramas. Poison is a fresh reminder of how unconventional he is, even Safe (1995) being a horror film without no horror.

Hero is a pastiche of a documentary with direct to camera interviews and a documentation style, where the obsessions of a boy we never see, alongside the reason for him shooting his father, become increasingly complicated. Homo explicitly draws from Genet's film, both its eroticism of prison life (including a dark masochism) and a scene of idyllic in scenes of forest woodland, twisted and turned further in rich colour. Horror, pure b-movie black-and-white, feels like a clear mock-up of a strange fifties drive-in film but given the saddest and humane underlying message.

From http://thecinemaarchives.com/
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Homo is stepped in sensuality, and yet that dark masochism is to be constantly found, jarring against the tasteful depictions of gay relationships; in Un Chant d'Amour, there were moments of tenderness, the kissing of one's hand clearly lifted for Poison, but it also had the eroticised moment of a prison guard pushing a gun barrel down a prisoner's throat. Jean Genet is a blind spot for me, but I am aware as a gay man he a) viewed homosexuality as being an outlaw status, and b) eroticised and wrote of criminality in a heightened way, something even John Waters ran with in deliberately bad taste comedies. Hero in vast contrast takes the cynical nature of an expose documentary, the true crime tales that are as numerous in the 2010s as back then, but subverts it as we see the explicit yearnings the boy had (an obsession with spanking Haynes tackled further making Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) later) but also showing the tale of an actual angel among normal heteronormative life's rancid underbelly of domestic abuse and broken marriages. Horror is about the plight of infection, how one is ostracised in pain, more striking as its surrounding a heterosexual relationship between the protagonist and a female love interest, the disease which causes growths on the face without any bias for sexuality as AIDs itself was.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Strange/Unconventional

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

Personal Opinion:

Altogether, Poison is a striking production. The shock of some of its scenes has been replaced by more transgressive LGBT work, like the explicit moments of sexuality, but others are still impactful, such as a crowd of prisoners in a flashback for Homo (including a John Leguizamo cameo) spitting in a figure's mouth. I cannot help but think even Bernard Mandico for a film like The Wild Boys (2018) has been openly influenced by Poison, a work still in terms of how it fragments and intercuts the three segments between each other, and how they are different in technical style, very unconventional. That's before you have to try to decode and read the images onscreen, including those which feel like their own piece such as the first person from a child or youth pawing at colourful jewellery, in a full and vivid moment not dissimilar to what Kenneth Anger was after in tone in Puce Moment (1949).

Altogether, these moments come together with an earnest, striking thought in mind. Homo with a sense of immense eroticism, sometimes as colourful as its look and other times morbid, Horror a tragedy which takes ropey b-movie tropes and turn them into something deeply sad, and Hero the climax a happy ending where the camera literally floats into the sky. The result's an absolutely fascinating work and a reminder for me of Todd Haynes' talents.

From http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjM3NDk4
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