On Body and Soul (2017)

Director: Ildikó Enyedi

Screenplay: Ildikó Enyedi

Cast: Géza Morcsányi as Endre; Alexandra Borbély as Mária; Réka Tenki as Klára; Zoltán Schneider as Jenő; Ervin Nagy as Sanyi; Itala Békés as Zsóka

After a hiatus of eighteen years, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi returned back with a success, On Body and Soul the 2017 Golden Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival, and was nominated for the Best Foreign (International) Oscar. Befitting the director of My 20th Century (1989), an idiosyncratic debut crossing together separated twin sisters to Thomas Edison's light bulbs, On Body and Soul is a growing romance tale which takes place at an abattoir, in which a significantly older male chief financial officer Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and a very introverted quality inspector Mária (Alexandra Borbély) develop a connection due to a shared dream, finding themselves continually dreaming they are a deer and a doe respectably in a winter snow covered woodland.

Shot in an abattoir, all septic white and cold, with their connection pushed together when someone steals medical goods for mating the cattle, I will warn viewers there are scenes with real cows being killed and cut up for meat. The images of a slaughterhouse and the real place, (i.e. including smell and spatial environment), do differ for me but I will make the reader aware of this out of warning. On Body and Soul also, depending on how you view Mária, is one of the best depictions of a learning/mental disability even if it is never explicit on the story about her. A new staff member with an uncanny ability of memory recall, but called "Snow White" by colleagues who view her like one might do an actual alien, Mária's characterisation is fascinating from this perspective.

Quiet, nervous and able to remember even the twelfth sentence spoken to her, Mária became interesting for me, as a viewer born with autism as an avatar for being an adult with learning disabilities, when we see she still goes to counselling. She has, amusingly, still gone to the consoler for children (due to the location looking like a children's room and he asking her if she preferred someone else), but that was where the idea came into consideration. Distant from everyone due to extreme shyness, able to describe how one's dilating eyeballs can tell if they are lying or not but with difficult able to communicate, as if this skill was instead learnt by her artificially than naturally in adaptation, she is blatantly an isolated person but it is only with context it comes off as written as someone on the autistic spectrum.

As someone who also has a pedantic and vital talent, extremely good at her work that complaints about her reducing the beef to class B comes from her being able to tell its far fatter than regulation by mere inches, she could have easily become a distant character were it not for how in depth to film deals with her as a figure and the world around.  Almost alien to anyone else, she is only really able to express herself using (of all things) PlayMobil toys by herself to figure out how to talk to people like Endre next time, a more extreme case of a disability than myself in my own personal take on the film. The bond grows only part of the way through between Endre and Mária due to accident, a psychologist brought in due to the consideration the theft of under the counter hormones might have some sexual hang-up in place, which means that this potential romance is one that is awkward and takes a long time to actually develop as the dream is the only initial connection. Alexandra Borbély's performance is the best regardless of fan interpretation; hers alongside the script is a hell of a superior take on such a figure if you did describe it as such, even as a proxy interpretation of a disability superior than many films about disabled characters which are cloying, saccharin, patronising or squander potential by becoming all the above.

Beyond this, On Body and Soul follows the virtue of world cinema of pure unpredictability, a romantic drama in the least expected of places and in an unfamiliar world, with a foot firmly planting into reality, a starkly shot drama, and the other in the ethereal with the serene scenes of the deer. The cast beyond Borbély , especially Géza Morcsányi as Endre, are just as strong which adds a credibility to this entire premise without it coming off as absurd. Everything is ordinary and characters are far from perfect, such as the running gag of one of Endre's co-workers and a friend who is a larger middle age man, who says man have control over woman in the typical chauvinistic manner, only for his relationship to his wife clearly the opposite but still an existing one.  It is amazing to think, in On Body and Soul's balance of incredibly black humour and emotional depth, which the film manages to go through some incredibly dark humour and frankness in its disarmingly quiet tone. There is an Oscar nominated film now because of this one, even over Dogtooth (2009), that following the joke Mária watches porn to understand how sex works, you get images of actual hardcore porn explicitly shown in the background to one scene, managing to make it come off as a quiet amusing surprising as the film succeeds in finding a balance between its eccentricities and its warmth.

As a result, the film can be both hilarious at points but also utterly emotional even within the same plot point. Like a cousin to Argentinean director Martin Rejtman, who continually made jokes involving heavy metal in his films, a gag about Mária trying to find "love music" starts with death metal, only for the song found as a result of the scene tying into when heartbreak takes place and a very close to the bone, and uncomfortably realistic, attempted suicide with wrist cutting happens in the last act. (Again, I'll warn the viewer about this whilst wondering how the practical effects creator made it look realistic on an actor completely naked during the scenes.) Comparing back to My 20th Century, an incredibly stylish and magical fantasy film shot in monochrome, On Body and Soul is a much more subdued work in tone but you can tell it is the same filmmaker here. Something very unpredictable underneath it surface that, to confess something, I openly had a chance to see much earlier ago from when I covered this only to turn off after a few minutes, a lack of patience which I can thankfully rectify with the statement that On Body and Soul is a very good film. An exceptional one to add weight to this, from a director whose work is sadly not as well seen but will hopefully reap that benefits that this production's success (and a restored and available version of My 20th Century) for the better.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

Ghost Chase (1987)

Director: Roland Emmerich

Screenplay: Roland Emmerich and Thomas Kubisch

Cast: Jason Lively as Warren McCloud; Tim McDaniel as Fred; Jill Whitlow as Laurie Sanders; Leonard Lansink as Karl; Paul Gleason as Stan Gordon; Ian MacNaughton as Frederick McCloud; Chuck Mitchell as Mr. Rosenbaum

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Yes, I am covering a Roland Emmerich movie, which is bizarre even for me to consider. But Emmerich long before his big budget films had to begin somewhere. His first known film is arguably Universal Soldier (1992) as it had Jean-Claude Van Damme in his popular Hollywood years and led to sequels off the back of financial success. I hold some good to that film, entirely for a scene of Dolph Lundgren as a Vietnam soldier, brought back to life,and having gone insane, holding a supermarket hostage and beginning a crazed monologue about the war whilst a colleague, also a resurrected soldier, is eating frozen meat. Stargate (1994) was after, though I'd argue that whilst it is an important step in his career, the TV series has subsumed it culturally just for being over ten seasons without the spin-offs. After that was Independence Day (1996) which was a smash hit, starting Emmerich's course to blockbusters to the modern day.

Before then, he started with West German/American co-productions, such as a Malcolm McDowell starring sci-fi Moon 44 (1990), or this, which looked like a horror themed E.T. rip off but is Roland Emmerich making an eighties horror tinged comedy with cast members from the cult film Night of the Creeps (1986). Nothing is inappropriate in the film for a family audience baring  the surprising amount of swearing, an affinity for "Goddamn" in particular and an occasional "shit", all about two horror loving guys Warren (Jason Lively) and Fred (Tim McDaniel)  alongside the put upon female lead to their amateur horror films Laurie (Jill Whitlow). The E.T. stand in, in lieu to Steven Spielberg's famous 1982 about a diminutive alien being a huge mega hit, is here the ghost of a diminutive English butler of one of the guy's late grandfather, acquired when Warren is the benefactor of a will. Said butler Lewis wishes his body to finally rest, taking advantage of Fred being a wunderkind with film practical effects by hijacking an animatronic version of himself as a corporal body, which in fair due to the film itself is a very well made puppet creation who never comes off as unintentionally creepy with his big eyes and stereotypical English accent.

Ghost Chase is just an okay film, but I must confess this is a Roland Emmerich film I have seen that I have enjoyed. Unfortunately the German born director became a pretentious one, bombastic and yet bland, who puts messages about climate change in films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) only for there to still be the problematic nature I have always had with disaster films of them gleefully killing off whole populations as statistics in elaborate catastrophes. His cinema does not appeal to me at all, but not without a concern that he simply followed spectacle without risk and with pseudo gravity to the material.  Ghost Chase, co-written by Emmerich, is a simple and silly tale where two goofball male leads and female character being the grounded one cross paths with an evil movie mogul who wants the inheritance too.

I like the tributes to horror throughout the film, as they fell from a sincere place and not stumbling into anything that would be ridiculed. One of the leads Fred is the aforementioned talented director/tech head jack of all trades who has turned their home into a giant haunted house, even creating a breakfast preparation system which the creators of Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. When you get an actual haunted house, it has all the clichés like superimposed actors as ghosts, sentient suits of armour and a giant spiked crushing device, all done with a loving sense of playfulness that is not to be found in later films from the director I have seen. Even the fact they take advantage of Night of the Living Dead (1968) being in the public domain is for good, such as splicing it in-between a meta slasher opening inside the film, starting as being part of the trend of the films in the eighties only for it to be a production being shot the leads in their house.

Lewis himself is interesting the main selling point of this entire production, one of the many miniature beings who exist in the eighties, many of which were as mentioned in the shadow of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial being such a big blockbuster hit. Not annoying in the slightest, there is an added side to this being a film by German born Emmerich in which one of the villains is an incompetent German henchman who looks like a glasses wearing middle aged man, felt with a wink. Lewis even evokes fighting the "Hun" in World War I in one set piece against him, which does not feel offensive when you consider this is a German production that is probably taking glee in all this.

Beyond this, it is a predictable movie. As a depiction of Los Angeles in the eighties however, shot in Hollywood, it is interesting to see Emmerich's take on Hollywoodland before he would be a permanent member, even if his shots show it as a crowded urban sprawling epicentre more than its glamorous facade may suggest. The story plays up to this place's inherent oddness, where turn of the century houses hide knee-deep between studios and undistinguished buildings, and where it subverts the stereotype of the drunk doing a double take at a strange sight by revealing a drunk homeless man as a former star, offering Lewis information for a very important location he needs to get to off camera.

The irony is not lost of Roland Emmerich eventually becoming a big Hollywood director  considering how much of the film is about the leads, especially Fred, wanting to get their as creators. He should be happy he got his dream, the one Fred wants whilst Warren is in love with his off-and-on again female lead, almost suggesting the Fred character is a take on himself as a wide eyed wannabe director with so many ideas in his head. It is annoying that this dream however includes a film like 2012 (2009) in the reality, a bloated and unsubtle experience for anyone. This admittedly could come off as extreme mean to write, and anyone wanting to defend that film is welcome to try to me, but a person's life is long enough for him or her to change over the years into an entirely different person. It would be interesting to see how the helmer of Ghost Chase ended up being the man he did in the later decades. One possible issue is that, whilst I may maintain an open mind to his work, not a lot of Emmerich's work is exactly appropriate to cover for this type of review, which not even his greatest defenders would argue against. Possibly one exception is Anonymous (2011), his ill advised period film suggesting William Shakespeare did not write his own plays. In comparison, something as innocuous but joyful like Ghost Chase comes off as more charming.

Kingdom Hospital (2004)

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Screenplay: Stephen King, Tabitha King and Richard Dooling

Cast: Andrew McCarthy as Dr. Hook; Bruce Davison as Dr. Stegman; Meagen Fay as Dr. Brenda Abelson; Ed Begley Jr. as Dr. Jesse James; Sherry Miller as Dr. Lona Massingale; Allison Hossack as Dr. Christine Draper; Diane Ladd as Sally Druse; Jack Coleman as Peter Rickman; Jodelle Micah Ferland as Ghost Girl

Back in my childhood, when my parents were obsessed with watching Stephen King adaptations, Kingdom Hospital was just a very eccentric horror tale set at a hospital that just happened to involve a talking anteater. Revisiting the show is now stranger in knowledge that Stephen King, the legendary horror author in one of the few times directly working on a project, is remaking Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, a two series project between 1994 and 1997 that was itself strange, unpredictable and alien. For von Trier, they were just before his Dogma 95 phase of stripping his productions of all artifice, when he was originally a very stylish and artificial director for his first few films, The Kingdom's first season his most well regarded piece of genre filmmaking in his career. Kingdom Hospital, also about a haunted hospital but shipped to Maine in the United States, as a project, funding particularly by Disney as it's a Touchstone Television production, is significantly weirder as a concept in knowledge of this.

So King developed the series. It was first a mini-series until King had gotten to the point of a "Bible" for the second series only for it never to happen. Unlike The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital is built on an old dyeing factory, but the staff is still a disorganised lot. Heads more obsessed with blue-sky thinking whilst others steal actual heads off corpses in ill advised jokes, all before you even consider the building is haunted, a psychic older woman Sally Druse (Diane Ladd) finding ways to stay in the hospital to rectify this. Here the tone is softened from the Danish production, with more sympathetic characters and certain subplots excised, like the doctor in The Kingdom who wanting a cancerous liver in his own body for experimentation or the weird way Udo Kier stole the final shot of the first season, and did so in the second by way of grotesque puppet limbs.

More emphasis is placed on the supernatural tale, about a ghost girl (Jodelle Micah Ferland) who is also an ominous figure of death. Added as well is the plot of Peter Rickman, played by Dynasty star Jack Coleman, as an artist who is left stuck in a hospital bed in a semi-comatose state due to a hit and run incident, the anteater a mysterious figure known as Antibus who offers him help if he helps the anteater. How this continues throughout the show is not a mysterious one, very straightforward in that the goal is to help the ghost girl and prevent a major catastrophe, as between constant miniature earthquakes and a realm between the hospital and the dead, the Kingdom Hospital is on weak foundations.

The series is focused in the beginning on this progression. It is more eccentric then the dark humours of The Kingdom, more mainstream horror than the eeriness of Lars von Trier's take. Notably, in a really interesting detail, King worked on most of the scripts, with exceptions including co-writing with fellow author Richard Dooling and even his own wife Tabitha King, bringing a connected sense of progression. The series also had one director over all thirteen episodes, the latter a fascinating difference from most television where there are multiple directors and the producers/creators have more control. Said director Craig R. Baxley is also a former stunt man who helmed Stone Cold (1991), an action film with former American football star Brian Bosworth, which adds to the strange nature of this production.

The cast itself, a mix of Americans and a Canadian production, are as idiosyncratic: former Brat Pack star Andrew McCarthy as Dr. Hook, the cocky yet noble doctor who lives in the belly of the hospital; Bruce Davison as Dr. Stegman in probably the best role, probably one of the most iconic characters of The Kingdom finely transposed by Davison as a vain egotist from outside Maine who has a string of malpractice cases and a pitiful view of humanity; Diane Ladd, who has been in this territory before in David Lynch's Wild At Heart (1990), as the older psychic; and among the rest Ed Begley Jr. as Dr. Jesse James, who has an added humour to his casting as he had a role in the popular medical drama St. Elsewhere.

Whilst considerably toned down from The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital is strong in the first half. You cannot ignore the influence of Stephen King, a considerably different person in views of the world than Lars von Trier. Von Trier back at this stage was still considered a bit of joker, playfulness as he would always end the episodes of the first season with himself talking to the viewer, and always with a motif of making the sign of the cross followed by the devil horns to finish. Later in life, whilst the humour was there, it is arguable his view of humanity became significantly bleaker. Stephen King, in contrast, grew into an optimist who nonetheless has tackled incredibly dark (and dark humoured) work which can be nasty.

He does find details from The Kingdom which are fully taken over and have surprising symmetry to his own work, be it the character of Elmer Traff (Jamie Harrold), a goofball who is trying to woo an older female doctor including with the ill-advised theft of a head, to the two orderlies with Down's Syndrome who also act like a Greek chorus who know more than anyone else. The later is from The Kingdom, but it is surprisingly connected to King's trend of sympathising with disabled characters to the point they usually have unnatural gifts unnoticed by the outside world, causing one to wonder how he and von Trier reached these characters (notwithstanding the latter's fascinating film The Idiots (1998) which confronted views of disability) or if von Trier had one of King's paperbacks at one point in his life.

The production does feel like a mini-series as it was intended to in the first half, as Kingdom Hospital moves at a steady pace, helped considerably by the fact that a lot of the show is played broadly for humour but always drip feds important plot points. It wears its heart on its sleeve, as ultimately the villains of this story are corrupted ordinary people, be it exploitative factory owners or a deranged doctor who know skulks the ghost world in stereotypical mad doctor form. The best aspects of the show however are when it is at its weirdest and funniest. It was not able to be as strange as The Kingdom got, but enough is there in the first half that promises a lot, just in how the personification of death is an anteater of all things. One episode is entirely devoted to the doctors bursting into "Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye" to a patient, one that happens to be a convicted criminal, which could be entirely indulgent if it wasn't compelling.

There was almost a dangerous irony in Kingdom Hospital being released the same year as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), a British production by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness for Channel 4, a piss take of authors like King as a bad hospital set horror show with weird touches. Controversially I find Darkplace off-putting because of how broad and over-the-top the "bad" aspects were than naturally blending in absurd touches. Kingdom Hospital in comparison is unintentionally ridiculous at points, especially whenever Diane Ladd gets into supernatural terminology, but Stephen King's greatest virtue for cinema and television beyond ideas was also his sincerity. Kingdom Hospital also juggles different tones and finds a way, when it is good, to balance characters on two different spectrums in the same world, from Dr. Hook who keeps a shrine every mistake that has lead to a patient's death including his own to Otto (Julian Richings) the all-purpose man with a German Shepherd dog the audience can hear talk, managing to make the pair and others blend together perfectly well.

Personally, the best episode is number 6 The Young and the Headless, which is arguably for me where the series peaks and the problems do creep in afterwards in later episodes, culminating into an excuse for Where's Your Head At by English electronic duo Basement Jaxx to have two literal meanings. One that this is the episode where Dr. Elmer makes the ill advised decision to steal a dead man's head, because it looks like himself for a sick joke, and that to deal with the earthquakes the hospital hire a seismologist, whose recovery from alcoholism by pure accident is broken and hits him like a ton of bricks. It is not a subtle use of music, but considering the music video has scientists trying to teach monkeys with human faces to play instruments, and that's not even the twist, the show for one episode fits the Basement Jaxx song perfectly as the head's owner wanders the ghost corridors of the old hospital in panic and our seismologist gets so blistered he sees ghost girls in the bottle. This does warrant mention of the good use of music; another example is that most people only know the band Foundtains of Wayne for Stacy's Mom, where this show has managed to get another Red Dragon Tattoo stuck in my head like an ear worm.

Production wise, the show is not as extreme as The Kingdom's, visibly a prelude to the Dogma 95 movement in its aesthetic for Lars von Trier; Kingdom Hospital does establish its own aesthetic, though the CGI effects have definitely aged. Where the show does stumble is near the end. Bookended by a feature length first and last episode, the show has two later episodes which stand out like sore thumbs. The first is egregious, about a disgraced baseball star that missed catching a ball at the World Series which really is not great and, introducing time travel and the ability to alter reality, many time continuity questions that are too complicated to consider, especially as this is important for the finale. The second episode I could have dealt with as, whilst King has been openly hostile about religious zealots in his work, here a priest is crucified only for miracles to take. That it is not revealed as a delusion or a trick by an evil force, but an actual miracle (even the cheesy reintroduction of the bread and fish story with tuna sandwiches), is probably the most surprising and interesting aspect as it literally leads to a major religious experience for the community as they gather in the streets. This is also the episode co-written with King's wife which suggests where the sudden change might have come from. The show however promptly forgets this episode and never considers how significant this would be to the world, making the episode ultimately pointless. That sucks as, whilst it might put people off, sudden unadulterated spirituality from a source who is not blinkered and sycophantic about the subject would have been welcome, only to be pointless because the production pretends none of it ever happened.

The show also is undone by pacing issues as, alongside those two episodes I have mentioned which benefit no one is story context¹, the show does rush into its denouement. It is neither helped, even if it is a big conclusion involving scenes set a century before the hospital existed, that the first half of the final episode has a lot of recycled clips clearly meant to refer back to, needing to explain detail but also felt like padding. This proves a bit of an anti-climax as a result. It leaves a conundrum that, whilst it was always going to live under the shadow of The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital even without the spectre of nostalgia over it had much to admire. When the show is more earnest and silly at times, it developed its own personality, but those finale few episodes did a considerable bit to stain the show's quality continually.   

This adds a saddening notion that Stephen King, legend of horror literature, when he writes the text himself has failed. His own work adapts to the screen but always with an unpredictability, where something which is so drastically different in tone like The Shining (1980) works, where something which is faithful to him but has to work for cinema like Doctor Sleep (2019) works, choosing two films tied to each other deliberate for an example. This is a question to ask with each adaptation or work of King's in the future; here, just because he is an acclaimed author doesn't mean trying to write a TV series is going to be difficult, especially as it is Lars von Trier in an odd set of circumstances hanging over the project, who was probably baffled by the whole concept if anyone mentioned it to him.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

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1) The baseball episode has a passage where the sports star in pinned in fear in the same room just because one of the main villains is there nearly merely ogling at him. In context it is ridiculous.

Tetsuo The Bullet Man (2009)

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto and Hisakatsu Kuroki

Cast: Eric Bossick as Anthony; Akiko Monô as Yuriko; Yûko Nakamura as Mitsue; Stephen Sarrazin as Ride; Tiger Charlie Gerhardt as Tom; Prakhar Jain as Elliott; Shinya Tsukamoto as The Guy

In the year of my birth 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto made his theatrical debut Tetsuo the Iron Man, causing a seismic wave across the globe. In 1992, after a failed attempt at being a commercial filmmaker (Hiruko The Goblin (1991)), Tsukamoto made Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer which is held in as high regard. Come 2009, after a career of huge highs (Tokyo Fist (1995), Bullet Ballet (1998), A Snake in June (2002)), and another stint in more mainstream filmmaking, he returns to the Tetsuo world with a film premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival....

...it has been effectively deleted from cultural memory. The Bullet Man is in itself a culmination of an English language adaptation, leading to Tsukamoto instead deciding to have his new Tetsuo whilst set in Japan have an American character Anthony (Eric Bossick), living in the country with his wife Yuriko (Akiko Monô). It is effectively remaking The Body Hammer as the catalyst as the murder of their young son is the same shocking incident here too, revealing a secret side of him when the mild mannered foreign salaryman starts transmogrifying into a blackened metal machine man. Tsukamoto himself, again as the antagonist for the third time in this series, is a hacker who wants to reveals Anthony's true origins through his father's work.

The immediate thing of note is that, whilst there is Japanese spoken dialogue, a lot of this film is in English. It's stilted at times, though this isn't like strange experience Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), a pulpy western by Takashi Miike with phonetically spoken English by the whole cast, where there is some Japanese dialogue and actors like Bossick, whose career is actually found more in videogame acting like the Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid franchises. Instead the result is that some are left strained by the creative choice, like actress Akiko Monô who is struggling with the language barrier, whilst others like Tsukamoto himself feel more comfortable even if it's still an odd choice, in his case helped by his surprisingly good history of onscreen performances in his belt since his first film Tetsuo The Iron Man. I think some of the dialogue is ridiculous and where some of the problems with this choice stand out instead. The Bullet Man at times is less the conclusion of this incredible series, but closer to a lurid nineties anime released by Manga Entertainment in the nineties with a cheesy English dub.

For myself, coming to The Bullet Man with lowered expectations, the issues that stand out in reviews is a) the English language dub, b) the low budget digital camera, and c) that this has the most structurally conventional plot with some lore. I will argue the low budget digital camera is not an issue even if there are moments of excessive shaky camera in scenes which can be disorientating to extreme. In fact, I would argue this brings the film to the modern day when one of the virtues of the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man was that it was the cinematic equivalent of placing one's head in a garbage compactor. It was a cheap and resourceful film which used oil for blood, rewarding for its disorientating chaos which is transferred to The Bullet Man by the stark use of a digital camera. This also feels in hindsight a test run for Kotoko (2011). His film after, a psychological drama that becomes a horror tale about a psychologically ill mother, Kotoko is much higher regarded but also deploys this stark aesthetic style as well, the starkness and habit of shaking the camera become a toll for putting the viewer on edge between these two films.

Plot wise, I think for myself the real issue with The Bullet Man is that it feels like a regression of a director that for all his reputation for intensity grew into the least expected humane film maker. Oddly, in his industrial sound tracked and violent films, even at The Body Hammer Tsukamoto became fixated on the human condition in all its forms over a string of incredible films, literalising everything from grief to rage to desire through literalising them physically and without sacrificing the emotional core.  There a semblance of this eventually in The Bullet Man, but there is definitely felt more the vein of a conventional "cult" film on the surface when it is getting into an abandoned military project and revenge, tropes Tsukamoto could tackle but felt more the kind of detail in a generic Japanese pulp film imported to the West on DVD than from him. Some of it is the kind of material he could tackle with haunting detail, [MAJOR SPOILER] like the fact Anthony's mother was already dead and resurrected as a form of android before conceiving him [SPOILER ENDS], alongside the fact that this is still a story of a man overcoming the grief of losing his son and having clearly had to suppress rage due to his father's overprotective attitude, something I will get to a bit later in more detail.

The other aspect of Tsukamoto's growth was that, at Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer no less, his female characters grew in depth and how they were treated, to the point they were usually the person most sympathetic of the cast, even the one person who has a euphoric conclusion with Tokyo Fist. Even the original Tetsuo film, with the infamous penis drill, has the detail that the actress in that film Kei Fujiwara was the co-cinematographer with Tsukamoto himself, a distinct figure onscreen who also became a director I wished made more films¹. (She also helped put together that penis drill, so she at least had work with the prop in her infamous scene in the film²). I'm glad The Bullet Man itself led to Kotoko with singer Cocco, but ooh this felt like a step back in terms of Akiko Monô playing a really generic wife figure, whose only depth is needing revenge and also being in peril. It is a bad regression even next to Tsukamoto's first film, where Fujiwara was at least striking in her role.

Why I wish The Bullet Man was not buried culturally however is that, for all the flaws, there is so much to show that Tsukamoto is still a bar higher than most filmmakers even at his weakest, a director who mostly made his own independent work with a strong visual eye. His work has ideas and is so intense he makes most cult films anaemic even with this, one of his weakest films. Little details, like his own face distorted on a computer screen, manically laughing as an email reveals Anthony his origins, are enough as visual motifs Tsukamoto has always been good with in keeping a viewer on edge. That intensity, which puts him on a higher level than most cult directors from Japan, is even found here with editing the slices the visual flesh and wounds a viewer.

The music is also, as always, a great tool of his, the late Chu Ishikawa finishing the Tetsuo trilogy with his calamitous work, the audio equivalent of a metal recycling plant. Notable Nine Inch Nails provided a main theme of noise transforming into air siren-like triumphant bridges. It is an instrumental of unconventional beauty, and arguably of importance as not only was it a goal finally completely between both groups, but one of the first times Trent Reznor with Atticus Ross producing a track for a film. This would lead to a beautiful and ongoing friendship between The Social Network (2010) to even Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's television documentary series The Vietnam War (2017), so we could thank Shinji Tsukamoto for helping begin this relationship among other factors.

The practical design is also exceptional still, especially as being inspired by old Japanese genre films Tsukamoto even called his studio Kaijyu Theater after giant monster movies, Tsukamoto never hiding the handmade quality of his films' practical effects. Eric Bossick is okay as a lead, but the literal Bullet Man is a thing of disturbing beauty, both sleek in his black metal form which grows the more he is wounded, but also a literal human weapon combined with a id of rage being literalised by guns spurting out of injuries to fire back. Whilst it is not to be everyone's cup of tea, when The Bullet Man jumps into noise and screaming and delirious practical effects, it feels less like the cheesiness of a film like Tokyo Gore Police (2008) from the era, a rubbery gore experience, but a tangible brutal experience.

Thankfully, after this Tsukamoto after a period of absence in the Western consciousness returned with pride. This was the era he started restoring his own work, released in the United Kingdom through Third World Pictures (and Arrow Video in the USA in the 2020s), helping his reputation considerably alongside a string of films which got attention through the likes of Third Window. If anything, The Bullet Man is a flawed film, especially when against another pure genre work of his like Haze (2005), which is abstract and striped down to an extreme, it feels lesser to. It is still a tier higher than most work because it is from Shinji Tsukamoto however. Rather than hiding it as an embarrassment, Tetsuo The Bullet Man deserves to be brought up as a curiosity in his work.

Abstract Spectrum: Chaotic/Psychotronic

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

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1) Organ (1996) and the even stranger Ido (2005) deserve to be restored and made more easily avaible. They are two films that buckle the trend of "safe" filmmaking whilst showing her personal voice. Organ is a ninety lurid Japanese pulp film which manages to be more gross and uncomfortable than most, grimy body horror, whilst being uniquely surreal at many points. Ido, originating from a sequel to Organ, pulls in her history with theatre in a bizarre mindmelter of Buddhist theology, lurid body horror and batshit weirdness as Fujiwara herself turns into a pig monster at some point.

2) "For the latter, Tsukamoto just wanted to make something simple and said it would be enough if we could just pretend like it was moving, but I thought it would only be interesting if it actually moved. I didn’t have any hi-tech skills, so I thought, “That’s it!” I took the nearest working electric fan, dissembled it down to its core, used all the rubber and tape I had at home, sprayed it up and got it to go, vroom [laughs]!!" - Kei Fujiwara [LINK HERE]

The Lighthouse (2019)

Director: Robert Eggers

Screenplay: Robert and Max Eggers

Cast: Robert Pattinson as Thomas Howard; Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake; Valeriia Karaman as the Mermaid

If cinema was dead, how does The Lighthouse exist and do as well as it did? Robert Eggers, after the success of The Witch (2015), was in the position of many filmmakers where after success they can crash and burn with projects where the producers allow them carte blanche to make whatever they want. I love such projects, but they rarely success. This could've been such a case, managing to be a monochrome film shot on 35mm celluloid about Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson going insane in a 19th century lighthouse, even shot in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio. What we got instead was a highly admired film that even got a Best Cinematography nomination at the Academy Awards.

Well The Lighthouse exists and upfront I loved the perverse weird thing completely. Dafoe is an old lighthouse keeper, introducing himself with a fart and sounding like the Old Sea Captain parody from The Simpsons, whilst Robert Pattinson is a new employee on an island. The Lighthouse from here is surprisingly simple in what it's about, namely that it makes a damn good argument about the dangers of getting shitfaced on alcohol continually. I'd argue there are explicit supernatural aspects, as I'll get to the seagull, whilst there is also the subplot that Dafoe is obsessed with keeping Patterson out of the top of the lighthouse^*. Aside from this, this is a film about two men going insane. This is not helped by the fact the drinking water isn't great, being in the 19th century, and booze is found on the island with considerable ease.

Eggers' style here is distinct. Shot in black and white, to the point the cinematographer Jarin Blaschke was working with a camera lens as old as from 1912¹ and had to figure out how to adapt it to modern cameras, this film looks truly unique. Adding to this nature, unique in text, is that the screenplay by the Eggers brothers comes from them having done their research and pulling from history for aesthetic, to the point of the lighthouse having been built for the film. This is distinct too as, referencing the supernatural, they pulled from folklore. Shrouded on an island in the middle of the sea, the film runs with nautical aesthetic of the kind where it would make perfect sense for characters to suddenly quote Moby Dick era Herman Melville. This is apt since the script openly admits it took quotation from Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett.

You can practically taste in the air and dirt being blown everywhere, the alien grotesqueness of this world in its use of squid tendrils, crustaceans and other aquatic life on and under the sea. Erotically too as, whilst Patterson's character is also a man hiding a secret, the first moment he starts to crack is when he apparently finds a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman). Thanks to the screenwriters' research on shark vaginas, you get a film here like Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018) which manages to get away with stuff in a fifteen rated film in the United Kingdom which is gleefully transgressive.

The little supernatural details do suggest a bit more is going on in the island. There is a one eyed seagull, (played by three in a dying breed of trained birds from Britain who, alongside their trainer, should've gotten a Best Supporting Acting Oscar nomination², a bird onscreen that is visibly antagonistic in their small role to Patterson in an unnaturally intelligent way. Dafoe wants him never to kill seagulls, as they are said to be the souls of the sailors who died at sea, which comes into play. The secret of what is in the top of the lighthouse is never ever seen by us; suffice to say that in how its shot, it cannot be something like a hallucination but nudges into cosmic horror, the area of H.P. Lovecraft or even a William Hope Hodgson in that there are things which are beyond the senses of human beings at the sea. There's even a religious strain as especially in one shot, a reference to Prometheus, the man who acquired fire for human kind of note due to how unfortunate his reward for that was from the ancient Greek gods.

Beyond this, the mood and style offers a dramatic weight for what is very clearly told in terms of story, especially as it swings upon the guilt that Patterson character is trying to suppress but failing to. Helping considerably is that the performances are excellent; Dafoe is a veteran who has always been reliable, whilst Robert Pattinson becoming as good as his senior. Patterson is in a fascinating position that, starting the 2010s in the last of the Twilight films where he really wasn't good, only to become a distinct and great actor, he is in the position of a figure like James Dean where his handsomeness has made him an idol but he himself wishes to become a great actor, which he has strived for and proven himself with. The script itself between him and Dafoe, a two actor film, helped considerably especially as The Lighthouse for all its darkness is rife in exceptional ye old English and is hilarious at times. The film is intentionally funny if you have an incredibly dark sense of humour; the longest monologue, performed by Dafoe that goes into godless intense vengefulness and even evokes the sea god Triton, is played for its over the top nature and language, and only happens because Patterson criticised Dafoe's cooking. Such brevity in the middle of what is a pretty dark film helps so much for it to grow.

Also worth noting is the use of the ratio, where a modern cinema would have to press the buttons to change the shape of the screen to show this film. It's smaller than even the Academy ratio of 1.375:1, one of the earliest in American cinema chosen to organise films to a specific one. It's a testament to how archaic this looks in that the last film I saw in the cinema with a similar square screen image before The Lighthouse was James Whale's The Old Dark House, a film from 1932 which was also a deeply strange and perversely humorous tale. Whilst it could be seen as distancing a viewer, this aspect ratio actually sucked me into this world, a rich one fully felt but the ratio perfect for three actors, a flock of seagulls and no one else onscreen at a single location. The incredible sense of craft on display for such weirdness is something to admire especially as it gets under the skin.

It's pointless to wax admirably about The Lighthouse beyond this, as the film is both a maximalist gem in terms of its craft but very simple to grasp and access, not needing to be scruntiased further. Eggers to his credit avoided both making an over ambitious bomb or trying to make a follow on from his first success, which can plague artists regardless of medium. The result's existence is miraculous and a much needed moment of positivity, showing that bold experimental filmmaking can exist outside the avant-garde. Usually it happens in genre cinema like this a lot, but this belongs to a fascinating series of films, whether each succeed or not, that have been lumped into "elevated horror". That name is problematic, coined by journalists who didn't want to admit praising a horror film, but the idea of horror cinema being a vessel for idiosyncratic oddness and artistic creativity has been with it since Georges Méliès' supernatural films³, making these leanings a rich vein in the genre which has thankfully returned and in the mainstream no less. That its lead to a cartload (boatload) of films over the end of the 2010s which are unpredictable and divisive, from Midsommar (2019) to even Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017) no matter how I loathed it, is a good sign. And whilst horror cinema from around the world is eclectic, that this moment in the United States exists and makes a contrast to Blumhouse Productions, which disappoints me in every film I see squandering deep concepts for average productions, is only a good thing.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Atmospheric/Bawdy/Grotesque/Weird

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

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1) HERE

2) HERE

3) As of 2020, Eggers has been tagged to a reinterpretation of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), which considering the film has been remade by Werner Herzog means there's no sense of hesitation to this idea, as it the promise that Eggers will likely be researching real vampire lore for his work if it ever was produced and made.

* [MAJOR SPOILER WARNING] Looking into the light up there was probably the worst thing Patterson could do, certainly evoking a Lovecraftian monstrosity especially when you end up seagull food. It does evoke, alongside an explicit depiction of Dafoe (naked) with lights coming out of his eyes, some real supernatural aspects. The contrast with all the stuff likely conjured to Patterson's character as his sanity goes for a walk is well balanced, allowing both sides to exist without a cheap compromise to either taking place [MAJOR SPOILERS END].

The Summer of the Massacre (2011)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Joe Castro and Schroeder

Cast: Tim A. Cooley as Chris, Nick Principe as Lori Williams, Brinke Stevens as Mrs. Williams, Lisa M. Garcia as Kimberly Ann Williams, Tchia Casselle as Melanie, Scott Barrows as Mr. Boogens, Lauren Boehm as Lisa, Felipe Winslett as Vinnie, Chris Staviski as Bradley, London Hilton as Conrad, Justin Marchert as Carmen , Joe Mannetti as Richard Khan, Bahram Khosraviani as George Vic, Dan Lovell as Dax Malone

In my decision to explore the films of Joe Castro, which I will continue, the idea was to be as non -partisan in my opinions without turning the reviews into puff pieces. The main ideas was to see if a director in any field, if they make many films, can be an auteur at least in reoccurring obsessions and motifs, to which particularly in micro budget cinema a director might actually read the reviews and be angry at whatever opinion you have.

Opinions should be allowed, and it was a good thing that whilst grotesque and nasty, Terror Toons 3 (2015) was actually compelling to witness. That said, the idea I had revisiting Terror Toons (2002) about Castro being very misanthropic comes to haunt The Summer of the Massacre, which I sadly have to confess was one of the most worst viewing experiences emotionally I have had just because of its relentless stream of violence and nihilism without anything to gauge with. For me, "worst" now is a rare nightmare where it's the attitude that I find worse nowadays than technical quality. Thankfully, this is not Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017) where a creator makes a tool out of themselves, but sadly a case of a director I have softened to making a one off creative decision I am not found of in the slightest, where The Summer of the Massacre is most well known for having broken the Guinness World Record for highest body count in a slasher film, at 155, but through the perspective of a nasty attitude and a serial killer fixation doesn't work for myself well at all.

The anthology is four stories intercut by book ends, the first warning you how idiosyncratic Castro's style became into the 2010s where you have a warehouse full of extras in digitally mangled and desecrated corpse forms like the cover of Slayer's Reign in Blood. The comparisons to what Castro's style is, still doing practical effects but heavily computer manipulated to extra hyper digitalisation and green screen, is the paper animation of Jan Svankmajer's Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), where the Czech animator manipulated pictures, and the front covers of Carcass' Reek of Putrefaction (1988) and Symphonies of Sickness (1989) albums, their first two when they still were going "goregrind" and made collages from real medical photographs of death and disease to shock listeners. Joe Castro's style is gross and unforgettable in design but becomes too much, especially as I don't think he meant this to be as extreme as it is in this film but fun.

The anthology stories are also slim in content and long. The first, in which a guy is attacked whilst jogging and mutilated, leads to an endless stream of him killing extras as he has gone mad, picking off anyone in his rampage until he finds his assailants. Beyond the CGI, obviously fake but stylised to revel in all the gore and internal organs rendered onscreen, Castro's style is like many micro budget films if on a higher scale, a lot of location shooting in a very large cinema and casting ordinary folk off the street to star as part of the body count. It's an acquired taste, but it still continues because it has a charm, cast members regardless of acting quality you rarely get in Hollywood in terms of the variety of shapes and sizes getting a chance to scream and be killed, which I can respect. This segment, with barely any plot, however lasts too long.

The second story Lump is the most interesting of the lot because it has a story of a slasher film. A sister sick of her female sibling, an incredibly disabled and incapacitated girl with a pronounced lump and likely to die, pushes her off a cliff in the woods to the horror of her brother, even her boyfriend and friends who are actually against being part of this. The younger sister, the lump burst and somehow alive, wakes up and goes on a revenge spree against them all. It's not my thing, but it's an idea with a story. It is at least something of potential interest.

The third is where The Summer of the Massacre, alongside the book ending segments interspliced between the stories, show this is meant to be nihilistic on purpose, a really nasty tale of a father of a man, a bloated "bogeyman" who conceived him by raping his mother, coming back to torment and mutilate him when he is an adult. Here the edginess gets too much for me, also with a sense that with the interviews with fake serial killers that are spliced between segments of The Summer of the Massacre feels part of a period alien to me.

The film does have a view of "coolness" to its edginess, of grim horror and serial killers, Joe Castro someone old enough to have grown up figures who gained uncomfortable cult auras around them despite being mass murderers, still significant into the nineties with figures like John Wayne Gacy or individuals in jail like Jeffery Dahmer. It's a concept alien to me as an Englishman as, whilst we have tabloids go on about this, we've never developed this aura for our history of serial killers. Barring Jack the Ripper, there is very little chance of someone like the Yorkshire Ripper ever gaining such a reputation. For me as well, there is also the question of when was the last time a serial killer, as they sadly still exist, was talked about in pop culture a great deal. A part of me considers that since 9/11, and between terrorist attacks and spree shootings, a consciousness has come up that makes the notion of highlighting these figures distasteful.

Certainly The Summer of the Massacre feels of a tone I couldn't get into, and for me when you get to the end of the Bogeyman story, where the titular fiend massacres an entire hospital, Joe Castro unfortunately crosses a line of desensitisation that, like starting at the early Carcass LP covers for too long, just becomes dulling than shocking, oppressively so. This applies as well to the final story, about a group of campers being terrorised by a mutilated and burnt up fireman, which didn't linger once my senses had been burnt out entirely. The only thought that came by then, the one great interest, is that Joe Castro continues with LGBTQ content. There's another drag performer in the film, whilst sadly only briefly, and the fourth story surrounds two firemen who were in love, burnt to death, and the surviving one becoming a Jason Voorhees figure, still lurid and nasty but coming from a place of note¹.

After this, the wraparound returns to the warehouse full of corpses, the serials killers interviewed (three of them) throughout the film hold up against the police with a cage full of people and inexplicably having acquired a nuclear bomb, turning in the end to a bleak post apocalypse where news broadcasters talk of Chernobyl for reference. Whatever Joe Castro was going through, a really bleak "fuck the world" mood and/or wanting to break a record of some sort, it's not a sombre nihilism but too much to digest at once. This opinion is not a condemnation of Castro's filmmaking, as Terror Toons 3 was a film you wanted to take a shower afterwards from but was also a bizarre film with a black humour to it. Instead, this was such an endless experience that I'd rather watch any Terror Toons film before it.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Nasty/Psychotronic

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

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1) One film of Castro's I'd like to see is not even a horror film, a rare tangent in his filmography called The Young, the Gay and the Restless (2006), meant to be a parody of American daytime soap operas with a likelihood of a few shirtless men throughout. If it worked even slightly, that'd be a film worth seeing.

The Golden Boat (1990)

Director: Raul Ruiz

Screenplay: Raul Ruiz

Cast: Michael Kirby as Austin; Federico Muchnik as Israel Williams; Brett Alexander as Doc; Mary Hestand as Alina; Michael Stumm as Tony Luna; Kate Valk - Amelia Lopes

On a New York City street, the protagonist Israel (Federico Muchnik) finds a line of discarded shoes that leads to an older man Austin (Michael Kirby), covered in blood and proceeding to stab himself in the guts, all whilst saying he's from Los Angeles. Thus begins this jaunt by Chilean director Raul Ruiz, accompanied by a score by legendary experiment jazz musician John Zorn blaring on the soundtrack.

It was natural for Raul Ruiz, a true journeyman who made films throughout the Americas and Europe, to make at least one American film, though its notable he only ever made two films in the United States, this and thriller Shattered Image (1998), most of his career entirely out of this and mainstream cinema. Of note is The Golden Boat being from 1990, also when he was finally able to step back on his homeland's soil, fleeing Chile in 1973 during a military coup d'état and witnessed in The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), a 1990 workshop production finished in the 2010s by his widow Valeria Sarmiento, and also arguably ending his 1980s work with a bang. The eighties was the most delirious point of his career, alongside one of his most prolific, where his Euro co-productions were at their most heightened and surreal, including an English language adaptation of Treasure Island (1985) funded by the Cannon Group.

The Golden Boat is just as strange, as soon after this beginning a man wanders to Israel on the street with a stereo, claiming it is now his despite it never being Israel's either, only for Austin to stab the guy to death and follow Israel. In this tale, Austin now becomes a shadow picking people off around Israel, sometimes people die only to reappear again, as death is always a vague thing for Ruiz, a man who lived up to this in his own life as with Sarmiento's help he's still releasing films even after his own. One man, a neighbour of Israel, when stabbed by Austin just gets into a sit down conversation with him whilst tending to his stomach wound, a religious figure as unnatural as Austin watching on at Israel from afar.

To attempt to create a plot line, the only things I can say is that these two characters do know each other, spectres of a greater form who have wandered into Israel's life, Austin the atheist and the neighbour the religious. Israel's female neighbour, even when Austin kills her, will still be there, in the midst of this and even hypnotised to pose for a classroom's worth of people drawing her crammed into a small New York Apartment at one point. The eighties for Ruiz has been accounted for its full dream logic, reoccurring in all his career at its extreme then as plots regardless of budget, length or medium and be it for mini-series or a dance film Mammame (1986). In some cases they could be sketched loosely as novel adaptations of the likes of The Blind Owl (1987) as if crib noted.

This is also his New York City film, which allows for an alien view of the world to be shown; one of the funnier jokes, that has stuck with me, is a throwaway line about a cafe selling sushi hotdogs and won ton enchiladas. A tangent in a university turns into a bloody farce when a bathroom full of guys, spying on a female teacher, peeves Austin off as he cannot stand voyeurs. The Golden Boat has also never had a release in the 2010s, so it's vague to see his distinct visual style in the per-usual VHS form, strong artificial lighting and sudden changes to monochrome affecting his take on the United States.  Halfway through he even has an audience laugh track, as Austin is obsessed with a female soap opera star whose very well spoken husband is not impressed by his existence, even hiring goons in hope to silence him. Ruiz when you can see his films, as intended, was a great visual artist and its significant for how random he could seem to be, as liable to have purely surreal jokes as he is to have clear themes, he was very precise in his craft. One notable thing, which is part of the film's effect but worth mentioning, is that some of the performances' have a stilted air to them, in-between characters arguing about God or Israel being the hapless figure in the midst of all this, which can be very distinct.

The score is good and adds to the film's peculiar energy. By 1990, after developing his reputation for distorting jazz through various genres or reinterpreting the likes of Ornette Coleman, was when he had created Naked City and their innovative untitled debut, where his interest in extreme metal like grindcore met lounge music, surf rock and even the James Bond theme. I'd like to say this score, whilst not as extreme, feels from the same category of experimentation from that period, suiting The Golden Boat fully with eerie wordless vocals in-between crime jazz melodies and sparks of general strangeness by a talented legend. In general The Golden Boat is of note of having a who's-who of figures from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, writer Kathy Acker (who plays the university professor), installation artist Vito Acconci (as a Swiss Assassin who may have killed the wrong person but denies it), the experimental theatre company the Wooster Group, filmmaker Mary Hestand or former porn actress/sex campaigner Annie Sprinkle (as a waitress).

It fits in the sense that The Golden Boat, one of Raul Ruiz's obscurer titles, was a trawl through American culture in general, where Israel is a music journalist, just for a joke about loud rock music causing him to become deaf, or its absorption of crime stories in hit men who repeat themselves. It's an acquired taste, but The Golden Boat does compel me, a curiosity whose off-kilter tone won me over, interrupting the digging up of a character buried at the beach at Coney Island with a random woman appear to give the two diggers sandwiches, or a boy claiming he's actually a dwarf in his thirties. Some of the dialogue referring to sexual violence is uncomfortable, like art being described as a form of rape, but The Golden Boat for all its lightness is still tinted in darkness, a tenseness where for how absurd it is Austin spends most of the film covered in other people's blood or his own, this a world with death hanging over people, in a pre cleanup New York City which looks dank and claustrophobic. The film also ends tragically, a death that lasts even if the story itself looks cyclical.

Considering Raul Ruiz's career, I am also forgiving of some of the more uncomfortable lines in this film as his career, even in the eighties weirdness, is permeated with a darkness of a man who fled a dictatorship, and was constantly obsessed with death and murder even in terms of films like City of Pirates (1983) involving a serial killer who is a child. He merely tinted it with a lot of bleak humour, as far as depicting Cantos 9 through 14 of Dante's Inferno, infamously, with ordinary location shots of his homeland of Chile in the 1991 A TV Dante sequel as a literal depiction of hell.

That it's not easily available is sad, even thought you'd presume an English language film like this might've been a lot easier to access or distribute. Shattered Image, a more structured crime film about a woman existing in multiple realities of herself, would've likewise made sense to be available. (Also A Closed Book (2010), whilst not regarded well at all, was a British production also shot in English that was a chamber piece thriller). Again, Ruiz has had a bad hand dealt to him in accessibility, despite his significant reputation, so obsessive devotees like me try to find what I can and write reviews like this to change that. A film like The Golden Boat definitely deserves this kind of support.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Surreal/Weird

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