Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984)

 

Director: Chester Novell Turner

Screenplay: Chester Novell Turner

Cast: Shirley L. Jones as Helen Black; Ricky Roach as the First Lover; Chester Tankersley as the Second Lover; Marie Sainvilvs as the Saleslady; Jeanine Johican as the Church Friend

An Abstract List Candidate/A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #164

 

You're going to burst Hell wide open...!

Black Devil Doll from Hell is one of only two tales from Chester Novell Turner, an independent African American director who made two idiosyncratic shot-on-video tales, only to vanish until  when he was relocated as part of those two films being rediscovered. One is Tales from the Quadread Zone (1987), a horror anthology. The other is Black Devil Doll from Hell, the most famous of the duo and originally meant to be a segment of the other before being expanded into a full length tale. The production was re-edited by David Ichikawa; whilst the song he added for the opening credits is a delight, a slightly disconnected rock track being your nightmare by him, I am aware that, when Turner had this film distributed by Hollywood Home Theater, “they just screwed me six ways to Sunday.“¹ In fact, this was the catalyst for Turner to sell Tales from the Quadread Zone independently, making it one of the rarest videotapes in existence in the United States large sums of money were paid for, and the factor in him vanishing from his filmmaking career at the time due the lack of success financially distributing Quadread Zone independently.

The film itself is...well, is a lot more complicated and uncomfortable than its notoriety as a SOV evil doll oddity may suggest. It begins at an actual church, Turner's own score prepare for the usually oddball tone of a SOV film from the era, but you are not prepared for what is him trying at a metaphor with psychological complexity, a morality tale that came from his own love for the likes of The Twilight Zone. Shirley L. Jones plays Helen, a very devout Christian woman who goes to church, a person who openly scolds a man who looks at first hand like a flasher or trying to pick up women, only to be found to be selling stolen objects on like coats. She also manages to find Satan's doll helper in a second hand store.

The doll is naturally alive, but where the film gets uncomfortable but fascinating, as well as truly weird, is how the doll becomes effectively a personification of toxic masculinity and links to Helen's sexual desires. Effectively this, due to the SOV quality and Turner working with his home environment, shooting in Chicago, is the ordinary life of a single African American woman, struggling with her own sexuality against her religious beliefs, if invaded by a demon puppet film which adds a strange additional metaphor. Turner himself argues that the doll was like a Monkey's Paw, that "He can give you whatever that’s in your heart."¹, which does raise some troubling aspects to how the plot plays on but in itself is fascinating in how it is executed. Suppressed and clashing with her own faith, the doll when it comes alive, a creepy figure times even played by Turner's nephew in some shots, grants a wish for Helen when she originally wanted to abstain until marriage. In her case, trigger warning, Turner either unintentionally leaned on problematic content or on themes of concern as her fantasy starts off as sexual violence with a violently aggressive male figure, a personification of violent masculinity who uses derogatory speech and aggression, as part of said desires.

This also means, again with the trigger warning, a sex scene which, even if it involves him using his horrible breath on her, starts off as a rape scene. Even without this factor, it comes off as a BDSM light fantasy with a puppet, involving uncomfortable role play for a viewer. It is morally complicated to watch, with the sense of whether Turner realised the tone or not for the scene even if he had deliberately wanted to make a viewer uncomfortable. It is also one of the strangest scenes I have ever witnesses as, yes, you have the main actress Shirley L. Jones and a prop puppet (which she helped in production of) acting out a sex scene. Jones bravely stars in the film, as the person I admire the most, willingly in this film doing a lot of nudity and this aforementioned sex scene, including an initial shower scene where she suddenly starts to have sexual fantasies kindled. Not a professional actress, she only has worked on these two Turner films, with the added weight that she feels like a regular woman cast onscreen for an added sense of realism, not a professional actor whose appearance and acting style is manufactured by external sources. She and Turner also developed a romance during the production of the film, which does sooth some of the content at least in knowledge that, alongside being game to star in the film, Jones actually felt comfortable acting this material out.

Is the scene, what the film is getting at, defendable? It is problematic, and there is literally a scene where the phrase "raped by a puppet" gets brought up over and over again further on, but I wonder if Turner, in his logic, was trying at a greater meaning. I cannot help, as the doll is a vile creature who uses "bitch" frequently and dominates, that he is a personification of the worst in men, unfortunately someone whose charisma attracts Helen, the Monkey's Paw effect here unfortunately for her offering her desires in a form where she is made submissive.

When she renounces her faith and decides to embrace her sexual desire, it is only to find that for her, the puppet was a better love for her than an actual man, which adds to this perverse tale as she goes for the perfect (human) lover only to be trapped with no actual man of flesh being good enough to satisfy her like the doll did. You can even add a gigolo metaphor, even if unintentional, as the puppet returns to the store and needs to be bought by women over and over. It is all problematic, but Helen is never a demonised character even when she fully renounces her faith, throwing the Bible and household objects in the bin, which adds to the complexity. The moral tale is that, sadly, even acquiring the doll and letting it tempt her into the trap. Gender politics issues aside, and in mind that the film's logic is weird, it could have much worse in how this was presented.

As a moral tale, where unsatisfied she attempts to reacquire the doll only for his to be her downfall, but she was never someone doomed by her weakness, whether deliberate or a flaw in Turner as a storyteller. It instead feels like a bleak tale inexplicably appearing to us in this perplexing madness, of a woman tragically caught up in an abusive sexual encounter and without any one to help her recover. It is not pleasant, considering this film is seen as a bizarre cult film held aloft as psychotronic cinema, with no warning of this when I first of this, but that is the fault of writers who did not mention the film's secret bleakness, as with the jarring tonal shifts in Tales from the Quadred Zone. Both suggest some deliberateness to Turner's style, even if it did not completely work, as he was not shying away from the darker sides of life between this and that later film ending on a character committing suicide.

As with so much of this type of cinema, it feels like a home movie but this has become for me of great merit, as arguably once you adapt to their logic they make worthy time capsules of what locations and time periods were like over slickly produced films. This may sound crass or heavy handed, so I am careful with my words, but with representations of African Americans in American horror cinema still a minority, this film stands out especially as Chester Novell Turner is a rarity from the SOV era when it was almost entirely white men making them. Black Devil Doll from Hell is not a film I want to chuck away glibly for a lot of reasons, and this is a factor also the consider, where the church filmed in at the start is an all-black church, with a preacher being recorded saying his sermon, and the homes are ordinary places as in micro budget cinema with people's real bric-a-brac decorating the environments.

The look of this film, even without this in mind, is so stark it adds to the perversity. (On a lighter note for this review, once I got used to the Casio music, the music by Turner himself eventually become so percussive for me I was actually getting caught up into it) Baring in mind, even if he bungled the presentation and made a much more difficult film to accept, Turner here touches on topics, as a white Englishman, I am not stupid enough to attempt to be the fountain of wisdom on but do feel stick out. That of this character's faith, her sexuality, and that the doll, regardless of race, comes off as a personification of masculinity with the added baggage, baggage I suspect Turner did emphasised in his desire to make this figure to be as bad as he was, all because he felt that made him a worst horror tale creation.

Again, as an outside, I am sane enough to not consider myself able to fully speak out on any hidden layers to this film, but it is fascinating to consider that an African American SOV director, here in this tale as a guy who in interviews talked of loving the likes of the Twilight Zone, made a film with so much gender and sexual politics to unpick, including issues of faith, even on the first watch regardless of whether it was successful or not. He could have chosen something else like a monster film but made this instead, which is interesting. More interesting, whilst perplexing, than it's "so bad its good" reputation suggests or that a quasi-remake Black Devil Doll (2007) exists as a parody. Looking at the later film just from its trailer, it only plays as an uncomfortable example, with added bare breasts from who are clearly hired actresses and models, of how under the banner of "irony" you can get away with playing up to racism and racial stereotypes of black men as a joke. The original SOV film I have seen is definitely one of the weirdest I have seen in a while, not a pleasant one at times but damned compelling. It even ends like an old pulpy horror tale as, with the female second hand store owner having sold the doll again, another woman purchases him and the cycle continues, all with the sense that, if he ever got around to a sequel as he has considered, I legitimately wonder what Chester Novell Turner's take on this story would be like decades later.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Lo-Fi/Uncomfortable/Weird

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

======

1) http://dailygrindhouse.com/thewire/returning-quadead-zone-resurrection-chester-n-turner/

The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974)

 

Director: Jack Hill

Screenplay: Jack Hill (as Jane Witherspoon) and David Kidd (as Betty Conklin)

Cast: Jo Johnston as Kate; Cheryl Smith as Andrea; Colleen Camp as Mary Ann; Rosanne Katon as Lisa; Ron Hajak as Buck; Ric Carrott as Ross; Jason Sommers as Prof. Thorpe; Ian Sander as Ron; George Wallace as Mr. Putnam; Jack Denton as Coach Turner

Ephemeral Waves

 

Oh my cod, my cod!

The Swinging Cheerleaders is not a good film. Actually, it is an insanely dated and dull production, not quite a sexploitation production, not quite action either. Not really much of a high school football narrative either, though that makes up a huge part of the production and initially promises a bit with the zoom in on a sports stadium and a montage at the beginning of the movie. I say all this as a fan of Spider Baby (1968), another early production by cult filmmaker Jack Hill, a really interesting pulpy horror film which threw back to the past by casting Lou Chaney Jr. in one of his last films alongside looking to the future. He is held in high regard for his blaxploitation films, iconic because of his casting of Pam Grier, but he is a journeyman director who worked in multiple genres, which means he has worked in many areas throughout his career that would be of interest. Sadly The Swinging Cheerleaders did not succeed.

It is a fascinating artefact in principal, as cheerleaders (whilst they exist outside the United States) are an inherently American pop culture concept which I grew up with in various forms since childhood but as an inherently alien concept. Note that, whilst male cheerleaders exists, it is usually always female cheerleaders that are depicted, where they can exist in multiple forms - as parodies, as tropes, as archetypes, as figures of the popular students in American high school, and as figures of sexual desire, the latter significant in this case. Naturally, as a sexploitation film, the interest is in a female cast of sexy cheerleaders, even if by logic they are meant to be high school students and underage, thus adding a creepy edge.

The premise is that a liberal feminist plans to sneak into the team to write an expose, which will inevitably lead to her changing her mind about becoming part of the team. It actually feels like a plot from a 2000s Hollywood film, like when Miss Congeniality (2000) with Sandra Bullock was about the Miss America competition. Whilst there are attempts at giving the female cast some gumption and independence, it is noticeable that the female writers are actually pseudonyms for male one, and that they do not succeed entirely from creating fully formed female figures. There are definitely moments where they did not think through ideas or are absolutely of the time, such as when the feminist will suddenly want to have sex and romantically linked to the lead player, despite their first interaction with him asking her for sex on the introduction and coming off as a pig.

The men in general are pigs here. It is a plot-based one at times - as there is illegal fixing of games for gambling among the teachers - but there is also a lot of scuzziness played for humour. The coach is a horn dog perving on young woman, making up a lot of this, whilst the lead player comes off first as utterly unlikable in the modern day despite the later attempts to write him off as much more sympathetic. The lead female character's initial boyfriend, a liberal left winger, adds an odd reactionary slant as he comes off as a spineless deviant the more you learn of him, beaten up by the police in protests but here, when his girlfriend leaves him, showing himself to be a rat. Even the one likable character of the main cast, an African American maths teacher ("I want you to take your mind off permutations") is sleeping with one of the students, regardless of the fact that he has a change of heart of helping with the gambling when a moral pass is approaching that he refuses to break. Married, there is a really lurid sequence, one of the only few explicit ones in the film, where his wife, a really striking and deep voiced older woman, threatens his young girlfriend with a flick knife in a school corridor.

Much of the film, beyond this, drags on. The set decorator was having fun - peacock feathers, skeleton in a cheerleader outfit and seventies posters, all in one scene - but this is as conventionally put together as you can get with an exceptionally glacial pace. It realty is not that explicit in the sex either, as whilst it has some topless nudity, making it quite a quaint film. Even when it starts to get ahead, the tone is so cheerful that the one scene of note, a tumble between corrupt campus cops and the football players, should have shown that the film should have moved closer to the football and more pacey hijinks, completely ditching the sex appeal and becoming a more family friendly farce. Instead, the film is so quaint that, not only does it feel dull, but also skips over a lot of problematic content blithely. The film casually skips over what is effectively a gang rape in the plot line for one of the biggest examples of this, where a female cheerleader wishes to lose her virginity and accidentally encounters the male liberal rat, the content implied and never shown, but The Swinging Cheerleaders just casually dropping the event with the characters merely seeing that she now has a hangover and her love interest just beating the other male character up.

Even without this scene, that light tone is still dull. This fully embraces one of my biggest grievances when films stick adamantly to their plot without extra flair even if said plot is generic. So much that, honestly, this last paragraph is going to be this short and end here as there is not a lot I personally found of interest in this film.

The Soultangler (1987)

 

Director: Pat Bishow

Screenplay: John Bishow, Lance Laurie

Cast: Pierre Devaux as Dr. Anton Lupesky; Jane Kinser as Kim Castle; Tom Ciorciari as Zack

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #163

 

At least eat before you smoke!

Let me make a confession - I have never been a huge fan of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), at least growing up and even into my thirties. Never for any specific reason, but hung by its own petard, its acclaim in the horror canon leaving an albatross to be hung round its neck with too much praise to live up to. Personally, I have preferred the first sequel Bride of the Re-Animator (1989), where Brian Yuzna and a team of crazed special effect artists in tow managed to both have an eerie premise, the creation of the perfect woman and all the issues related to this idea, and insanely imaginative and gore effects that leads the film to get bizarre by its finale. The one thing I am grateful for, mind, is also how this premise has managed to lead to a lot of rip-offs, cash-ins and even micro budget productions, all with the amusement that the original H.P. Lovecraft tale that lead to this, Herbert West - Reanimator, is a story Lovecraft was not fond of, because he had to work in a serialisation style, and some scholars of the author do not hold highly in his catalogue, which is strange to consider due to how evocative it still is.

I would be curious how Lovecraft would have reacted to the likes of the bizarre shot-on-video oddity Reanimator Academy (1992), where alongside the resurrected head of a stand up comedian you had gangsters from a cartoon bumbling through a tale of a reanimating agent. Another is The Soultangler, shot in Long Island in New York, befitting as, whilst an entirely different state, Lovecraft himself was born as hair's breath away in Rhode Island, able to be reached by boat in fact with ease The Soultangler mind, set in a time with a lot of eighties hair on the female cast and so much smoking that was cut out of the sixty two minute "director's cut", completely drifts off into its own tangent.

No budget cinema needs to be approached differently, as for every film which becomes an acclaimed breakout, even a legitimate masterpiece according to mainstream culture, many from the micro budgeted realm (even those with their own cult followings) are usually curiosities which require their own logic to fully appreciate. I have said this in so many words many times before, but it should always be returned to as that in itself is where my pleasure laid in the end. Slow, long dialogue and exposition scenes, homemade synth scores, and drastic reinterpretations of genre filmmaking are among such tropes between them, in this case a crazed scientist named Anton Lupesky who has figured out how to let his soul leave his body and enter any other, even long dead or just the brain, as long as there are eyes within the remnants. All at the cost of being an insane butcher of the living, getting his two lackeys to kidnap young women for his perversions so he can experiment on and tangle his soul into theirs.  

From there The Soultangler is a languid experience, a slow drift along in the full ninety minute cut, following also a female reporter whose father was one of Lupesky's early victims and goes on a journalist investigation of him. Probably one of the biggest distinctions about no budget cinema is that shooting with one's environments, a surprising amount of verisimilitude collides with the chaos of a genre plot line. Large sketches of The Soultangler is dialogue with the distinct haze of its filmed form effecting all, a world where acting is in a coarse, sometimes shouted and sometimes hazy form, it having a naivety, with the exception of the cops at the end of the film who have to clear up the eventual bloodbath, none of which is stereotypically "wooden".

Long Island here actually looks nice - for every grubby environment, there are many trees even in the streets and a sense of a humble community, perfect for this type of locally sourced homemade film making. It is arguably, for any accusation you can say over a Hollywood horror film being more professionally made, actually superior in its real locations, from shooting in an airport to the reality of the New York environment, where a red Dodge kidnapping van haunts the suburbia and everyone is wearing jeans. Like in a serious drama, our lead Kim is in the struggle of being a journalist wanting to write good work for her paper The Daily Chronicle, only for her boss wanting to sell copies by leaving it a rag. A lot of stark, almost abandoned environments and buildings make up a lot of the eeriness of the environment, and even the one scene in the villain's home involves a nice setting, a wooden panelled home the production was lucky to get permission to film in. One which is appropriate as a contrast to the grubby basement where his horrible experiments on, where he just experiments on victims and leaves body parts hanging around because he is one jam sandwich short of a picnic. Not surprising from a man, alongside being an elitist and a misogynist, who thinks telling a woman her gender secrete a wonderful essence is a great pick up line.

The result is definitely an acquired taste even next to more well known no budget films, but that in itself lulls you into a false sense of security. When the heroine has her drink spiked, we are abruptly thrown into a nightmare sequence with a talking doll that, when crushed under foot, spills out butcher's offal, followed by zombies who could be the denizens of Carnival of Souls (1962) terrorising her. A film where, falling asleep, a person suddenly wakes up peeling her own arm off. It is moments like this you can use as a perfect example of this type of cinema's unpredictability. That, for all the lengthy scenes of shouted irritance and smoking, or the rock song played over scenes of the villain just being mad, you enter weird tangents like this that keep you on your toes. In fact, baring that song which just has the title of the film and moans over and over, or a rockabilly like punk song, the synth score itself can vary between dungeon synth and an Italian horror film score, which alongside the post dubbing and that the film was preserved on hazy 1'' master tapes, makes it a lot more atmospheric that it initially suggests.

In fact, out of the no budget or micro budget realm, The Soultangler is one of the more interesting as, whilst it is still cheese, it is a film with a bit more production value or just the luck to shot in a place where they had some personality to work with, rather than go isolate themselves in a couple of dull greyish corridors. It even uses Haxan (1922), Benjamin Christensen's seminal and unique horror-documentary hybrid on witchcraft, as a placeholder for a documentary about devil worship in the United States, taking advantage of it being in the public domain and good nightmarish imagery of witches kissing Satan's behind whilst it was available.

Of course, the ending gets ridiculous as a micro budgeted version of the ending of Re-Animator. Moving brains, head chopping, arguably a complete lack of logic from the villain of just jumping into bodies only to let them be willingly be disposed of, and absolutely absurd material made by devoted practical effects artists and with the cast eventually covered in fake blood. Within a film that manages to literally run with the premise of the eyes being the windows to the soul, or that someone in the script writing had bothered to read books, as this film both a) references glucose helping to improve memory and b) mentions French philosopher René Descartes' obsession with the human pineal gland being where the soul was location, I have to admire this somewhat silly film for having a lot more personality. In his career, Pat Bishow did make a few more films but not many over the decades. This film, released by the American Genre Film Archive on physical media and by Bleeding Skull beforehand, is the kind for the reason I have talked of which has led me to be charmed by these micro budgeted films regardless of their limitations. It is definitely entertaining if anything.  Having seen it multiple times now, all as much to write this review but ultimately out of a joy for the production, it a better film over other micro budget movies which have been torture to try to sit through for their lack of imagination in contrast.

Event Horizon (1997)

 

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Screenplay: Philip Eisner

Cast: Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller; Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir; Kathleen Quinlan as Peters, Med Tech; Joely Richardson as Lt. Starck; Richard T. Jones as Cooper; Jack Noseworthy as Justin; Jason Isaacs as D.J.; Sean Pertwee as Smith; Peter Marinker as Captain John Kilpack

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #162

 

Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

I hated this film. It is a film once, growing up with parents who were more lenient in letting me see adult films of a higher age rating, which had a greater aura than it does now. It is a film which has a strong aesthetic, but is a reminder that, for myself, I have become bored with the predictable tropes of American horror storytelling. I am writing this in knowledge Event Horizon had a troubled production which softens my blows a little - the original cut was over two hours, more gorier and a lot more detailed in plot by accounts. The irony is that it was not the shoot itself were the problems lay, or that it was even Event Horizon itself at all, but that James Cameron's Titanic (1997), produced by Paramount, was taking so long to finish they pushed Event Horizon to be released in a hastened post-production.

Premise wise, British director Paul W.S. Anderson comes with an intriguing idea, as a haunted house film in outer space, where a recovery team are sent for the titular spaceship, one which has an experimental warp drive that can bend dimensional space travel. Dated nowadays, as this proclaims that in 2015 we had colonised the Moon already, but still intriguing. Naturally said warp drive was not a good idea, where the catalyst of the horrors arises from, that the ship has effectively went through to Hell, bringing back all the horrors with it. The plot is, amusingly, not dissimilar to a bottom of a barrel Japanese anime called Roots Search (1986), also sci-fi horror on a space ship which disappeared only to reappear, where in that straight-to-video ("OVA") release the main characters are also tormented by ghosts of their past.

The difference is that, whilst that anime is notoriously bad, and has a gross fleshy aesthetic even in how "off" the character designs have, one of Event Horizon's virtues which I will hold high is that the production design is sumptuous, which I cannot deny, though in mind to this being depicted as an ominous hell, where the recovery team should have reconsidered their goal when the distress signal they have involves Latin being spoken aloud among screaming. I would argue that half of the film's cult status just comes from how distinct it looks when you get to the Event Horizon itself, where the warp drive is a spinning spiked ball of death you have to get to through a giant slashing blade corridor. Definately of the era, especially the techno music in the score, but like a lot of Hollywood films at the time, it felt like a last hurrah in the nineties for a lot of insanely elaborate production design, even in how the chairs in the cast's recovery ship are not on the floor but hang above on a moving arm each.

Tragically, the material, the plotting and dialogue, is utterly bland and pedestrian. Paul W.S. Anderson is a diverse figure - at one point the Vulgar Auteurist movement embraced him, where reviews even compared one of his Resident Evil sequels to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012) when they were released theatrically around the same time, but I do wonder why, as unlike a figure like Tony Scott, Anderson as a "vulgar auteur" is for me just a journeyman whose worked extensively over the years but never really developed a style from what I have seen. This is not a bad thing inherently, as that does not mean you cannot be a competent filmmaker. A lot of W.S. Anderson for me however, from the few films I have seen, like Mortal Kombat (1995) from beforehand, is that of someone who is slick and relies on his production value, which is a danger when he is the kind of director beholden to scripts, including ones like here which are not good, and is not someone I would hold as being able to manipulate them into something more.

The problem arises that the script by Philip Eisner, who would only pen another film Mutant Chronicles (2008), is insanely perfunctory; despite an almost Warhammer 40,000 sense of far flung science fiction combined with horror and other genres, a reference to a table top model game which is entensively steeped in elaborate visuals and lore, he does not here really do anything beyond character stock tropes moving generically around a plot whose twist, the ship has went through Hell, is obvious and stretched out for far too long. Anderson likewise cannot sustain the film beyond this, which is worse as this is clearly going for the Hellraiser franchise meets a space ship, ignoring that said series already had a sci-fi story in a sequel a year or so beforehand. Instead you only spend time dragging on with the characters being tormented by generic hallucinations, the only person in a surprisingly strong cast of British and American character actors, being Sam Neill, the character of the man who built the ship and is tempted by its charms, which is not surprising as between Possession (1981) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), the great New Zealand actor knows a thing or two about going mad onscreen.

There is, frankly, a lack of ambition in the film to match that exceptional production design, and I say that cutting some slack due to the unfortunate post production history. A much more darker film is hidden - between the aftermath of someone being raised on hooks in the medical room with their guts spilt out on a table, to the obsession with removing peoples' eyes out, there was a ghoulish film here Paramount (and test audiences) to their horror funded as a big feature. One key scene, drastically censored down as footage of the original crew of the Event Horizon, is said to be effectively the shunting from Brian Yuzna's Society (1989), only with adult film actors and amputees hired in a cavalcade of sex and dismemberment, lost potentially to time unless a VHS of the director's cut or actual footage gets leaked out.

Brutally, even the attempts at darkness and emotion are even trite however, such as one of the crew members an older woman haunted by visions of her disabled son back home, or Neill's character haunted by a wife who committed suicide, none of which really stands out beyond feeling apathy and boredom. The plotting is so predictable and with a very simplistic plot that, even if the director's cut was salvaged, it would have to drastically add either more drama or a sense of horror, or both, to actually win me over these years. Instead, from the version commonly available, I was bored to tears instead.

In the Name of Christ (1993)

a.k.a. Au Nom Du Christ

Director: Roger Gnoan M'Bala

Screenplay: Jean-Marie Adiaffi, Bertin Akaffouand Roger Gnoan M'Bala           

Cast: Albert Ayatollah, Akissi Delta, Pierre Gondo, Martin Guedeba, Félix Lago and Naky Sy Savane

Ephemeral Waves

Full Plot Spoiler Throughout

 

You'll eat with your anuses...

From a country, Cote d'Ivoire, whose cinema is normally not see of in English speaking territories, at least in Britain, I am introduced to Roger Gnoan M'Bala, an Ivorian filmmaker who started in the seventies, progressing to making theatrical length films in the nineteen eighties, and despite being constant over to the 2010s in production, was utterly unknown to me until here. The state of how we access African cinema, as a vast continent let alone remembering it is many individual countries with their own cultures, is possibly one of the biggest embarrassments I would accuse cinema and film distribution in English speaking countries to having committed. It is a shameful state of affairs that, when we have shelves or sections on physical and virtual film selections for "World Cinema", we do really have access even to canonical titles from filmmakers like Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène let alone a film like In Search of Christ being only available say when a site like MUBI graciously makes it available to at least see. Preservation is a concern with this too, as whilst we can thank Martin Scorsese and the World Cinema Foundation for stepping in to help the cause among others, it is shocking for myself that this film from the early nineties, in the version I saw for this review, was still with damages to the print used. This is worse especially as In the Name of Christ is a strange, fascinating film worthy of interest.

This case is definitely unique, undoubtedly a film if you were able to see multiple times would develop complex layers, not so much a comedy as was advertised to me but a strange satire with a significant sense, as a former French colony with the film's main language of use French, that this is a native Ivorian director tackling the complexity of that influence on a religious and cultural level. Here is an insidious influence of Western culture I would argue you might not necessarily get from a Western culture, even if anti-religious, about the Western form of Christianity suddenly intrude on a small African village. A village which, even if set in the then-present day, is literally a tiny African village where the locals where their traditional dress and an occasional suit, have their own indigenous customs, and still live lives with farming and their community, one that feels separated from the rest of the country this village is set in even if outsiders may appear and the lead character, Magloire I, the self proclaimed “cousin of Christ" and founder of this Christian influence, eventually daydreams himself on an airplane preaching his take on the Gospel of Christ. Adding to the issue is that, whatever Magloire I actually has the blessing of a God or not, this is a perverted take on Christianity that adds additional problems as well.

One day Magloire I, a male swine herder who is bullied, and early on whilst attempting to castrate a pig is prevented from doing so by being pissed on, suddenly has visions which makes him believe he is the aforementioned cousin of Christ. Very quickly, very fast, this is not a good thing, as whether the visions are real, and whether he actually managed to blind a tormenter of his, and bring back the sight of, and removed the madness of a woman to cure her, when he wins over the village he has immediately turned this into a cult worshipping himself rather than anything beneficial. Everyone to his proclamation must worship him, part of the produce by the farmers must go to him, and any women are encouraged to go to him so he can have sex with them, enforcing the patriarchal ideal of motherhood and childbirth.

He definitely has a different take on Christianity alongside his followers; one follower, once a man who tormented him, argues that due to the Bible having too multiple interpretations needs to be reinterpreted, with Magloire I writing a "Final Testament" of his own. In the midst of this, two brothers split and represent the schism between this Westernised religion and local tradition, as one sides on Magloire I's system and the other stays in the outskirts as a critic who follows the original customs more strongly, brotherly love preventing them from breaking apart as the brother in the Christian faith still looks out for the other even if they represent opposite paths in beliefs and ideals. And, notable, whilst the satire is aimed squarely at this take on Christianity, the brother who joins Magloire I's side argues that the old customs did not help in the slightest, which have a pressing emotional weight to them as old idols and fetishes, the original term of magical objects, are thrown onto a mass bonfire, including a fertility statue with an exceeding large phallus by a woman who feels it has been utterly useless in helping her become pregnant with child.

There is a sense a lot is to be picked, scabs to open up, in how this represents Cote d'Ivoire's history of colonialism which is going to pass many of our heads if we, tragically, do not learn of the history of colonialism in African nations directors like Roger Gnoan M'Bala are clearly dealing with. His take on Christianity here also has to be unpicked as this is not even the version of a sacred, virtuous form that was the original representation, where Jesus Christ died for the sins of even those who sinned and effectively erased the old angry God of the Old Testament, but a sudden alien object dropped one day in this African village. The village takes to it as, after proving his miracles, Magloire I becomes really good at talking rhetoric, promising a better life which, frankly, is something even outside of religious figures as something anyone wishing for a better life would understandably listen to, even if you fall for it and end up effectively with a cult leader ruling the place.

If it is comedy, it is the driest imaginable, contrasting its matter of fact look and aesthetic, mostly set in the countryside and only betraying its time of making by a mood inducing synthesizer score. It is laced with that aforementioned oddness, where the material is a drama, but because of how Magloire I is depicted, with the tightrope walk that he is neither just a charlatan but not good person finding a new humanity, everything is peculiar in tone deliberately. It cuts the chaff of cheap anti-religious commentary, of building a corrupt religious hypocrite as you might find in an American or British film, by having a figure whose visions are never explained and ambiguous, the first of a young child like a vision of the burning bush for Moses, and later even wadding in the sea with Christ Himself, notably the White Westernised version rather than the Jewish prophet born in the Middle East in Judea. There is also the fact that, in the satire, even if the visions are true the swine herder has, after spending his life belittled and mocked, even spitefully killing a pregnant sow before the visions, found an excuse to have access to constant attention, food and a lot of sex. Rather than grow as a better person, he has indulged in base pleasures instead.

He is a fascinating anti-hero in the centre, very much a case of how religion is betrayed by the banalities of humanity most times than necessarily by blame of an omniscient being directly involved, with characters around the side circling around him. Be it the brothers, a woman (with her husband) from the outside world who comes to the village as, unable to have children, she feels she can with Magloire I, or even the former bully, a very diminutive man, who among them expresses his love to a woman in the midst of all this. Magloire I does eventually perform a ritualistic crucifixion where he is tied onto a wooden cross. When this is not enough, he does the same again but recreates the full crucifixion but with a firing squad of old (possible) soldiers aiming rifles at him to fire. This does not end well.

Even if you have read this whole review without ever watching the film, I would immediately recommend, if you can track it down, seeing In the Name of Christ as, only around eighty minutes, this is a fascinating film which never drags, speaks concisely, and even if more could have been done with the premise and characters, is so clearly complex already with what you have that it is not a film that would lose power if you watched it again over and over. Again, we do not support African filmmakers and cinema enough. Even if that comes from my own opinion from my own little world as an opinion, if we cannot even get a more vicious satire of Western influence on African countries like Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki (1973) in the British Isles before the 2020s, beyond MUBI (again) being gracious in letting people see it briefly, this quietly perverse but reserved satire is even more marginalised as a result. 

Heil Honey I'm Home! (1990)

 

Director: Juliet May

Screenplay: Geoff Atkinson and Paul Wayne

Cast: Neil McCaul as Adolf Hitler, Denica Fairman as  Eva Braun, Gareth Marks as  Arny Goldenstein, Caroline Gruber as  Rosa Goldenstein; Patrick Cargill as  Neville Chamberlain; Laura Brattan as  Ruth

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

I'm a very, very bad Hitler!

Just after Dad's Army (1968-77), a famous British television series in which an aging home guard in the middle of World War II train to protect Britain under the leadership of Lindsay Anderson regular Arthur Lowe, the satellite television station Galaxy followed up with a pilot which that announcer states "And unless Arthur Lowe defeats him, it's the man himself in a few moments in Heil Honey, I'm Home!, as the Galaxy Comedy Weekend continues.". Thus, almost haphazardly, the male voice over narrator for the station perfectly set up the last words for what was to be one of the most infamous TV pilots ever to be created and broadcasted. What never really is documented, at least in materials I learnt of this show as I grew up, was that the show was meant to be subversive, not merely a misguided idea to image Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun as stars of a sitcom, with a canned laughter track and Jewish neighbours the Goldensteins, without meaning to intentionally play this as the dark joke. It was also designed as a found footage project - that, in a fictional content, a producer named Brendan Thalbury had created at least eight episodes, only for it to disappear and be rediscovered on the Burbank back lot. With its all bright and cheery sitcom theme tune, the premise clearly was designed with a purpose.

The issue, and why it misfired so badly, is tone. This, if anything is the perfect example I can now point to for a pet theory of mine - that, with possible exceptions, no idea is too offensive or dumb or weird to work but execution is such an important factor. Premise wise, this is subversive - it is perverse to imagine Hitler having the pet name of "Mr. Sausage" by his wife Eva, the disgruntled housewife continually annoyed he is late to dinner constantly, all whilst the Goldensteins are even more fractured in terms of their married relationship. The men in this world do not come off well - lazy, drunk, ego driven - whilst the housewives, Eva and Rosa Goldenstein bond over Eva letting Rosa know Neville Chamberlain, the current Prime Minister of Britain, is coming over for dinner in a mischievous and improvised game of charades. Again, one of these people is Eva Braun, the other Jewish, which leaves an uncomfortable edge, but in among the wholesome but trite sitcom clichés. Hitler and Eva even have New York accents, despite being a British production, adding that sense, in a perverse alternative world, that this is not that different from when The Flinstones were created as a nuclear family sitcom depicted with animated cavemen. We in this actual world realise this is not the case, and it is uncomfortable, and there is meant to be a point to this.

And Hitler is still a putz here. Also the main plot is that Chamberlain is coming over, hoping over dinner to reprimand Adolf for being a naughty man for invading Czechoslovakia, thus adding a political edge that this pilot is a scathing take on Chamberlain's 1938-9 attempts at peace talks with Nazi Germany which backfired. Neville Chamberlain since his death has had the man whose peace talks were useless, leading to Hitler signing a treaty but still invading countries, and WWII still transpiring. This is still what he is known for nowadays and this pilot buries him and kicks him whilst down for good measure. Chamberlain, as old foolish man Rosa Goldenstein wants to push her dull niece Ruth onto, immediately shows how out of place he is when, asked about tea, he starts singing "I'm a little tea pot..." with the gestures like a child. It is broad, but it is subversive that, using this strange genre choice, the entire "Peace for Our Times" aspect of his career which doomed Chamberlain's reputation after his death is perfectly depicted by Hitler first trying to hide the treat in the fridge and, when Chamberlain finds out, just coxing him with nice words and signing it, as Adolf Hitler effectively did in real life whilst still invading countries.

The problem with Heil Honey is that most of it is not funny. It is a broad, deeply silly piece of characters being too deliberately comical when, for a darker turn, staying fully in the confines of the sitcom with significantly better jokes, whilst still tasteless, would have worked. The writing is not great for most parts of it, which is why so much of it instead comes off as awful on multiple levels. The tinges of darkness, even if depicted as light humoured, are still here like Hitler having to dismiss his own Aryan Nazi soldiers as being a gag by Joseph Goebbels for when Chamberlain first came to the airport, Goebbels off-screen even more incompetent for one of the funnier jokes, hand written sign for Chamberlain and all. I doubt the show could have lasted long, because just showing this pilot after Dad's Army, in a time slot where one is not warned of a subversive piece, was as much an ill advised decision, but as much of the issue, with knowledge that only a few titbits of the rest of the series made available online, that the production missed the delicate target completely.

There was discomfort shooting the production from those involved, and even after that Galaxy screening, which is the version that was recorded on tape and allowed people to see the pilot, you hear the announcer being caught off guard about how political it got, just expressing perfectly how one reacts to the show. It was uncomfortable to watch, even if aspects were difficult not to admit were amusing, but the result is a testament to the fact that, when handling delicate subject, taking risks but also tact is necessary. As much of my experience, only being twenty or so minutes long, was with grimacing as it was bemusement. In fact, I would have not been surprised if a tasteless take on the material, in a different time slot and era, might have been more successful and politically stronger in making the point it had, rather than arguably a more problematic work here that lost many immediately. This pilot, as a result, is never known as a failed experiment as political satire, but the misguided decision in, well, creating a light hearted sitcom about Adolf's home life that rightly offended many.

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

 

Director: Werner Herzog

Screenplay: Werner Herzog

Cast: Brad Dourif as The Alien; Donald Williams as the Astronaut Commander; Ellen Baker as the Astronaut physician (as Dr. Ellen Baker); Franklin Chang-Diaz as the Astronaut Plasma Physicist; Shannon Lucid as the Astronaut biochemist; Michael McCulley as the Astronaut pilot; Roger Diehl, Ted Sweetser and Martin Lo as Mathematician

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I hate to say this, but we aliens suck.

You can argue for many layers to Werner Herzog, the German director more known to some for his public persona even over his most well known work like Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972). It can also be argued even who he is as a filmmaker is more complex because of his work in both fiction and documentary filmmaking. It cannot be separated because, making as many documentaries over the years as he has films, arguably more than over fictional work within the 2000s and 2010s, he was working in both mediums since the start of his career. Coming to The Wild Blue Yonder, we get something else entirely, a fictitious tale built around existing footage where Brad Dourif, a very underappreciated actor, plays an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy who has lived on Earth secretly for years, being our host and narrator.

His kind travelled from their dying world, the titular Wild Blue Yonder, and despite their best efforts to replace Washington D.C. with a new American capital with stores and an Andromeda museum, all Dourif has is a small town that looks abandoned behind him onscreen. He narrates how, having worked for CIA and been privy to the famous conspiracy of the Roswell UFO crash, how the human beings made an ill advised attempt to research the remaining wreckage of the ship. Spooked by nearly letting an alien bacterium infect the planet, they still plan ahead in case of any further incidents to search for another planet that can sustain human life, a group of astronauts searching in space.

Said tale is built from pre-existing footage. Astronauts from NASA are used, from the STS-34 space shuttle mission, whilst the Wild Blue Yonder itself, when reached by them, is our own ocean depths, the mysterious aquatic wildlife like jellyfish now strange and lonely creatures who like to communicate, only for the visitors to ignore them, and under ocean formations of ice or rock the architecture of a new world. That later footage, from a diving expedition in the Antarctica, was taken by Henry Kaiser, who is also a musician and has collaborated with Herzog a few times.

It is from Herzog a bit of an indulgent production as, even at around eighties minutes, it does risk taking its premise on for too long with only the astronaut footage in the middle half. Helping considerably is that, for the science, Herzog did get involved real academics to explain how the ideas the film talks of are in real life. This includes how long it would take just to get to the end of our galaxy with mathematical sums, or a theory which does sound like a deliberate fictitious one, but is an existing one, of the "gravity tunnels" which is the hypothesis that you could exploit the gravitational orbits to travel faster in space. Alongside Brad Dourif, this leads to the other prominent voice of the film, another MVP, being Franklin Chang-Diaz, whose theory of the gravitational tunnels (the secret allowing the spaceship to reach the Wild Blue Yonder) comes out abruptly as a sudden strange tangent. That and, sat next to a lemon tree outside, Herzog keeps a shot in of him sneezing.

The film definitely shows Herzog's auteurist voice, as whilst it is Brad Dourif who speaks the words as a narrator, they are definitely Herzog's sentiments. In two tangents one after another, he finds it a bad thing when we domesticated farm animals, pinning humanity down to locations whilst dogs could at least travel, and he definitely hates when human beings started climbing up mountains. Famously calling nature a personification of chaos, coming prominently in a film from the same year as this, the Timothy Treadwell documentary Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog has always respected it, and the best sequences of the film are when we finally set foot in the Yonder, the underwater footage of a striking world that does look frankly alien.

The film is also ultimately, almost naively, an ode to the best in humanity as he has text at the end praising NASA. Herzog, famously known for throwing himself in insane circumstances and/or getting into rows with his frequent star Klaus Kinski, has however always mixed his cynicism of humanity with the best of us. It can seem frankly hypocritical as, undeniably, his criticisms through Dourif about exploring mountains are his own words whilst he has however admired explorers of the natural world, but I guess if you are stuck in modern civilisation, you can appreciate those willing to explore and be adventurous. It is notable that the older Herzog has softened over the decades. Or he has layers, suggesting his more provocative statements are part of a persona; whilst the real man did nearly lose his mind on Fitzcarraldo (1982), this is also a man who loves football and has made documentaries after varying between the pioneers in the Antarctica or the digital world, willing to offer actual blunt criticism but also open to ideas more than some people a quarter of his age. The Wild Blue Yonder is not a key film from him for me, but its context makes sense and was worth having.

Abstract Spectrum: Playful/Tranquil

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

Leprechaun III (1995)

 

Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith

Screenplay: David DuBos

Cast: Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun; John Gatins as Scott; Armstrong as Tammy; John DeMita as Fazio; Michael Callan as Mitch; Caroline Williams as Loretta; Marcelo Tubert as Gupta; Tom Dugan as Art

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #161

 

With all this killing, I've lost me shilling.

The Leprechaun franchise is not particularly well regarded, and as a testament to having seen Leprechaun 5: In the Hood (2000), it is not a series for me to willing completely except as a completionist. Number three of the series was also handpicked out of context for me to cover (and watch) for two reasons. One is that it is the first of two directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, the British born Australian-based filmmaker who I would argue grew in recognition when the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, which retroactively created the "Ozploitation" genre for Australian genre cinema, where Trenchard-Smith gained acclaim for making a slew of films like The Man From Hong Kong (1975) and Dead-End Drive-In (1986). Secondly, this is set in Las Vegas, even if it is low budget and minimalising on location shooting throughout. Vegas fascinates me, a place I would like to go to even if I found myself hating it and wanting to leave immediately, probably stemming as much from Hunter S. Thompson's infamous trip there for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and growing up as a kid with CSA: Crime Scenes Investigations, when the original series took place in the city. Even depictions of the more cleaned up version such as Showgirls (1995) or even Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005) fascinate me.

It is, even if it helps the carbon footprint increase every day, an artistically created environment both radiating pure spectacle out of an old Hollywood picture and pure kitsch as a landmark, where you can inexplicably have gangster Bugsy Siegel and Liberace having left a mark on the environment. It also makes sense, baring Ireland, for an evil leprechaun played by Warwick Davis to be placed there. Trenchard-Smith's next film in this franchise shot the greedy bastard into space in the far-future for a joke; here, effectively a personification of said greed in an environment of numerous gambling establishments is perfect. Even a sight gag, a slot machine even found in a hospital waiting room, shows where the film could have ran with the premise further if it had the budget.

Trying to explain the actual plot for this film, not this imagined version, is pointless as Leprechaun III's biggest flaw is that, to get to eccentric and sometimes original gags, you have to create a plot even if it is exceptionally rudimentary. The part about the titular fiend is not an issue - an Irishman missing limbs drops a petrified leprechaun into a pawn shop, where the owner stupidly removes the amulet around its neck despite the original owner's warning. The leprechaun, as an legends and folklore CD-ROM kindly informs us the viewer, is obsessed with wealth, possessing a pot of gold where even one coin by itself can grant a single wish, which is Las Vegas as a setting allows for a monkey's paw-like scenario or a very angry leprechaun tracking the coin back.

The rest is the issue, a romance between the female assistant to a David Copperfield like stag magician and a guy who only gets interesting when Warwick Davis bites him, which is most of the film and bland. Unfortunately, this type of plot feels strung together with a lack of pace. Instead it is the side characters who are of note and keep it propped up, even a joke like two loan sharks debating poor socks they have worn in the past, or figures of cult status like Caroline Williams of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986) as one of the casino staff, an older woman whose interest in a magical coin leads to her becoming as inflated in places as if a group of strategically placed beach balls was in her body. Davis as well, in full makeup, manages to also make what could come off as demeaning and cheese inducing interesting because he is clearly having fun and is clearly among a type of actor, no matter how bad the film could be, who is bulletproof because of his professionalism. Even bumping into an Elvis impersonator and mimicking him, dressed in full green lederhosen, Davis is game and, again, for an inherently silly monster villain, his charisma is there.

In fact, it would have been inspired if this had the budget, or a significantly better script, to imagine a greedy leprechaun with magic powers (to cause people to spit out coins like a slot machine or statues to fire arrows) try to take over Las Vegas or cheat at the dice table more than he does here. When the film does actually try to be more creative, it is interesting. A journeyman who has worked in many genres, I do suspect Brian Trenchard-Smith is much more comfortable with action, which is he great at, than horror-comedy here, but I also say this as someone whose admiration for him does not want to blame him for the issues with the film either. He does embrace the bright fluorescent pink and green lighting, which won me over, but he feels straight jacketed not having a fight scene or a bit more pace to the material. When the script allows for something unpredictable, it is, the most memorable scene involving a scuzzy casino owner being seduced by a blonde woman who crawls out of the television. It has Warwick Davis impersonate infomercial figures like a psychic or an Evangelical preacher, but the scene gets freakish and interesting when the woman turns out to have been the television having transformed into a robot of wires, a piece of horrifying moving parts to have sex with especially with the rubber face and giant rubber breasts protruding off the front.

Then there is when the lead male is bitten and, yes, turns into a were-leprechaun. Sadly, it does get into Irish stereotypes about their obsession with potatoes, but it also gives him an actual personality when he develops furry eyebrows, an Irish accent and starts to speak in rhyme. A better, better film for me would have had true love prevail but with the main female character loving a half-leprechaun who occasionally gets distracted by gold; her own character gets interesting, in a nice subversion of a potentially icky moment when a wish brainwashes her to swoon over the casino owner, when her seduction technique involves slapping him around first. The problem with many horror films, and films in general, is when a lack of an imagination or taking a risk is involved, to the point of stressing that normalcy must be returned to even though, frankly, it is boring.

As a result, Leprechaun III is merely average. I have seen better from Brian Trenchard-Smith and most of the film, deliberately broad and meant not to be taken seriously, is a production which drifts along until it hits a funny line or weird moment. As a fan of the director, I am probably soften on the film than most people would be, always an issue with horror franchises especially when they strayed away from theatrical releases of this happening, that you need people to be on top or focused form, or the production with be lazy. I sense, if this was made with a bit more of this, this silly premise would have been a hell of a lot more entertaining.

We're Going to Eat You (1980)

 

Director: Tsui Hawk

Screenplay: Roy Szeto and Hark Tsui

Cast: Norman Chu as Agent 999; Eddy Ko as the Chief; Melvin Wong as Rolex; Michelle Yim as Ah Lin; Mo-lin Cheung as Lin

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #160.

 

Don't tell me you've got to piss again.

Most horror films do not break out into martial arts fights continually. This is why Hong Kong cinema is awesome, and here in particular you have a martial arts comedy film which does not tone down the horror either - someone is sawn in half to establish the premise. This is also of note as this is a very early film by Tsui Hawk, once a Vietnam born young man who, from here, would eventually become a legendary director and producer in Chinese cinema. This is before he started playing with camera angles, editing and aesthetic style normally avoided in the martial arts genre, back when he here keeps the camera back in his fights. The premise is simple, whilst establishing though that Hawk's very idiosyncratic nature was still here however despite a drastically different tone in how is was made, where on Cannibal Island an agent is chasing after the criminal "Rolex", only to meet a community that lives off human meat picked off from outsiders.

Even the cannibals themselves are suffering inequality, as the security force lead by their leader demands more portions over the populous of half crazed people, said leader the kind with a mistress demanding not his heart but an actual one. It is a lurid spectacle, entirely a fun horror ride due to there being so many fake outs, including a trick of a cut-off hand (by tilt upwards of the camera) revealing it was an already severed one, that becomes part of the joy of how broad and over-the-top the production is. It does already show Hawk's competency in skill of Hong Kong cinema, and beside, unless you scrap the barrel, by this point you have enough people behind the camera of these Hong Kong films that it was possible to deliver a quality film even for a lurid pot-boiler.

The only detail which does jar is a questionable joke character, a very tall and broad shouldered male actor in female drag, a traditional Chinese red dress, excessive makeup and hair up. His character is viewed as a woman, rather than gay or trans or a cross dresser, but I do wander whether the joke is as much meta textual that a male actor is playing broadly effeminate or not. Thankfully, with an incredibly black sense of humour, everything else is We're Going to Eat You is great.

It is a broad premise to set up fight choreography, but this feels effortless without losing creativity. It is not remotely the most extreme Hong Kong film, as the Category III films would push barriers, but it is a fascinating hybrid found common from the region. All of it interconnects well too - the horror wraps around the action, as you have to fight off cannibals, as does the comedy which is mainly physical, and the horror is still bloody, even inventively gristly such as a self inflicted wig splitting. Even a lesser know film like this can pull out incredibly amounts of gymnastics, the hero escaping a trap which dangles him between trees with hands and feet tied a good early example, and they are as mentioned creativity, such as when roller-skates suddenly get introduced in the end weaving between the final boss fight that is also taking place in the same area.

Even the music is exceptional - a scene involving a blind man, trying to catch a character, a thief who eventually starts running around like a mischievous monkey and crawling up walls to survive, has percussion chime in at precise comic timing. I caught on, though, pieces was "borrowed" from Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), which is not a bad thing.

Tsui Hawk would go on, becoming a veteran who influenced Hong Kong cinema even when he was the producer, and it is good to see one of his earliest projects, whilst lacking his later flair, still possessing his idiosyncratic nature. In fact, that sense of creativity even for a project like this likely helped him, cutting his teeth on a project like this where the tone itself can juggle so many pieces without collapsing. It would allow him to adapt to any production, which would benefit him in larger budget efforts and even working with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the result here long before then also happens to be a unique horror film too.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (2009)

Director: David Russo

Screenplay: David Russo

Cast: Marshall Allman as Dory; Jeanette Maus as Amelia; Sean Nelson as Jason; Tania Raymonde as Ethyl; Vince Vieluf as O.C.; Tygh Runyan as Methyl; Richard Lefebvre as Weird William; Natasha Lyonne as Tracy

Abstract List Candidate

 

[Some plot spoilers]

 

You guys name the turds you find?'

Little Dizzle is not the best example of unconventional American independent cinema, but is sad David Russo never made anything else as he has a distinct style as a director/writer/animator here that would have been interesting to see progress. He immediately shows, even if this was the one project he ever wanted to make before leaving cinema, his talents with an opening montage of a message in a bottle travelling in super fast time delay footage across the oceans. That it just leads to our protagonist Dory (Marshall Allman) finding said bottle and its message to just be a "fuck you" also states the playful absurdity of the production we will watch.

Dory, whose search for meaning comes with him going through as many major religions as he can and even atheism in search of worth, is a self proclaimed "Data Meister" who, finally snapping, burns his bridges so much his "ashes are halfway to Mars", left with only becoming a janitor for an office complex to work with. To be a janitor, hanging out with people his own age, their boss a cross dressing former soldier who fought in the first Desert Storm in the first Gulf War, is to see the world few do, as explained when the term "janitor" originated from "Janus", "arch" or "gate" and the Roman deity regarded as the doorkeeper of heaven. Among nice people, his life is arguably better now, the initial set up is playful with touches of stranger aspects peering occasionally from under the surface, with the production value afforded just from being able to film in a large building complex. A lot of the film has an amusing humour, such as the funny use of black censorship bars for a sex scene, and how (after some cleaning) the same room will be used for a meeting. You also find some very choice and inspired musical cues too, such as a cleaning montage set to non-English rap music.

The plot is steadily introduced when a company occupying one of the floors are testing experimental cookies which self heat in the mouth to reproduce the "just baked" taste. Such cookies, tested on the janitor staff by prompt of Tracy (Natasha Lyonne), have a very adverse effect on men only. Namely, that they cause pregnancy of strange fluorescent blue fish unable to survive long after their birthing. It is an odd premise, finitely a subversive gender swap, with the most interesting detail being that everyone who experiences this comes from it with a greater happiness. Birth and pregnancy are profound biological and cultural aspects of human beings which cis-males are separated from due to biology; yes, there is clearly a joke that these male characters, as it develops from the digestive tract, are pooping out blue fish rectally when they have gestated, but the experience and emotional bond to their fish is meaningful to them, tragically as said offspring will die soon after.

In terms of whether the fish fully amounts to hidden dept will depend upon whether layers can be found in the film. Certainly in terms of the themes at hand, it takes a big handful of concepts like from a bowl of experimental cookies. Dory's spiritual crisis could be seen as a gag and simplistic, between being now Jewish to wearing a Nietzsche t-shirt, but he fits a type of figure, of a generation, where in the West there is a disconnect from organised religion but sometimes reticence to abandon spirituality, which is befitting of also how alternative spiritual beliefs would grow over the decades such as Wicca. Co-worker O.C. (Vince Vieluf), the other most prominent character, wants to become an artist, his exhibition of toilet related art frankly the last dying breath of taking instillation art seriously, whilst it is ultimately his idea to provide the homeless with coats embroidered with "I'm sorry" on the back, to promote self healing for anyone who reads it, is a very naive and very easy to misinterpret idea, but possible the best one he had.

If anything, Little Dizzle as a film skirts around these subjects, alongside the corruptness of the company behind the cookies, much to Tracy's own horror, with a comic broadness. The weird aspects come from hallucinations caused by said cookies, alongside pregnancy and a desire to ingest salt, such as a sacred animation fish, Dory's shower freak-out done in deliberately fake computer animation, and a lot of manipulation of sound and visuals. Definitely, the film hedges its bets on that initial premise - the blue fish - and imagines the emotional attachment with sincerity and absurd humour.

It feels definitely as much of its era too, from a period when French filmmaker Michel Gondry and many films about young adults trying themselves were common in cinema. Also the musical choices definitely show a point when it was more common to have more "indie" or idiosyncratic choices, probably the best choice in this film a cover of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by The Langley Schools Music Project. An outsider music institution, the project was musical performances by four different Canadian elementary school choirs recorded in the seventies, covering songs between the Beach Boys to that song, originally by Klaatu but more famous by The Carpenters, that was released as an LP in 2001 and became a cult gem. It is a perfect choice for the ending, a sweet one where, rather than the presumed conclusion of beating the evil corporation, out lead decides against it because he has gained something much more profound from his misadventure.

Whether the film actually works as a great film is entirely subjective in this case, although there is plenty to admire. Certainly, it is not "abstract", as it never gets to the point the hallucinations warp reality fully. Likewise the blue fish, including the titular notion of the Immaculate Conception, never gets immensely religious and surreal, which could be the one real flaw of the film, that there was a lot left on the table which could have been explored. As it stands however, I admired the film, sad to see that its creator had no really continued beyond this.

Abstract Spectrum: Quirky/Weird

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