Crumbs (2015)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó (with translation by Daniel Worku)

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Candy; Selam Tesfayie as Sayat; Mengistu Berhanu as the Shop Owner; Shitaye Abraha as the Witch; Tsegaye Abegaz as Santa Claus; Girma Gebrehiwot as The Man Who Listens

An Abstract Candidate

 

Miguel Llansó returns, although in this case the older title far from being advanced from actually proves to be a Rosetta stone for getting more out of the later (better known) Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019). I still like the later immensely, but Crumbs became the favourite of the two immediately.

It is effectively an Ethiopian set sci-fi film, but the obvious thing to notice is how much Western pop culture is deliberately included. This could have easily been trite, like many post-post-modern illustrative artists I have seen on sites like Juxtapoz magazine that, whilst still are great illustrations, are beholden to knowing what the symbolism is. I have always worried, maybe irrationally, that especially in the modern day where "content" and "stuff" is more of a concern for companies to pump out to audiences, not dissimilar at all to the goods produced cheaply in pound stores or more expensive boutiques, whether any of this material will be left for scholars in a thousand of years or not, even that which is loved and became art to its fans. I am also someone who actually, on the opposite side to that opinion, as an admirer of Surrealism's ethos including admiring low culture, someone who would wish for even the content itself to celebrated even if just manufactured, that as long as there is a way to turn something into art, it is worth saving even if to be deliberately camp or perverse. A lot of the illustrations or art I have seen however, from the likes of Juxtapoz, whilst still good sadly still are beholden to their symbolism needing to be known with not much else between the lines, which would be a nightmare for scholars a hundred years down the line to appreciate even with context, and just an excuse for perverting brand names in surreal psychedelic imagery. Here with Crumbs however, there is something more profound in the end.

The absurdity is there. Actor Daniel Tadesse returns, and this time he has to locate Santa Claus to get tickets for the spaceship to return to his home, whilst his love interest Selam Tesfayie prays to the holy shrine of basketball legend Michael Jordan and lives in a bowling alley where it has seemingly come to life on its own will. This is film where, in terms of one-off imagery, an Ethiopian Santa Claus (played by Tsegaye Abegaz) smashing a children's bicycle in the head of someone wearing a Superman costume is something I actually witnessed and can write about. However, glacial and a road movie in its own way, there is something much more profound about Crumbs which means more.

It is felt fully when, far later in the short feature length film's narrative, we enter a cinema which has been playing a Turkish rip-off of Superman continuously. In a world where no one really remembers the past, believing a toy children's sword or a Donatello ninja turtle figurine are all artefacts of ancient warriors, this offers as much as its narrative the subtext that the artefacts we churned out on mass in our pass, whether of worth or cheap pound store junk, lasts a hundred years down the line (especially if made of plastic) and now is found by the survivors in this world. Here Michael Jackson is not the figure we have him as, controversial yet a huge mega star, but a legendary singer presumed to have been a farmer at the same time he made the Dangerous (1991). If anything, Llansó offers the perfect attitude to how to deal with pop culture in art. Name drop the material, which if you get adds new layers, but force them in a strange scenario where name or brand recognition are not the point but how these objects are reinterpreted in the environment. It is perfect in dealing with a problem, especially with this era now we have to add post to post-modernism, which is going to befall media which attempts to deal with all the culture around it that has been made and still will be.

More so as, in the other virtue of Crumbs, Llansó found enough surreality and scale in the real world. I liked Jesus Shows... immensely, but Crumbs wins out between the two for managing to find real life locations straight from a dream reality. Staying entirely in the country of Ethiopia, it is subversive and profound in itself to have this story in this country, where the cast of local actors of the territory and they get to play out a scenario with this much imagination. The manmade environment around them itself, as someone who admits to having had dreams of strange buildings made from the most banal of places like supermarkets, are just as evocative as the strange content the director-writer added himself. Railway tracks nearly to sink in the sea, the bowling alley itself is an atmospheric place where a bowling ball randomly rolls down a corridor by its own will, and there is the stunning if lived-in zoo where Santa is found. That last location, a masterstroke for the production to have found, is a vast extravagantly decorated environment found in the country of Ethiopia which offers far more production value than if made from CGI. As much as the film is deeply silly on purpose, like this being a world of a "Justin Bieber IV" existing, it both has a greater weight of imagination due to the production values the filmmaker found (or found in a discount store) but also a salient political commentary that is inherently within this material.

In this world in particularly, the apocalypse which we learn of that transpires did not really effect a lot. The metropolises and environments are abandoned, but the habitants have survived, with none of the gravity of a film set in a Western first world country like the United States saying everything would be a disaster. No one cares what has happened, and so much plastic or pot materials left after the end's wake is now more valuable than it was back when civilisation existed. The greater concern here now is being attacked by someone whilst you acquire a Christmas tree for your love one's collection of dwarf trees. Even Nazi imagery, one character wearing a Nazi uniform with Mickey Mouse ears and a gas mask, is no longer threatening in the end of the world, not even able to convince the store owner who sells artefacts the pay more by threatening him with a toy gun, and the traditional folklore and culture is still able to survive. A witch exists, and still thrives, only now she has the benefit to having a ceramic cup to drink from and little trinkets to be paid with. Even a figure like Michael Jordan now is a deity here to light incense to, rather than just the legendary basketball and Space Jam (1996) forgotten about.

It is also of note that, in a country like Ethiopia or non-Western countries, the complete saturation of our pop culture bleeding into theirs is inherently political for how it is matter of fact and has no power, merely objects in the background or trade. It evokes the film ‎Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016), from the Philippines director Khavn De La Cruz, in that for all its tragedy and surrealism another aspect I still remember is how, in its great production value, there was so much noticeable American pop culture (branded clothes from the likes of Pixar's Cars) among the trash and debris of its mostly impoverished or homeless cast. It disconcerts how much of the consumer goods floods of ours flood other countries, but it is thankfully not as powerful as we fear, as they will eventually become meaningless or at least not merely something to have to buy, merely symbols having to fight with others based on an individual's priority rather than what it sold to them. It is befitting, returning back to the Superman imagery here, Superman becomes a symbol of hope and virtue in this world, which would make the DC characters' original creators still proud, but that the Turkish knock-off is shown, still liable in itself to have inspired a young child in Turkey as much as the American Christopher Reeves films of bigger budgets.

Crumbs in itself, whilst also hilarious and a thing of beauty, gains a lot from this, and it now makes the more accessibly weird Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway more meaningful as it was in this exact tone of using pop culture, taking Soviet cold war era paranoia and its pop culture and smashing it together. Knowing as well that Miguel Llansó can slow down, let you breathe in a fully fleshed out world seen in less than seventy minutes as much as throw you through the lunacy of the later film, itself is fantastic as it means he is capable of being unpredictable and entice with what he can do with this distinct aesthetic attitude.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Post-Modern/Weird

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

Gumnaam (1965)

 

Director: Raja Nawathe

Screenplay: Dhruva Chatterjee

Based on And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Cast: Nanda as Asha; Manoj Kumar as Anand ; Pran as Barrister Rakesh; Helen as Kitty Kelly; Mehmood as the Butler; Dhumal as Dharamdas; Madan Puri as Dr. Acharya; Tarun Bose as Madhusudan Sharma; Manmohan as Kishan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #222

 

Here, life is gorier than death.

With its opening Gumnanm starts off well bolting out of the gates - a man orders another man to be run over, with a will being immediately passed on, only to be shot by a mysterious man dead and the film to kick into the opening credits of a city road at night with a mix of proto garage rock guitar against orchestral strings for emphasis. Even the fact it is not really a horror film, instead adapting the Agatha Christie story And Then There Were None, is compensated by the fact that you get a lot of gothic moments and even sets straight out of a horror story. The one tragic aspect is that, unfortunately, Gumanaam does have a bad ending. Following ten people and an airplane staff member who are taken to a mansion on an island where the ten chosen individuals will be murdered one by one in a revenge plot, I feel this has to come up front in the narrative, as this is a pitch perfect example of when tying up the loose ends and concluding the results to leave everyone happy can ruin all the good.

Particularly when everything beforehand is very good, in its own idiosyncratic logic as a Bollywood film made in the sixties with its own distinct structure, giving this a huge distinction separate from other films of this type of plot. Ten people are selected for a trip to a luxurious mansion. Even this prologue, to set that detail up, has its own literal song and dance. Many will know this film because its main theme played here, the rock n roll/surf guitar hybrid Jaan Pehechan Ho, was later used in the 2001 adaptation of Ghost World, but in context you have a nightclub of Western iconography and sixties colour (with purple and pink prominent throughout), with white suits on men, elegant Western night dresses for women, and Lone Ranger black masks for everyone. This immediately establishes that, as a pulp/psychotronic or just merely distinct piece of pop culture from India, this will be idiosyncratic.

One logic step you need to adapt to is that, of course, a lot of Bollywood including this one will have musical numbers even in the least expected genres. Bollywood's reinterpretation of A Nightmare on Elm Street (Mahakaal (1994)) had one, so will this. It has an odd touch in that, even when the cast learn that they will be killed off one-by-one, and even after this happens, they will still have comedy scenes, a romance between two of the cast members which includes a musical sequence in the rain, a trope in Bollywood which gets around their censorship with a very explicitly symbolism and in the lyrics, and musical numbers every least expected place in general. And yet, if you let yourself go with this, it does not prove an issue at all. In fact, whilst not three hours long like many Bollywood films, the two and a half hour length actually proves a virtue in that you get to live with these characters even if they are archetypes. The songs themselves for the cast even here add a lot more to their personalities by allowing them to stand out.

Archetypes definitely have to be on mind as there are aspects here which are not acceptable today or are part of cultural customs which would not be held high on. This film does have the duality between the chaste, good female character in Asha (Nanda), the niece of the deceased man, and Kitty Kelly (played by Helen), the later a Westernised figure who represents decadence played Helen with all the fashion iconography of the West, including the odd decision to go swimming in her normal clothes at one point, and the prolific and legendary Nanda wearing traditional dress. However, thankfully even this film undercuts this at points despite being embroiled in this stereotyping - you do actually like Kitty Kelly, even if she is complicit in the original murder, even having her own musical number despite all the deaths that have happened of just enjoying life, and there is a sequence where the two women get drunk and have a drunken musical number which is almost triumphant, all in spite of the male lead acting in a chauvinist brutal way to undercut it afterwards. There is also the butler, played by legendary comedic role veteran Mehmood, who is a character you eventually realise is played by an actor in blackface, or explicitly more faked tanned, his darker skin at one point used as detraction by Kitty Kelly in one moment her character is undercut in a terrible way.

It has not aged well, but with the actor Mehmood even at his most buffoonish, the butler also happens to be the best character of the film. Making his entrance on the levitating onto his feet on the dining table in a body bag, the Butler, despite being a nameless figure, stands out even as a broad cartoonish character for fun, a figure I immediately was won over with as the one person in the island who will not be killed, having to make sure everyone is fed and the mansion is kept running, and can act like his own Greek chorus to everyone as a result. In response to one of the most evocative touches of the film, a female voice singing through the island the cast is one a song of "someone is anonymous " that everyone and the viewer hears frequently, he has heard that cursing song so much, a "hit in the jungle", that it annoys him, and even the prop of his lilac tea set, stuck to the serving tray, becomes memorable for Mehmood waving it about. Even in mind to the problematic nature of the character being in blackface, and a ridiculous bowl cut hair style and Chaplin moustache that suggests just a cheap comedy figure, he becomes a sincerely lovable figure. He even gets a musical number, just after the one scene of racism, where he proclaims regardless of the colour of his skin he is still a great lover, which does not deal with the tastelessness of before, but offers a soothing pill as he gets to be a lothario in a nearly surreal dance number in his dreams of ancient psychotronic temple architecture, with dancing women, psychedelic colours and statues with flashing lights built into them.

It does become a chimera of emotions due to the tonal and genre shifts, justifying the gothic horror tag for its brief moments in the holy temple in the environment, and it works as much due to director Raja Nawathe making this a stylish film to match the content. The colours, the canted camera angles etc. but also completely inspired moments such as a female character playing a grand piano intertwining with the non-diagetic score at the same time, all of which makes sure this never becomes a dull or conventional piece, something which sadly one could have done with this premise. It is entirely with a shame the film has to have a conclusion, and that the one chosen was what we end up with. [Major Plot Spoilers] Between the fact that it involves a character never seen, baring in disguise, as the culprit, and a generic crime related explanation, it absolutely feels out of place even if it might have been impossible for Gumnaam to fully be satisfying, between the premise's contrivances to how to even explain the ghostly female voice we here throughout. Even how abruptly the film ends, resolving itself with an airplane acting as a deus ex machina with police on board, falters the film. [Spoilers]. It is undeniably, though, something pure in terms of a snapshot of a non-Western culture's take on cinema, and all the wild playfulness and distinction that can entail, in how genre tropes cliché in the West even at this time are turned on their head and what appealed to its nation's audience.. It has obvious issues, including problematic content, but this indefinable film in terms of genre is compelling for never, until that unfortunate ending, being predictable.

A Holy Place (1990)

 

Director: Djordje Kadijevic

Screenplay: Djordje Kadijevic

Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol

Cast: Dragan Jovanovic as Pop Toma; Branka Pujic as Katarina; Aleksandar Bercek as Zupanski; Mira Banjac as Gospodarica Zupanski; Danilo Lazovic as Doros; Maja Sabljic as Lenka; Predrag Miletic as Nikita; Rados Bajic as Spira

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #221

 

Made in the former Yugoslavia, Djordje Kadijevic's trajectory as a filmmaker before this film is fascinating. Originally making films set in World War II, his tackling of the subject matter was incredibly controversial, forcing him into television production. Far from more restrictive, Kadijevic thrived, claiming under his belt a cult hit when he transitioned to horror and folklore narrative. The She-Butterfly (1973), adapting a story by Milovan Glišić, would develop a reputation over the decades as an one long horror tale for his homeland the same way horror tales, shot for the likes of the BBC, would gain a cult reputation for people who caught them off television in the United Kingdom in the seventies. With A Holy Place, he turns his attention to the legendary author Nikolai Gogol.

Gogol is someone I have complete admiration for as an author, initially for his dark humoured satire Dead Souls (1842), where a man learns he can step up the ranks of society by collecting the deceased of lord's records, which have not been officially decreed as dead, and pass them off as his own villagers. Gogol, alongside a sudden strike of creative block which tragically fell on him at the end of his career, leading a second part of Dead Souls dealing with the redemption of the novel's lead to be left an unfinished fragment, is ironically someone who is acclaimed as a realist author yet has two adaptations to cinema based on a horror tale. This is not surprising in some ways as, in his work to depict reality juggling between a satire in play form of bureaucracy to humorous documents of peasant life, adapting his land's folklore is as much an act of recreating his home land on paper. It is only with the irony that the tale in question has been adapted twice, as both one of the only Russian horror films in existence, Viy (1967), and this Serbian (former Yugoslavian) adaptation in 1990.

In both, a young priest in training has an unfortunate encounter with an elderly woman who lets him and his friends sleep at her home in the middle of nowhere, in Viy being ridden on like a horse, in A Holy Place a much more violent case equivalent to a mugging as in both the old woman is clearly a witch. Both lead to the priest struggling back only to find a young woman in their place once he is able to escape the witch's clutches. This is immediately where Kadijevic's adaptation with his own screenplay takes a new direction, as whilst most would still be shocked, the priest is already embraced with the woman on the ground, in lust with her white garter and stocking covered legs each side of him, only for her to die.

A Holy Place openly deviates from the source, in that the priest is abruptly selected to says prayers for the young daughter of a rich man who chose him, revealed to be the woman he encountered on the previous night, forced to read prayers on three nights whilst she is far removed from life and death as a supernatural threat to his life. The original Viy whilst macabre has a very quick pace, at only less than eighty minutes, and a greater sense of farce, both in its priest character both eventually being left constantly drunk and shoved around over the three nights, and that the film, both adaptation the source material fully and with the involvement of veteran stop motion animation and fantasy film maker Aleksandr Ptushko, has more practical effects and monsters appearing as the nights continue. A Holy Place is more sombre, far darker and especially more sexual.

Surprisingly more sexual as, in one part of the review that is time stamped to a specific time, the British would finally be able to see A Holy Place legally in a limited edition bonus alongside the Russian Viy, from a distributor called Eureka under their Masters of Cinema label, which is strange as Djordje Kadijevic's film has been decreed suitable for twelve year olds to see despite being an incredible explicit film in the little it has. Namely, that, once the priest appears to the home of the young woman, it is increasingly obvious there are many sinister things going on. Originally held as a figure of grace, she is significantly more cruel and sinister as the priest hears stories from others, even witnessing her work first hand when the dog trainer on the premises is now a dumb individual barely coherent as he wanders the premises. The mother gone, the relationship with her father is even darker, including once the priest learns of the erotic painting said father commissioned of his beloved daughter only he can see.

Naturalistic, as was the case of The She-Butterfly, A Holy Place is grounded in a reality but the supernatural invades. It is ironic that the film, for that one British release in 2021, was limited edition only, with the wears and tears of preservation, as whilst Viy is the adaptation that has become legendary, A Holy Place in its deviations and expansions on the Gogol tale is actually superior in other areas to those Viy succeed in. It is not horror in the sense it is meant to scare, but its macabre narrative does entice. Moments which never appear again, like the fact the father is haunted by his late wife, whose painting will vanish from the frame, have an impact as a result.

Those which linger as even more striking. The young woman Katarina as a figure becomes significantly darker as you learn more of her. I did not expect this review to lead to the following, but she literally castrates men, by stomping on their crotches repeated, which can almost be feminist were it not for the fact, trying to seduce one of the older maids, she is a sadist in general to anyone. The ending of A Holy Place is not dissimilar to Viy's, baring that it excludes the fully monstrous in favour of a matter-of-fact bleak ending, or that this does not end with two random priests abruptly undercutting the narrative with black humour. A Holy Place, if you can see it, is definitely of reward.

William, the New Judo Master (2016)

 

Directors: Omar Guzmán and Ricardo Silva

Screenplay: Omar Guzmán and Ricardo Silva

Cast: Arak Bernal, William Clauson, Edward Coward, Pako Houston and Hoze Meléndez

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Beginning with a prologue, of a body of a being split in two after defeat, one half landing into the seas and the other to the earth below, the Mexican avant-garde film William, the New Judo Master to be frank does not go the direction you would presume, but for myself also becomes disjointed. The prologue sets up an immortal being who moves forwards in their existence in a world of continual death, and we can definitely establish the Devil is here too, with his head completely covered with black fur, with horns and glowing red eyes, watching on in his beige suit at the world around him.

Among the many tangents is of Swedish-American singer William Clauson, one of the first people to introduce the song La Bamba outside of Mexico in the fifties, here playing himself an old man who lives in exile in Mexico, eventually moving to a place of care whilst his home is completely ransacked by removal people, a mysterious safe becoming their obsession as they cannot open it. Among such tangents includes an older musical impersonator of Clauson, who has hired three male sex workers to love him, who get the most prominent scenes but is one of a few. In the middle of all this are various different pieces. We see the oldest tree in existence, at 95550 years old, the voice over from the immortal being (also playing a fictionalised version of the real Clauson), almost becoming the lament of the tree itself as it contemplates 9,550 years of existence and what transpired since then. We see a ship being sunk deliberately and shots of nature among many.

A lot of the film does evoke the many films of this ilk from the 2010s, many from the film festival and especially becoming much more easier to witness on the likes of the MUBI streaming platform, the many prolific films which defy a real categorisation that are a series of vignettes and aspects, blurring documentary with other factors. Some succeed, but there are many and they can seem completely disjointed in context. The theme that William... is grasping at, for me personally, is very simplistic. Quite nihilistic, as we vary between an older man who talks of removing his ten dollar bill from a collection plate at a church when it is passed among the church congregation a second time, to the immortal being lamenting over tombstones everyone they know being dead. It does, frankly, come off as sycophantic as a lot of films and media from the time it comes from have this same mentality, losing profoundness as a result.

There are also many scenes which never seem to connect. What is the connection, with a startling sequence, of a military boat being deliberately sunk, with the cameras inside allowing us to see its first person sinking into the ocean, to the older Clauson impersonator, whose life seems mainly to drift among bars at night and has a couple of musical numbers, one breaking from the static still camera shots with a gliding camera around his performance? Or the scenes of quad and motocross bikes on roads at night, soaked in orange-yellow street lights, and even involve a quad bike dragging a casket behind itself, again another vivid image? It evokes Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), a work of seemingly separate fragments which yet connected together with profoundness in his chronology mostly based in Japanese culture of the early nineteen eighties, but the vividness of that essay film was stronger whilst here, with its scenes involving cuts to microbes under a microscope in monochrome and tangents with fishermen swatting off squid, the images fascinate, but they do not fully connect. Even Clauson's story feels like it could have been expanded further, as his narrative intertwines Mexico and Sweden alongside the United States, including the fact he opened a Mexican restaurant in Stockholm later in his life, after a career with popularity and even some film roles, and that William... briefly goes to Sweden itself to a sanatorium that has long been abandoned he went to.

The structure of the film itself was what failed me on this, with disparate pieces that, separate, would be compelling by themselves stretched out. As they are, a lot of them do feel lacking for everyone which does stand out. Some, especially the man with his three rented lovers, especially could have been more fleshed out and compelling, only reduced to fragments including a scene involving violent use of a plastic bag. Even the striking nature of the film, in capturing distinct visuals, does suffer from the sense of the film not fully connecting. The film, neither quite documentary nor fiction, does fascinating but also frustrates at the same time.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Contemplative

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

Black Night (2005)

 

a.k.a. Nuit noire

Director: Olivier Smolders

Screenplay: Olivier Smolders

Cast: Fabrice Rodriguez as Oscar; Yves-Marie Gnahoua as La femme africaine; Philippe Corbisier as Oscar enfant; Iris De Busschere as Le petite fille; Raffa Chillah as Le petite fille; Raymond Pradel a sLe taxidermiste; Marie Lecomte as Marie Neige; Luc David as Le médecin

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

“I was afraid to sleep, the night seemed so peopled with ghosts. My fear and my desire to see them caused events which I recognized very well without really understanding them.”

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Set in a world which is permanently dark, where the sun only shines for fifteen seconds a day, Black Night is firmly among the vein of surreal films which exist in their own logic. Immediately we are in the position where everything is subjective when we are introduced to protagonist Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez). In the middle of a therapy session with his doctor, examining his thoughts for himself, we see a back-story of a happy childhood with his sister which was cut short by a shape shifter who ripped her limbs off, only with the factor that it was with his own hands (and scissors) she died afterwards. The therapist dismisses all this, the dream in a subjective image set in a theatre, with two creepy identical old men loom over the top as puppet masters. Reality for Oscar in an already abstract world is distorted for him.

An entomologist, one who specialises in filming insects, his days are greatly subverted when a woman (Yves-Marie Gnahoua) is found one day in his bed, pregnant and ill, his perspective of reality drastically under suspicion in what happens. Whilst shot in digital, Olivier Smolders' film is steeped in an atmosphere that is distinct, feeling at times likes the work of an installation filmmaker. His world even in the digital camera lens (and a CGI moon) is approaching chiaroscuro in its use of darkness and shadow. Set in a time in the past, it certainly looks of an old world, befitting its content. Animals will play a part, but especially with the real insects interspersed throughout. Some moments, like one pinned on a board, will upset but you get to the many, from stag beetles to insects, which in intercutting to will build the strange mood of the film with vibrancy. Magnificent creatures, they themselves are not creepy for me at all, though there are scenes of actors with them crawling on them, but their prescience are living objects alien to reality, such as those whose look like living dried leaves among examples, creatures a sense of they are the occupants of a dream the viewer has watching this film that actually from the reality of nature.

One aspect which does need to be addressed, as it is far more complicated, is that heavily layered aesthetic of African culture which could boarder on pure exoticism, including that a huge part of the film being that the woman in Oscar's bed is African, part of a narrative turn where his true childhood is exposed by a film he is provided, not like the one he fetishises in a shrine to his sister. Just a decade later to the 2000s the use of other cultures became more of an issue and Black Night's use of an aesthetic of an imaginary Africa could likely have become a problematic appropriate in another film. One immediate thing of note however is that Olivier Smolders was born in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, a city and country that would no longer exist only a few years after his birth, and are now known as Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively. Only declaring independence in 1960, this becomes a more troubling subject in how, under King Leopold II, the Belgium colonisation of the Congo is steeped in a horrifying and bloody history, but at the same time I do not suspect Smolders came to this film's content ignorant of any of this, or that even merely evoking this past is not without meaning in not even hiding its existence.

In fact, learning this detail adds an even ominous edge to the film, one that I highly suspect is intended when, for Oscar's place of work at a Natural History Museum, Smolders is clearly filming in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Erected by Leopard II, and naturally as much a source of controversy in the decades that past as his statues erected of him from after his 1909 death, it is naturally an institution stepped in a moral crisis in that it was originally a museum to colonialism, which it has had to deal with in its own renovations over the dexades. Whilst there is a danger in Olivier Smolders having his film play out with a lens of an imagined Africa as a European film, or that he never addresses the violent colonial past, this context adds a great deal especially as the film's dreamlike narrative disrupts itself. A huge plot point reveals the woman in his bed as his sister, evoked from his father's past in the African continent, and for all the potential issues of its fetishism, the film's nightmarish qualities push for Oscar being a man with layers to him. None so much as an unhealthy fascination with his sister, specifically a perceived image he had of a sister beforehand, a white girl, who even haunts his real sister briefly and may have likely shot her in the head in one scene.

Black Night pushes further into the surreal when, faced with the body of his sister, Oscar decides to create a human cocoon. This does lead to another moment depending on how one interprets the narrative where Black Night could be problematic - as the black sister turns into a white woman leaving the cocoon - but even how this moves on in itself is significantly more complicated. The other actress, with striking eyes and visibly cast both for her willingness to do nudity and to look completely alien even to this world, plays a figure who is both is Oscar's fantasy but also meant to be his sister, the perverseness of the narrative turn address in one casting choice. His obsession with his sister is inherently held as a fixation, one where the versions (his idealised child one, the real one and this cocoon one) blur at one point.

Said cocoon sister also has a stinger to impale men, so Black Night is as much stoking in horror as much as its own form, particularly as among its other aesthetic aspects including is taxidermy, one of Oscar's colleagues in his own world of preserving animals and letting this woman see his mural of preserved frogs set to drinking absence in a bar which is, with real ones, as macabre as that suggests. The fact that Oscar tries to turn his real sister into his idealised one is itself political as it is psycho dramatic - if you were to consider that even evoking Belgium's colonial past is itself a metaphor for the European subconscious with its own past, something Belgium has still had to struggle with and is something many countries have had to, be it after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 or times of questioning the representation of that past, Oscar rejecting his own life is problematic with the act in a literal sense, only for it to be impossible to erase the real life. That this is also psychodramatic, that his psychosis and the obsession with the idealised sister are there, complicates things. That his new cocoon sister, baring a leopard print coat, more of a cloak of fur, is eroticised and naked, with her striking red hair, adds a further layer of complexity in this character's mind, a representation or a character or both.

Certainly, even if the themes this film have become more sensitive to the Belgian based director's country of living, which is had to still deal with and for some may have not even properly addressed, the context means that this film cannot be dismissed and now gains new complications in its favour to mean something. Black Night is hallucinatory and meant to keep one as a viewer off guard, with a world where Oscar is haunted. A strange man is haunting a man in a leopard pelt in the park, a white man who is a child killer, the same one evoked in Oscar's idealised childhood who mutilated his sister, and when the sun comes out for longer and purges the world in light, not only does the museum come in disarray due to film no longer being possible to shot, least to one of his colleagues, wild animals suddenly roam the streets. Real ones, be it a zebra in a back alley, a leopard and even an elephant. The ending becomes entirely in Oscar's mind as reality, and even when it comes to one key aspect I have wrangled with, the director himself has described in an interview that this past he refers to "in spite of historians’ efforts, stems from a kind of fantasy-ridden delirium sometimes actually quite far removed from the real Belgian Congo"¹, he himself aware of the fantasy that this world evokes, including an awareness of its fiction. The tensions of the film, entirely in dream logic, are found everywhere, even in a scene of a schoolgirl, visiting a museum and played by an actress, randomly coming into Oscar's room and seducing him, only for it to merely scratch him and for her to disappear. A sense of this film having an unreality that forces the viewer out of their comfort, even in the mid-2000s digital sheen, is completely successful, and even if there are questions to still ask in terms of the subjects Black Night evokes in its images, it is a compelling film that will unpack more layers and interpretations when seen over and over.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Mindbender/Ominous

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

 

======

1) The full interview can be read HERE.

Ninja Dragon (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit and Godfrey Ho

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon; Paulo Tocha as Paul; Pierre Tremblay as Pierre; Chung Tien Shih; Jean Tang; Tien Miao; Hsieh Wang

Canon Fodder

 

Benjamin-chan, that sort of thing went out with the ark.

Whilst Ninja Terminator is a more infamous film, and has the more compellingly weird content, there was a time I liked Ninja Dragon more even if surprisingly drier in comparison, owned back in the days when not only these films were second DVDs which got their own martial arts section in second hand stores, but that two sided DVDs were commonplace. The reason, to immediately get to the point, is that when Godfrey Ho and his producer at a time Joseph Lai started buying up pre-existing and even unfinished Asian films, and cutting them together with newly filmed footage for the eighties ninja craze,  Ninja Dragon's source material would have been fascinating to see as it was originally.

They used some odd choices, not just martial arts films but a variety of genres for stranger results, but Hei juan tao (1982), the source film, would be interesting for me to see as it was intended. Immediately, as a Taiwanese production, this is from the final years of the Taiwanese black cinema movement, genre films from the country which could vary between films with legitimate political themes and/or pure exploitation, Hei juan tao showing this with the nude scenes it has. In fact, with the knowledge of the movement, and seeing the down-to-earth film here being used, the ninja footage does feel exemplary in its bright and gaudy nature. It does even add charm due to this odd juxtaposition of tones now as a result, from seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where ninja master where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with

In fact, the ninja footage really does feel exemplary adding to the charm of seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with gang leader Paul (Paulo Tocha) attempting to take over in power and wealth among their peers, cutting to the original source film. The leader of a gang called the Black Tigers, Ronald, is murdered on Paul's orders by his group and his henchman Mr. Fox, with his oldest daughter Phoenix taking over with a figure called Dragon the aloft man at her side. With the other group attempting to bump them off, from trying to kill Dragon with his door booby trapped with a rifle or kidnapping Phoenix's younger sister Fanny, Dragon will have to help from moles and turncoats in their own group too wishing to help Mr. Fox and Paul. As with all Ho ninja films, the two worlds are disconnected, even if they cut to close ups to Harrison's face and splice them in to footage talking to the main actor of the original film, or have Paulo Tocha spliced in shooting the heads off flowers for target practice with his own minions.

Ninja Dragon is a drier viewing experience but it has its charm, even in something that is inherently part of these films in their contraction, such as the dubbing and writing of new dialogue to make this all have "sense", characters in these films with quasi-English accents from the then-British commonwealth Hong Kong having their own weird charm, and English language names and a tendency for calling people "bastards" to go along with this. The one major difference here with this film is that Hei juan tao was not even a martial arts picture, instead a crime narrative where conflicts were resolved with guns and shooting people, meaning that the ninjas involved and all being (mostly) Western white men is surreal to consider as a juxtaposition. In fact this film even takes this aspect of these films, which were churned out by Lai and Ho at the time each year, to an added subjective tone in that the Ninja Masters live in their own heightened world of politics and high tier intrigue, only pushing pawns outside their own worlds with phone calls.

Enough is to be found in the source material itself that does have some unintentional humour, such as the fact (when it happens twice) that people will bash their own skulls in on rock (or gravestones) to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner, but this is one of the most straightforward and sombre narratives to latch ninjas upon. It does change how to view the film as, even with some of its broader moments, it is much more grounded then some of the stranger films. It even has more subplots and narrative complexity then others, which adds a great deal, such as Paul's gang having a mole kindly helping the Black Tigers or the figure of Benny, at first the comedic foil trying to woo Phoenix, even in something misguided as hiring goons to pretend to threaten her for a fake rescue, only to become a creepy whose involvement in the narrative adds an unexpected turn. That this is a Taiwanese film, from a crop of genre films that were made before the Taiwan government cracked down on them and the Taiwanese New Wave of art films came to be, now adds a greater weight as, for all the ones which were just pulp, this has their grounded and gritty tone even in its action, the matter-of-factness of the confrontations and ploys by the gangs standing out now for me.

Even the great music choices "borrowed" from other sources are deep cuts, as the main theme for this film, at least the ninja training sequences with Richard Harrison, is from the anime film called The Dagger of Kamui (1985), a sadly obscure theatrical anime by the veteran director Rintaro which was befittingly a period ninja epic.  This film Ninja Dragon, surprisingly, even has an unexpected twist which shows the source film used was a bit more creative, a wedding reception leading to a tragedy and a bleak ending even if Ho includes a ninja battle to leave the film patrons happy. That even that ninja fight has its own charm, set among urban Hong Kong and still having talented martial artists in the ridiculous ninja costumes fight, shows that this is one of the times Ho's weird logic with Joseph Lai to make these films, whilst still an awkward creation, almost makes sense when it works as here. This is definitely a film you visit later into your obsession with Godfrey Ho, as you do not get as much as the absurd lunacy that made these cut-and-paste ninja films notorious. It was one of the first I ever saw, and did leave a good impression, but I will admit that, if you were to even to attempt to argue for these films, this was one of the many he and Joseph Lai churned out should be one of the later ones to visit. It is, however, one of the ones which I can argue is legitimately entertaining though too, and I am only arguing for seeing later as, whilst more accessible, you need to understand the weird world of these films by jumping on a Ninja Terminator, then seeing how these films could have almost seemed a sane concept when one like this actually works.

The Rat Savior (1976)

 

a.k.a. Izbavitelj

Director: Krsto Papic

Screenplay: Ivo Bresan, Krsto Papic and Zoran Tadic

Based on a novel by Alexander Grin

Cast: Ivica Vidovic as Ivan Gajski; Mirjana Majurec as Sonja Boskovic; Relja Basic as Gradonacelnik; Fabijan Sovagovic as Profesor Martin Boskovic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #16

 

Wishing to uncover horror and fantastique cinema from all around the world, I turn my eyes to this Croatian production, made when Croatia was part of the former Yugoslavia. The film was shot in the future Croatia's capital Zagreb, which adds a considerable production value to the film once I talk of it, and helmed by the prolific Krsto Papic, a significant figure in terms of Croatian cinema among former Yugoslavian filmmakers. Notably, in terms of the international connections, this is actually an adaptation of a novel by Alexander Grin, a Russian novelist whose work juggled both the fantastic but many tropes and archetypes of pulp narratives, from sailors to criminal, in romantic settings. I have, unexpectedly encountered him before, emphasising his reach in Eastern European culture as his novel Jessie and Morgiana (1929) was adapted into the magnificent Czechoslovak film Morgiana (1972).

The Rat Savior, whilst his work did not explicitly tackle the environment he lived in, definitely evokes that Grin was a member of the Socialist revolutionary party who was arrested many times, as the backdrop to this Croatian set production imagines a world on the brink of economic collapse. A struggling writer named Ivan Gajski (Ivica Vidovic) is reduced, when kicked out of his rented apartment, to selling his own books out the street. Luck has it, encountering the former owner of a store now having to be a park warden for a safe pay check, finds him and shows kindness to his acquaintance when, rather than letting Ivan sleep in the park, he sneaks him into an abandoned bank to sleep in for a couple of days. To his surprise that night there, Ivan discovers a bizarre orgy in one of the halls, with a mass of people dining, having literally orgies and surrounding a strange "savoir" lead by hooded figures who conspire to take over the city, even eliminating those in their way.

This said group are literally rat-people, rats that have disguised themselves as human beings and wish to take over. Here I do have to spin and debate a potentially controversial interpretation of the material as, whilst it is never explicitly suggested in the film, some people may draw from it this side. Obviously there is a theme of corruption, an insidious form overtaking the world be it is fascism or another form, which even for a writer known more for his romance and adventurous stories may have been one time he referred to his political concerns. The issue, not to accuse Grin in the slightest, is that with rats a common metaphor in this, you could easily view the film's narrative as anti-Semitic. This is as much unfortunately due to the use of rats as a metaphor for Jewish people, more so as this film happens to have this secret cabal operating out of a bank. Neither will I accuse the 1976 itself of an insidious metaphor, especially as the film's lore is significantly more complicated than merely of rat-people hiding among human beings.

They are literally becoming doppelgangers of real people, able to steal their form seemingly as rodents biting the victims. The result is a non-science fiction interpretation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), first made as a film by Don Siegel, and always a film (before you consider its various adaptations) as either a metaphor for communism's evil influence or even a damnation of fifties conformity. We can read so many metaphors in horror and fantasy, what the mood was of the time or what ideas still lingered in the consciousness, that even if controversial to bring up, there is a potential danger that a viewer may come to this debating whether old, problematic ideals of anti- Semitism may have slipped in even if accidentally. It could merely be that using the metaphor of the rat is such a loaded concept, due to the type of metaphors this film uses having unfortunately been used by other more insidious sources. Barring this, I can affirm this will be a very glowing review for The Rat Savior, but it does need to be considered at least once.

Entirely because, as an idiosyncratic film made from a culture whose cinema has sadly been neglected, The Rat Savior was a compelling little piece and also as much able to stand on its own two feet with virtues. Not quite horror, it is still gruesome at points including when the rat-people torment victims by putting them in a cage to be bitten by the rodent kin.  It is likely a period film due to how timeless it is, but even that adds a mysterious energy to the production. Even if this is a very conventional narrative in structure, it oozes its own personality. The central location, of Zagreb, is an ageless world from a century before, one with the help of some distinct production design and even some fog machines having its own menace as the film progresses. Papic and the film crew also come to this with a lot of clear talent, a film which whilst a genre film is filmed with an elegance of a production wishing to bask in the world it is creating. A sense of being caught off-guard is immediately to be found in the open credits - of deeply surreal and vivid paintings, of rat people biting limbs off and openly surrealistic iconography including people spawning of out trees and giant eyes, welcomes us to the story as something unconventional as does a jazz soundtrack. It is of the time - and there is even jazz flute for the Ron Burgundy fans - but it is a very distinct and unique soundtrack to score this film, especially as it is good.

Even if the makeup design for the rat-people, as Ivan learns of the conspiracy and helps create a rat poison which exposes them, is pretty obvious, what with fake teeth and hair on actors, this is still a very ominous narrative especially as the paranoia of learning who is a doppelganger and who is not comes into play. With the sense of even those in higher power like among the police are part of the rat-people, the film does not take the easy way out with a twist to the ending that is a tragedy and is helped but it never being a film, at eighty minutes, which overstretches the narrative further then it needs to. Some of the film defiantly has streaks of pure genre - including a romantic subplot for Ivan, the film does brazenly crowbar in some female nudity unexpectedly - but it also has an elegance to fit its dread. It is not surprising, when held in high regard the film's homeland, that whilst (sadly) the film is obscurer further west in the globe, Krsto Papic himself readapted the film as Infection (2003). Whether that was ever a success as a film is for another day, but it is telling the investment, and the clear sense of accomplishment, that Papic even decided to remake one of his own films for a new world and era.

Ninja Terminator (1985)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit, Godfrey Ho and Warren See

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Harry; Jang-Lee Hwang as Tiger; Jack Lam as Jaguar Wong

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Yes, that's my ninja star.

I once binged on Godfrey Ho like a mad man once, acquiring a large quantity of his films on second hand DVD, even the "straight" martial arts films his name was put onto let alone the films he was notorious for. A Hong Kong born director, those notorious films, including Ninja Terminator, were his "cut-and-paste" ninja films. They are not the only part of his filmography - he directed martial arts films and even worked with Cynthia Rothrock - but they are his most infamous work with Ninja Terminator one of the most well known. When I first reviewed this film on a blog - back in January 1^st 2012 - the film had a 4.4 rating on the Internet Movie Database, and as I blog this time the score has climbed to 4.6 as of the 12th March 2021. Ho's legacy is marked with this notoriety, and internet cult status, for said films.

Ho's career with the ninja films are tied to producer Joseph Lai, and his video production company called IFD, these films now are a cultural artefact which are fascinating to look back onto, especially when they managed to be successful with said films . Ninjas became popular, with the Israeli cousins and film moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus began a string of films on ninjas like Enter the Ninja (1981), and a fictionalised form of the Japanese mercenary came to be of note. Lai and Ho acquired martial arts films, even unfinished ones, from around Asian and spliced in new footage with Western actors like Richard Harrison (even non-actors) in costume store ninja costumes and churned them out. Like its own perplexing web of narrative, the ninja films due to how many were made, where Richard Harrison only shot footage for a few only to end up in far more, and that they have reoccurring themes have a perverse Borgian lunacy to them if anyone was mad enough to watch them all.

In this one, three ninjas (including Richard Harrison) steal from their ‘Ninja Empire’ the pieces of the Golden Ninja Warrior, an artefact that can turn your body and arms into living shields able to deflect even sword blades, crafted from a prop which looks like a nifty gift store present. Yes, there is a weakness to this artefact I am not surprised is never brought up in the film, that one’s legs could still be lopped off from under you regardless by a sword, but such a powerful McGuffin kickstarts the ball rolling. The Ninja Empire is on the hunt for the individuals responsible for its theft and one of the three ninja thieves is killed, leaving Harrison’s Ninja Master Harry fighting for good, while his conspirator within the two years that have past is leading a crime syndicate and wants to claim the remaining pieces. From here, the new footage is spliced with a film acquired to cut into this one, through scenes of characters calling others from an entirely different source by phone, including Harry with his infamous Garfield telephone which closes its eyes when the receiver is put down.

Through his second in command - who dresses in a white suit and a lovely blonde curled wig - and his own set of minions, the syndicate goes after the surviving sister of the murdered ninja to claim her piece of the Golden Ninja Warrior. To protect her, Harry sends in his own man Jaguar Wong (Jack Lam), a suave and skilled fighter who intends to help her and generally undermine the actions of the syndicate with his fist. It is fascinating to watch Ho and Lai's work nowadays again as experiments in trying to create new material with mostly old work, an experiment which even becomes nearly meta as, in another infamous aspect, the Ninja Empire send toy robots to give characters warnings, including video tapes which use footage from pre-existing films shown on television screens. Godfrey Ho, alongside his producer Joseph Lai, is infamous for this run of ninja films which take pre-existing films and re-edit them, intercutting new scenes of ninja combat and Richard Harrison, to weave together  new narratives using the English dubbing script and some blatant editing techniques. It was done mainly to capitalise on the bludgeoning obsession with ninjas in American culture in the 1980s, so you can view this as a questionable practice as well as ramshackle to the extreme. Nowadays however, this cinema is now an artefact of an old era, as even the time when these films managed to get on DVD, and shipped in the United States and Britain, is now the past alone in the eighties when they were first commissioned.

Time now allows you to learn the film spliced in is Uninvited Guest (1984), a South Korean production, and that the film gets away with a lot of borrow music, not least a Japanese band Logic System. Even if something I am amazed never got them into trouble, especially when they were pinching from Pink Floyd too for this film, the soundtracks in hindsight were always awesome from these films when they worked. How these films have not occurred the wrath of the original musicians, especially since they have been released on DVD unlike rip-off films that have borrowed music too, I have no idea. No one care, no one knows about their existence, or Roger Waters really adored cut-and-paste ninja films. We will never know.

They are accidently, if blundering through the experiments, demonstrations of the ‘Montage of Attractions’ theory that Sergei E. Eisenstein, the legendary director of Battleship Potemkin (1925), had developed. Eisenstein believed that by juxtaposing two single images together in a specific way would have a certain effect on the viewer, and that it could be used in different ways to have significant power to them. This is seen at it best with Lev Kuleshov’s experiment known as the Kuleshov Effect, where the same image of Tsarist actor Ivan Mosjoukine was spliced together alternately with an image of a plate of soup, a person in a coffin, and a young girl playing, each version having a drastic change in effect on the viewer in each combination. By utter accident, in an attempt by Ho and Joseph Lai to take unfinished and obscure films from South Korea, Taiwan etc. they ended up practicing the same methods Soviet filmmakers perfected to make numerous films over the eighties and early nineties even if for financial reasons. It does not completely work, as much because the pleasures fans of these films have is also the seams being visible, but the illusion is a curious experiment, especially as they did not just use martial arts films, but at least one softcore soap opera set in the fashion industry as well that was remade into Ninja The Protector (1986).

Admittedly, Ninja Terminator does have one huge flaw, even in context of this series of films, that the source film is not as energetic as it could have been. Clearly a film focused more on a conventional crime genre, where a villainous minion has to cut off his finger or that this film has to weave in a drug deal Jaguar Wong hijacks, the ninja material for the most part of the more memorable content for good reason. There is so absurdity, like a female lead being threatened with a ticking clock out of a cartoon, or a final fight with the blonde wigged villain on the beach, where sand proves a weapon in immobilising a person, but this is one of the films Lai and Ho used which is less distinct than the ninja footage. With a plot that, because of two different sets of footage being spliced together, doesn’t really make sense, the film ends up being an abstracted version of these sorts of c-level movies. The tiers of each side face other but do not interact with members of their own side in other tiers, outside the moments when they are connected together by editing of course, and fights break out about almost every five minutes. Nothing is seen as ill-advised production decisions either. No one raised an issue about toy motorised robots being the messengers of death for the Ninja Empire, walking into rooms under the veil of ominous smoke or getting stuck on the raised doorway, but its charming and hilarious to see especially when the robots boom with the voices foreboding doom on those who trespassed against them.

Everything that transpires in the film either undermines conventions of plotting, such as having a henchman of the villains get his own prolonged sex scene, or all the tangents of the life of Master Ninja Harry and his wife being witnessed, such as her trying to cook crabs or her career in the fashion industry, making up for the fact most viewers would find this a nightmare to sit through. Any moment it seems to slog through the minutes is undermined by the fact that something interesting is going to happen, as much now because the world here of Hong Kong is now a lost one. Ho would retire from cinema in the late nineties, and whilst not really connected to the fact Hong Kong would go back to China after 1997, there is something more profound now in seeing the city in this film, even if there is one scene where a post card or an image was clearly used to establish locations.

Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai, while they could be taken to task for their idea of generating as many films they could sell from existing materials, at least, when their creations succeeded, made movies that are entertaining, and used pre-existing materials that had something inherently watchable about them for any viewer even if they were trash. Even the ninja sequences, with stunt actors clearly doing the fighting in the cheap ninja suits for the likes of Richard Harrison, are competent and have skilled performers involved so that, despite most ninja fights in Ho’s films consisting of flips and repeated sword clash sounds, they have something of worth even over some martial arts films made out of Asia, where non-martial artists are hired and have to be covered over in editing.

The real disappointment, if any, is not the final product, as these films were an acquired taste even when they developed an ironic enjoyment or even had legitimate fans. The issue is that, particularly with Ninja Terminator, it does not have the same impact as for my younger self that it once had. It does feel like a Frankenstein stitch job, and suffers from a result, able to see the original source film awkwardly fit the new frame. It is neither particularly abstract either, but I feel as much of this is from the choice of source film as I suspect, one day, one of these cut-and-paste ninja films I will reintroduce myself to or learn of will be legitimately weird to see. Instead, this one was even quaint to see, something charming in its wonky nature even in terms of the English dubbing, where Asian characters all have English names like Victor, all if most rarely threatening, and a comical and excessive use of swearing used. With this film, generic tropes are cut to shred like an unfortunate watermelon Richard Harrison practices on with his katana and is repeated again later in the film to compensate for the lack of a second training montage, and in terms of a climax, one involving the trademark of these films of coloured smoke bombs and back flips between three ninjas definitely makes up for the failings, even if I am fully aware of this film's many setbacks.

Abstract Spectrum: Erratic/Weird

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

Southland Tales (2006)

 

Director: Richard Kelly

Screenplay: Richard Kelly

Cast: Dwayne Johnson as Boxer Santaros; Seann William Scott as Private Roland Taverner / Officer Ronald Taverner; Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now; Mandy Moore as Madeline Frost Santaros; Justin Timberlake as Private Pilot Abilene; Miranda Richardson as Nana Mae Frost; Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen; Bai Ling as Serpentine; Nora Dunn as Cyndi Pinziki; John Larroquette as Vaughn Smallhouse; Kevin Smith as Simon Theory

An Abstract List Candidate

 

We're a bisexual nation in denial....

As I consider it, every decade should have a notorious film like Southland Tales. They may not have to be a great film, or even in the science fiction genre, but they should be an attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the era including the pop culture of the moment. There can be more than one per era, but Southland Tales definitely feels for better or for worse a nice exclamation of the 2000s.

It is worth bringing up another example for this idea of mine, a perfect example for capturing the nineties' zeitgeist being Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), which juggle science fiction material (recorded memories alongside their voyeuristic nature) alongside pre-Millennium anxiety and an explicit parallel to the Rodney King riots of Los Angeles. Southland Tales, surprisingly, is also set in Los Angeles, also is mixing real life politics with science fiction, but is also at times intentionally funny. Like Bigelow's production, which hurt her career, Southland Tales became an albatross for Richard Kelly, the Donnie Darko (2001) director following up his cult hit with this, knee deep in the George Dubya Bush presidency of the Patriot Act and conflict in the Middle East, hovering up the music and pop culture stars from the era in a film which was not well greeted originally.

Talking about Southland Tales means, as well as admitting how weird it is, about addressing its notoriety. Richard Kelly's career, baring The Box (2009), has never really gotten going and Southland Tales was an insanely ambitious project, a six chapter tale with the first three graphic novels, followed by a two and a half hour epic starring a gamut of figures that exist between 2000s pop music and the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment company. Said film, set in a time after a nuke is set off in Texas, leading to mass surveillance and a strange conspiracy involving an amnesiac action star Boxer Santos (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and went as well as a zeppelin made of lead.

I openly admit that I hated the film when I first saw it, and even now, I will admit that until you embrace the film, it can be a perplexing mass of tangents, something I have grown to love now that has be passed. Set over three days, Southland Tales moves towards the end of the world, as described by Private Pilot Abilene who is played by Justin Timberlake, a physically scarred war veteran who mans a gun turret by the beach and deals in illegal liquid karma, part of a new energy source in this world where World War III took place and targeted oil rich companies in the Middle East, leading to an energy source based on ocean waves which has a side result of a new narcotic. With mind to the Cannes Cut and the Theatrical Cut being now able to be both seen, the later with a lot of exposition brought in to make sense of the world and the Cannes Cut not being as difficult to grasp, if missing key pieces, a lot of the issue with Southland Tales is less the film being difficult but that it throws so much onto the viewer. A television series, in a madder alternative world, would have had a time to bring in all this material too and likely have been cancelled after one season, as Kelly had the luck to be able to make this film in the first place but was burnt by this type of storytelling being an acquired taste for many.

Beyond this, many pieces are shown to us and rummaged about in a mass. Santos, married to the daughter of a Republican politician in the midst of a campaign trail, wandered out of the desert with no knowledge of he is, with a porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) his new girlfriend and co-author of a pulpy movie script with him that accidentally foretells the end of the world. This apocalypse involves two Sean William Scotts, that Liquid Karma's creator Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), and his cabal of assistants including Bai Ling and Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein, are sending monkeys through dimensional rips and are aware their sea powered energy is starting to slow down the Earth's rotations, and that pimps do not commit suicide. Add to this a neo-Marxist movement to try to overthrow the Republicans, including an underground severed thumb trade, and a plan to blackmail people through a staged racist cop shooting with an avant-garde poetry duo in comically big prosthetic noses, and this film does skirt a line between relevance even into the modern day and being ridiculous.

And Southland Tales is as mad as a box of frogs, but unlike other scattershot projects, this feels too perfectly focused to have been merely indulgent. For everything that feels like Richard Kelly's project was escaping out from under him, like the decision to have three graphic novels begin the tale, there are also intentional moments of real pathos and are legitimately hilarious, too well thought-out to have been stupid or bad creative decisions. Also of significance is how even the cast there is, whether on purpose or not, feels itself a deliberate mirror of the era. Pointedly, this reflects the era post 9/11, starting in a prologue (shown as a home video shot by two young boys) of a nuke being deliberately dropped on Abilene, Texas. This escalates to an extreme version of mass surveillance, which allows it always in case of possible terrorist activities, and where someone even has to monitor the cameras set up in the toilets at LAX airport as part of their job. Whilst pockets of seriousness are here, Richard Kelly finds the impending end of the world as a bizarre carnival.

In the centre of this is Dwayne Johnson who, sadly due to the failure of this film, was cautioned away from these types of projects. This is a shame as, if you had seen any of his work as a professional wrestler, Johnson was a bolt of pure energy where he finally showed his persona and he is exceptional here. His wrestling work if you were to look back on it sadly has dated in places, due to a lot of it being around a hero or villain who used bullying and homophobic/transphobic content in his speech, but Johnson also changed considerably when he became the film star, practically a different human being over the 2000s on who took his best virtues, his ability to cut speeches with energy and his body language from professional wrestling, and bring it to a new career. I remember watching in wrestling of him as a kid (and returning to it) which shows he was capable of being either the charismatic hero or the obnoxious heel. The time period I grew up with him was even when his dalliances with Hollywood would eventually take him away in the early 2000s, even incorporating it into an obnoxious arsehole that looked down on wrestling despite only having been in The Scorpion King (2002) as a lead. This is Johnson before he had fully become a Hollywood star and at that time, which is a fascinating sight to see, just after his pro wrestling career as a full time job and just before a full film career. Playing a nervous and clueless figure trying to rationalise the madness around him, he is good. Just in his nervous hand gestures, he is transferring his craft from one medium to another.

The cast in general flirts with other areas of entertainment, even in a limited time, and all of them stand out. Even minor roles being taken by the likes of Christopher Lambert, as an illegal arms dealer working out of an ice cream truck, or Jon Lovitz stealing a scene as a psychotic cop stand out. Seann William Scott, who would still have been seen as Stifler from the American Pie films, is probably the person who has the least scenes but manages to gain sympathy as a huge part of the film, playing literally two people, whilst Justin Timberlake gets arguably the best scene, a drug induced musical number where he lip synchs to The Killer's All These Things I've Done, a song whose vague lyrics go gain weight in this context. The only person who feels they have to stretch is Sarah Michelle Gellar. I have come to appreciate her role as Krysta Now, but the character itself could have actually been better if an alternative casting choice and/or a different characterisation had transpired. I can suspend disbelief of an alternative world where Krysta Now has a talk show, where she and other porn stars debate topics like teen horniness with full explicit swearing. Even the fact Christine Now has her own single is not that insane - an iconic disco song More, More, More is by real life adult star Andrea True - but probably I can see needed another television star who had a bit more salt to her personality take the character further. An actual adult film star from the era would have added to the weight of the character, and to the idea of Kelly bringing in a variety of pop cultural figures of the 2000s.  The touch of being a stereotypical simpleton, whilst leading to so much that is funny, does also feel like Richard Kelly's one mistake in juggling the serious and the comedic, which does not really equate with many female adult stars if you find interviews with them.  

Regardless, what makes Southland Tales what it is, a huge factor to how it likely became as decisive as it did but there were defenders even at that original release, was that it plays a merry farce of the material. It is very political, but the left wing characters are punch down to as being pathetic, ridiculous or petty as the conservatives are seen as tyrants, conspirators or just evil rich white people. Kelly can have a major scene, where the armoured police force raids the Marxist Anarchist group trying to overthrow the political system, only to both cast an actor with dwarfism as a SWAT member for a clear height contrast, but never ridiculed, but also having filmmaker Eli Roth have a cameo being shot dead on a toilet. As a result, there are moments of real sincerity, but also a fake advert for a liquid powered car literally fucking its competition through the tailpipe, which the characters in film even find bizarre.

Does this even work? That is difficult for me to say now as I have lived with the film so long it has won me over. Even a criticism early on of Sarah Michelle Gellar's character does not mean I do not love the film exactly as it is, more so as the theatrical version against the notorious Cannes premiere version is good enough as it is, with more initial exposition to set the world up and less odd tangents about Dungeons & Dragons which never plays out in the main narrative. If it is intentional how complicated the film's plot is, Kelly envisions the period he made the film as one of pure weirdness, as apt as scoring the film to music of the time such as the Black Rebel Motorcyclists or Muse, the NME magazine darlings of the era,  or having Moby compose the soundtrack. When it works, I find Southland Tales does succeed especially if you consider parts of it as comedy, to which it can be hilarious and plays as melodrama at times.

Johnson is great as mentioned, making his reaction stick to more mainstream roles sad, but you have many interesting roles. One, for example, is Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen who gets to relish the lines and delivery before you also have to include Bai Ling, a very unconventional cult actress, adding her idiosyncratic acting or filmmaker Kevin Smith in so much prosthetic makeup to the point I have not realised all this time he was the character he was until this review. And there are many moments that stand out. Some are clearly indebted to others - in lieu to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), he hired singer Rebekah Del Rio to perform a rousing version of the Star Bangle Banner with a string quarter that would make anyone patriotic - but also a lot of sincerity.

Considering its opening, a tragedy, there is by the end of Southland Tales a melancholy. It is an insane film at times, juggling tones that many would find off putting, such as a woman demanding to give The Rock a blowjob at a crowded beach with a firearm at hand, but does not lose the fact, as Strange Days did, that its mania gives way to a lot of despair. As Kathryn Bigelow's also possessed in its darkness and chaotic finale, both films conclude around a giant party around the whole of Los Angeles with violence breaking out, coming off with exhilaration but loss. Strange Days in fact ended in hope, whilst in Southland Tales has the world end not with a bang, but with a pratfall, an ATM machine being dragged to Mexico, a floating ice cream truck, and a mirror image forgiving a man for his failures so he can find solace. Kelly sadly was hit hard by the film's notoriety, and did not make a film ever in the rest of the 2000s and 2010s, only produce or write a couple. It is a shame as, as is mostly the case, these notorious failures are usually compelling. Southland Tales for me is also brilliant.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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