Gushing Prayer (1971)

 

a.k.a. Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute

Director: Masao Adachi (with Haruhiko Arai)

Screenplay: Masao Adachi

Cast: Aki Sasaki as Yasuko; Hiroshi Saitô as Kôichi; Makiko Kim as Yôko; Yûji Aoki as Bill; Shigenori Noda as Arai

An Abstract Candidate

 

The best way to describe Gushing Prayer would be to attempt to explain the film to someone who isn't a cineaste, with a lot of explanation having to be made first. First, you have to explain that, whilst an erotic film usually evokes softcore titillation or in some cases a drama, one exception to that rule was the Japanese "pink" movement where, for every film which was made up into the current day entirely for the sake of titillation, there were exceptions. Especially in the late sixties and seventies, as long as you kept under the low budgets and still had sex, you could make a film about any subject and structure. Adding to this tale would be to talk of Masao Adachi, a screenwriter and filmmaker who, working within the pinku genre with inherently political and unconventional structure, would eventually stop making films just at the time Gushing Prayer was created, joining the communist militant group the Japanese Red Army, and reside in Lebanon for decades until being arrested for passport violations in the 2000s. That this tale ends with Adachi being released from jail, making another film in 2007 (Prisoner / Terrorist) and working onwards, really emphasises both the idiosyncratic context to the film beyond sex and that Gushing Prayer itself is going to be as unconventional.

With George Bataille quoted before coitus and echoes added to voices in certain scenes to add a disconnected mood, this is pinku but with very different aims. Do not come to Gushing Prayer for sex but late sixties into the seventies political avant-garde or you will be sorely disappointed. This comes to sex as a subject for its characters to have to grapple with, four lost teenagers (two boys and two girls) trying to "beat sex", trying to escape their bodies and their sexualities to become something more when the lead among them, fifteen year old schoolgirl Yasuko (Aki Sasaki) has had sex beforehand with her middle age teacher and is expecting child. What this leads to is the quartet trying to overcome sensuality, effectively guilting Yasuko into being a paid prostitute for feeling something with her teacher.

With tanks on parade in the street, the film feels of a tense political time in Japan, the film the penultimate one in the filmmaker's career in his first arch, before The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), an overtly political piece before his complete separation from the art form for decades. Most porn films, to be blunt, do not have echoing voiceovers on a street taking of being unable to beat sex, and from its female voiceover of various ways an 18-19 year old girl committed suicide to the acoustic guitar score, Gushing Prayer does contrast the genre it is in, even in mind to said genre for the films meant to be erotic having a history of unpredictable and inventive productions. Even its habit, as a monochrome film, to switch to colour is used in provocative ways even if the film has a lot of nudity and sex emphasised by it too. When a son shows his friends his mother having sex in the bedroom to ask whether it is real, even if it is evoking titillation in the sharp turn to warm (reddish) colour, it does provoke a great deal in the context this is happening within when it's a character, quite an unlikable figure but one clearly trapped in a youthful despair, to show his mother in front of his friends having sex and all the baggage that involves. That the film is as well about teenagers rather than adults, despite a history as well in Western cinema of adults playing teenage character who are seen naked and eroticised in even comedies, adds an uncomfortable weight potentially for viewers too.

Honestly, the film itself feels alien in the modern day, an unknowable aspect to its tone and attitude which I can appreciate but in this case as well is in clear danger, despite being only under eighty minutes, of missing a point at all for a viewer, neither the pinku film about eroticism, and feeling of its time in terms of a rebellious avant-garde film, one which is severely limited in its choice of subject and may have lost meaning. Whether a good thing or one Masao Adachi was right to make, this is a film now you have to view with a generation where the idea of youths being this hopeless politically but wishing effectively for either permanently chastity or total mastery on a transcendental level, in a film grounded in its bleak Japanese urban streets, contrasts a world where many forms of eroticisms even merely imagined or faked are prolific, and do not even need other people involved.

What grasps to me however, and will still connect to any viewer, is Yasuko, a figure who you are clearly sympathetic to. Her misanthropic peers, who wish to overcome sex and did not like the fact she broke their rule, are still alienated teenagers trying to grasp at something, refusing a basic part of their world and finding themselves unable to escape it. As the figure in among them who is the centre, Yasuko is a figure who resonates still decades later as a lost figure, able to briefly have a moment of joy, the colour footage returning for her to briefly play in her own daydreams naked as a nymph in an apartment, but the coldness of the world around her eventually crunches down. Deciding to turn the gas on in an oven is the sole option, and the colour comes back to haunt the viewer with blood in a toilet bowl.

It is a difficult film, all whilst never presenting a difficult aesthetic style, but still being a stark and confrontation piece in its tone and presentation. Merely that, with its mind on such a bleak tone and alienating in its genre tropes, Gushing Prayer is difficult to work with. Still with reward, but also a curiosity as a result in its genre and the avant-garde films made at the time. Knowing Masao Adachi was following on, as much as a screenwriter for the likes of Kôji Wakamatsu, on similar pinku films which challenged and rattled against their own genres, not films held as erotic but difficult avant-garde films, make this an interesting glance at them all.

Abstract Spectrum: Philosophical/Stark

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

Winter Vacation (2010)

 

Director: Hongqi Li

Screenplay: Hongqi Li

Cast: Jinfeng Bai, Lei Bao, Hui Wang, Ying Xie, Naqi Zhang

Ephemeral Waves

Sorry comrade, we're illiterate.

Introducing us to the setting, a northern Chinese industrial town, three male teenagers meet up in the middle of the cold winter streets, debating whether to go to the vegetable stand to see a female grocer outside selling cabbages, all because they were informed she was pretty. One of them points out that the only reason this has been raised is only as she is an outsider to the small industrial town, all deciding against this. In the background, a mantra is being repeated from an unknown source whilst they wander off the school. Thus begins a film with the driest of dry humour begins from filmmaker Li Hongqi, which does not set up a comedy of the usual sort but is so deadpan it hits the bottom of a still metaphorical lake of its own creation.

Winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2010 Locano Film Festival, sadly Winter Vacation has become an obscure title, belaying that for its slow still scenes usually shot in establishing shots with the cast, this is the bleakest of comedies. Set in a town in Inner Mongolia to be precise, during Spring Festival, even the cabbages on the vegetable market look bleak in the eyes of poet/novelist/filmmaker Hongqi, also working as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym and stretching scenes to an extreme, all to the point they could cause anxiety for a viewer if they do not find it funny, or frustrates. More so as Hongqi deliberately strips all the character out of the environment, where the only thing left is rundown industrial environments and white walled rooms and the prolonged takes. The only distinctions are really some of the clothing, mostly the teenagers' as between purple and lack striped Bonad Fashion Jeans hoodie and a couple of other items, the adults wear nothing particularly to stand out either. Even the music, baring the Boredoms-esque end credit track, which consists of a hummed female voice contrasted by a male one, hesitates and is seemingly confused, asking in wordlessness with wariness to the male one. If you are not patient with this, Winter Vacation becomes a nightmare but, if used to this tone or prepared, you can be in my shoes where it made the film funnier the longer the scenes lasted.

Even in mind of the humour being mean and misanthropic - with many people slapping each other, the youngest son (a toddler) being constantly threatened with his uncle "kicking his butt", and a female toddler already having lived a long life already with insomnia to go with it during nap times - the humour prevents this film being too bleak. Instead, the bleakest of humour here is universal in its sense of the doldrums of reality, whilst also being political without being blatant about this. This presents not an idealised world, mainland China seen by itself in grandeur and outside by many with controversy, but instead as a place of individual towns and places where life has to drag on. The location, one I have rarely seen in Chinese cinema at the time I finally saw this film, belies the idealised image and is closer to what Jia Zhangke has filmed in terms of his cinema, belying and defying genre too as he went on, in showing the real grounded reality of his country. Within this story, one young male child wishes to become an orphan when he grows up, and another couple formally go for a divorce without any drama to it in a blank looking government office. In among this the teenagers, in-between school, drift around. Some bully others for money by just slapping them repeatedly. One girl shows affection for one boy by making him a green knitted woollen hat, which beyond the prolonged digression of a group looking over it returns back with an unfortunate punch line. Even a "your mother" joke appears, even if significantly less cruder than done in the West.

Another considers that teenage love may affect her studies - probably leading to the best if crudest dialogue among the likes of "I've basically become her menstrual pad" or the entire life goal of wanting to continue on an endless cycle of fruit from someone's loins, when the boy saying this is too young and clearly naive to know what an adult relationship will be like - and another considers a way to help his country, taking the mantel of wanting to be a good comrade but considering school a useless direction instead of alternatives. You could argue it goes for the obvious - in which the finale involves a male teacher (having forgotten to take his medicine) giving an improvised lecture to a class about the pointlessness of human progression, instead of the intended one on apomictic molluscs, only to be informed he is in the wrong classroom - but Winter Vacation became too glacially witty to be pointlessly nihilistic.

A joy is to be had in how dour the film is in the right mindset, and profoundness is to be found for a grandfather watching on TV scenes, from one of the director's own films, of the same stillness only to have both someone slapping another person, and then a scene of two people with walking sticks on a street antagonising each other. When the film is willing even to be crude, it does stand out against the rigid filmmaking style. Anything that is remotely political in the obvious sense, jokes on couches and chairs set out in the snow about wanting to do much for the country between teenagers, is there to deflate the image of mainland China with probably as much power than anything overtly critical in another filmmaker's work. Personally, Winter Vacation even without the decade of build to see, as I first heard of the film in fleeting coverage of the 2010 Locarno Film Festival in Sight & Sound magazine, was a thing to delight in with my own perverse joy.

One Hamlet Less (1973)

 

Director: Carmelo Bene

Screenplay: Carmelo Bene

Based on a play by William Shakespeare

Cast: Carmelo Bene as Hamlet; Luciana Cante as Gertrude; Sergio Di Giulio as William; Franco Leo as Horatio; Lydia Mancinelli as Kate; Luigi Mezzanotte as Laertes; Isabella Russo as Ophelia; Giuseppe Tuminelli as Polonius; Alfiero Vincenti as Claudius

An Abstract Candidate

 

For his last theatrical film, Carmelo Bene after the likes of Oscar Wilde and Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly came to William Shakespeare. Starting as he means to go on, the Italian theatrical director/actor and filmmaker begins with father's ghost floating by at the moment a murder transpires, during a scene of sex on the beach at night for the first scene, with poison poured into the ear of the soon slain king post coitus as Claudius takes the crown in grainy black-and-white photography. Bene is sadly a figure whose work has not been as well known outside his homeland of Italy. As much of this, with One Hamlet Less a prime example, because his films are alien beyond the late sixties and seventies period of world cinema where experimentalism was rife and their types of experiment, to be frank, are from the period. However in terms of grandstanding, distinct and unique voices, Bene's should be more readily heard as, already audible if you can catch him, his is a compelling one as he completely dissects and breaks the Danish tragedy into pieces of his own. 

The world he depicts is over the top. It is of multicoloured costumes with big shoulders, big hats and cornettes on women, glasses which cause one actress to have eyes which are big and bug out, and where the sets, excluding the use of an actual beach, are usually white theatrical spaces with giant walls of stacked books usually the main set decoration. All his films have unique aesthetic looks, given them all character. The one aspect which may put people off, openly admitting this now, is that most of the female cast are nude, with the camera emphasising this at times, and this is the one thing which, for a film I am going to lavish praise on, is going to cause me to roll my eyes too. He has had nudity in other films, but the others have had their distinctions, whilst here it does come off as ridiculous, mainly because it does come off as emphasised rather than for the purposes in his other workl. Aside from this, the world of a Carmelo Bene film is something spectacular. He is not really the same as Ken Russell, nor Federico Fellini, and even his acting for Pier Paolo Pasolini contrasts two very different filmmakers. Even his films have unique looks to each other though they all embrace the artificial and theatrical, as this world's white sets contrasts the proto-neon hues of Salome (1972), a film even with its female nudity was more profoundly classical as it was almost eighties no wave homoerotic camp in hindsight.

Whether you need to have read Hamlet or get the basics will help, but suffice to say, the key is that this follows the basics and deviates considerably after which. That Hamlet is a Danish prince whose father was slain by Claudius, the uncle taking the throne and remarrying his mother. Hamlet, becoming mentally unstable or acting it out, bides his time in the court until he can progress in his plans, but here the film drops a lot beyond this, including the eventual plan for revenge. The result, then, is Hamlet if you know the text but not even then as you would know it, going as far as having Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, in a role as an unseen narrator who whispers his theories on the Oedipus complex (the son murdering the father, sleeping with the mother) over scenes. Or at least his stand-in, as it is actually Polonius as Freud who torments Hamlet so, as much here Hamlet is a man just wishing to stage plays as he is the Danish prince of the Shakespearean narrative. Hamlet has to play the part of the origin figure too, go insane and have his erotic desires blurred between Ophelia, his potential love interest, and his mother Gertrude.  As much of this version is a joke, a parody, as it is taken seriously, even with the conclusion for Hamlet himself an anti-climax in a graveyard.

Ridiculously gaudy, One Hamlet Less however has a deliberate gaudiness, theatrical costuming which is as much artificial with over pronounced shoulders on costumes and, for female cast members, not even anything barring headdresses and skirts as it is the heightened acting. There is a noticeable homo-eroticism, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their cameo very youthful and attractive men with pronounced red lips and make-up, to the point it comes apparent they have been actresses in fact or swapped mid-film on purpose¹. Moments of this eroticism at least showing more than the moments where the camera pans on the bodies of women which causes you to cringe, particularly as in the era of codpieces this is more internalized through the fabric.

There are scenes in the real world, particularly a beach where a graveyard has been dug into the sand, where the skeletons are brought up by the sea waves, but it is mostly staged bound sets with economic but vividly distinct sets, a huge factor to Bene's style. It is, like the other films, a dense kaleidoscope work that with patience grows in weight, Bene liking dialogue which is not natural, heavy in intellectualism, and at times shouted or practically belted out of actors like mad people. Alongside the frantic editing, his work is as much to cut and match between shots, to blind the viewer in the madness of his kitsch take on the Kingdom of Denmark, where even origin source text in this particular film in his career fits his world.

Kitsch it not an insult as, far from a surface irony, Bene's take is serious and sincere, appropriate that in Shakespeare's tale, of a nobleman who plans to take vengeance of the betrayal and murder of his father, a chaotic mass of backstabbing and politics is depicted with this hyper-coloured delirium. Hamlet whilst set in a location became its own realm outside of reality to place various meanings on, so as Hamlet here pretending to be mad wanders sets that vary between late sixties pop art and a medieval film about to kick into disco. It befits the depth of darkness is portrayed here in bright illustrious colour, and in terms of the many adaptations of Hamlet, stranger exist even in mainstream pop culture when Arnold Schwarzenegger played a version of the Danish prince for a one scene joke². The abrupt tangent to Arthurian legend, whilst the most difficult thing to grasp, even fits the tone and Bene for me as an actor is exceptional, the centre piece who keeps this working. He can go for the fence with his delirium but, as his first film Our Lady of the Turks (1968) attest too, even that is a fine art. It is telling, in the most sobering scene, he acts out one of Hamlet's most famous sequences and dialogue, the "alas poor Yorick" lines with the court jester's skull, with utmost quiet sadness and then escalates his voice louder when his Hamlet laments his place and death.

Just screenshots would be enough to show how interesting the film it. Women, laid on a white seat with dresses who hoop skirts make them look this living Christmas tree decorations, or with giant balls as improvised skirts to sit behind; anachronistic luggage cases everywhere; night scenes full of rows of candles (touches?) burning in the open air; a happy, cheery brawl to the death with a morning star spilling blood, played out like a game of tag over and around multi-coloured spheres in a white set; and enough textures to saturate the eyes, mind and thoughts. Naturally like Bene himself, it is beautiful and at times insane looking, striding through scenes agonizing on their existential existence as the film itself darts between the various figures of this weird world. Contextually, even as the shortest and in many ways least erratic of the films I have seen, this is arguably the one you try afterwards when you are accustomed to Carmelo Bene's work. It is still a brilliant piece of the whole body of work.

Abstract Spectrum: Heightened/Kitsch/Weird

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

 

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1) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also go with a bang, liberally changing the source text, before you ask.

2) Last Action Hero (1993).

The Cat, The Reverend and The Slave (2009)

 

Directors: Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita

Ephemeral Waves

How can you mistake me for a panda?!

Merely a fragment of a much larger image, the document by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita is slight in many ways but still compelling, the collaborators from separate birth places (Negra in France, Kinoshita in Japan) yet joined to create extensive art installation, short based and even theatrical length documents of the fringes of modern human culture. From the various sub currents of Japan, of people who dress up in female masks and clothes of kigurumi cosplay, or have virtual girlfriends (Wife, Girl, Mother (2019)), to The Cat's subject which is primarily about Second Life. The couple, just from this triptych, blur the line between constructed fictionalised scenes but about real people, following three different worlds within the online virtual world created in 2003 and which became a phenomenon at the time of the documentary.

The three narratives including their tangents, "triptych" truly the best way to describe this film, involves The Cat, which is about the world of the furry community, The Reverend, in which a Christian minister has ventured out into the Second Life virtual realm to preach the word of God, and the Slave, part of a variety of individuals involved in virtual escorts and consenting BSDM-like slave to master roles. The world of Second Life is a vague one for me, frankly, but experience of family playing The Sims, a virtual game Negra and Kinoshita explored with short Neighborhood (2006), has provided me with the idea of the virtual world as an idealised one or to explore. It is for me, however, a double sided coin I admit wariness to. There is something strangely compelling yet disconcerting, with the initial shots, of an ordinary world rebuilt within Second Life, of a room where you can watch TV as in real life, recreating the ordinary world exactly and finding it not as harsh as a fantasy baring a few idealised tweaks. In contrast, when a group of women called the Earth Mothers Charity Association are seen debating to plant virtual trees to encourage real trees in the real world, you see the virtues of grappling with the virtual landscape. I find in reality, if I have to past a bias, it is that the banalities of the real world seep into the new one which has always made me wary of these virtual realms, the idea of them as places that should offer complete unnatural freedom only to be dragged down by the flaws of real life something I find a great deal of. At least repeating those aspects when virtual reality can offer if never true escape but a place for creative imagination would suffice, but a lot of repetition and grinding as one would do in real life, and not see them as the same, really startles me with the likes of this.

Commodity is there, as money transaction exists in Second Life long before bitcoin became a thing, as is the fact to even get to each sim (location in the world) you past a variety of obtrusive advertising. I wondered, if I had ever decided to go to Second Life, and be brave in my anonymous form, whether it would be possible to spend the time building places only possible in dreams, strange locations I dream of in sleep and as much are the obsessions in even cinema, itself a form to escape the real world in truth. Yet the wonder how expensive that would be is there, as estate and property are there in the Second Life, as is the man briefly seen chastised by his wife in the real world, in their ordinary kitchen as a fellow player, for starting an escort service.

The real world seeps in, not in least, that one man we meet entered the Second Life to find the wife who left him abruptly in the night, never to be seen again until he searched. This also introduces us the master and slave relations, figures who in the virtual world, be their avatars animal people or human, who have slaves willing to do what the masters want, and with slaves who have their own slaves, and many each. This is far less disconcerting to me than the banal costs and lives of the real world invading the virtual one, as it leads to one of the most interesting and mentally fulfilled figures named Lisa. Lisa, a trans woman who still has to go back to being Chris when she has to go to work, and switches between as well, lives in a small apartment and has a group of female slaves. However, with a semblance of knowledge of BDSM's ideals of consent, only the term "slave" due to its historically loaded meaning is problematic, as what we see is consenting adults involved in role-play, posting erotic photos to each other and playing games of commanded chastity to enhance their sexual lives. Lisa is also using to in finding a real life relationship away from the virtual world, with one of her female slaves which she talks of in an interview to the camera soon to be met, dealing with the reality as much as the sexual fantasy including the issue of a potential step daughter with all the baggage that will involve.

Contrasting this, in the world where Second Life is full of gambling and sex and vice, a reverend named Benjamin, an ordained Christian minister, has brought a church to Second Life alongside his wife. They would be one of many in the online game - as it progressed religion in general came to the world such as the Islamic faith - and they even acquired an island (a sim) called Truth to help the faithful escape sin. Some with raise their eyebrows at this, be it this review or actually watching the documentary, but this is not strange to me. In hindsight, the notion of Christians going out to spread the word of Christ, depending on which denomination, would have naturally gotten to Second Life, among the porn and gambling trying to bring an alternative side in a perceived view of entering a new horizon to offer salvation. It is virtual, a simulacra, but this is new land to spread the gospel, but where the segment does raise questions, and where the film's brisk length teases in a tantalising philosophical conundrum, is how the religious notions of redemption exist through this mirror.

Second Life, and the internet in general, for myself, is a mirror to human perception. Again, this is my personal opinion, so this is merely an idea to contrast and scrutinise. We created these constructs, forms in digital for our ideas and our dreams, alongside our worst sides and also our subconscious desires intentionally or accidentally, even if separate from us. It raises all sorts of strange reflections, such as in other aspects of avatars and the masks players have, when the real notions of faith are involved with what is effectively these subconscious aspects of human minds made accessible as a apparently form. A senior priest, brought in to console Benjamin, refers to Star Trek and the new frontier, but there is a lot that could have been unpacked. The film briefly cocks an eyebrow, where we see the senior preacher leave his church in a lavish red car, which he calls "his mid life crisis", but never was there a subject matter, as with the rest of the triptych, which leaves one unsated and wishing for more. Openly, I do not criticise Negra and Kinoshita's film at all for slightness, and they are clearly a case of their work altogether, though sadly not easily accessible, which build to a single work based on comparing these different worlds. The depth would be found in contrasting the worlds they explore and similar themes shared between them, in their static scenes of interviews and set pieces, occasionally some ambitious (if heavily structured) moments of the camera pulling away in aerial shots over buildings or passing by among the cars outside.

The third of the triptych is one though which many of us may have some greater idea of, but as one commentator points out, in his cat ears and tail, is likely due to their exoticising in the mainstream media. I openly admit I learn of the furry culture, of people who role-play as (and even embrace the identity of) animal people through episode five, season 4, of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations called Fur and Loathing, about a dead body leading to a furry convention in Las Vegas. Furries, in their prolific communities, are likely to be come across if you look in the right places online, or at least for myself in my interest in fan art. I openly admit to not being a furry, in the sense that my connection to animals has always been of them being separate to myself even in my admiration of the natural world, but there is something profound and beautiful in the scene where a group, in full costume, proudly march through a convention hall corridor, more striking as one of them is even carrying a flag like a flag bearer. The people within he costumes are also regular people, getting into debates as one does with a female cashier, who is not one, of the difference between having sex with an animorph and a person dressed as an animorph, in mind that (as referred to in that CSI episode) there is a sexual subsection of furrydom, with terms like "yiffing" coming to the mainstream, but that it is not the entire picture in the slightest¹.  

I wish, again, that a longer version of this film existed. What we get offers a lot of a potential fragments, sub currents within sub currents as there is mention of furry escorts existing in Second Life, and the notion of these new worlds, as they would have been then as the internet was fully available, and how they interact with the normal real world is a subject that would be fascinating to see. Just in terms of scenes like one at night where an older woman wishes for members of the furry community not to talk too loudly outside her house, not wanting her lawn to become an anime expo, which paints a picture of how she has adapted to the communities around there. Or that the film ends with Second Life being struck by a virus-like prank of thousands of images of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle raining down on the screen like fake money, the flaws of the idealised world seen. But that is not a dismissal of the documentary itself, merely a wish for more. What we get is a finale briefly entering the Burning Man festival, its own potential documentary of a place of self reliance and strange sights (women nude, willingly being rotated around on an improvised art installation spit, trucks turned into coiling giant dragons). They also look to the idea of melding with Second Life, and whilst the online game has faded in the popular consciousness as others have come about, even something like the wholesome videogame franchise Animal Crossing becoming a communal experience for many as online games and virtual realms have multiplied, those which followed it were the same in creating new places for communities to exist. This subject, and the many seen, if anything could be returned to even by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita, adding more to the interesting content here.

 

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1) That said, the sexual subculture of furry fandom, even if not the whole, can be found and is not a marginalised aspect in the slighted. It is eroticised fantasy, and far more complex than merely zoophilla, entirely different in what it entails. Again, it is not my interest either. Hopefully this lands as an amusing joke, rather than accidentally offending any potential readers who are furries, but I myself did not grow up being pulled towards the Cadbury Caramel Bunny, a figure in adverts I saw growing up who, upon looking back, was an example in mainstream pop culture of a figure ridiculously sensualised, for what is an anthropomorphic rabbit, among many that I would not be surprised would have had influenced someone towards the erotic side of furry culture.

Bird of Paradise (1932)

 

Director: King Vidor

Screenplay: Wells Root, Wanda Tuchock and Leonard Praskins

Based on a stage play by Richard Walton Tully

Cast: Dolores del Río as Luana; Joel McCrea as Johnny Baker; John Halliday as Mac; Richard "Skeets" Gallagher as Chester; Bert Roach as Hector; Lon Chaney Jr. as Thornton; Wade Boteler as Skipper Johnson; Reginald Simpson as O'Fallon

Ephemeral Waves

 

"What do they call this place?"

"Probably one of the Virgin Islands"

"Heaven forbid."

Immediately from the gate, pointing out that Bird of Paradise is offensive and politically incorrect - as a pre-Hollywood Code film where natives of a Pacific island are defamed superstitious and exotic, sacrificing maidens to volcanoes, compared to the white male protagonist - is obvious, but a waste of a review if that was the only thing to spend a review writing about. That should be something we should be already be aware of, and to have to repeat that as the basis of a review is in itself a sad state of affairs. Context should already support a viewer in realising this is from a different era be it the attitudes spoken of in terms of the "native" characters we see portrayed and that, with establishing shots taken in Hawaii, the lead female lead despite being a maiden from the Pacific Ocean islands is being played by an actress not from the region, Mexican actress Dolores del Río.

What Bird of Paradise is now is a cultural artefact, one which for many would be difficult to appreciate, or have to clench through its problems, but I came into with fascination as a text alien to the modern day. It is of the old Hollywood of pure fantasy, a construct depicting a Pacific island of the mind, the kind of haze dream which, camp nowadays, would have fed the brains of the likes of avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith, and perverted with overt phallic plants by Bertrand Mandico for The Wild Boys (2017). Its racism, and the complex web it ends up in for a tale of a white sailor Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea) falling in love with del Rio's native girl Luana, is a reminder that even a decade is a time ago, so the early ninety thirties is itself a time before with a lot of attitudes that have to be tackled head on. The film states it is set in the early thirties in dialogue, but you could swear it was turn of the century, the islanders the stereotype of the naive exotic "others", the white sailors teasing them with ice in the water which confuses them, and offering items from the first world like smoking pipes as trinkets as one would to children. It would be easy to just bury a film like this, probably not the worst film likely to exist from this era in terms of depictions, but that would be an unwillingness to look at ourselves and see our bias.

It also has a farcical edge, surrounding a notion in the plot of virgins being sacrificed to volcanoes. The entire volcano sacrifice concept is one that led me to wonder mid-viewing, as the film will eventually hinge around Luana, the tribal chief daughter, being there to sacrifice to appease the volcano God, whether it is something which is actually happened in one obscure tribe or likely a pure construct of colonially bias pulp. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pastiched in The Forbidden Room (2015) among countless influences, which is where this idea only exists for me, and this is likely one of the first (if any) sources for this fancy as a plot device then anything remotely practical as a practice.  

Again, I find myself with idea that merely saying that this film is merely offensive and not to watch is a worthless act to do for a review, even if I have to return to this over and over. I would hope you, the reader, if you are to feel uncomfortable with the content I will warn you about would just avoid the film - of white leads looking down on the natives, with some of the extras cast for authenticity, a romance with a native girl that eroticises her and shows her as a simple figure among figures backwards in their violent superstitions. If you were to still watch the film, my imagined reader, and be offended it would be obvious why. However, the film exists and, just from the volcano subplot, what Bird of Paradise is as content deserves to still be prodded with curiosity as much with these concerns in mind.

What Bird of Paradise definitely is camp melodrama, emphasised by the fact that even the sailors, despite Joel McCrea with his manly leading man appearance being the centre of attention, alongside beingcomedic foils are frankly flamboyant in a couple themselves. This is a film of exaggeration, not that dissimilar (but with more political issues) to the fifties tiki hut lounge music movement of exotica. With an uncredited Busby Berkeley choreographing the "native" dance sequence in the middle, this is Hollywood's extravagance in both its glory and bad taste too. It is emphasised knowing this film contextually has many importance sub currents to it in terms of American cinema's history. From RKO Studios, which would grow in stature over the thirties and forties just from King Kong in 1933, this is produced by David Selznick, in a brief period with RKO before a future including the legendary Gone with the Wind (1939) among his projects. King Vidor, a figure behind a fascinating film like The Crowd (1928), is here as is the fact that this is a sound production. Moving from the silent era Vidor worked in, to a period where actors were pushed aside when their voices now became a factor to consider, and the technology for sound having to be negotiated around practically just beforehand, Bird of Paradise from its exotic score to the dialogue stands out knowing just before sound was alien.

Then there is the fact this is a pre-Code film, a period sadly not easy to access still outside of the United States. Suffice to say, even if former post-master general Will Hays had already being brought into Hollywood at this point to clean up the cinema, there was a period in the early thirties where a lot of adult and edgy content for the time was still flagrantly around. Baring its problematic ethnographic content, Bird of Paradise is tame in the modern day, but it is still surprising for an underwater sequence where clearly, whilst blurred in the image, a female stand-in for Dolores del Río is very naked. Or that del Rio herself eventually wears above the waist only a strategically place garland which leaves nothing to the imagination. Or that, in contrast, McCrea's body is eroticised too, in a scene where coconut milk is seductively drank between them and spills on their figures whilst among of the native foliage.

It is a shame such a film is embedded to its historical context, the artificial reality of the dream factory felt fully here in its lack of subtlety or the exaggeration, where something like a shark randomly causing the natives to flee in their canoes is touched upon with a heightened shock for what is merely a fin gliding through the water and strategic use of pre-shot footage of a real one. Sadly, such an aesthetic is found, in its sincere form, in problematic material. del Rio, whose reputation includes her work back in her homeland of Mexico and the theatre for her full legacy, is frankly stuck with a character unable to grow as, with her childish grasp of English, the character of Luana is the eroticised innocent. Even Joel McCrea, who would make a career in the last half of his career mostly in westerns, is stuck with generic bland white male hero. These films appealed, and they influenced figures that could run with their best virtues even on lowest budgets into phantasmagorical content, but you are stuck with a film which has to cast a Hispanic actress, in a role which ultimately does not give her a lot to do, as an entirely different ethnicity. A film which has to dance a merry dance awkwardly around miscegenation, something Will Hays among his many do-and-don't would have as prohibited in Hollywood cinema but continues here beforehand to be uncomfortable for the ideas of the culture. [Spoilers] The volcano appears for a tragic ending but you can suspect as much of it is loaded even by accident in this mess of the time's attitudes. [Spoilers] I enjoyed this film when it was pure pulp, of whirlpools lovingly rendered in heightened style, or the extravagance of a flying fish swarm with many extras in boats and McCrea hitting them with a tennis racket, but you have to take these moments with the cultural baggage. The difference is I accept this and try to find these aspects to take of interest. That does mean rolling one's eyes a lot and having the kindness to warn others out of concern of their worst aspects.

The Seventh Walk (2014)

 

Director: Amit Dutta

Screenplay: Amit Dutta

Cast: Paramjit Singh

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sometimes they pause, to listen to the music.

Dubbed "A tale of two stones", The Seventh Walk with its contemplative images and sitar score is a film meant to be slowly absorbed, a production following the creative process of an Indian artist Paramjit Singh, playing himself. A prolific figure himself, director Amit Dutta's film is definitely the kind which sadly lose from when being able to be seen easily on a large theatrical screen. Films like this, which can be accessed in the film festival circuit or in him homeland, can be accessed in the streaming era, but The Seventh Walk was definitely designed for a theatrical screen, in not only its contemplative images but also especially the sound design. The entire film does feel in danger of feeling even its slight length, but I can only imagine how more potent the film would be if, in a darkened screening room with the largest screen, you could experience its atmosphere that way.

It ascribes not to a plot. Singh the artist is seen wandering the natural countryside of his home, the green woodland to the open plain. An older man, he goes through life calmly and at times creates art, first highly detailed charcoal drawings but in various forms of artistic tools. He specialises in landscapes but not only does he work in other subjects but, as the film slowly includes a surreal whimsy, his own work as an artist also includes a lot of more abstract themes, including the prominence of rocks and stones unexpectedly pronounced in places or in unexpected places. With text translated in two languages, green text against black of poetry, The Seventh Walk is a film of beautiful natural images meant to be basked in, the creative spark that Paramjit Singh has to be found for a viewer in the time spent in this world with him.

Sound design is prominent here too, a world described and drawn without seeing it. Avian life, cats mewing, the wind blowing a gust and many other things are pictured as you can hear them in the soundtrack. One scene has the plucking of a tiny orange flower sound like on uprooted tree. The latter moment shows when the increasing amount of odd imagery starts to transpire, even being caught unnoticed by me as I was watching until repeated later. Singh's art has dreamlike and surreal iconography which Amit Dutta starts to create in the natural world, contrasting Singh's evocatgive bright coloured landscapes with the natural palette of the countryside. Tiny model houses are prominent, unexpectedly being found nestled in the side of trees, or on the rocks in the river. Rocks themselves are prominent in Singh's art, when one starts to float away from a model house on that aforementioned river, and others start to hover like UFOs around the environments.

Eventually, from a first person perspective, shoes start to fly too, introducing a young girl as one of the only few people in a film, baring the artist the film is on, entirely instead about the landscape's evocative nature. It is a film that can, honestly, be lost as a result of so many which follow its style of contemplative still scenes. Even the moments which have the image distorted do not break this, though does strike one at the end with an incredible impact when what it is presumed to be a painting is in fact a fully formed, three dimensional world. The whimsical nature of its stranger moments also won me over to The Seventh Walk, a film which has a lightened heart.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Whimsical

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

Om Dar-B-Dar (1988)

 

Director: Kamal Swaroop

Screenplay: Kuku

Cast: Aditya Lakhia as Om; Anita Kanwar as Phoolkumari; Gopi Desai as Gayatri; Lalit Tiwari as Jagdish; Lakshminarayan Shastri as Om's Father

An Abstract List Candidate

 

...in the cheap feverish thrills of porn pictures of Coca-Cola, I croak...

Made in 1988, Kamal Swaroop's Om Dar-B-Dar would only get a release in 2014 in its homeland. Trying to decipher the film is inherently a challenge - a film as much based on non- sequitur and dream logic as it has structures - but that adds a greater weight. In context to Indian cinema, this is unique and incredible as, in any context of any nation's cinema, it is bizarre and inventive.

Contextually, "Om" (Aditya Lakhia) is a boy, christened as his name so not to be found in the messenger of Death's book. Able to breathe underwater for a long time, Om will eventually be pushed towards becoming a spiritual leader, sponsored by a watch company, who will reject the breath of Lord Brahma, the Hindi God who created the universe, by a mass holding of breath across the country. Long beforehand is his home life, the astrology obsessed man and his daughter Gayatri (Gopi Desai), who comes into a relationship with a man named Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) when she goes to a cinema on her own, another woman who comes to their home as an actress fleeing a creator of "mystical" films on the gods, and a possible conspiracy with diamonds involving a "primitive shit-land" where the frogs on the grounds breed the rare stones.

Om Dar-B-Dar is, beautifully, a very strange film. Legitimately surreal and in its own way subversive, even the dialogue (for the version I viewed) is censored if translated in the subtitles still, usually surrounding sex references such as the actress being suggested to an adult film writer. Certainly, the film is in constant flux in terms of what the plot line actually is about, but it feels precise, a haze dream with a semblance of logic but is totally against full interpretation. On its mind is certainly a lot of context which would prove more meaningful if you knew Indian culture. That Om's family origins are in having faked their caste, pretending to be of the Brahmin caste, which was of great status in terms of influence especially in the British colonial era and, in this context, has haunted the patriarch. That it is brazenly (even censored) playing with the iconography of Indian cinema is there. There is even a good old Bollywood song, a good one in a film full of good music, which it turns into its own, set in the gritty real streets at night of a city, with bright lights, set to a song whose lyrics (rhyming "It is a like a sea baby" with a merchant lady) fit the film's stream of consciousness absurdities.

In fact, if any moment in a film of great moments, won me over to the exceptional nature of Om Dar-B-Dar, as an abstract film and cinema in general, the early passage when Om is still in school has it.  Among fellow students refusing to get off their bicycles permanently and a teacher who can still hit a student inside a room psychically from the outside, it has the least expected of musical numbers. One, even in a national cinema which has gladly embraced other culture's musical and brought them to theirs, which offers a very individualistic track. Namely, what can be described as Indian Kraftwerk, for a lack of a better term, involving "porn pictures of Coca-Cola" among other dreamlike, post-modern and almost cut-up strange lyrics as teen boys dance in a trance to the music in their classroom. It is an exceptional sequence, a musical montage, and among many aspects, it still feels incredibly ageless in moments like this.

It still feels radical especially as, whilst it slows down in the latter half, the first has a lot of scenes which jump ahead in an unknown time suddenly, time skipping ahead as the editing burns through events whilst still feeling as you can grasp what time you are in. Eventually the film, with its dialogue being increasingly strange, does become alien in its oddness, but you have enough grasp even in the first half to have sympathy of the characters. The astrological and mystic charm obsessed patriarch who, alongside a history clearly in left-wing radicalism, also has a hatred for the "goggly" (whatever that is) wishing for it to be banned from cricket and Indian culture in general. The daughter, whose flirtation with the man in the cinema includes requesting the same song on the radio, about a shepherd in a doll, with its innuendo being a symbol of their teasing interactions. The actress, who was only allowed to play a tiger goddess to not besmirch the real deity's sacredness, fleeing and brought in to be the patriarch's secretary. And Om himself, a trickster at points, bringing a man counterfeit coins raining from the sky, but generally a likable kid.

Playful in both visuals and language, Om Dar-B Dar does so in different ways. The film's dialogue, both in its native language but also in snippets of English is taken advantage of, bilingualism found in Bollywood films with certain phrases and words, poetry in its sentences and even how characters retort to each other playfully. In terms of the look of the film, it is not as exaggerated. It has a very realistic, grounded reality of both the countryside and bustling urban centres which helps make the absurdities and breaks more striking. Certainly a huge factor to the film working in its tone is that, because of its grounded aesthetic, there are sequences which are less absurdist but allow you to follow the characters are individuals. You have as much time to follow a period where Om accidentally/deliberately loses a person's bicycle as it is to the Indian Kraftwerk sequence. It also means that some of the odder aspects are more more bizarre.

The frogs who have diamonds in their stomachs is stranger with the contrast in the film as a result, which come to be as the patriarch has a man ingest grounded up diamonds, and gestate them to eventually defecate out in a secret open field when no one is looking, never seen explicitly but profane in an Indian film playing with the idea of shit with that word (or equivalent) never censored. When suddenly, when they are no longer a secret and school children who found them in their dissected amphibians mob the land, it becomes weirder as a result with the world built up from reality than an equally broad world, especially as an unexpected body count comes to be when toy guns suddenly become real.

When the push to a spiritual leader for Om happens, it is prompted by advertising, when Promise toothpaste suddenly appears in shot and convinces a close female friend to go to him, winning him over to a promotional deal as their spokesperson. Even after two viewings just to get to this review, Om Dar-B-Dar is a dense film to try to unwrap its weird logic, but certainly its juxtaposition of a very grounded, very modern filmmaking style with surreal whimsy are surprisingly good bedfellows who help each other immensely. Certainly, and impossible not to see, is that the film whilst so breezy and light-hearted is still in context to its country's culture and cinema very crude and subversive on purpose, gladly raising references to birth control and sex. It's style of generally going against conventions is part of this too, both the template of a grounded drama and having that against truly weird, deliberately erratic content based on word and language puns as it is randomness which is wonderfully poetic. It is easy to miss how subversive the film is in its glee, but that in itself, is to a viewer's reward. Its abrupt release in its homeland is befitting, as much part of a prank as the content is, but Om Dar-B-Dar deserves as appropriately odd historical context as the film deserves greater awareness as an incredible piece.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal/Whimsical/Weird

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

Duvidha (1973)

 

Director: Mani Kaul

Based on a story by Vijayadan Detha

Cast: Ravi Menon as the Merchant's Son; Raisa Padamsee as the Bride

Ephemeral Waves

[Major Spoilers Throughout]

A stark film in creation, Mani Kaul's film exists in a time in an unknown past. A young bride (Raisa Padamsee) is married to a merchant family more obsessed with money than anything else, her husband (Ravi Menon) to immediately leave her for five years before the honeymoon has finished to work in the town. There is a ghost however near her new home, in a fruit tree. He falls for her immediately, disguising himself to her as the husband but nobly admitting the truth to not deceive her. Their relationship complicates things, as the husband's family presumes he is their son and she becomes expectant of child.

Duvidha is very simple as a narrative. Only under eighty minutes, this is a folk story in tone but very much of a perspective meant to challenge. The ghost is more sympathetic as the plot goes on, but the young bride is inherently the one true person of sympathy, even as the story naturally takes on its pre-cinema storytelling roots with a shepherd the right person to decide the conundrum of two husbands, all done by tricking one into going into a leather water bag out of a series of tests and leading them to being cast in a well. The ending in the end is ultimately bleak. The wife is stuck in a loveless marriage, of money and status, trapped and becoming the perfect figure on the outside to her new family as the narrator describes but felt as a soulless compromise from true happiness. Pointedly this film finds itself caught between two movements at this point in Indian cinema - the traditional "Bollywood" films and "Parallel cinema", which were social realistic work which challenges the issues and ideals of the nation. Duvidha takes influences from Parallel cinema in its critique but defies by its supernatural narrative, its own unique film as a result.

Here, the ghost is not the trespasser as in other tales, instead a believer of true passionate love whether his was the moral way to go or not, whilst the family are disconnected from emotion. Whether that ghost is ethical to have done what he has done, as already mentioned, is as much in mind to he being a metaphor and that, either way, Padamsee's lead is still the one trapped in a cold place. As she states, she was pushed out her family house quickly after adolescence unlike boys, and forced into a strict life. Any further attempt to add layers in reading is pointless when the tale itself is the meaning.

Where Duvidha is radical is how it is made. A stark, muted colour palette is immediate. Set in the countryside, even extravagance and colour are deeper in a dirtier form. Clothes look worn or at least lived in, the makeup on Padamsee harsher if adding still an aura, red and oranges by themselves darker. It is naturalism pushed to the point of an unnatural tone, the image (as a film preserved into the later decades) grainy and with objects like fruit more tangible in a woman's hands as the world around her is starker. Amidst this world, of an almost barren desert-like atmosphere and the men almost all wearing white which part of the bare chest exposed, worn in look, adds a great deal to the tone as clearly shows as well an influence from art. Also of note is that parts of Duvidha are shot as still images alongside the moving ones and even a few which change, the result altogether stark and stripping away artifice even if the film itself is a folktale. The soundtrack too, with dialogue not spoke by the actors onscreen by dubbed later at times, and the music intermittent, adds a dividing line between the viewer and the material. Altogether, the film is a compelling piece, unique in its own context without however being a difficult work to grasp. It instead has something distinct in its different sides connecting this well.

Beautiful New Bay Area Project (2013)

 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Mao Mita as Takako, Tasuku Emoto as Amano

Canon Fodder

 

Of all the projects you have never expect from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, though he has made some beautiful ones himself as well as terrifying examples, a martial arts short film commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival is still unexpected. This is still in mind to a director who began in pinku cinema and like a lot of his generation juggled genres, connectable to even someone like Takashi Miike in terms of being both V-Cinema (straight-to-video) veterans who have been eclectic in their creative output into the modern day. But martial arts in cinema involves a lot of additional choreography and planning even separate from a director who can transition between horror like Cure (1997) to dramas. Contextually though, what the short film is makes sense in his world.

The set-up is that, becoming love sick for a female labourer named Takako (Mao Mita), the president of an urban planning company named Amano (Tasuku Emoto) becomes obsessed with her whilst he is the acting head of a new development project at a wharf. His is not a pleasant romance, as she is not interested and his decision to steal her name tag from the employee board, rather than the prologue for a cute romantic comedy, leads to her having to retrieve it back even if her skill in martial arts have to be used, beating every security guard and grunt before him. For what is a genre film in less than thirty minutes that is playful, Beautiful New Bay Area Project is still idiosyncratic and part of Kurosawa's themes, with a lot to still unpack. Set in terms of modernising an industrial area, we have an idyllic new project to completely rehaul the environment which is demonstrated by even having its own model diorama in the offices. This is obviously the kind of utopia future architecture, no matter how much the management says is good, that is to hold with suspicion. The office itself is septic white and looks build from easy-to-deconstruct materials. It has an atmosphere but is obvious cold to the real, working factory and wharf environments which Takako hails from.

She herself, in a monologue to the camera, talks of having been born from the sea like a mermaid, a figure of working class who is juxtaposed to the coldness of an office urban world that, when an unseen mouse appears in the front office, causes all the staff to flee in terror regardless of who they are. Japan has had a fascinating balance between its heritage, its old history and culture, and the most advanced of modernism, but that does not mean that the schism has been a problem to tackle in its art. Kurosawa has tackled this before, his horror film Pulse (2001) imagining if the dead interacted with the living, and took over the world through the internet, as much a metaphor for the isolation of people as it was a literal apocalyptic scenario. Beautiful New Bay Area Project is, for all intense purposes, a fun spin in a genre the filmmaker has never dabbled in, but this is prominent. As is the fact that the management and officer workers are literally divided from the working class by tape, as there is a hint of a norovirus that Amano is isolated from by his goon-like management and the vans he is whisked off in.

Amano is in another scenario the character who you gain sympathy for, told he is a cog who needs to work in the machine to keep it working, his achievement with all the cogs more important than he the individual piece, which is explicitly told to him by an aide. He becomes, as he says himself, the cog which has broken off, but in a twist, he is not sympathetic at all. His love for Takako is sick, and the transgression to steal her name tag, stealing his identity, offends her. Licking it is definitely not acceptable and just gross unless she was to have consented to it. This presents the other idiosyncratic aspect that, when the first fight comes mid-way through, this is still a martial arts fight film. You need to remember that for a film for the Hong Kong film festival, the country with its rich history of martial arts cinema, Japan has its own which shines here that may not be prominently talked of in their entertainment. Not as much talked of, Japan has a history of elaborate fight sequences. Most will know of it if they know the tokusatsu superhero sub-genre, particularly all the shows into the modern day like the Ultraman franchise where costumed heroes fight monsters, or the history of Sonny Chiba, a cult hero in cinema who founded the J.A.C (Japan Action Club) school for stunt and martial arts performers for his nation's cinema. If you have least seen Chiba's iconic film The Street Fighter (1974), brutal and blunt is the best way to describe the action in Bay Area Project, not of elaborate flips but the credible ways a smaller woman in the female lead can take down men twice her size.   

The fights when they come are exceptional, and Kurosawa to his credit remembered to golden rule to not compromise them by editing or cheats. In fact, the odd juxtaposition of he making a film like this makes one wish he would have continued in this genre, as his themes and tone adds to it. He, for me, likes long scenes and static pauses, which against the stark modern office where the chaos breaks out makes the sudden explosion of violence more striking, the glass tables and white corridors real in the harshness as a person's head collides into them or for Takako to move around, be it by grappling or kicks or biting or keys to the leg or fire extinguisher to the head, to survive.

That the short is that, short, is not detracting. Sadly, this is the type of work in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's career that could be easily missed or forgotten; never even hearing of this until approaching the production for this review, it is a fascinating piece, and in all honestly Mao Mita as a female action lead in itself would be enticing if she had ever continued from this sole film credit. A shame either way.

Black Scorpion (2001) Part 2

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

[The following is a continuation from the first half which you can read HERE. And yes, they were written separately over time, the first devoted to the first half of the one season of television and the later covered here to the final. You can tell a lot of additional emotion in the words what the final review and progression was.]

Halfway through viewing the Black Scorpion television series, you have a villain with dwarfism, more of a trickster who rides about on a hover board in the air (part of the show's then low budget CGI). He is dressed as Cupid firing arrows at bystanders that cause them to fall in love with the first person they see. He never returns after that one episode, and certainly is the most baffling moment of the whole season. He is not even the main villain of the episode, but there to cause mayhem in a scenario where the leads are paired with villains they had romances with, adding to the weirdness.

Black Scorpion, to be blunt, could have done with more of this as by the second half the sense of decline and numbness started to kick in trying to watch the show. It was doomed by the inherent structure of having to pad out forty plus minute episodes for its original station the Sci-Fi Channel, which would have been an hour with the advertisement breaks.  This is a huge crippling flaw, as you can feel the show having not enough to come up with in terms of good material, more so for a twenty two episode show, eventually draining for myself to see. It eventually has to rely on the same specific villains being brought up over and over even in cameos, as the show has established early in the season it can have even dead ones cloned back to life.

It is a programme where not a lot is sustained or memorable, and whilst the episodic nature could have been worked around, there is a sense too of the budget being way too small to really push into anything more than its template. It has to rely on a lot of dialogue and including all those poorly put together fight scenes with actors who (with sympathy for them) are clearly not trained even to do choreography. One episode is about virtual reality, which is strange as surely by 2001 the first wave of VR as a craze had died out in the late 1990s and would have waited to the 2010s for the tech to improve. It is mostly just to add production value in a fantasy medieval set or two for the deadly VR game, which allows Roger Corman to recycle his Deathstalker films for footage. Even then, the episode squanders cult actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as a fantasy grunt than a villain which could have boosted the show for a moment considerably. Set in a scenario where someone wants to use VR to help the homeless, by putting them in a virtual utopia, only for the mayor to use it for the prisoners in jail, Black Scorpion's political satire is still a mangled but fascinating mess even if less pronounced. Even a late running plot, of police chief Henry Strickland wanting to run for mayor, is quickly written off in two of the last episodes when it could have been rewarding to see where that went for the series finale.

A large part of the show, always and still the most compelling running joke, is that Mayor Worth is to blame for most villains due to his corruption. He even hires a band of female rockers, whose music is not as bad as everyone says but is grungy alt-rock with horror punk lyrics, to subliminally cause riots through their music for a mock morality campaign. That is satire the show had right in the palm of its hands and could have toyed with. That the show's humour instead is mostly bad puns, based on the villains' gimmicks, sadly becomes more and more the case in the last half of the season when before there was more playfully fun comedy. Even the villains themselves eventually become interchangeable baring one or two exceptions, like a hockey player that Mayor Worth accidentally has paralysed by his own team mates to rig a game, getting a robot suit from a mad scientist so brazen he enters a hospital room randomly and even has a glossy catalogue of his deadly tech.

Most of the time though the show is relying on buxom actresses in fetished costumes, neither helped by the fact the heroine's willingness to kill them is still there, even despite defending herself from accusations of this at one point. There are too many villains and too many killed off, preventing any from gaining traction through the series. Those that do sustain a bit of time are not really interesting either, baring their sidekicks of the opposite sex and common trademark of novelty themed bombs to throw out the back of the van like explosive ice cream scoops, as was the case in the first half of the series. Adam West, who was a stand-out in the early episodes as the Breathtaker, is reduced to a goon to eventually escape prison and is merely voiced acted, which is a miserable waste. The one figure who gets someone interesting is Stoney Jackson, as the Gangster Prankster, with an odd but memorable second episode where Jackson gets to stand out. That and the premise at least shake things up. That Argyle is forced against his will onto the side of the villains, actor BT one of the most charismatic of the leads, and where the plot eventually leads to. That, when Gangster Prankster is sick of a comedian mocking him on television, it leads to the creation of a device that causes people to expand like balloons and even explode when they laugh. It is bizarre, with a death-trap involving being tickled on the feet and Gangster Prankster wanting to cause mass explosions by dropping feathers on Angel City on a plane, but it is at least idiosyncratic for a series which is repetitive most of the time. If the show had kept to this warped, low budget pulp, it may have gotten more mileage for me.

Instead, I struggled eventually to even get through the series for writing a review, let alone to complete, all in spite of any episode by itself being innocuous. This is a show which, if shorter, would have been tolerable in spite of being very conventional, but as an episodic narrative where the characters will not progress it becomes harder to sit through for each episode's length and the amount of episodes. Michelle Lintel's lead has moments of conflict but really has no wiggle room to drastically evolve her character, whilst Scott Valentine, in-between directing one episode where we get an ice skating Black Scorpion for a memorable moment, plays a character who is pulverised all the time by villains. That also includes Black Scorpion herself, who usually kissing him afterwards, means that in-between their romantic chemistry, his character is also eventually going to be a masochistic if he was not before.

One of the few episodes to really take a challenge, and hence one of the only good ones, drastically upturns the show even in a scenario which eventually retcons this, bringing back normalcy by the end credits in a bizarre sci-fi twist. That Black Scorpion's identity is revealed and leading to everything getting darker - friends are forced to sleep in their cars due to their connections to Darcy, the police are after her, and Valentine's detective changes in his conflict of emotion. That this has to be amended by the lead getting a clone of herself, who is rapidly degenerating the moment she left the cloning tub due to an ever increasing brain, is weird yet gets into something compelling, including the continuous aspect of the lead having to fight against her alter ego, literalising it here.

It is one of the few compelling episode, and still in mind of having the bad puns and being around a villain from the first half of the series who is an evil photographer, the episode having to be forced out of all the series' bad creative decisions to be good. Even the two episode finale, which should be a major climax, feels brittle. Soupy Sales, famous among other aspect for his daily children's television show Lunch with Soupy Sales, plays a useless TV psychic who gets villains, abruptly just new clones than already in jail as they were, to cause crimes for him to predict. The resulting narrative has a lot of padding and does not feel like a jump in drama in the slightest. It becomes twisted in a way which is not dramatically compelling but just morally wrong too from one character, when Argyle has Darcy's dead father cloned to help her through a crisis of faith as a superhero. This would be the end of this version of the character, followed up by two compilation movies from episodes of the show, and frankly any semblance of this show working was clearly visible halfway through as not being there. Roger Corman whilst a man of huge talent is imperfect, and there is really a sense here, ironically, whilst he could make films cheaply and quickly in his golden era, that a television schedule is its own structure which could not be easily deal with. Black Scorpion had moments there were entertaining, but so much for a show I had to sit through for a long time I can gladly live without now.