Freakstars 3000 (2004)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Werner Brecht, Susanne Bredehöft, Ilse Garzaner, Mario Garzaner, Horst Gelonneck, Kerstin Graßmann, Irm Hermann, Brigitte Kausch, Christoph Schlingensief, Helga Stöwhase and Achim von Paczensky

Ephemeral Waves

 

But first, "How does the bath tub lift work?"

After his cinematic career, Christoph Schlingensief would transition to public events and live performances in his desire to provoke the German populous. In a review of United Trash (1996), I mentioned the infamous “Please Love Austria – First Austrian Coalition Week” stunt, involving allowing members of the public to vote asylum seekers out in a Big Brother scenario, all in mind to a far right group gaining political traction in the Austrian government at the time of that stunt. Whilst not the most provocative of these, especially in mind to the one just mentioned, Freakstars 3000 on the surface is definitely a work that could become tasteless even if in itself a provocative concept.

Freakstars, originally a television series immediately sets itself up as a curious film, neither documentary nor fictional film, begin both with a tribute with one of its participants Werner Brecht but also commenting that it had actors abused and made to act as disabled. Then an animated credit sequence appear with light hearted music, and thus begins a talent competition pastiching the likes of American Idol, which would have been in their first boom in popularity, only with the participants cast with disabled people. The project from Schlingensief was clearly meant as a provocation in terms of forcing people to think of people with disabilities (mental or physical) outside an alienating comfort zone of patronisation, like Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998). There are added provocations in this film, least this compiled production I watched, which would have been deliberately targeting the German audience; one such example, which I would not be surprised Christoph Schlingensief choose on purpose, is the iconography of a clamp for people's names and in the animated title sequence, which caused me to wonder if that was a reference to eugenics and measuring skulls.

The actual project, in terms of auditions and working with people with disabilities, is carefully done and ultimately more soft hearted than that initial concept and references suggest. Schlingensief does not look down on the people involved, all the audition sequences jovial and with applause as we see the first rounds a group gathering together in a playful singing or talent competition. The challenge is the presentation - rough early digital and TV aesthetic around the taboo of physical or tangible disability, jamming it into a middle class German viewer's eye. Truthfully, Freakstars 3000 is a failure because even the production felt this was not really enough, and that the film even less than eighty minutes goes onto tangents most of the time away from the premise. Previewing its later content, you briefly wonder if that is actually Angela Merkel on one of Freakstar's spin-offs, the future chancellor of Germany from 2005 in a mock political show, looking deeply uncomfortable as a disabled older man chews on the cud of political rot. Instead they are two of the participants of the show, one of them Horst one of the MVPs as an older man, playing a figure next to Kerstin, an older woman with schizophrenia playing Merkel, reducing German politics down to shouting figures whilst Horst thankfully points out the phrase "Hitler is a Nazi pig!" is one we need to say, or shout as he does, to remind outselves of that fact more often.

The film has tangents, from political shows to parodies of those old television advertisements that used to sell CD compilations, something I gained nostalgia for, as well as amusement that Germany had these ads too and that the fictional releases here have an exaggerated amount of discs per set, Horst's getting 555 discs for his music. It is, truthfully, somewhat of a fangless production in terms of what it is meant to be getting at. Ultimately, it's nice amused air to itself is sweet, as the denizens involved with this talent competition never seem mocked and insulted, even getting into fictitious scenarios such an abrupt (and frankly pointless) hostage sequence. There is however also a sense of the project in its entirety, if this footage compiled is the best of it, never really got to something meaningful, beyond the initial provocation of forcing the viewer to view people with disabilities. There are eventually quite a few tangents, and for everyone that is amusing, such as a home shopping spin-off, where a hand cranked mixed is proved useless, by the final act it starts to dwindle. When you get to the final candidates and a band, the talent show aesthetic is dropped in favour of a fictitious narrative, including one of the members Werner Brecht having a health scare, and a final performance with them as a free jazz band which never really gets to a point.

It evoked Young@Heart (2007), a quasi-documentary of a group of singers all over seventy, which was attempting to deal with issues of mortality and has vaguely clung to me, least for enforcing a fascinating with Talking Heads with a specific cover of Road to Nowhere, but was ultimately soon-to-be-forgotten work which never really stood out, wanting to warm fuzzy feeling of pleasantness which is always nice, but dissipates like a puddle in the sun quickly without substantial meaning added to it.. The only time the work gets mean to the competitors is the rejection of those who failed to get through to the next round, taken from the likes of American Idol, and even that here is softened considerably, even in one case with one competitor playfully wrestling the director Schlingensief on the ground restaged as a confrontation.  There is nearly a nod to the point presumed for this show, a jab at reality television and talent shows' cruelty as much as tackling disability, when a gong is used in a round to start the performances, evoking the immensely popular American show The Gong Show, but that never goes anywhere. Likely, with clear emotional sweetness, Schlingensief himself likely never wanted to be cruel to anyone who participated.

And they stand out, between Horst and Mario, the scene stealer with his singing voice and a surprising talent behind the drum kit, or Andrea a the AC/DC fan unlikely to work within a free jazz band, an entire cast of real people here full of charisma and energy. There is also something, even if obvious, pointed to reducing political parties, whether nationalist and anti-Semitic, or even a figure like Angela Merkel, into shouting caricatures, and it is poignant, especially to the references to Nazis, that it is disabled people playing them, an emphasis knowing that tragically the Nazis' view of disability were inhumane. Thankfully, they became the source for said disabled people long after they are gone to be taken the piss out of.

Sadly, Freakstars 3000 eventually loses momentum, losing focus among its various tangents and the emphasis on fake drama, even if the latter is a point to jab at reality television. Speaking as someone with autism, a learning disability, I say ahead of time I cannot speak with everyone who has a disability when it comes to gauging the film, but it definitely becomes a lighter hearted work which really never goes into true provocation. Von Trier's The Idiots, for example, was a fictional black comedy of people faking disability as a band of outsiders, likely to become offensive were it not, for me, a sense of it still being entirely on the side of disabled people. That film, part of von Trier's Dogma 95 era, really hit powerful points, especially when real people with disabilities are brought in, and those in these outsiders are forced to show either their empathy or their biases, and that it was a provocation of forcing one to think of severe disability and as a subversive nature to this within "normalised" society. Contrary, if this was considered in poor taste, it says a lot to how complacent German culture was at the time that Freakstars 3000 was mad. Milder forms of transgression, whilst useful to help built conversation, can however be much more focus than this, among many of this time for the director including a parody of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. It does feel tame, which could both be a sad state of myself to react this way, or truthfully that talking of disability requires more than a warm blanket sensation that this ultimately becomes, especially as coming from United Trash (1996), this is tonally a huge softening of the image of Christoph Schlingensief but also far less ambitious in terms of production and imagination in transgression.

United Trash (1996)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief and Oskar Roehler

Cast: Udo Kier as UNO-General Werner Brenner; Kitten Natividad as Martha Brenner; Thomas Nicolai/ Thomas Chibwe as Peter Panne; Joachim Tomaschewsky as Bischof Pierre; Jonny Pfeifer as Lund; Jones Muguse as Afrikanischer Diktator Hassan

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

It's not shit, its chocolate.

With United Trash, I introduced myself to German filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief. Making films since he was seven, the best way to read Schlingensief's career is either as a provocateur or the more brazen comment of a shit-stirrer, who viewed his home country and its society, including the middle class, in constant need to be attacked. Particularly once he transitioned from cinema to reality television and staged provocations, Schlingensief in his homeland of Germany went for the juggler. In that later period, after United Trash into the 2000s, he provocatively staged performances and becoming a media figure himself. This includes allowing members of the public to vote for whether asylum figures living in a Big Brother environment were allowed to stay or not in the notorious “Please Love Austria – First Austrian Coalition Week" stunt in 2000, after Austria gained a government including far right nationalists, whose outcry and success as a televised and public event, staged next the Vienna State Opera. A later work, originally a reality show on German television which became a 2004 documentary, was Freakstars 3000 which was a talent competition for people with disabilities.  

His lack of worldwide reputation for provocation is bizarre; especially when I get to United Trash and try to comprehend the barrage of transgressive lunacy I sat through, it is strange Schlingensief never really got his work a wider cult attention to my country knowing that the likes of Lars von Trier from Denmark were as capable of the same thing. For all I will bring up, United Trash is a well made film in terms of scale and its elaborateness, unexpectedly taking its influence from transgressive cult genre films for its goal to shock and awe the viewer. I will say, immediately, this is not a film for the sensitive. Shot in Zimbabwe, set in a mysterious African country with a dictator having been provided a German V2 rocket by a UNO general he intends to blow up the US president with, United Trash is going to offend someone, and that is not a lazy comment in this particular case.

It is the story of Peter Panne, son of a former sex worker and a UN German member. The UN member is UNO-General Werner Brenner as played by Udo Kier, the cult actor and a von Trier collaborator who worked extensively with Schlingensief, whilst his wife is Martha Brenner as played by Kitten Natividad, a cult and adult star whose early career includes later films of the cult director Russ Meyer. Already when you begin the film, chaos transpires. Surprisingly elaborate, even acquiring a helicopter for the opening, you already have a sense of the tone where everyone is shouting and nothing is sacred, including a side character called Bischof Pierre who is an excommunicated Austrian priest preaching to the locals an anti-Roman Catholic rhetoric, including wanting to drink the blood of the Pope, and Lund, Werner's bodyguard and lover. In the opening, Martha is ready to give birth to Peter abruptly, all set to what sounds similar to the Naked Gun theme.

United Trash, trying to figure out its purpose, is a complete burial of the United Nations and other groups with the ideal of trying to help in third world countries. You could lose sight of this in the film's willingness to throw itself into the truly bizarre, or that you have a barrage of multiple narrators and onscreen captions, male and female narrators and even Peter himself elaborating the tale, even subliminal messages onscreen the film warns of ahead of time. Alongside the distinct production style, with elaborate camera movements and time transitions shown through extras carrying signs stating them on handwritten signs, United Trash as a later film from Schlingensief is a rare transgressive film with a bit of a budget and benefits from Schlingensief's clear experience from his work since the eighties.

It is also a film, more so now, which is still shocking and at times in danger of just being politically incorrect with no real need to; eventually, due to a very unfortunate incident of getting a marble stuck up his nose as a baby, and his mother's attempt to remove it with a spike backfiring, Peter ends up with a huge gape in the top of his head, a slit which there is no way for me to circle around in description as it is called a "pussy" at points, which seemingly oozes squirty cheese. He is also meant to be a potential new Messiah, as if talked of in the prologue, one as a pawn for both Bischof Pierre for his anti-Catholic plan, who has seduced his mother, but also for the dictator who wants to drop the V2 into the president's bedroom. Your reaction to the film, barraging through its length in a quick pace, is entirely that it is not taking prisoners at all.

It has, when Peter gets the unfortunate injury, a scene of a doctor and his assistant in bloody surgery carving a prosthetic baby up like a turkey of fake blood, somehow managing to become an actor later than mere bloody offal. The film skirts homophobia, but only because Wrner's lover Lund is a degenerate, a comedic foil who is buff and has a fake tan, but for a joke also a pederast with a young infant Peter and marbles. A half-dead man, blown full of holes when a disgruntled local woman accidentally misses with a uzi, sits around Werner's sitcom home just wanting access to a public phone, and only in the country looking for sausages is a running joke for a large segment. This is a film where "pouring whiskey into his pussy" is an actual line. It also, bluntly, has a scene of Kier in black face (and blackened torso) wanking a banana off his banana skirt which would have not aged well even then, meant to be shocking in a scene where Kier in a UN military cap, black face and a banana skirt entertains the laughing locals on a stahe with Lund in a seventies tracksuit, all of which is beyond bafflement.

It is meant as satire, the UN and frankly Western involvement in general in the African continent viewed as inherently corrupt and misguided, let alone any specific African country, bringing their idiocies over to another land and making it worse. References to Yugoslavia, and the bloody collapse of that former country into multiple in the nineties clearly hinted at, are evoked as being one of the UN's achievements, and the film even to the point Martha and Werner's home is depicted in as a sitcom with canned laughter, burying its leads as misguided figures farcing around in another country. That the local extras are sidelined, mostly background figures with many performing songs and music nearby, can be seen as much as a mistake of the film alongside its provocations. Ironically, Christoph Schlingensief himself clearly must have realised the film as a satire of Western involvement in Africa did not work, or at least went further in a way that sooths the film's scattershot nature. He would go on to create the Operndorf Afrika (Opera Village Africa) in Burkina Faso in 2010, a cultural institution that would include a school, an opera house and a clinic¹.  

The film in truth is a mess, but I will openly admit to having been taken aback by the film, compelling in its own right for how far it goes in its humour. It is also a rare case for Udo Kier having a lead role, and it is amazing to see him act with the energy of 110% extra force than previously seen in films from him, a rewarding experience to see him unleash a level of energy I have never seen from an actor I have always admired. He is matched by a cast as equally willing to fling themselves into this twisted farce. Kitten Natividad in particular, factoring in her willingness to be naked on screen including covered in mud, has as much energy as the brash American figure among the cast, a distinct presence physically but matching it with a bravado as much too in her performance.

Tonally too, the film does come off as a completely alien and perplexing work. Neither is it just how transgressive the film is - in the fake blood, or playing to taboos or the nudity - but even in the little touches like a kazoo suddenly appearing in the score which disarms the viewer. Your willingness to adapt to the film is a factor, including how brazen the film is to drag the viewer along, pulling them back and forth with the constant narration or jumps forwards. It will feel too much for some viewers even before factoring its transgressive nature. Certainly where the film heads to even when described does not begin to spoil the experience of what is seen - the US White House depicted within Zimbabwe with the local cast, cameos by a fake Cicciollina and Jeff Koons, obliteration followed by a happy ending by way of incestuous marriage, and a strange blob creature infant from a Frank Henenlotter film as an ending shock from the later's films - and realising this is the European art house equivalent to a Basket Case (1982) or one of the cult American films, only with its idiosyncratic choice of location and higher production value, is an experience which catches one off-guard.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Transgressive/Weird

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

 

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1) As talked of HERE.

The Force Within (1993)

 

Director: Richard E. Brooks

Screenplay: Bob Manus and Stuart Steel

Cast: Stuart Steel as Nick Larson; Joseph Campanella as the Police Chief; Ross Haines as Cadillac Joey; Bob Manus as Lt. Bevins; Kathleen Kelly as Chrissy Bancroft; Gigi Greco as Ronnie; Sunny Hom Thoon as the Master; Todd Papia as Richie Lombardi; Joe Callo as Jonnie Lombardi

An Abstract List Candidate

 

"I never cum on the outside, I cum on the inside, that's how I keep my power!"

 

With that quote from the film to begin, The Force Within is definitely peculiar. Martial arts culture influenced a lot of people, and when it was possible to, anyone attempted to make a martial arts film in hope it would sale. The Force Within is a strange creature, and initially be aware readers that the martial arts is not great in the film. It is a lot of a slow motion to compensate for the cast, trained in the arts but clearly slower rather than the kineticism of Hong Kong martial arts cinema or even the American straight-to-video films of the era in this genre, and what the real meat of the film is turns into a paradox between the lead actor clearly wanting to sell himself but in a very convoluted way.

The lead Stuart Steel plays Nick Larson, who is meant at once to be a cool figure but is also a completely undefendable figure. In one way, regardless of budget, a martial arts anti-hero who is completely undefendable, as his former master (known as just the Master) is brought in with his new pupil, is interesting. As a drug dealer, Nick is self-destructing as his own gang lose money from their illegal gambling den, or when they get money back waste it on the horse track, whilst Nick is killing corrupt cops when they want too much money and collapsing in the web of his own fate. Nick is definitely not a likable figure, despite Steel clearly acting as he is meant to be cool with all the women he beds in his strip club, having also been the man behind the story behind the film and being an executive producer. Because he is a drug dealer, he is unscrupulous, and contrasting a man who teaches a martial arts school for kids at the side, he is also proudly dating a sixteen year old named Chrissy (Kathleen Kelly) and is effectively controlling her. Never becoming physical as a relationship, as he cheats on her with all his new dancers at the club, he does effectively keep her locked up with coke and puzzles as a bribe, which makes it not a surprise when she turns to coke behind her back. It is not a character to try to act as a cool figure, rather than an interesting evil anti-hero whose downward spiral in this case just ends up with a martial arts fight in the end. It proves fortuitous that Stuart Steel never acted again.

And Nick's obsession with not coming, returning to the starting quote, is a bizarre touch in that part of his martial arts ability is to channel sexual energy without losing his semen, retaining it for sustained power. This, actually, is from the Taoist concept of "retention of the semen" to prevent loss of vital life force, as I can attest to reading a text of Chinese erotic art in university where it explicitly touched on the belief of how drawing energy from women through carnal acts, but also not ejaculating and even learning an alternative way of orgasm, all a real belief in Taoist concepts of the past. Knowing this film does have some real verisimilitude to the films they want to emulate adds to the strangeness, as is the back-story of Nick's skill being explained by the Master to his new pupils through public domain martial arts films. It is a shame none of this, for all I will say is entertaining about the film, never of any use as that reference to a very idiosyncratic Taoist custom is unique to say the least.

This is also a film that sustains a lot of its own energy through many tangents. The crime plot is there, but you have a lot of scenes of dialogue, and especially scenes in the strip club which take up most of the length of the film. Set the very nineties dance music, a lot of which co-composed by "Brat", there is quite a few dance sequences that take up the film's short length (stripping, erotically dancing with a snake, and an abrupt trio of female dancers from a British variety show). There is a comedian, in the film meant to not be funny, who claims he was on The Ed Sullivan Show and with the joke dragging on until his fake hair is pulled off. And then there is Otto and George. Otto is the MVP and the crux of this film's misguided nature, as alongside the bizarre decision to hire a ventriloquist at a strip club in the world of this narrative, Otto is a now very un-PC puppet whose jokes even piss off the mullet wearing Italian gangsters in the front row, drawing their guns out onto their lap. You can guess, dear readers, this character and his humour has not aged well, under his mop of black hair and distorted cherub face, when he does jokes about HIV or deciding the virtues of self-fellatio against women, alongside a surprisingly still scathing one about Woody Allen opening up a kindergarten, (look up Allen's scandalous life for this dear reader), or that he has the back of his head custom built to expose his brains in a long JFK skit that varies between Kennedy's real infidelities and his Dallas assassination. Otto gets a lot of time onscreen, clearly the marquee for the filmmakers, even though this is meant to be a crime-martial arts film.

It does have an erratic nature of never figuring out its own point. For the British DVD release, the figure on the poster is an older man with salt and pepper white hair, clutching a woman with a pistol in his hand. He is just a minor character, played by the prolific television actor Joseph Campanella, a police chief in-between importing palm trees to Brooklyn trying to take forty percent of Nick's income, but not a figure of real note to the narrative. Some of the unpredictability is worthwhile, such as in response to one of your bodyguards being killed, Nick showing a great inspiration to hijack a opposing gang's birthday party for a member with a gift of a cast middle finger in tow, before knocking teeth out, or that to punish a member of his gang, death is done by way of forcing them to take cocaine repeatedly until it bursts their heart¹. Martial arts cinema has always had a weird streak, an unsung weirdness whether dealing with the Shaw Brothers' most idiosyncratic productions or the Western productions, so it is with a shame The Force Within for entertainment you have to bear in mind how miniscule the quality of the actual combat is compared to the weirdness of everything else.

A lot of the fact it cannot go beyond its restrictions also means how languid the film is. That a lot of the martial arts has to be improvised around, not only in the slow motion use, but also in a lot of training sequences as the Master himself, likely a non-actor, is a figure not an elaborate location but a small dojo likely a real place a viewer could have gone to. It means when the film does try to be a crime film, it does have a bit of grime, such as gang members bursting into a drug addict's white walled flat, killing him and his girlfriend over stolen money, but also the film has the budget to have a lot of locations, neither micro-budget and yet not quite the straight-to-video martial arts films of that era that got DVD releases in the early 2000s era of the British market. It feels a contradictory film in its construct.

Likewise, whilst I have adapted to the world of micro-budget cinema, the sound and music use does become even a mess for me, erratic at times between the music being too quiet in scenes or a mess of sounds, technical faults even in some of the duller films from that early DVD era of cinema in this genre were able to rise above. Stark in its low budget, with aerial scenes of metropolis (the same one) crowbarred in, the bigger disappointment with the film, if any, is that its director Richard E. Brooks, despite only making two films, was a prolific cinematographer in his career beforehand. Yes, he was a cinematographer on Creating Rem Lezar (1989), a notorious American video production which gained internet cult status, but he also helmed Dark August (1976), an evocative regional horror film from Vermont that, alongside its subdued and moody narrative, looked exceptional in context from his work. One of the only films he made, in contrast, is a film that will be difficult for many to sit through, as beyond a lot of nudity, never was there a film that was indulgence defined and also looked of its little budget.

Nick, and actor Stuart Steel, are meant to be likable at times or cool, but is definitely a scumbag, our only uneven focus within a drama which awkwardly moves along. Quoting philosopher Lao Tzu before the end credits, this is a film desiring something profound, which has been the following for so many films which have burned in the pyre of failed movie making. I will say, truly, I found it compelling as a mess, but I will add the caveat that even in this context, I have seen weirder films in this area of cult cinema, so it is an acquired taste only. In among Furious (1984), with its random chickens, or the weirdest of Shaw Brothers like Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983), The Force Within is minor tier for when martial arts cinema gets funky.

Abstract Spectrum: Haphazard/Procrastinating

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

 

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1) That or lines like "We're going to be combing Ninja Turtles out of our hair real soon", even if it possible un-PC and very early nineties nowadays.

Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

 

Director: M.J. Bassett

Screenplay: M.J. Bassett

Based on the videogame franchise by Konami

Cast: Adelaide Clemens as Heather; Kit Harington as Vincent; Carrie-Anne Moss as Claudia Wolf; Sean Bean as Harry; Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva; Malcolm McDowell as Leonard; Martin Donovan as Douglas; Deborah Kara Unger as Dahlia

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #227

 

Silent Hill: Revelation is not a good film. It says a great deal that, with my negative reaction to the original film by French filmmaker Christophe Gans, Revelation manages to convince me that the prequel was a better production. The problem is simply that, adapting Silent Hill 3 (2003) from the videogame franchise, is that you have a film at ninety minutes having desired to elaborate on a complex narrative but never bothers to let the viewer ingest and soak in the world. Everything within this film, whilst cliche, will always been intriguing for a fan of horror storytelling like myself, and there is plenty to work with. Cults, an evil god, a cults, a god, a figure in the lead Heather (Adelaide Clemens) who is in hiding with her father (Sean Bean) and her connection the place of Silent Hill, an abandoned town which descends into an alternative world hellscape when the alarm sounds.

In mind that the original video games are famous for their slow drip feeding horror and psychologically complex content, and a lot of horrifying monsters, there is a film here like so many American horror films of the 2000s onwards (even popular ones) which are like rollercoasters but not for me imaginative ones. Looking at Revelation without the context of the videogames, it runs out of the gates very early into itself. Following from the prequel, Heather is connected to a dark past of Silent Hill, an abandoned town lost to a nightmare based on a former form of herself left there, on her eighteenth birthday drawn back to the environment and a cult there wishing to dispose of her dark other half. It makes very little makes sense beyond this. It does, but it is thrown abruptly onto the wall, and in mind to what the videogame narratives might have had, one would hope they are not this abrupt throughout with their use of their plotting. This crowbars a lot including the other half of Heather, Heather as a character herself, and a large part of the Silent Hill mythos including cults and trying to resurrect gods, but what you get is a lot of exposition and CGI monsters rather than trying to elaborate on this.

Originally commissioned in three dimensions for the theatrical screen, part of the return of 3D as a gimmick in the late 2009s and early 2010s, this does have the presentation of a haunted house experience as, at the moment Heather is in a mall, you get more absurd kooky horror than psychological dread where kids turn into demonic figures eating bloodied offal, and she enters a kitchen where a tied up male victim is having flesh cut off him to cook on the griddle. This is definitely, even as someone who came to the film never playing the Silent Hill games in time sensitive context, not what I came to knowing those video games for, even when they at the time of this film had Western made sequels not well regarded. Even if its original creator Konami have not been as kind or strict to their franchise as you would think, including commissioning a pachinko machine from the series' iconography¹, but the problem in truth is that, even if this is the divisive goofy entry in the franchise, it was never actually an experience to sit through, just a case of a film which hurdles along and leaves no impact, every decision ill advised in presentation even if everything in the plot ideas is not inherently bad.

It is not scary, but the worst thing is how abruptly put together the film is and how predictable it is. The moment the cult subplot is introduced, it is one I have seen in other American films, but that is less of a concern than how it feels ultimately pointless as a plot thread, never interesting and is barely with context in the scheme of things. The sequel follow on from the first film, but it feels an abrupt extension, including a sister from the original antagonist who is barely given screen time and only stands out for her pale skin and lack of eyebrows, ultimately a figure to turn into a Hellraiser film character design abruptly as a final antagonist. Knowing, in video game lore, the character Claudia Wolf is actually important to the original Silent Hill 3 game as an antagonist makes this even worse in how she was handled, even worse for film fans knowing they cast Carrie-Anne Moss, who many know for the Matrix franchise, and barely gave her screen time in this role.

You have a generic male love interest, feeling sorry for actor Kit Harington as for everyone in front and behind the camera, a figure has a secret to him which is obvious. Pyramid Head, the iconic figure from the Silent Hill franchise, is misused again, here a guardian figure who spends most of the film tied to a merry-go-round as its tormented engineer. Malcolm McDowell, the legendary actor once behind Lindsay Anderson films like If... (1968), makes for some fun and a potential H.P. Lovecraft tangent this film could have had as a man deemed insane for having realised there are multiple dimensions, including the Silent Hill hellscape itself. He is only in the film briefly, turning into a monster, and to throw out the term "Metatron" abruptly, thus burying a figure from the real Rabbical Talmud as merely an unseen plot exposition, so this is sadly a brief glimmer of joy.

The truth in Revelation is the opposite problem to the prequel, the first 2006 wanting to tell a story in its slower pace ultimately not that interesting, and Revelation hurdling along without thought to its material being more creative or unique either. Neither haunts the viewer, which is the biggest lasting mark of the original video games whether their writing and technical aspects (like voice acting and graphics) age for every new gamer or fan to the franchise or not. Even the prequel had a haunting nature in briefest of moments where you wandered through an abandoned town full of raining ash and Akira Yamaoka's score from the games standing out.

The one moment which offers something at least lurid and creative, only to be lost, is the one monster in the film clearly designed to stand out. A freakish doll monstrosity with multiple heads, held in hands too, and including the heads of victims turned into mannequins and ripped off the petrified corpses to become part of its form. A weird spider creature, its creation in CGI is unfortunate, but alongside with the one exploitive moment in the film, with an actress cast to do nudity as the victim turned into a mannequin, you have at least something which is weird and perverse even if the CGI and knowledge this creature will never return to the film to be dealt with neuters it. It says a great deal to that, when you research the original Silent Hill 3 videogame, there was even more weight made of what is called "The Memory of Alessa", effectively an evil doppelganger created in the game's complex lore who is talked if here in exposition with weight and ties back to the first film. Within that game, you at least had a boss fight, whilst here osmosis by hugging abruptly resolves that issue quickly. Cast who returns to the film, even in cameo, never have any context for them being here, such as Sean Benn, and baring a weird context of lopping limbs of prisoners in an asylum and a boss scrap, Pyramid Head is a concept without any of its initial context, sapping the horror of a figure who, merely made from polygons, became iconic in the first place for gamers.

The fact the film came to me, and will go, is a tragedy. It is a tragedy, not wishing to bother to talk of it in any elaborate detail, where I feel sympathy for its director-writer M.J. Bassett, or the cast, feeling that it in another time could have been something special but is tragically a work that shot itself in its feet. If we have to talk about this in terms of videogame adaptations, for myself personally the greatest sin with many of them was never accuracy to their source material, as I tended to come to many without the original context, but whether any had energy to them. Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a terrible adaptation of the source material in terms of adaptation, but I openly admit it is a compelling goofy and bizarre creation, turning a platformer into a Blade Runner pastiche with fungus people and Dennis Hopper, whilst Street Fighter (1994), a bad adaptation of the source, is entertaining just for Raul Julia's godlike scenery chewing.  Nothing in either film, even if angering the fanbase, of the Silent Hill films really stood out as memorable in terms of interpreting the source material, and ultimately between them they are a real tragedy in their own ways together with such promising source material.

 

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1) Dubbed Silent Hill: Escape, as detailed HERE, Konami can as mistreat their own franchises to their fan bases as anyone else can, so I will not just cruelly dog pile Silent Hill: Revelations for tonal choices only.

Legally Blonde (2003)

 

Director: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

Screenplay: Rachel Sweet

Inspired by the novel by Amanda Brown

Cast: Jennifer Hall as Elle Woods; Paul Korver as Casey Whitehouse; David Moscow as Oscar; Caitlin Mowrey as Keaton Wescott; Christina Pickles as Professor Abbott; Harve Presnell as Henry Whitehouse; Celia Weston as Mrs. Ingrid Tolleson

Ephemeral Waves

 

My nicotine patch is wearing off.

Countless films have had television series made of them - even Casablanca (1942) with a 1983 one season with a young Ray Liotta in a tiny role. Legally Blonde, after the success of a 2001 film, starring Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a sorority girl obsessed with style but also wishing to become a lawyer, led to 2003 a sequel Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde but also a television pilot. (There would be two sequels in total, the third a direct-to-video sequel, a planned "official third film, and the musical). The television pilot was obviously meant to capitalise on the success of the films, created the same year as the first sequel, but never went beyond an unsold pilot lost to fuzzy bootlegging.

Which is not surprising is that it is not a great pilot. What is strange is the knowledge that its quirky premise as a franchise could have been something special. Even without context of the films, which have their own following, there is a fascinating premise here of the stereotype of women upturned to have empowerment. Elle Woods has the natural blonde hair, is enthusiastic and obsessed with fashion, the stereotype of the ditzy natural blonde yet especially with this version coming to law school with knowledge and the legal mind that undercuts the insults she gets from others presuming she is dumb. It is inherently a feminist idea to imagine here, that for her pink clothes and a Chihuahua called Bruiser Elle is intelligent, just however someone who is atypical to the image of a female lawyer, whatever that exactly means. Instead, this one also loves Dido and tries to claim to know Tom Cruise to get a rented apartment.

Replacing Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Hall as Elle Woods is the best thing in the pilot with her peppy enthusiasm. Mainly an actress for television, sadly her cinematic filmography is not as large, a shame as she has the enthusiasm, certainly managing to make this caricature a fun and likeable figure. I do not joke with the idea of this being able to subvert ideas of feminism, least in the sense that appearance is in the eye of the beholder. Likewise the stereotypes of a fashion obsessed glam figure is itself a potential cage unfairly put on women when, whether their preferences in dress and style, they have the capability to be very intelligent and skilled people. It is not really a joke either even in this pilot's broad form, with Elle as capable and potentially sharp in her ability to be a defence attorney or prosecution as she is in her choice of shoes. That the premise is playing with the stereotypes of natural blondes as well is something to bear in mind, as it is pretty obvious (and in itself problematic to know does need to be spelled out repeatedly) that stereotypes can apply to anyone and all of them are cruel.

Clearly, the premise worked for one theatrical film, even if because of Reese Witherspoon as a lead actress carrying it on her shoulders, but here you have an example that any premise can work, but bad or flat execution fails them regardless. I think of a later day Anthony Perkins television pilot from just before his death, The Ghost Writer (1990), which had him as a horror writer whose newly wedded wife and new step children had to adapt to his creeping haunted house, but the execution there was a broad and flat comedy. Here, with unremarkable early 2000s pop punk and pop on the score blaring, the vibrant fruit of the premise dies on the vine too.

The scenario depicted, a mock trial about whether a larger male student is allowed to play on the women's hockey team or not, is reduced to wearing pink and convoluted arguments rather than a potentially more subversive ideal of Elle being a damn good lawyer in the making who just happens to be overtly "girly". That, and to draw the longest bow for the review, is that this would have been the closest you probably got to a show tackling transgender politics we would have to talk about in the late 2010s, but again, anything profound is lost, especially as in over twenty minutes, Legally Blonde zips by on a surface level.

Legally Blonde the pilot barely gets through the initial setup of its premise, as much around Elle finding an apartment, and an inkling of a friendship with the original antagonist named Keaton, before it finishes never to be seen again as a world. Neither does it help the pilot that, whilst she is meant to be sympathetic as a young woman belonging to a rich privileged family wishing to stand on her own, a black sheep for wanting to become a lawyer, Keaton is really not a nice character, an obvious one who is cruel and blunt for the sake of it. Even their female lecturer, after insulting Elle originally, least shows a sardonic wit and appreciates her students when they think smartly.

It leaves one envision an alternative world, or the truth that the idea of television pilots can be more enticing than the results. I can see in these unsold or cancelled pilots, for their abruptness, fragments of realities which never find a conclusion, fragments like dreams, like how we cineastes obsess over fragments of films, unfinished projects or even lost ones like the segments of the Dead Sea Scrolls partially broken into fragmented sentences. It is in this one, or at least I, cannot help but think of how you could take this format of the unsold pilot and transform them into surreal dreamt fragments. Even releasing them even officially as DVD extras would have made sense if the rights were possible to wrangle.

But you also have to realise that, with this pilot's flat look, it really does not stand out. Neither does it help the show, baring its lead, does not have a supporting cast to really stand on. Keaton is not really likable; the male love interest is only interesting when first seen wearing an eye patch for sight issues, only for him to discard it; even attempts at adding minor personality to characters likely to never reappear, like the older woman who ultimately gives Elle an apartment as much as being a natural blonde once, get lost in the pilot's generic form.

The only thing that really stands out is a feint hint of early 2000s nostalgia with the music, but alongside the pilot clearly being paid by singer-songwriter Dido with its constant praise of her in one scene, even that is merely a fragment. I may have been born in 1989 but my adolescence proper was in the early 2000s, where the soundtrack was nu-metal's last gasps, pop punk bands like New Found Glory and the beginnings of streamlined emo by the mid-2000s, which really do not really appear in this pilot at all. This pilot's light colourful sheen only can carry it along so far too, and honestly, it is not a surprise it never was picked up for a full season.

Shakedown (2018)

 

Director: Leilah Weinraub

Cast: Egypt, Jazmyne, Mahogany, Ronnie-Ron, Slow-Wine and Keyonna Taylor

Ephemeral Waves

 

Some places are just hard to find.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic when it began in 2020, where many were likely watching films on the internet unless they had also acquired large DVD collections to finally go through and rewatch, there was a perfect time to appreciate cinema's more maligned areas when blockbusters were being held back for a year or unable to be completed. At a time where there were films lucky to have been finished, but many were instead delayed or not yet released, the time useful for the sake of bringing attention to both retrospective titles, like the virtual We Are One film festival which screened on YouTube between May 29th and June 7th 2020, but also smaller independent releases. This context is worth bringing up as, alongside being a fascinating documentary built from footage director Leilah Weinraub filmed through the early 2000s of a lesbian African-American strip dancing group known as Shakedown, Shakedown's history should also include the fact it premiered on PornHub¹ even before going onto the Criterion Collection's streaming service or the film's own website. That is a distinct thing consider, especially as this is proudly an LGBT work about lesbian African-American culture, juxtaposed by this distribution context.

This detail has thankfully not overshadowed the film, in mind to Pornhub and mainstream pornography being still seen as a local leper, due to problematic attitudes to sexuality worth questioning as much as problematic puritanical attitudes that single out porn for no justifiable reason. Historically, it will show alongside entrepreneurism that Shakedown's director Leilah Weinraub took this brave risk, and she deserves blessings for a great work but also for having a promotional decision that, as this would afterwards be on The Criterion Channel, blurs media sides. It also fits a film whose (evocative) poster and its footage within itself is not shying away from being sexually frank too. Within a world of "studs" and "fems", the world of Shakedown is of female dancers in erotic and explicitly sexual dances for a female clientele, surrounding them on the dance floor and even slipping dollar bills in their g-strings. Shakedown both is a film proud of being sexually explicit, and also one without needing to spell it out that really forces one to question notions of gaze and idealised physical attractiveness.

Coming to this as a male heterosexual viewer, obviously this world is for me from being an outsider, and as a white viewer as much so. It would be frankly stupid to consider my opinions the ones to follow in thought on this document. As an outsider however, probably the most fascinating immediate detail is that, whilst the dancers and patrons are of all shapes and sizes, many of the women we follow and interview dress and perform in deliberately hyper-feminised ways in their performances, usually seen from a male heterosexual form of eroticism when depicted. The film has discussions on this whilst stereotypical images such as money placed into g-strings and twerking are witnessed in a world of proud gay black women who dress and act how they want.

It is technically a documentary, but it is more meaningful to call the work an archival project experienced in first person by the director, Weinraub putting together filmed pieces shot by her during the nineties into the early 2000s following female go-go and strip performers at black lesbian bars. As someone who is remotely alien to this world, it is an uncensored lens to the world which is greatly appreciated as much for its pride in showing itself. We see the people in this world and talk about a world of theirs. Egypt, among the many dancers with such distinct stage names like "Slow Wine" and "Jazzybelle", is one of the most prominent voices, who openly admits to having once as a teenager in high school, not coming out as gay, having beat up other girls in high school who tried to make a pass at her in cheerleading groups, a long progression to finding her sexuality when having been brought to a gay club called Catch 1 without realising its target patrons. We see these dancers as ordinary people, Egypt's girlfriend both a former teen fan who found a poster of her and that is the real woman against her persona Egypt. We see the backstage, dancers getting changed and ready to go out, and there is a lot on how many of them came out of the closest later in their lives. One of the most distinct figures, the MC Ronnie-Ron, talks of having been from a Jehovah's Witness upbringing, not coming out as gay and originally when she had being a "fem" only to find herself as a "stud" dressed down much later, become one of the most charismatic figures in the documents as much for the brash personality that would have came to her in that time.

We see gay parents, one a female dancer with their daughter the first "Shakedown baby", one of the absolutely sweetest segments to see, including footage of an interview show called Issues in the Hood, where for the one person surprised of one of the female parents' occupation, another person calling in says they should be proud of themselves regardless of said occupation. In contrast, returning to the poster of Egypt, that is one of a couple of tales of how posters of her advertising the club, homemade posters for Shakedown and other "parties" shown throughout, became fixations for teen girls. Against discovering their sexualities there is also however a tangled web in the cases brought up. Even in mind to an anecdote of one girl stealing a poster from her mother to keep under her bed, and being beaten for it, a lot of blatant outward text of one's inner life when one's parents having posters for these clubs, even if married, is talked of a few times, alongside the fact that Egypt's friend who brought her to the club, which led to her finding her sexuality, was gay to her surprise too and unaware of.

Throughout there is a nice and subtle reminder, without hammering it home, to never make snap judgements of what sexuality should be as, between a performer who deliberately exaggerates her costumes to the point of drag to Egypt herself, who was came out gay only when she was brought to such clubs. These are all individuals and their sexual attractions vary wildly. Their matriarch Mrs/Mother Mahogany, who runs the clubs, even talks of there being a vast difference between stripping for male patrons and for women, for the later far greater need for dress, pose and how to portray femininity to tantalise the female audience, whilst the flexibility and openness of the community means that, costume and body diversity alone, all the dancers here are vibrant and powerfully eroticised figures in full control of their own image. Whether first wearing a full fireman's costume, street clothes to suits or costumes deliberately chosen to barely conceal a thing, this is as vast and creative as you can get from these performers in how to express them. Particularly, again with mind as an outsider, of the stereotypes of how black women are sexualised in mainstream media, it is really ironic and fascinating that those stereotypes are embraced by quite a few of these dancers, including in dressing and acting in a way to emphasise their figures, alongside women in the crowd or running the establishment who do not wear makeup, dress down and act the complete opposite. 

It is only seventy plus minutes long, which is a shame as this subject matter (if the materials recorded at the time were plentiful) could have been longer. A timeline of this culture in Los Angeles with footage shot by the director on early digital cameras, it is low resolution and of its time, among the homemade posters and DIY attitude of the performers and their MCs. The film is proudly sensual and erotic for any viewer of any gender and sexuality, but entirely from a perspective of a minority in LGBT culture with its own characteristics, which is a huge virtue of the film coupled by the complete lack of patronisation and lecturing within this world, throwing them instead into the middle of it with some onscreen text and talking head interviews for context. Entirely working class, with a lot of background in Baptist and Christian churches, this world is shown and allowed to breath. There is even male figures, such as an older guy who talks of being in this area the Shakedown headquarters are at since the fifties, who looks to the club we follow with friendliness and mutual respect as someone who is hired as an employee.

The only time Shakedown depicts anything oppressive is when two male white police officers abruptly appear in the middle of a performance and arrest a dancer halfway through her act for soliciting, not even bothering to cover her up as they handcuff her hands behind her back in a way that comes off as humiliation. The sense of this club, and these gay women, being outsiders is finally felt as it is male police officers who continually appear to interrupt the club, disguised in plainclothes and abruptly appearing as outsider threats. Their sense of banality, when the director manages to get conversation with them (even if lying about having turned her camera off), makes it far more troubling especially in how, in the middle of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States went through the entire Black Lives Matter movement and a lot of greater existential questions of how police should be. Ultimately the male owner of the building not wanting sex taking place in his establishment is what tragically ends the Shakedown parties, he feeling like an outsider without understanding the wholesome environment he is intruding on, forcing eventually the tale of a safe place being torn down and having to be rebuilt as the ending.

Shakedown is a film I admire just from the perspective as an outsider to this culture being permitted access to this environment. Hence documentary as a genre tag would be a disservice when this deserves to be called a home movie, to embrace the intimacy of Leilah Weinraub being a participant of this world, and an archival piece, worthy of those tags as positives as it is a snapshot to a place and community bristling in energy and excitement. More so as this is a community of progressive ideals, not stereotypes stand-ins as framed ideals, but women who are a variety in who they are and themselves a far admirable image to raise up as an LGBTQ ideal. The decision to premiere for free on PornHub was only until the end of March 2020 and, sadly, this is easily a film that can slip through the cracks after the initial surprise of that promotional strategy, when in truth it is one worthy to see. Choosing PornHub ultimately has a rewarding existential question in itself too. In late 2020 as well, PornHub flushed half if more of its user generated content when accusations of unwholesome content were made at them². They themselves too as the mainstream face of porn is an albatross around their necks too when, in image, the stereotypes of mainstream pornography can easily stick to them even for all their amateur and professional figures of all types who create material for the site. Not even in terms of questioning the tropes in mainstream porn either honestly, but whether the tropes are in themselves gauche.

Something like Shakedown is a rewarding and even subversive work to briefly have connected to such a site, with real LGBTQ women proud of themselves, and painting an image of their own desires and sexuality which, as mentioned, defied many presumptions. That of a) what is eroticism for a gay female gaze and b) that presumed stereotypes of the male heterosexual gaze, in shapes and sizes, do not necessarily exist as things merely only men like, but that the problem was always the male objective gaze, not a woman's dress sense and figure. The film also does not in the damndest hide the explicitness of the sexuality, both in how explicit the nudity seen is, and even with eroticised smothering of whipped cream at one point mid-dance, and a mock strap on performance, among scenes. A hell of a lot more powerful erotic imagery can be found here regardless of the average viewer and their sexuality and gender, greater knowing it is for gay women by gay women.

 

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1) More detail on the film can be read HERE.

2) HERE.

Crime Wave (1985)

 

Director: John Paizs

Screenplay: John Paizs

Cast: Eva Kovacs as Kim Brown; John Paizs as Steven Penny; Darrell Baran as Ronnie Boyles; Jeffrey Owen Madden as Skip Holliday; Tea Andrea Tanner as Dawn Holliday; Mark Yuill as Stanley Falco; Neil Lawrie as Dr. C. Jolly (as Neal Lawrie); Bob Cloutier as Mr. Brown; Donna Fullingham as Mrs. Brown

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'd say the guitar stays behind until you're unbroke.

Not to be confused with Crime Wave (1985), Sam Raimi's follow-up to The Evil Dead (1981), written with the Coen Brothers, the Crime Wave I am talking about is an obscure Canadian film and a curious one at that, shot in "Total Colour" and produced with "Select-O-Sound", one which went out of its way to replicate a time that never existed by even having a score, by Randolph Peters, evoking old educational films.

In this world, a family has let out a room upstairs to Stephen Penny (director-producer-writer John Paizs in a mostly mute role), an aspiring writer who wishes to create the greatest "colour crime film", and working at night by street light when he types. Living over the garage, the young daughter Kim Brown (Eva Kovacs) develops a bond with him, wishing to help Stephen overcome his writer's block. She even gets (as we the viewers do) a demonstration of optical illusions all within a story, which she narrates, of Stephen being unable to overcome his ability to create a script and the frustrations surrounding this.

A significant section of the narrative, with Stephen able to write beginning and ending but struggling with the middles of narratives, is the story of Crime Wave, Stephen's goal of a tale, in its various forms. Of vying tribute musicians - Buddy Holly, Hank Williams and Sid Vicious - with an Elvis impersonator named Ronny Boyles getting involved, one of the many stories written and unfinished by Stephen who ends it with the Tribute King dying by crashing face first into a telephone pole in a car wreck, the pole (including the face imprint left) becoming a tourist attraction.  Or the Always Diamond couples and beauty goods distribution wars, with a couple who steals from homes and even murder when need to, leading to a wheelchair bond woman's mouth being blocked with dog biscuits, or a self-help book guru who has a mental breakdown and bashes his head on the kitchen floor to die. All the unfinished scripts we see, pastiches of real crime films, with real old posters on Stephen's walls like Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955) and The Sellout (1952) with Walter Pidgeon, are funny in their weirdness. We even get the fragments, as Stephen cannot write middles and leaves the attempts in the trash for Kim to collect, from an abrupt cancer subplot, hidden bondage roleplay, or the unfortunate death of a child's pet when it went under the lawnmower.

It seems a crass thing to say, but this is a very Canadian film, at least in the sense Canadian films, when they are eccentric and allowed to be weird, are their own unique type of weird cinema, an eccentricity with quaintness where trivial things are magnified in their oddness, like a character having car counting at night as a professional part time job. This is however contrasted by a perversity; the calm and politeness of Canadian culture they are stereotyped is subverted in the likes of Guy Maddin's films as they are here, with moments of abrupt gore, and very explicit referrals to sexuality. Sex is just nearby, be it nudity or secret kinks, and even with the daughter at one point, a young teenager leading to raised eyebrows, offering Stephen to overhear her parents having sex at night to pass the time.

A lot exists on the fringes of Crime Wave, its gee-whiz mentality contrasted by so much, set in a timeless yet contemporary, which belies a more sinister edge. Of fringe groups of a more positive light too, but still ostracised, such as a group of men hanging outside in the day in the streets who are possibly gay cruisers, only to be target of homophobic half-ton truck drivers, or overtly bleak such as the fact that the final act is caused due to the town of Sails, Kansa being closed and abandoned due to a radiation accident or some "secret stuff" that means any left pets have to be shot immediately. Some of the jokes may be too dark for some viewers - in one case, an imaginary film called "The Last White Man in South Africa", an action story only seen in a poster and one scene of a Rambo figure, has not aged at all unless you call it a really bleak joke in mind to where Apartheid was at this period - but the tone in itself, strangely humble in spite of what is not hidden at all, helps considerably for impact.

The twisted nature (and weirdness) of Crime Wave comes to a head when, to help Stephen, Kim sends a letter to Dr. Jolly the screenwriting expert. Unfortunately Dr. Jolly (Neil Lawrie), who looks like a gaunt Joe Bob Briggs, the cult film and exploitation movie expert known for his Southern redneck persona, has also gone mad, trussing men up on beds and riding them in a cowboy hat, hiding the bodies after death in the boot of his car to dispose of. Crime Wave itself, to pastiche old genre films, is structured as one only in a very bizarre form, where Stephen's inspiration (by way of a street lamp over the head) is to turn on himself, and the genre tropes when they do appear are subverted, when a conflict is resolved by a car driven (or hurtled along) by a dog behind the steering wheel abruptly. With its incredible and distinct colour palette, looking of even the forties, and a whimsical tone based on old idiosyncratic influences, by way of Canadian educational films, this was a pleasant surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Perverse/Weird

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

Computer Chess (2013)

 

Director: Andrew Bujalski

Screenplay: Andrew Bujalski

Cast: Patrick Riester as Peter Bishton; Wiley Wiggins as Martin Beuscher; Myles Paige as Michael Papageorge; Robin Schwartz as Shelly Flintic; Gerald Peary as Pat Henderson; Gordon Kindlmann as Tom Schoesser

An Abstract List Candidate¹

Just the number of possible games explodes exponentially with each move, it's close to 10 to the 120th power. And to try and compute all those games might take even longer than humanity would be around to do so.

1980. A computer chess tournament is taking place where computer programs are pitted by their creators against each other over chess games. As the games take place in a hotel, sharing space with a New Age therapy group, a series of increasingly bizarre details start to be noticed by the people there. The cats found everywhere, and there is a strange woman in the foyer outside. That the computers, particularly one Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) is maintaining with his colleagues, are developing bizarre ticks and possibly even self consciousness is an issue to consider as well. It is, as a premise, a very idiosyncratic one to begin with, but more so with mind to its director. This is because Andrew Bujalski is known as one of the founders of the "mumblecore" subgenre.

That genre is a divisive one even in whether the title is even official, a nebulous name for a series of low budget dramas which emphasis improvisation and dialogue, whose processors include underground cinema and John Cassavetes. With a film like Computer Chess, it is best to imagine it closer to those predecessors in existing in an undefined genre, a drama surrounding an ensemble of professional and non-professional actors work from a scenario onwards, one which Bujalski was obsessed with and was finally convinced to bring to screen as an intentionally "unmarketable" project. It firmly eyes the past of American experimental cinema as far as their own uses of now dated filming technology like video and 16mm. Computer Chess was shot, and deeply influenced, by Bujalski wanting to shot the film with vacuum-tube-based video cameras which, even if they would have been a nightmare to work with, drastically added a necessary aesthetic dynamic to the film's lo-fi aesthetic.

What could be seen as for the sake of nostalgia, with its captions of text having to be added in post production, usually slanted by nature of the obsolete computer tech clearly being used, is one of the first virtues of the film, where the deliberate artistic choice has a pronounced effect for the film dramatically and for mood. Meant to replicate the early eighties where the primordial versions of computer geeks are crammed in a hotel, it adds a frank harshness to the material, particularly as part of the shots are meant to be footage being filmed from the tournament's grandmaster Henderson (Gerald Peary), a chess champion who wishes not only to document the tournament but intends to challenge the winning computer system himself in a proto-Deep Blue scenario. The camera rarely moves, not an issue as in lieu of older American films, like from Paul Morrissey, the dialogue is heavy, constant and compelling to follow, the small character interactions becoming fascinating like a microcosm of personalities and eccentrics.

One where Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), one of the more unconventional and openly rebellious competitors, spends most of the movie sleeping in corridors due to not having a booked room, or how the one female member of the chess tournament finds herself effectively patronised by the chess master who wishes to virtue signal her presence in a really tone-deaf way. Where there are even two drug dealers that are also conspiracy figures, believing they will be witnesses to the beginning of the apocalypse, one believing that this is all a secret Pentagon related test for military programs, a conspiracy which for some other characters may actually turn out to be real and lurking in the background of a harmless chess tournament.

The camera used gives a archaic look, exactly that of old filmed documents on other obsolete formats like Betamax or 8mm. Materials I myself once handled as part of a volunteer position at a media archive and as a result can attest to their strange, ethereal qualities - time capsules of a period one cannot reach, captured in materials that drastically effect them as much, materials which add their own fascinating hazes. Whilst Bujalski's work here is minimalist drama, the format choice gives the sense of the viewer having come across personal home footage, willing to take risks even with a colour segment that, within a mainly black and white film, comes as a sudden shock to one's perceptions. Then the camera used starts to glitch out at impromptu moments, none of which were actually deliberate on purpose but the issues arising from using the camera. Accidental moments which take place at the right times also happen, when cracks start to appear in Computer Chess' initial tone and things get weirder for a film wishing to move aware from the director's genre creating legacy. Subtle oddness, meaning this is remote from the most abstract films ever made, but following on from the best of this type of low budget American cinema where Bujalski never lets himself become shackled to tropes of his genre, stepping out of them to conjure up a series of peculiar details the characters start to be as concerned about as things go along.

The subject of computers at their infancy is a major subtext here, fears less of computers turning into Skynet from the Terminator series but their self awareness being more strange and perplexing. This is especially the case as the computer programmers here, including the sole woman Shelly (Robin Schwartz), tokenised as the sole female tech at the tournament by the men, are not the glamorised ideal of modern pop culture but a subterranean minority developing these computer systems at the dead of night. A minority working on machines which may even be throwing games in rebellious boredom, computer intelligences wanting to play human players instead, or asking questions back at the programmers asking those questions originally to them. Their behaviour in the tournament can already be described as weird due to programming hiccups, the introductory forum before the matches covering an infamous glitch from the tournament before that evokes less embarrassment, but how the misfires of these computers can be seen as idiosyncratic quirks human beings can have.

And then there are the cats. Not just two running around the hotel corridors, not just three, but also an entire hotel room full of them never explained and a full scale infestation of the hotel. The new age therapy group the chess tournament have to share space in eventually break into the other's lives due to this awkward space issue, who participate in mock rebirths they include Papageorge in when they find him sleeping in the conference room, or when the chess master's hubris is undermined immediately on the day he challenges the winner because he did not book the room long enough and has to work around the New Age group. An older couple from the group even attempt to get Bishton to join them for a threesome, suggesting the limits of a chessboard as a metaphor for his closed nature, only for him to inform them the numerous moments one could play on a board could take longer than most human lives to document the scope of, leading the two sides bleeding into each other as esoteric outsiders away from conventional normalcy. All of this feels like real incidents Bujalski could have taken from his everyday life, thus proving reality could be even weirder than an active imagination. He eventually add slithers of material feint of full blown sci-fi that go even further from this. The system Bishton works on becomes a character in itself, a cranky machine that loses games on purpose and even gets into supernatural horror in a flashback sequence, when someone makes the unwise decision to ask it existential questions. And the final shot involving the mysterious woman in the foyer continues a trend in 2000s and 2010s American independent cinema of strange pop surrealism, the tastes of genre cinema and non-sequiturs that flash up in films with body horror stubs and flushes. ([Spoilers] Especially when you think about that fact she can pull the back of her head off to expose the brain underneath, asking one to consider what that final moment pre-end credits musical number means. [Spoilers End])

Stylistically the tone is maintained throughout all this. Bujalski steers the lengthy conversations into areas that even if the subjects are strange always are interesting or funny. Bujalski's subject itself, despite being seen by him as un-commercial, is inherently of interest, as there has always been something fascinating about the least likely of topics findings themselves the centre of films. Communities in their own worlds with their own languages which are mundane to the outside world but when allowed to breathe in a feature length have a life to them. Something that Bujalski takes seriously with respect, just happening to also notice the weird what-ifs in such a world. With virtually no context for Andrew Bujalski in the slighted until Computer Chess originally, this was entirely new for me when I first saw the film, utterly rewarding for the differences he brings to such material. The best kind that distorts genres to the point of being legitimately unclassifiable, at least in terms of detailed categorisation, but stays focused over ninety minutes to become low budget filmmaking that never becomes predictable or cookie cutter.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

 

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1) The following is less a re-review, but a republishing of an older review from 2017, tidied up for my current style of writing, and rewriting segments to be more precise. The original review by itself perfectly encapsulated what I felt about the film.