Vertical Features Remake (1978)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Colin Cantlie as the Narrator

An Abstract List Candidate

 

For me, one of the most rewarding films in the career of Peter Greenaway is Vertical Features Remake, an early short film which I will argue is one of the most perfectly executed in his career, hidden away at a period before making feature films which leaves it easy to malign next to many great titles more know. Presented as a public information documentary, in which a fictional group known as the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration attempt to recreate a lost film by the figure Tulse Luper, it also has importance to Greenaway's career. Tulse Luper, a character created as a journeyman and polymath, would have one of his most ambitious projects based around him, The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003-4), one which despite being a trilogy including meta-narrative additions is among one of Greenaway's obscurest productions to see. Even among those you can find with greater ease, even little details like a specific water tower film archive used in image will be returned to for Drowning by Numbers (1988).

Set to library music synth, composed by Brian Eno, in its opening credits, Vertical Features Remake looks like an actual documentary from this era were it not for the production having to correct itself constantly. It is the driest of dry humours you will need to appreciate this, effectively a structuralist avant-garde film which however has a meta textual sense of the self-referential, but if you can get past the main content of the film, it is compelling. The main content is "Vertical Features", a project by Tulse Luper which, reinterpreted over multiple tries as new theories and archival documents are found, consists of 121 shots of vertical objects in English countryside towns being shown in order in a varying time per shot and sometimes set to music. This is the aspect which is still a dense and obtuse avant-garde film to experience. Viewed in the right light, as the later adaptations get said music and vary in shot length in more varying ways, it is actually peaceful to sit through the segments like one could an installation work, but it is the one thing you have to bear in mind as they are experienced as whole short films within one forty plus minute experimental production.

The humour is entirely how many jostling voices come into this project, predating Greenaway's The Falls (1980) and his experience at the Central Office of Information (COI) suggesting to him the farce of trying to create comprehensive archives. Told entirely with narrator Colin Cantlie, and still images representing everyone outside the Vertical Feature remakes, the arguments for and against the project, and having to remake this project over-and-over, does have an intellectual concept of how one struggles with attempting to recreate the past based on merely preserved notes and artefacts. It also gets to the point one figure will even question if Tulse Luper even exists, an excuse for the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration to get funding for this self indulgent technical editing exercise, which is where the dry farcical air comes in. Combined with Michael Nyman crafting most of the score, at the beginning of his work with the filmmaker, and this is as esoteric as you can get, crossing Greenaway parodying a documentary from the time but also sincerely, in many ways, creating an experimental structuralist film, its creation of a fake history as unconventional as you can get in terms of filmmaking.

And it predates The Falls' entire structure among other shorts he was make beforehand, his debut a three plus hour film parodying attempting to catalogue the world in a more elaborate and bizarre structure with this same template. The Falls is less avant-garde film reconstruction but more science fiction narrative of a world after an unknown incident turn people into bird people, with all the use of pre-existing photos and just more actual actors to push this further. It definitely shows, right from the get-go, Peter Greenaway would have easily continued into this experimental world but found himself moving towards dramatic narratives with the experimentation in their structures and themes, finding a way to go forwards. Here, subversively, even if still difficult he may have also figured out a way to make explicitly avant-garde material much easier to digest.

The beauty of the English countryside against very rigid experimental art is a fascinating juxtaposition to have, unlike other real experimental films which have pure coloured shapes and sound only, and the set-up as effectively a piss-take on the subject also makes the content have a greater depth. An argument is made by the end Tulse Luper's project, for a group known as Session Three to develop a "dynamic landscape", was actually a condemnation of his own group's plans by showing the potency of the landscape already, alongside hints at colleagues being likely to have destroyed or altered his work through their own goals. It is still, by parody and making an avant-garde film within a film, Peter Greenaway tackling subjects that will appear in his narrative works, where a lot of protagonists struggle in terms of making pure art or life goals fighting against individuals who wish for purely political, financial or emotional victories. It is, know to me for a long time, a secret masterpiece in Greenaway's career even for the simple fact that, effectively a short film, it is the right length, has no chaff even with four "remakes", and is artistically perfect as it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Meditative/Playful

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

Blog Update September 2021

 The following post will be brief, but a necessary one. Simply put, a significant change in my personal life, involving moving home, will transpire within the remaining year into 2022. This is significant because, whilst it may not affect the blog's existence, it will affect content currently and may affect it in the future.

Currently, there is a significant amount to clear out, including old notes with one of the goals to have content ready even a month plus ahead if need be for the likely effect of the move. In mind to this, recently, there has been less focus on "abstract" cinema, but hopefully this will change alongside a very odd and esoteric mix. This move encourages a need to go through planned ideas that never came to be, for this blog, for the side content Games of the Abstract, my other blog 1000 Anime and possibly some Archive material too so that everything is dealt with.

I intend to plan ahead for October 2021 and Halloween by trying to have as much content in most of these topics ready, maybe covering horror films beyond the month, for a very eclectic choice. I intend it to be celebratory, in mind to the move's likely effect on me, so it is going to be a curious mix of many types of posts. Clearing out old notes, which I admit are handwritten, I am not just going to dump odds and sods as they are, but wishing to flesh them out, they are a going to be a weird mix even for my standards of topics, which in itself may lead to some entertainment for your dear readers is just finding the least expected juxtapositions every time you long onto the blog. This will last into the next year as I want them all cleared out, alongside topics which come of interest as always happens when you plan ahead but find things you want to write about as time passes.

In terms of the future, even if it means a change in content, if it leads to fewer posts to focus on other concerns and/or bearing in mind a change in what is covered, that will simply because this will clear through indulgences, including streaming subscriptions, and a change of personal life in a positive way. I do not see this as a concern in truth baring concerns of how it will go, and the wait to see how it goes, but that does not mean this blog, which was a hobby to do to unwind, will be left to gather dust or have less passion place upon it.

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009)

 

Director: Rob Zombie

Screenplay: Tom Papa and Rob Zombie

Based on a comic by Rob Zombie

Cast: Tom Papa as El Superbeasto; Sheri Moon Zombie as Suzi-X; Paul Giamatti as Dr. Satan; Rosario Dawson as Velvet Von Black; Tom Kenny as Otto / Rover/ Old Man / Herbie; Brian Posehn as Murray the Robot; Dee Wallace as Trixie; Ken Foree as Luke St. Luke; Geoffrey Lewis as Lenny Crumpski / Roy Sullivan

Lew Temple as Adam Banjo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #234

 

There's no cable in the jungle.

Opening with a thirties cartoon aesthetic, with black and white animation, and even orchestral music, I came to one of the more curious titles within Rob Zombie's career with no idea what to expect. El Superbeasto is an animated film, one which was originally started in 2006, a production which really cuts against the image even I had of him, as he lets his hair down and is effectively goofing off here. Even when our titular lead runs over Michael Myers of the Halloween films in his low-rider for a one scene joke, it is not a extreme as what he did in Halloween 2 (2009).

El Superbeasto, a farcical tale set in a horror world metropolis, follows an egotistical luchador-slash-actor in a very tentative narrative, one with a large cast including his far more likable eye patch wearing stepsister and spy Suzi-X (Sherri Moon Zombie), and a plot of a figure named Dr. Satan (Paul Giamatti) wishing to marry a woman with a 666 birthmark to gain great power. This in context of his film making career, Rob Zombie doing comedy is really strange especially when he was a divisive director of very violent horror films of an acquired taste, one I openly admit barring The Lords of Salem (2012) and Halloween 2 I have not caught the same wavelength with. This adds the weird touch, for what is a film I find a lot of problems because it was trying too hard, is how the figure of such work like The Devil's Rejects (2005) is proudly a pop culture geek of material some of his fan base probably did not know of and, unlike including Urotsukidôji sound clip in a White Zombie song, is probably very uncool to them. For example, it is a hardcore reference, of something no one who may have been the target audience of his films at the time would have known, to have a visual cameo of Korla Pandit, an African-American musician who posed as an Indian composer of exotica music, making a cameo as the piano player at the marriage from Hell.

It is also of its era, as with carte blanche, El Superbeasto asks the question whether you can be ironic with having so many animated bare breasts onscreen, even to the point the song composers Hard 'n Phirm, who come from the Black Dynamite (2009) school of explaining what's onscreen, have a song telling viewers it is okay to masturbate to cartoons and feel like true Americans, even if the film was produced with a South Korean studio. And credit where it is due, for a film whose production was a case of a frolic for its creator which expanded in scope and production, this does look good. It does admittedly evoke The Ren & Stimpy Show, a show I grew up with which is a cursed thing nowadays to make comparisons to, not even because of its creator John Kricfalusi being accused of sexual misconduct and grooming of teenagers, but that he infamously rebooted the series as an adult show with Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" (2003), a cursed item for many that even a voice actor for the original (Billy West) refused to work on the project¹. That reference, bearing in mind childhood memories are useless to work with, also brings up the issue that El Superbeasto is far more interested in shock value and being silly than actually taking advantage of its tone and world for better jokes.

El Superbeasto is a very crude work, when our lead, a completely unlikable figure prat, is introduced working on a film-within-a-film where, parodying porn, he turns a woman into a living pizza or, really evoking Ren & Stimpy, has another woman erotically sucking one of his rotten, horrible looking toes. At times, the film comes from a time where many people were trying to get away with stereotypes or deliberately shocking comments which, long before "Social Justice Warrior" was considered an insult, was always just low hanging fruit in terms of humour. Rosario Dawson, as Velvet Von Black, a stripper able to inflate her body on command and even mould a breast into a balloon animal, skirts a line of just having Dawson playing all the vulgar and cuss filled stereotypes of a poverty class figure that speaks and farts her mind as much as imagine an unrepentant figure inexplicably finding herself in the plans of marrying Dr. Satan, he himself literally a nerd bullied at school who even without that context was an annoying sex pest. It is also a film which is knowingly being ridiculous and throwing the kitchen sink in with a couple of zombie Nazis, and that too raises the issue that, even without some of the more questionable jokes, this sinks under just wanting to be over-the-top without taking a breath or really embracing the virtues, sunk within itself, which would have been funnier, still incredibly lurid but also even deeply weird in the best ways.

The result is an acquired taste, one which even for Rob Zombie fans would be a great indulgence. This indulgence is what put me off. Moments in this are funny, legitimately so, and some aspects are fascinating to have seen if it was not trying so hard, which makes this more of a strange thing to have to unpick through. Beneath the music by Hard 'n Phirm, whose over explaining for a joke is overbearing, and the over-the-top nature of crude humour and drawn nudity, there is something compelling of being in Rob Zombie's brain, being in a world where the strip club has legendary horror character cameos and monster women dancers, where the most obscure characters he has referenced in lyrics live, not surprising for a man who, whilst reaching trendiness when the likes of Dragula was a track in The Matrix (1999), was referencing The Munsters, an old sitcom from the past even in the nineties when Zombie had Dragula as a popular song.

One of the huge virtues is just Dr. Satan and his assistant Otto, an intelligent ape with a British accent who hates crude things, living in the corpse of King Kong underground with a creator he hates but is stuck with due to Satan being able to twist the screw on his head to turn him into a beast again. Casting Paul Giamatti as Dr. Satan is eyebrow rising but also a beautiful surprise, as Giamatti also happens to steals the film alongside Tom Kenny as Otto, who is a veteran of voice acting famous for playing Spongebob Squarepants. The pair of them and how the characters are written, Satan a dweeb and Otto the figure who has to put up with him, alongside the running gag of Otto's friendship with their elderly elevator operator in very slow conversations, is the sort of thing where you get the perfect mix of humour that is funny in the children's show for grownups tone, and also to funny crude humour when Otto catches Satan wanking and the viewer realises those are dog squeaky toy sounds on the soundtrack to represent it².

Also having clearly gotten the tone right is Sherri Moon Zombie as Suzi X, with Brian Posehn as Murray the Robot. Yes, her character is a hyper-sexualised cheerleader, ahard-as-nails stereotype of all the sexy action women of nineties pop culture who you can have naked all the time, but alongside the delight in Sherri Moon putting on that high pitched voice for the role, there is the knowledge, regardless of what you think of Zombie having all the nudity and sex humour in the film, which is sweet of always having his wife in his films, always presenting her with admiration, even here in this insanely sexualised figure still feeling it was given to someone who would have been game for the role and knew exactly was going to be animated. More so as, since mocking Nazis is a crude joke that is completely defendable, she even gets to steal Hitler's brain (or his head) and mow down an entire mass of incompetent zombie soldiers with her sexually frustrated robot friend, whose relationship shared is a very kinky and passionate one which shows how you could have had your cake and eat it throughout in having the adult humour.

This does ultimately, sadly, become a barrage of jokes with a knowing wink, an irony that does become more a concern than being consistent or actually be engaging rather than too much to digest. As much of this is not appreciating this type of tone at all in truth - that it would have been better to instead be sincere and try to create a world where everything is weird - and that eventually you are also with a film which is just improvising in the end. When it, alongside cameos by regular collaborators with Zombie like the late Sid Haig, it will end on a parody on old southern music television for the last scenes, it feels crow barred in like a lot of the gags do. It is fascinating to be inside Zombie's head, and see how cheesy it is, and that in itself a worthwhile advantage of witnessing films like this, but as I have found in some of his straight faced horror films, there is here too, for all my interest and like in him, or someone who if he focused or embraced the more esoterically weird touches of his work would have won me over more easily.  

 

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1) Referred to in the following interview, though bear in mind of the more "curious" comments within the brief section on that title, including the context that the new version of Ren & Stimpy played up the characters being bisexual for humour. I think we can all agree even the 2000s was a different time even if I do not immediately jump on titles like other amateur reviewers may, with stuff that in hindsight was questionable back then let alone now. Strange as it is too, whilst it would have to come with a warning of John Kricfalusi's problematic accusations for good reason, looking back at the original series and even suffering through Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" would be fascinating, even if the latter especially sounds like stapling your testicles repeatedly.

2) And for less crude jokes, casting Ken Foree as a talking cat, if you are in on the joke by knowing who he is, is the kind of winking joke that does win you over.

Battle Heater (1989)

 

Director: Jôji 'George' Iida

Screenplay: Gorô Nakajima and Jôji 'George' Iida

Cast: Akira Emoto, Hisako Hara, Masao Imafuku, Kenichi Ishii, Pappara Kawai, Gorô Kishitani, Takayasu Komiya and Shigeru Muroi

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #233

 

In cinema, we tend to lionise the director, hence the auteur theory; even when people have argued against the theory, directors hold an important place as the helmsperson, the captain, of a production. Think of those directors who have not developed cults, for all those maligned or leaving the director's seat after a short career, and wonder what they contributed. Jôji 'George' Iida is an example, whose filmography is fascinating to look at, of an obscure director with a very eclectic career just in genre cinema.

Starting among the boom of low budget, straight-to-video horror which developed in the late eighties, only to continue on with the likes of Another Heaven (2000), a flawed and convoluted horror murder mystery which nonetheless had a lot to admire, he worked into the modern day as a screenwriter in television, or an original creator. Spiral (1998), the once-forgotten sequel to Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998) released theatrically at the same day in Japan and taking a huge step in a different territory¹, is likely his most famous work as that has become of more note in the modern day. Iida makes interesting films, even Another Heaven now having a fonder air to it for me now.

We will begin with the obvious - this is entirely about a demonically possessed onsen, a type of heater-table hybrid, meant to keep one's legs warm and that is entire unique to Japanese culture. They are an object you learn about when their pop culture imported globally, and you have the absurd fact that, yes, this is as ridiculous on the surface as an American horror film called The Refrigerator (1991), a real film about a flesh-eating refrigerator. Also idiosyncratic to Japanese culture however, and referenced in voiceover at first, is that their folklore talks of how an object that lasts for over a hundred years develops a consciousness, hence why even a film like this which is intentionally comedic is still not as ridiculous as it would have been if a Western film. When your folklore has horror tales about possessed umbrellas, it is not something that breaks credibility even if meant with humour, which Battle Heater proudly wears on its sleeve. When the title is literally depicted as a giant foam object of rock in the beginning, and a Buddhist monk is eventually crushed by the "End" title of the final shot, Battle Heater is deliberately silly, without irony but playing up to a gleefully morbid sense of humour.

The evil onsen happens to be acquired by two equipment salvagers, the youngest accidentally removing the seal that keeps the malicious table dormant. He happens to live in an apartment complex full of eccentrics: the punk band who bully him and whose singer wants to steal his love interest from; a woman and her lover who have killed her husband, and are secretly (and slowly) disposing of the body; and an elderly couple revealed, in the darkest of humour, to have built a contraption to kill themselves with alarm clock timed electrical current. Immediately Battle Heater stands out as, rather than dragged out and a dull tale of an evil heater table, all the subplots are interesting up to the point the onsen acquires enough energy to become a giant monster, occasionally killing someone by tricking them to sleep by it like a Venus Flytrap. The dark domestic humour is really interesting - particularly the lover and murderous wife as, casting an actor as the torso of the dead husband who does an exceptional job of acting with his mouth open in rigor mortis, their bickering relationship of a soured adulterous couple is (even of a different culture) comparable in the best ways to similar characters in British comedy.

All of Battle Heater, as a result, is incredibly broad but an advantage in that there is a style to the material, straddled between modern Japanese life and its own world. One minute you are in a scrap yard wasteland in a Lucio Fulci approved phantom zone, covered in fog to match his own history of using fog machines, the next minute the school the female love interest goes to where, in machinations, the mass crying student populous awaiting the final concert of a beloved music teacher will provide the mass screaming populating fleeing a demonic table as it eats a drummer. Probably the best aspect of this is that, in actuality, it is still a small production that relies on some silly production design with care. The murdered husband is an actor clearly propped up in a hole pretending to be half a corpse, but it works; the onsen itself is wobbled, rattled and shaken about; there is even a scene of its plug, moved about likely on a string (and even having first person shots hunting for a socket) that adds a sense of play.

In Iida's career, this marks a different direction from the more serious films he would make in the horror genre, which makes it a distinct production. He is good at comedy, broad and with a lot of slapstick, but the visible dark humour stands out too. The surprise of seeing this film, which I hated the first time I ever encountered it as an immature viewer, to the point of being on the lowest 1/10 tier for an inexplicable reason, comes with a greater admiration now of this obscurer genre director. It is an impressive little gem, and to think once ago I hated the film that much feels embarrassing in hindsight.  

 

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1) Especially helped, when they re-released the original Ring trilogy of the 1998 to 2000 films, that physical media distributor Arrow Video included Spiral as an extra film restored in their 2019 (late 2010s) box set. Spiral is fascinating as its own curiosity, especially in mind that the re-canonised sequel, Hideo Nakata's own Ring II (1999), is a perplexing creation in itself that would divide people. Not surprising when Nakata would admit he was influenced by the infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the strangeness of his own sequel against the bleakness of Spiral make them a fascinating duo to exist.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief            

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief      

Cast: Udo Kier as Adolf Hitler; Alfred Edel as Hermann Goering; Margit Carstensen as Martha Goebbels; Volker Spengler as Fegelein; Andreas Kunze as Martin Bormann; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Joseph Goebbels; Marie-Lou Sellem as Tochter Goebbels; Asia Verdi as Nurse Morell; Brigitte Kausch as Eva Braun

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Enjoy them, the nuts of the Germans.

[Major Plot Thread Spoilers]

From the year of my birth, enfant terrible Christoph Schlingensief shot this film improvised in an actual World War II bunker, documenting the last days or so of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle before their world collapsed. You could say it is tasteless, not comparable to a serious take like Downfall (2004) with the late Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Yet, with the added irony of the Wim Wenders connection this film has which we will get into, and how most now know Downfall for turning the scene of Ganz's Hitler getting angry into an internet meme, whether about video games and films, how one deals with the legacy of the Nazis especially as a German is salient to the project's point and a fixation Schlingensief has been pointed on.

In a 2005 documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, effectively an extended sit-down interview with Schlingensief by director Frieder Schlaich over his career at that point, one of the points Schlingensief made, and is contrasted by the broadness (and for me misfiring) nature of Terror 2000 (1992), is really profound to consider. That of how he talks of Germany having been ultra-tentative about Nazi history, saying that if they had left it open and let it corrode in public, there may have been less concern of its fetishisation and a rise in Neo-Nazism. German law, even to the point videogames had to be censored, understandably had a strong reaction to trying to deal with this history even if you are against censorship. One of the bleakest moments in their history is a difficult one to deal with, and yet 100 Years of Adolf Hitler cannot be said to be trivialising it either, even this perverse farce having a profoundness when, because of the evil he committed in real life, Hitler is reduced to Udo Kier as a drug addict, Eva Braun clearly being more attracted to Martha Goebbels, and Goebbels himself carrying on incest with his daughter. In fact, no one in the group of male party members still alive really likes Goebbels, more fixated on getting the Reich Councillor position and hoping to oust him even in a bunker they are all stuck in.

Terror 2000, which was made in the post-Soviet Union fall and tackling the question of migrants in German culture eventually did become merely uncomfortable, as for a subject which has been a discussion for the country even decades later, it never really was a film about the migrants themselves and does eventually, particularly with its attempt to mix corpse humour with content like rape, end up missing its target. Here the mix is right, even when it does cross into taboos like sexuality that dances a dangerous line in that territory too in one scene. It would almost being tragic seeing these people lost and broken until you remember that the real figures led to World War II and the Holocaust, the follies of people who acted worse than beasts yet tragically still human. These tragic figures a small cast of actors play in 100 Years... bicker, feel cornered, argue about who gets a higher rank when all this blows over, even Hitler's origins when he originally wanted to be a painter evoked even if reduced now to Udo Kier making arse prints in paint on canvases. Theirs is also one of the bleakest depictions of Christmas celebration you could get only screen to, with scrawny trees in the darkened corner. At fifty five minutes too, this never skips over into dragging on, and the last days of Hitler are not told the same as real life.

Case in point, Hitler does die, and yet you can become the Fuhrer, and can only take that name and that of "Hitler", if you have the moustache, which Eva Braun eventually does. It would almost be subversive in another way, were it not for the specific figures involved, that Eva and Martha Goebbels are romantically attracted to each other from their introduction, and are married at one point, even if it leads to Martha dying and her birthing a (cloth doll) child at the same time that will be put in a river like Moses in a wicker basket.

Though a film made in little time, it is a striking production, actually shot in a bunker, with the film also shot in stark monochrome and using only the lighting available from the production as the only lighting source. It neither hides its artifice either, based on a play, as you will see the clapboard multiple time and calls for "Action!" in many scenes, a film openly admitting its improvisation. So much so as I leave the most curious aspect which bookmarks the film at the end of this review, as it is the most open to interpretation. Wim Wender's 1984 Palme D'Or win at that year's Cannes Film Festival, for Paris, Texas, which could be seen as the most profane aspect of this entire film even in lieu to its trivialisation of the evil of Nazis, with the footage of the German auteur's award speech, about the potential of art, contrasted to the film it has the footage within which is about the worst of their culture being turned into a profane farce. With Kier speaking directly to camera the names of highly regards high art filmmakers and actors in his first scene onscreen, like Wenders to Margaret von Trotta, there is a sense however that, next to the emotionally tender Paris, Texas, this as Schlingensief's 'career would continue is a pit stop into the grotesque on his end. Certainly he is not pulling his punches, with malice, when he cuts to a figure by the end of the film talking of how, if you do not talk of politics at the time, the German people should have been proud of their achievements and resilience during and after World War II. In the modern day even if a misinterpretation that really skates the dangerous line of forgetting Germany's guilt and why it exists in the first place, more so footage used in a film from the nineteen eighties. Even this film bastardising and trivialising the Nazis never forgets their sins, merely mocks them.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990)

 

Director: Naoko Omi

Screenplay: Shiira Shimazaki

Based on the manga by Kazuo Umezu

(Voice) Cast: Ai Orikasa as Nanako; Naoko Watanabe as Masami; Rei Sakuma as Miko; Shinobu Adachi as Rima; Ikuya Sawaki as the Narrator

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #232

 

Anime horror is not as common as you would expect, least before the 2000s. Even with the golden era of straight-to-video "OVA" (original video) anime in the eighties and nineties this was surprisingly not common, despite the fact that alongside the likelihood of a higher production quality than TV series, you could get away with content that is more adult. Hentai can get aware with more even in mind to certain Japanese laws, but that is its own territory. In the modern day, TV series have increased on the subject. You have to work around television restrictions unless you intend to release it cut and have the uncensored version for sale, but this genre has grown over the decades nonetheless.

Manga is on the other hand a place where horror thrived, and as the cult of Junji Ito grew in the West into the late 2010s, as Viz Media started publishing his work again in hardback releases, these titles and authors in the field can sell. One figure that we only tentatively know of in the West, but has had work adapted in live action in his homeland, is Kazuo Umezu.  Umezu also knows how to sell himself - he looks like the Japanese cousin of the titular character of Where's Wally?, with his red and white striped clothes, and even had his house painted in this trademark colour. Umezu has worked in other genres, but horror has made him a veteran, one whose work in animation is rare. One exception is a rare title, The Curse of Kazuo Umezu, one which was so rare it is the kind of title, if not for fan preservation, that would be obscure to almost everyone. How you come to acquire the license, considering how many straight-to-video "OVAs" were made in the eighties, let alone preserve a title like this is going to make this frankly difficult to access beyond that fan access. It is a shame as, for a tiny little fragment, it is nonetheless fascinating even as merely a rip taken from a Japanese VHS by a Western otaku.

At over forty five minutes, the anime is two short stories.  The first, a schoolgirl suspects that the new transfer student is a female vampire, but thanks to videotape, the truth is more horrifying. The second is of a group of schoolgirls going into a haunted house to their peril. The most distinct aspect of the anime, bookended by a mysterious thin narrator/crypt keeper who entices us with morality tales, is the visual look of the anime. Clearly, there was an attempt to replicate the style of Umezu's manga, black lines heavily used and very grotesque imagery. It shows in the female characters, if just their eye lashes and eyes, who dominate the entire anime. It looks good in terms of design, and the format allows for nastier material. The first story brings in a freakish level of body horror that the cutesy break between two stories cannot make into a complete joke - think of very, very big teeth. The second story, lots of raspberry jam smeared everywhere, made even more disarming by the character designs and that this has a murky atmosphere as an anime altogether, an aspect found in OVAs especially when not viewed in high definition.

In terms of quality in other areas, the slightness does leave it merely a couple tales, not dissimilar to if you have a tiny little comic book of these narratives. It is distinct, even in mind to the actual animation not being innovative. In terms of entertainment, this is definitely a case of the presentation of what is on screen, where interestingly the stories do occupy themselves with the ideas of seeing something only to live to regret it, curiosity literally killing the cat. The second, cut into by the narrator, becomes purposely abstract, reality cut to pieces by going to the wrong place. It even gets dreamlike and also reflective of itself, the main two characters watching horror movies, including one called "the Curse of Kazuo Umezu", before they end up investigating the haunted house.

It is a minor work, due to its length, in horror anime, but it is still fascinating. It cannot help but evoke Junji Ito, both because Umezu is an influence on his but that, whilst adapting his work to animation has been difficult, Junji Ito's work and his growing fame in the West has taken place at a time when anime horror is more frequent, causing one to reflect on what would happen to an influence like Umezu if he got as much anime adapted from his work. In live action, a lot has been done with his manga, Nobuhiko Obayashi of note adapting The Drifting Classroom (1972-4) into a 1987 film.  Whilst a production like the Junji Ito Collection (2018) is a very divisive anthology series for television, mostly because of trying to adapt his art style, and that people were not expecting his more comedic creations not seen in the West at the time take focus, if offered a fascinating snapshot, and anime based on titles like those in The Curse of Kazuo Umezu would be enticing too to witness. Until then, this with its own layer of eeriness, emphasised by the likelihood the version I saw a preserved Japanese VHS version, presents a rewarding curiosity in itself.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

 

Director: Joe Berlinger

Screenplay: Joe Berlinger and Dick Beebe

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan as Jeffrey Patterson, Erica Leerhsen as Erica Geerson, Stephen Barker Turner as Stephen Ryan Parker, Kim Director as Kim Diamond, Tristine Skyler as Tristen Ryler, Lanny Flaherty as Sheriff Ronald Cravens, Lauren Hulsey as Eileen Treacle, Raynor Scheine as Rustin Parr

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #231

 

I thought the movie was cool.

The inherent issue with Book of Shadows is simple. It is a generic horror film attempting to latch onto the original Blair Witch Project, in a position commissioned on the sudden success of a film that spearheaded the formation of a horror subgenre, with all the difficulty of trying to franchise it. The original was a low budget, even micro-budget, production and one where its structure is a vague "witch" lore, even if fleshed out material, you are trying to expand to capitalise on the unexpected box office success on. Even if it means the most early 2000s and diverse soundtrack possible - Diamanda Galás abruptly on the same soundtrack as At the Drive-In, System of a Down, Queens of the Stone Age, White Zombie, and before his name became mud, Marilyn Manson - you will struggle unless you find a way around a film, for any criticisms of mine, was still immensely unique at the time to not pale in comparison.

Structurally the sequel is caught in a compromised position from the get-go, because whilst the pre-credit prologue is brilliant, the direction taken is attempting to capitalise on the original's success but pulling at a prequel where you have to add so much to the material. As in most cases, nothing is inherently bad on paper. Openly meta-textual, with real footage including Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien and even film critic Roger Ebert, set in context of the Blair Witch Project being a popular film where, blurring reality, the real location of Burkittsville in Maryland is swamped constantly by tourists obsessed with the film. The prologue is exceptional, a pre-opening credits sequence of a significantly better film, which is shot in interviews of townsfolk who are either annoyed by this, talking of this all being fake or a nuisance, or taking advantage as is the case of one older woman is by selling twig figures and even rocks from her back garden.

Book of Shadows was a film tampered with, such as with Disposable Teens by Marilyn Manson being a replacement to Witchcraft by Frank Sinatra in the opening credits, but the reality is that the project feels hesitant throughout its form of trying to work from the source material, playing safe to a huge disadvantage even if the original cut had fewer of the artistic clichés requested on the film. The odd choice, which in another context should have made a compelling film, was hiring Joe Berlinger as the director, a documentary filmmaker by this point who gained acclaim for the true crime narratives of Paradise Lost (1996). He would go on another tangent after this with Some Kind of Monster (2004), an acclaimed but also notorious documentary following the band Metallica recording its divisive St. Anger album, effectively therapy on LP in its long messiness and nu metal tinges. This is not the first time a filmmaker famous for documentary work has stridden briefly into fiction films. Michael Moore has Canadian Bacon (1995), whilst Errol Morris has an ultra obscure film called The Dark Wind (1991). Whilst the idea of the Blair Witch perfectly fits his filmography as a subject to subvert, Berlinger's link to this film is an abrupt tangent as a mainstream horror film in what we ended up with.

There is also a sense, whilst this film was micromanaged heavily, that the film was not going to work from the script level, or that truthfully for myself, this is still a very conventional film knowing full well what could have been. Considering what is already within the original's background, even having a fake documentary to present its lore, intertwining with American urban legends and folk culture, it is sad that the final production is not as interesting as the background of what the Book of Shadows was meant to be suggests.

The prologue shows what this should have been, and shows the great film from Berlinger, but that is merely a prologue. It begins properly with a Blair Witch tour group, one of two, in one funny moment involving a rival tour group in one scene bickering together. It has a fascinating group to have worked with - a former mental asylum patient who runs the tour, with a heterosexual couple  working on a book on the Blair Witch craze, a female Wiccan witch who finds there is anti-witch bias, and a female goth with possible psychic powers. Again, nothing is amiss, aside from the fact the film never gets to anything complicated. After one night, they wake up after all their partying with all their equipment baring camera tapes having been destroyed and with no knowledge of what happened. It is a simple premise, one not really connectable to the same material, and heavily reliant on Berlinger being one director/co-writer that plays the subjective reality card, what is reality and what is not as the group realise their relatives are distorted, but refuses to tell the viewer which is real.

The problems being when, for a Blair Witch sequel, a ghost girl who twitches is uses for a quick scare, and even if that was a concession to the producers, this film structurally is gambling entirely on the notion of subjective reality but still being very conventional. It builds to an obvious twist, but even if it did not, you have little to work from beyond even the lack of a clear insight to where reality is. The characters really do not work beyond stereotypes, such as our Goth character being introduced in a graveyard laid on a tombstone, but even then, this does embolden that, flaws and all, the first Blair Witch Project was more unpredictable and interesting. Without resources, that film had to focus on building what characterisation they had and without immediate access to traditional scare tactics you could access on a larger budget.

In something that is clearly from the VHS release, Book of Shadows even ends after the credits  has a tacked on gimmick of hidden ghostly images and letters hidden onscreen, having to rewind the film (i.e. as you could do on videotape) to see. This is almost charming, a William Castle gimmick but Castle, as a legendary horror director and producer who came up with elaborate gimmicks, would have promoted this upfront and, if he had grasped the DVD format, readapted this to work for the new technology and a possible buying audience. Here it misses the point. There is even a joke, as the characters talk about the first film, of why in moments of fear a trio of two men and one woman never had sex in the heightened emotion. It is crass, but also The Bogus Witch Project (2000), whilst not a great parody compilation, got to this just and was closer to the source material in tone in general.

Games of the Abstract: Keio Flying Squadron 2 (1996)

 

Publisher: Victor Entertainment/ JVC Musical Industries

Developer: Victor Entertainment

Single Player

Sega Saturn

 

Sadly, one of the most expensive British releases for the Sega Saturn is one that I had fond memories of as a game demo, one which barely covers a curiosity that, with a few titles, never was ported to the United States. The full motion video pre-credits, animated, introduce the titular Keio as a young woman sent to retrieve a family heirloom back from thieving tanuki racoons, who in Japanese culture have a mythology of being sentient beings in their own world, one here the villain from a previous game stealing artefacts to help find treasure. That Keio wears, as her special costume, a Playboy bunny outfit is a bizarre, but Japan has had this as a motif in their pop culture beyond the Playboy license. The first level, found on as a demo and the same introduction here, is a simple but beautiful looking 2D platformer where you can acquire a giant comically big mallet and hit enemies in the woods. A character, a princess dubbed Himiko Yamatai, comes as a joke where as a potential boss fight does not go expectedly, where Keio in an in-game cut scene bop her robot once and cause it to collapse. The level and the demo ended with Keio in a hut which is knocked off down a giant hole.

Actually playing the game beyond this point, Keio Flying Squadron 2 gets weirder, one of the few obscure Japanese game that got a release in the West only for PAL European territories, with an English language track and translation as a result. It is not with a spoiler warning that, for the final level and boss, Keio is in a demon's stomach, digestive acid at the bottom, hitting its cut anthropomorphized heart as it spits out random words (English translated) of Japanese concepts like "karaoke" or "otaku" which you use as platforms to climb up to freedom. In fact, how you even get to this point is not as much a spoiler in this case but more part of the freewheeling, deeply eccentric work which, adding to the weirdness, is a sequel to a Mega CD game.  The Mega-CD itself, whilst not the last add-on, was part of the period where Sega arguably started to stumble after the success of the Mega Drive/Genesis game console, an attempt to extend the life of that machine with CD based gamed with their own upgrade in visuals and style. Adding to the strange circumstances, to a game that is probably forgotten too, is that it was a scrolling shooter where Keio rode her cute dragon Spot. The sequel, twice, returns to its roots as a scrolling shooter, among its many curious tangents.

Most of the game is a platformer. Jumping on enemies' heads is standards here as well, unless it is a mole person to which in its score system (which will be explained later) you get points docked off. There are three weapons too, very useful as without them you die after one hit, making them a useful defence for one blow you can hastily pick up again if lost if you are quick; the mallet, an umbrella whose lighter attack is compensated by being possible to open and float on jumps with, and a bow with arrows. The world is strange and very Japanese, which seems distasteful to point out baring that, not hiding it, this is actually set in Edo Shogunate era of Japanese history (1865-1868) Japan, even having an animated segment later on, set at a martial arts tournament, where Keio is interviewed for television screens. Yes, there is a martial arts tournament later on, as a pair of boss levels, which was abruptly in how late it is in the game, and yet appropriate for a game which could go from scrolling shooter levels to one at a theme park jumping a rollercoaster car despite the setting among other scenes.

The game has challenges, but playing it there is more of a sense of it being more of a spectacle to enjoy whether on an Easy or Hard difficulty. The points system as well is a greater priority, for a game of very eclectic sequences and challenges, where if you lower the score down to negative points, you get advice of how to improve in the game in the special gallery, amusing and cute images the higher your score can reach.  In its whimsical form, you get a surprising amount of diversity in the main game, all surrounding a slight and absurd tale of acquiring sacred orbs that can lead to a great treasure. Running through a trap ladened house of ninja raccoons (and finding myself thwarted for a brief period by the trick floor panels you fall a level down from). Having to throw a variety of objects, be they scenery at enemies, friendly kappa whose bald heads are spring pads to jump higher from, even giant mah-jong pieces to throw into a pair of hands to open a weight locked door. The rollercoaster ride, followed by a maze like jaunt underwater in an aquarium, thankfully without oxygen to worry about air bubbles as a shield, to even a jaunt into outer space.

The bosses as well, whilst simplistic, are just as odd. The finale of the two scrolling shooter levels, with hazards to dodge and power-ups for more fire power, concludes with a battle against an alien in outer space who abducts cows from the nearby Earth and flings their newly carved meat at you among its many attacks. A toxic waste dumping truck shaped like a bald feudal era court minister. The haunted house giant head boss that, after multiple forms and throwing coconut drinks at it, eventually turns into a digitised head of a real man and disappears in shame when defeated. And, particularly, that martial arts tournament, which brings back the princess, Princess Himiko, who is trying to acquire the McGuffins for her own heritage, but also gives you a random choice of the boss beforehand in the brackets. Either a bomber (dubbed in English as being flamboyant and explicitly gay), or a Christian priest as I got who, as a giant with blue skin, floats in the air, summons angelic cat creatures and who replicates his head after being hit, the copies usable weapons to fling back at him. I did mention Keio Flying Squadron 2 was a weird game?

Even in mind to its age, the game still looks sumptuous, with only a remaster (if possible) of the full motion video animated sequences and a gloss up really needed to make it shine. The quality of the animation itself alone, whilst occasional, is neither to be dismissed either, even if Saturn's aged ability to load it and picture quality is a good reminder, when they and other companies explored animated and "FMV" live action scenes, this was still new territory for videogames which is poignant at a time a lot of anime inspired titles and anime adaptations with animated sequences were being develops. In this case, like a lot of animation studios who worked in video games, Studio Pierrot was hired, veterans from their foundation in 1979 who have made incredible work (the film Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)), but also produced huge worldwide popular titles like the Naruto franchise.  

The English dub is of its time; fitting the era, it is broad, and baring one horrendous use of a Jamaican accent, it is charming in its goofiness when anime and video game dubbing would change over the decades. Whilst it is limited, between sound bites in-game and as each chapter is charmingly split into episode previews, it does add a bit to the tone, such as the ninja raccoons in one level who shout how they have disgraced their masters. The Japanese dub version is full of prolific anime voice actors of this era, lead by the J-pop singer and actress Miho Kanno as Keio. No one in the English dub is prominent baring Roger L. Jackson, who does many voices. Mostly working in video games, he has worked in animated and films. The same year as this game was released, he also voiced Ghostface, the scary voice of the killer in the first Wes Craven Scream movie.

Not a long game, each level is however different from each other, five chapters each, so you got a great deal from this. Each stage provides a new challenge, and most importantly, all of them had fun or interesting aspects, even if the underwater level if frustrating at points. The plot is, to be blunt, tentative in how it is put together, but it will not dismiss a game where none of it feels unimaginative or generic at all. It is a delight to have all of them stand out, even the second to last, a simple platforming level, adding a unique mechanic of traps everywhere, even comedic ones which are still dangerous of tanuki waiting near bamboo cages with power ups under them, or noticing hamster wheels inexplicably powering moving platforms in a previous one much earlier, only to have that signpost having to occupy one yourself with the decency of the visuals to show how much you need to run to get everything working. It is a game where, not too long or short, it never has a dull level in the slightest.

Keio Flying Squadron 2's obscurity, and rarity, even its Japanese release looking a rarer title when Japanese Saturn games are far cheaper in certain titles, is a tragedy. Its creators Victor Entertainment, a subsidiary of the media corporation JVCKenwood Victor Entertainment, who have worked and distributed in a huge variety of mediums but stopped in video games in the early 2000s. Sadly, this interest production is forgotten; as of August 2021, the PAL release can cost over £200 pounds, and like many games of yore, it floats in the ether, which is tragic as it is a bundle of eccentric fun.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

 

Director: William Dieterle

Screenplay: Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis and Leonardo Bercovici

Based on the novella by Robert Nathan

Cast: Jennifer Jones as Jennie Appleton, Joseph Cotten as Eben Adams, Ethel Barrymore as Miss Spinney, Lillian Gish as Mother Mary of Mercy, Cecil Kellaway as Matthews, David Wayne as Gus O'Toole, Albert Sharpe as Moore, Henry Hull as Eke

Ephemeral Wave

 

A failing, poverty stricken painter Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) finds his muse, a young girl named Jeanne (Jennifer Jones). Every time he encounters her, however, she increasingly ages up to adulthood, with the added sense that, unaware of his world, she is a figure from the past. Already this is a distinct premise to begin with, but any film which starts with a lengthy monologue about the nature of life and love, over clouds, and manages to not only have one quotation onscreen, but two, for Euripides and Keats, is going to not be a conventional Hollywood film from the forties.

The back-story about the film adds a strange tragedy too. Its producer David O. Selznick was a wunderkind of MGM studios, given his own creative control, and was responsible for Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture Oscar, for Rebecca (1940), and Gone with the Wind (1939), a cultural monolith even if a problematic one. He also became romantically involved with actress Jennifer Jones, born Phylis Isley, Portrait of Jeannie as a result effectively a love letter to her made at the end of their relationship. Theirs is a really difficult and complicated romance which makes the film in a larger context more disquieting. Both married originally when they had their relationship, Selznick effectively destroyed himself, alongside issues like gambling addiction, trying to control and shape her image over films which did not succeed, and theirs is not a relationship in the modern day that would be seen as wholesome at all. He would die in 1965, and Jones would live to 2009, with other marriages and a life beyond, but with mental health issues throughout her career, it is not surprising after her film career she decided to devote herself to de-stigmatising mental illness with her institution the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education.

Even by itself, Portrait of Jennie feels like a totem to a love off-screen finally waving goodbye, even if they would live together as a couple until his death decades later. Unstuck in time, not quite a Kurt Vonnegut character, Jennie is a figure from the 1910s, already dead but appearing to Joseph Cotton's impoverished painter at various times, beginning as a young girl and eventually becoming a woman. All of them are played by Jones, the first time acting with a higher pitched voice and childlike innocence, alongside a strategic placement of Cotten and the film camera. As he grows in talent, under the watchful eye of an art seller, he encounters Jennie over and over again, replaying her as a living breathing spectre he becomes increasingly obsessed with, building to the ultimate portrait of her as an adult.

Portrait of Jennie's oddness is compounded, as in any case, by the context of when the film was made. Forties Hollywood means sumptuous monochrome unless in rare cases, such as the finale here using silent cinema colour tinting, matched by romantic melodrama and extensive use of an orchestral score to add a haunting mood. A gamut of character actors flesh out this cast immensely, such as Ethel Barrymore as the watchful eye becoming increasingly concerned by Eben's mental state as he obsesses over a figure no one else has seen, or his best friend Gus (David Wayne), who gets Eben work painting a nationalist mural at an Irish-American bar. All of them, but especially Barrymore's character, add a level of emotional weight that helps the film immensely. And of course, Joseph Cotten is a huge advantage here. It is great to see Cotten in a lead role, particularly as his inherent talent helps adds conviction to a peculiar premise. His earnestness in a film, to a nun played by Hollywood royalty Lillian Gish, about the immortality of love for an unknown figure is the sort that would collapse into kitsch were it not for a great actor like Cotten being there to speak it.

Jennifer Jones as an actress, the idolised figure, is placed in a curious place with this film. This is a case, even with a director William Dieterle an acclaimed figure behind the likes of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), where the producer has more auteurist influence, which leaves this with an intense level of reality as a metaphor of love for someone is if there will never be there, and is an openly self-destructive romance where Jennie due to the plot who will depart from Eben's life no matter how hard he tries to steer the course of time in another direction. 

Jones herself, performance wise, does have a challenge in having to play a character that changes from a child to an adult, and does her best. There is a sense, though, of her being a precious figure captured in the prism of the film's camera as much as the paintings in the film. Said film is entirely about the male perception of a loved one, thankfully never straying into a gross obsession but instead wistful, never patronising but pretentious in a sentimental and applaudable earnest way, a weird hybrid of fantasy and the supernatural, possibly even science fiction depending how you interpret Jennie's state. It was not a success when it was made, with Selznick's constant work on the film and the over increasing budget causing this to leave a black eye, enough to push him forth to working overseas on productions like The Third Man (1949).  Portrait of Jennie is a rewarding film for me, truly unique, but its back-story does make it as disquieting as it is compelling.

 

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1) The podcast You Must Remember This, which tackles the first century of Hollywood and classic Hollywood especially, covered this relationship in Episode 66, and it is a tumultuous narrative when read of.

Father of the Pride (2004-5)

 

Creators: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Jonathan Groff

Directors: Klay Hall, John Stevenson, Mark Risley, Bret Haaland, John Holmquist, John Puglisi, Steve Hickner, Mark Baldo and Mike de Seve

Screenplay: Jonathan Groff, Ben Kull, David R. Goodman, Glasgow Phillips, Jon Ross, Jean Yu, Vanessa McCarthy, Jon Pollack, Ron Weiner, Mike Barker, Robert Cohen, Peter Mehlman, Matt Weitzman, Josh Bycel and Jonathan Fener

Voice Cast: John Goodman as Larry, Cheryl Hines as Kate, Orlando Jones as Snack, Carl Reiner as Sarmoti, Danielle Harris as Sierra, David Herman as  Roy, Julian Holloway as Siegfried, Daryl Sabara as Hunter

Ephemeral Waves

 

Hello, security camera! Here is one crime you cannot stop! [lifts shirt] I stole a six pack.

Out of the cancelled shows I have covered, I vividly remember the time this was released, as it was on Sky One in the United Kingdom, but it is interesting to see the show beyond mere memories in its entirety. What the show is in context, a sitcom done in digital animation about a family of white lions, is a lot more deceptive then that merely suggests as a premise. For starters, that this is a DreamWorks Animation production is of note, as where this show's story really begins is arguably 1994, when Steven Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music executive David Geffen founded the company. Only a few years prior, DreamWorks would have a cultural hit in Shrek (2001), followed by Shrek 2 (2004), so this would have been a time of the company riding high. Also working in television, they decided here to take a sitcom with the same logic, only with a more adult sense of humour, in that you have some big names in the voice cast, and all based on the lives of Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, two German emigrants to the United States who, combining magic with trained wild animals onstage, became staples in Las Vegas. With Siegfried and Roy on as executive producers, Father of the Pride is an irrelevant toned sitcom which follows a pride of lions, as a stereotypical nuclear family, living in the magicians' private zoo "The Secret Garden".

The sitcom archetypes are on full display, matched by the eclectic voice cast. The overweigh, lovable but emotionally clumsy patriarch Larry is the new top lion in the stage shows, perfectly cast by John Goodman, a great actor and a really big figure to cast in a show meant to last. The loving and very patient wife Kate, played by Curb Your Enthusiasm alumni Cheryl Hines; daughter Sierra, played by Danielle Harris, originally a child actress in Halloween 4 (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989), who in a few years from this show would be cast in Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween film and become a cult genre actress alongside her voice acting work at this period; Daryl Sabara-, of the Spy Kids franchise as Hunter, the sensitive young son more inclined to Lord of the Rings; Orlando Jones as Snack, Larry's best friend and a gopher; and to play to the sitcom trope of in-laws and not getting on with them, Carl Reiner as Sarmoti, Larry's father-in-law who originates from Africa but, with the choice of phrase Reiner uses, is played as a disapproving Jewish father-in-law who, once the top lion and still a chronic womaniser, digs at Larry constantly as a putz.

We will get to Siegfried and Roy themselves for their own paragraph, as staying with the animal cast their narratives take up most of the episodes' short narratives, fully investing in the structure of a sitcom but with the complication of these still being wild animals, even if anthropomorphized and living in houses. Some of the humour of the entire series has aged - too broad, some very politically incorrect, especially all the gay jokes, and some time capsules to the early to mid 2000s, the "Lost Episode" which is rebuilt from the recorded dialogue against sketch board images basing a large part of its narrative around Siegfried and Roy wanting to update their stage show with a giant sexy animatronic of American singer Jessica Simpson. You can even map out when the show was made because of the episode where Donkey from Shrek appears, voiced by Eddie Murphy, interpreted as an actor from the success Shrek films who does car commercials and has a stunt double to accidentally kidnap.

But when the series works, which is most of the time, what on so many levels is a show with too many factors against it being even pleasant to sit through, not even getting into the choice of CGI animation, it is hilarious and a good show. The only time the show ever misses badly, beyond an ill-advised decision to create a new pilot recycling footage from the first, is an episode about Kate, when in election part of the school education system, accidentally making a racist comment against turkeys. As a take on the complex issue of representation, yes, if you take the premise of turkeys as a metaphor, which is a murky, misbegotten tangent to make am episode from even if some jokes within it are funny.

The interesting thing is that the decision to be more mature and adult, in spite of jokes which have aged badly, alongside the voice cast is why the show works, where by the second episode what is the standard joke of the father-in-law moving in progresses to the idea of Larry and Kate picking up a stray drunk zebra in a bar to consider killing, all because she in a fit of rage destroyed her father's precious zebra skin rug and they need a replacement. Jokes throughout admit, despite being civilised, the locals in The Secret Garden could still eat each other, and Larry references having done so in the past, and one episode takes this to an extreme moral choice of whether Larry should let Snack know his new girlfriend has just dumped him or lie and say he ate her. Even without the large list of guest stars alone - Lisa Kudrow as a depressed female panda, Dom DeLuise as one of Sarmoti's poker buddies - the humour really plays off the absurdity of humanising animals, playing the sitcom tropes, but not losing the idea of them being animals, such as the unfinished level even making a plot point Hunter wanting a dog and, his own sentient figure, said dog working out a contract with Larry even if stolen from his original owner.

Sometimes it is proudly silly, such as a lobster (voiced by Danny De Devito) in a fight for his life against Barbara Streisand (not voiced by her), which is why a lot of the show manages to succeed. For everything which does not work, other moments of humour gain a lot either from the writing or the cast, such as the reoccurring gag of an Indian elephant being defensive about the turkey he is living with being just a roommate, or that the white tigers in this world are middle class and the lions are working class.

Stealing the show however is Siegfried and Roy themselves, Siegfried voiced by British actor Julian Holloway, a veteran of old British television and whose filmography includes multiple appearances within the prolific Carry On franchise of sex comedies, whilst Roy is voiced by David Herman, an actor and comedian whose also is a prolific voice actor. Even though they are played, with broad German accents, as buffoons in their own worlds, it is heartening to know the real magicians were executive producers and let this caricature exist, especially as the pair in this series was hilarious and never felt like a mean joke. A pair of pure ids, of energy and passion, who are however alien to the logic of the real world, Siegfried and Roy are always comic foils, even if they influence the narratives, but the bizarre scenarios they are involved in are however always highlights of the episodes. It is always golden, whether an entire episode of them wishing to have a Big Gulp, hijacking a convenience store at night, or Siegfried was exposing his gambling habit in a random attempt at kindness.

I have mentioned the animation only briefly, and at the time, this would have once been good quality 3D animation for television, but this has aged even more than some of the humour has. It does not detract from the show, but you wish in hindsight 2D animation was used. This became prominent with the aforementioned "Lost Episode", included on the DVD release, told in just drawings but showing how dynamic the characters would have been, even the potential for more elaborate onscreen jokes likely to have been possible as one sees, a shady bar for depressed alcoholic magicians which would have not been as inventive in CGI. More than any show, this is a case despite being animated where the non-visual content is the more rewarding part.

So much worked that you could have salvaged the production with another season, with enough virtues found that it would have progressed and improved. The show itself as a production tragically has to live in the shadow of when, in 2003 before the show would premiere a year later, Roy Horn was mauled onstage by one of their tiger, a really gruesome moment of coincidence to have. Father of the Pride however kept going, still given a chance in spite of this incident where thankfully Roy, who also suffered a stroke at the same time, would recover. Ultimately though, even with a real life tragedy that could have led to the show being shelved if it had been worse, this was a case of a show which premiered on a huge hype train which dwindled in interest for viewers.

Out of fourteen episodes made, two were not even shown in the United States, one of them the original version of the pilot, and there was the "Lost Episode" on the DVD. There is a sense of a show which never kept momentum, and in some cases was not well presented. Sadly, the episode never shown in the States, The Siegfried and Roy Fantasy Experience Movie, was one of the funniest Siegfried and Roy subplots, whilst the re-making of the pilot was a waste of resources.  Whilst it is funny in the new footage that, wishing to get Larry a psychiatrist, Siegfried and Roy go to Kelsey Grammer, playing himself, who just played a psychiatrist in a famous show, it is a waste of time in terms of putting it together Frankenstein-like from the original pilot. Altogether, there is a sense of a show that, whilst everything with it works, was just fated not to succeed, which is sad in hindsight to have. Baring one horrible real life incident, there are cases where shows even if they were flawed gems like this one never caught on, and television has a lot of casualties over the decades which merely did not attracted enough attention.