Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013)

 

Director: Gustav Deutsch

Screenplay: Gustav Deutsch

Cast: Stephanie Cumming as Shirley; Christoph Bach as Stephen

An Abstract List Candidate

 

And if the grasshoppers don't eat up all our garden...we will see better days.

Beginning on August 28th 1931, Shirley... exists in a world recreating the paintings of Edward Hopper, framed around Hopper’s 1965 Chair Car two years before his death. The resulting work, directed, written, edited and with production design by Austrian architect graduate and multidisciplinary artist Gustav Deutsch is set in a world all of primary and secondary colours. This is the brightest reds on frames, green textile chairs, and yellow curtains in the initial French hotel room setting which begins the film proper beyond its train car bookends. Not quite an avant-garde production in the sense of extreme manipulation of form and content, yet whilst there is a narrative it is neither conventional structurally either. The look of the film trying to replicate Hooper's paintings has an extreme artificiality which, depicted like doll's houses on the screen, is striking to watch.

Radio reports are broadcast before each segments over the time setting text, building the world where Shirley (Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Stephanie Cumming), a theatre actress, travels the world in a period between the thirties to the sixties where World War II, the Korean War, communist witch hunts and racial divide are among the subjects transpiring in the United States. The film expressly admits its artificiality - her life that of someone working in theatre, to be undercut by members trying (and failing) in Hollywood to communism red scares cutting into the American theatre in general, but still a representative of these figures in the paintings. Hooper's paintings from the mid-1920s used only his wife and fellow artist, Josephine Nivison, as his model, so aptly Cumming's Shirley plays numerous roles including that of the blonde usherette in a theatre as much as she is dating a journalist Stephen (Christoph Bach).

Shirley is a chameleonic figure, one who represents the female figures of the Edward Hopper paintings, as distinct in costumes like her red dress, demanding in itself from Stephanie Cumming as, barring one or two lines, other actors in the film are playing cameos, even with Stephen. That is even before Cummings is willing to be part of a camera's/painting's gaze with a full nude scene later on, depicted matter-of-factly within the painting's form; the stark reality of an actress on an artificial stage, smoking in this heightened world yet herself tangitable real in the body, staged a few times before but not this explicit, feels less voyeuristic than in itself a sudden starkness forcing the viewer to think of Shirley, Stephanie Cumming herself in the position onscreen, and the figure of the painting being represented, especially with the figure of Shirley fleshed out in dialogue throughout before. Even before that, the character is both fleshed out as a figure by Deutsch's script but as much a chimera of Hopper's work and the figures of this era in American art, one that is a challenge for Cummings to have successfully drawn.

Shirley's cinematic form, as an abstract film, is more subtly difficult to think of. It is more outwardly conventional as it progresses as vignettes, but in itself, it is a bending of what cinema is both as a literal portrait in movement as well as, the director-creator's interest in very artificial sets, in artificial colours, still being tangible onscreen to the point you could walk through them. This was literal, as following on from the film's theatrical release, an exhibition of the same name at  further explored in an exhibition of the same name at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in that city exhibited artefacts from the sets of the film¹.

Literally moving paintings, they do show their hand with the artificiality, even to the point the world is exposed when pillars in the background are pulled upwards off screen at one point. The film's attempt to paint this in context of the world is the one aspect Gustav Deutsch's film does feel two dimensional however in a detracting way, one for what is far more compelling as this spectrum of emotions surrounding the world Hopper existed within. Alongside the songs by English singer-songwriter David Sylvian, which feel at odds with the material, this does show its hand frankly with the problem of trying to paint a picture of the period but reducing it down to a less complex and awkward reality.

Shirley at one point is reading with interest an adaptation of a Thornton Wilder play, whilst in New Haven, to be directed by controversial and acclaimed American filmmaker Elia Kazan. The Elia Kazan references, when Shirley starts in one monologue damning Kazan for the aspect which makes him a controversial American filmmaker, naming names during the Hollywood blacklisting of the fifties against American communists, does show that the film, if it has one huge flaw, simplifies history. In contrast to making two dimensional paintings on canvas, already fully in three dimensions are lingered on even in JPEGs online, moments like this, trying to show the history context do undercut the admirable work on the film; even if you the reader believe Elia Kazan is still undefendable for what he did in that era to his fellow collaborators in cinema, if you read the history of the Hollywood blacklist it was far less black and white than is painted in that monologue.

Aside from this, I admired Shirley: Visions of Reality as a fascinating production. I will admit that work which is art installation filmmaking is also a compelling art form for me, but Shirley... to its credit feels cinematic to a virtue. Whilst with flaws, as a narrative and a mood piece, this succeeded.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eerie

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

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1) Additional context can be found with Yatzer's Film Director Gustav Deutsch Brings the World of Edward Hopper to Life, published on 15th May 2016 and written by Eric David.

Games of the Abstract: Planet Joker (1997)

 

Developer: IMP (with collaboration by Yoyogi Animation Gakuin)

Publisher: Naxat Soft

One Player

Sega Saturn

 

Planet Joker, and I will lean in on the terrible pun, is the joker of the pack when it comes to Japanese exclusive Sega Saturn games. Getting into scrolling shooters, and knowing how many were released on the Saturn itself, Planet Joker at first is disarming to its reputation when its anime 2D FMV opening starts, cheaper as a production but still looking interesting, looking to possess charm. I will be positive on Planet Joker, but when you get to the actual gameplay, for a 1997 game of this type, and when its crude polygon appearance is first seen, and the tinny sound effects for the firepower especially is heard, I now appreciate those games in the genre in gorgeous 2D from the time. Even Taito's polygon effort G-Darius (1997), which was stunning pre-HD re-master even from memory of playing it, makes the comparison to Planet Joker an unfair one. Planet Joker feels like a very low budget production struggling with limited resources and making mistakes; especially when independent 2D "doujinshi" games of this type are contrasted against, made by few people but looking stunning, exist that managed to their own limitations decades later, this does deserve pity for the comparisons.

The publisher Naxat Soft, game development division of semiconductor firm Kaga Electronics, and which changes its name to Kaga Create in 2007, is famous for games especially for the TurboGrafx-16 like Devil's Crush (1990), part of a famous "Crush" series of fantastic pinball games, so seeing they published Planet Joker does feel like, without wanting to dismiss Japanese-only releases that may be good, that they struggled with a foothold on the Saturn in terms of well regarded or remembered productions. Whilst released by another publisher in the West, Acclaim Entertainment, the one game we got in the United States and the United Kingdom they published in Japan, the beat em up Battle Monsters (1995), was not well regarded either. They continued for other consoles after the Saturn, but even if the pachinko game they released for Sega's console is underrated, Heiwa Pachinko Soushingeki (1996), their CV for the console is obscure baring infamy.

Thing is, this review is not going to bury Planet Joker either, a game that never achieved the infamy (and sincere love) of Death Crimson (1996), an infamous Saturn only light gun game, though there are numerous mistakes made throughout the game in terms of gameplay. Joker's real issue is its pretty basic and those mistakes, a low budget production that, as likely was to be found on the Sony Playstation and especially on consoles which are prolific in the content they produce, you get these games trying to compete which will look bad in comparison trying to chase the competition and/or try to create a game on hardware which was encouraging small groups to produce for it. Even the Saturn was successful in its homeland of Japan, and as a result you get these games trying to compete which will look bad in comparison, with the added issue being that the Saturn was a difficult machine to produce for technically too. The mistakes aside, which I will get to, the game's biggest problem in existence would have been how conventional as a shooter it would have it is, a seven stage long work in its normal mode, only the first four stages in Easy Mode, that does not stand out were it not for a few aesthetic touches I appreciated.

Nothing is unplayable and broken, which puts this higher than games which likely exist, and it is more the grievances of being unable completely to pause during boss battles or that hit indication on them are difficult to gauge, barring a hitting sound effect, which feels bad game play design. The weapon options is its own issue, but that is for later, and most of Planet Joker is a very standard sci-fi shooter where you have an option of giant mech robots to use, shooting down helicopters, other mechs, combat vehicles and eventually giant bosses. Locations do not vary over a modern metropolis in the early levels, including in what feels like the high street district at night on Stage 3, and the alien forces of the titular Planet Joker in their own mechanical environments. Even some of the best looking shooters that were ported to the Saturn, to an outsider, like Battle Garegga (1996) may be off-putting as it is entirely machine-versus-machine combat within a diesel punk aesthetic, works created fetishising machinery, entirely built as much around the lovingly rendered war machines of the mind, which is not for everyone. Battle Garegga is, however, still gorgeous to look at even in the modern day, to listen to too, whilst Planet Joker feels like it needs a hug because the poor is at an unfair advantage to almost every other shooter from this era in production value. Barring the aesthetic touch that helps Planet Joker, this is a mech versus war machine game whose appearance even at the time would be disastrously flat, and barring a few touches, like inexplicably fighting a giant monster construction vehicle as the Stage 1 boss, this game does look inferior in comparison to others just in visuals, even 3D shooters, but also could have been saved with a few surreal or imaginative touches in what you saw onscreen or even shot at.

The aesthetic this does have, with the anime cut scenes in the few there, does help considerably. I openly admit it feels like a low budget straight-to-video anime (an "OVA") in presentation and tone as a game, which is not a criticism for me as I like those titles a lot. Set on May 17th 2039¹, a mysterious army invades Tokyo, with a special unit of the Self-Defense Forces sent out in bipedal flying combat mechs consisting of three female pilots to fight them off. You as a player are Satomi Takayama, a Japanese member of the team, assisted by Elen Rockwell, an American, and Sahra Huga, an Indian pilot, with Mika Yamamoto your operator and communication manager, and Takao Takasugi, only seen once as an animated talking head before the first stage starts, as your commander of the SDF Special Forces. Ultimately, your enemy is revealed to be run by John Markwell, a man seen only once to deliver a monologue, for a game that is not translated, about "Planet Joker" in an extended cut scene, looking like he is cosplaying as the Phantom of the Opera. That cut scene is the turning point in game play as well as tone, marking when the mysterious army blows up part of Tokyo, if not all of it, and Satomi has to take the battle to his side for the three stages you access in Normal Mode or above in difficulty.

The animation is limited, that extended cut scene after Stage 4 mostly moving mouths, but any level of production value like this helps Planet Joker not come off as one of the worst games ever made for at least having a personality. Even the most low budget of straight to video anime, really notorious ones like the videogame adaptation Mars of Destruction (2005), from the decade later and seen as bad for anime fans, managed to get a J-pop end song, as this one does over the end credits. Notions of what is bad and good in a game, in mind that the people of developer IMP likely worked hard as they could on this production, should be more constructive as, barring some mistakes, this does work for the most part. Even if in the middle of the stage it will abruptly pause and slowly load a talking head scene of the characters' heads as they talk, the production value is at least an attempt at a personality.

The gameplay is basic, the polygonal models moving forward and dodging attacks where, on-rails, you occasionally stop and your mech robot turns on the spot or, occasionally, scrolls up or down. It feels like a game struggling with its lack of production value, but it is playable. I feel sympathy for developer IMP. More interesting is learning¹, from the credit for animation, it is credited to Yoyogi Animation Gakuin, which is also the Yoyogi Animation Academy, the oldest animation school in Japan², which has also training for a school specializing in anime, voice actors, and manga. This makes their inclusion in Planet Joker even more worth defending. Credited in other anime productions, from Sound Production Assistance on Gatchaman Crowds (2013), to Production Cooperation on Macross 7 (1994-5), a major anime franchise entry and over episodes 8 to 49, the possibility students or new blood cut their teeth on this production first is meaningful in hindsight.

The gameplay, whilst not a bullet hell game, also is a reminder that scrolling shooters are more about hand-eye coordination and dodging bullets more than even shooting the enemies. The game's few issues with these basics are where Planet Joker deserves reprimanding, and one I have left until now is how the firepower you have drastically affects your ability to play stages. Here it is a flaw that - alongside a bomb/wave secondary option, the wave almost useless, and a charge mechanic which really had not weight of usefulness to it - with the option of seven robots to choose from, an additional one unlocked played the game once on Normal or above, they all have three different firepower options, which can be changed or boosted with power-ups you collect, which can scupper your chances badly. Some of the firepower, especially when it cannot fire forwards but only diagonally, is a nuisance to use, and thus even from the character select screen you can make Planet Joker far more difficult for yourself, in a way that is bad game mechanics on the production itself as well as led to me actually dodging power-ups onscreen like they were homing bullets too. You can work around this, and even a superior game like Battle Garegga can have a controversial mechanic, in that case a difficult scale that was so technical (and cruel) it took updated changes to even figure it out over decades, but something like this or the lack of ability to pause on boss battles as a Saturn console release do cross into bad programming.

Beyond this, you can play and beat the game, with Score Attack and Time Attack available, a boss rush option unlockable. You can reach the ending, with a healthy maximum of nine continues possible to add in the options to use, to reach 2D illustrations of the three female leads almost in school pulling pranks on each other and hanging out. Planet Joker still is a bar higher as a game in quality because you can actually play it. The game's worth to preserve, even as someone who believes in preserving everything, is a more downbeat issue as, truthfully despite enjoying the game, this is the kind of work even if you accept its visual limitations which does not stand out. Even in the context of "bad" games, it is not a well known one even for the Sega Saturn, which is why the Death Crimson reference early in the review had to be brought up. Scrolling shooter fans, if they can track this down, or if it ever managed to get a re-release, would find some interest in Planet Joker, but this is definitely the case of a title that I enjoyed but I cannot defend for its limitations.

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1) This is based on the description provided by Sega Retro for Planet Joker.

2) For reference, the Yoyogi Animation Academy's own website, which is available in English too.  

Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

 

Director: Jindřich Polák

Screenplay: Milos Macourek and Jindrich Polák

Based on a story by Josef Nesvadba

Cast: Petr Kostka as Jan Bures / Karel Bures; Jirí Sovák as Klaus Abard; Vladimír Mensík as Rolf Kraus; Vlastimil Brodský as Ing. Bauer; Marie Rosulková as Shirley White; Otto Simánek as Patrick White; Valerie Chmelová as Helena

Ephemeral Waves

Patrick, it's Hitler! Yes it is Hitler! Patrick, you must take a picture of me with him!

That title immediately raises your eyebrows doesn't it? Barring the suspicion, viewing the film multiple times, that the hot beverage Jan Bures (Petr Kostka) scolds himself with may actually be coffee, this title fits a Czeck sci-fi film that, released the same year as Star Wars, exists in an entirely different spectrum of the genre from the Soviet template. In the seventies interpretation of the future, time travel is possible and is a popular tourist activity even if limited in airports it is available at, one such station at Prague. Rather than the concerns of any schoolchildren being eaten by a dinosaur on a class trip, the greater problem is that a group of former Nazis, sustained by anti-aging pills, have planned to travel back to 1944 with a stolen hydrogen bomb from the United States' military museums. Bribing a time travel pilot with the intention of presenting this weapon of mass destruction to Adolf Hitler himself, it is small enough to fit into a briefcase and could drastically change history immediately. However the pilot, Jan's twin brother Karel (also Kostka), chokes to death in the morning on a bread roll and, deciding to fake the position, Jan finds himself in the boots of his brother, a womanising fascist sympathiser and pulled into this conspiracy to change history for the Third Reich's favour.

The film is a comedy, though it is not a succession of gags, instead a sustained narrative which will even have moments of seriousness when it talks about World War II. It will however show its hand in the humour, how amusing it is, when the pre-credits sequence involving the Nazis plotting even having a parrot mimicking "Heil Hitler!". Or that the opening credits, re-mixing real monochrome documentary footage, reinterprets over a seventies jazz funk track Hitler moving his hands in time to it like a dance choreography, as with the goose-stepping tropes. The film mercifully avoids broadness, instead playing the humour dry even with the more broad sci-fi aspects. It is of its era, from air stewardesses wearing fur bikinis or full France Sun King era dresses, but also in good ways such as the model made rocket launch sequences looking like a Thunderbirds sequence. And plenty of moments feel timeless, especially in what the tone of this unique premise is. The absurdity is in how, to save the world, Jan will find himself going back in time, with doubles of people involved and alternative timelines being created, with the humour coming from a variety of slapstick, comic timing and pure corpse humour, all ramping up when the first time Jan enters World War II, the Nazis hijacking the rocket ship made the gaff of travelling back to 1941 to a less welcome reception of being there to save the Reich.

The film is playful in telling its plot. Little gags build - like the hired car whose boot keeps popping up, or the space age dish cleaner which eats away pottery and junk food - whilst eventually you are in the scenario of Nazis meeting their younger selves, doubles killing their younger selves off because two cannot sustain one pay check, and simple mistakes like picking up the wrong briefcase. This manages even an action chase sequence at one point, having acquired period suitable Nazis vehicles let alone uniforms, and the one really broad joke, two middle age Americans who end up on the hijacked ship, has the delightful humour of a Soviet film parodying the United States. Especially when the Battle of Waterloo is unheard of, but Watergate is, those two characters, still lovable but entirely not speaking in English, feel fascinating in themselves as a playful jab in the ribs against the other superpower to the Soviet Union.

Everything, including the film's title, one of the best ever written down in the English translation¹, has a meaning in the production, and every little detail has a weight to it, even something as trivial as the "freeze" spray, continually used, which turns a person blue faced, frozen in place and gurning incoherently, leading to numerous incidents of it being used including an unfortunate attempt to bend one victim's leg. The situations of the film add to how original it still is, especially as it is still legitimate in its concepts of alternative history, Nazism, time travel and a slight streak of surrealism felt through.

This creativity means as well that, in tackling Hitler and Nazi Germany, they are undoubtedly villains to parody, but it never becomes broad stereotypes and even manages to have a haunting sincerity. When depicting Hitler and his inner circle, this leads to a sequence where, with the many items brought to this timeline, Hitler acquires a visual projector from the future which shows the downfall of Nazi Germany, of Berlin bombed into desolation and Russian troops at his door, which is a stunning science fiction sequence, arguably one of the best of the genre for the complexity of the emotions within it. That a comedy sci-fi film, with real footage including corpses used among that documentary footage, manages to balance out with this striking tonal shift for a moment, and succeed, is a huge testament to the production, more so as this is a film in one scene managing to give sympathy to a man who is undoubtedly a monster in history for completely justifiable reason, breaking down when he sees his fate is inevitable.

From even that scene, there is still the madness of multiples of characters, the punch line of having a trampoline on top of a tall building's roof leading to multiple tragedies at one, and the inevitable problem of trying to tell someone, even yourself, that you come from another timeline merely produces a blank reaction or leads to the truck driver you are hitching a ride with booting you out for being mad. Especially in the final act, when Tomorrow... manages to make all of this work, everyone from the actors onscreen to the production crew succeed. Petr Kostka as Jan, and his brother and duplicate, has a lot by himself to work with, and succeeds as the everyman stuck in this bizarre journey, whilst everyone else working in front and behind the camera manages to make the film work in every cog and twist.

Tomorrow... was once an obscurity, with the additionally strange history that, back in the day on British television on January 16th 1982, BBC Two screened the film for its first and only British screening at the time, to an audience which, decades after, reflected on this screening with wonder and curiosity as it took place on a night where, with only three channels to choose from, BBC One's regular airing of the football (soccer) programme Match of the Day was delayed². Preserved and available to a wide audience decades later, Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea is a worthy one-off even in mind to Czechoslovakian cinema, Czeck and Slovakian filmmaking alike, from this era being filled with countless unique films like this as original.

 

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1) Considering as well the director worked on a children's film a decade later, translated in English as Merry Christmas Octopus (1987), Czeck and Slovakian cinema knew how to invent creative film titles.

2) As documented in this review by Andy Goulding, from June 16th 2012 for Blue Print Review.

Hellbent (1988)

 

Director: Richard Casey

Screenplay: Richard Casey

Cast: Phil Ward as Lemmy; Lyn Levand as Angel; David Marciano as Mr. Tanas; Cheryl Slean as Sally; James Orr as Spike; Phil Therrien as Duke; Stan Wells as Jones; Leigh Dego as Jane

Ephemeral Waves

Hey Lemmy, are you going to eat that burger, or wear it?

Major Spoiler Warnings

With a love song called Van Goh's Ear being one of their few original songs, a punk band performing in a club, grinding by, finds itself with the potential deal with Tanas (David Marciano), a shady figure whose sense of corruption is found, as the band plays, with a shooting he sets up at the same time. Not only a normal shooting, but at Christmas, with a motorcyclist wearing a Santa hat and beard, with a machine gun, hired to assassinate a man and wife leaving their child an orphan. Tanas can inexplicably appear uncalled for offering a mainstream contract to Lemmy (Phil Ward), head of the band, his base a strange strip club with topless women are bound to strange art installations, and wheelchair bound Vietnam vets ranting about Agent Orange in front of the dancers, a den to hide his shady operations with drugs and murder.

Tanas is a Satan figure, dangling a Faustian contract for Lemmy, literally for his immortal soul in Tanas' red lit chamber. The irony is that neither side seem competent, and this comes to the strange tone of Hellbent, a kitsch eighties tone which ultimately helps the film win me over after its initial rocky start, one which eventually it takes risks and gets compelling adds the bow to what succeeds. Lemmy and his band only get particularly good when they sell out, and unfortunately by then, with Tanas' henchmen frankly as incompetent, everyone's on a destructive trip. Tanas wants Lemmy, and his fellow member and love interest Angel (Lyn Levand) to go on a downward spiral, whilst his own men including a philosophical one whose only contributions is to rip off when the legend of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat¹, the other a sex deviate drunk he introduces Lemmy to getting high on cough syrup with hard liquor at the same time.

No one is going to leave this great, when the band was an amateur one who are not great at the beginning, even when they cover the Appalachian folk song Oh Death onstage, but the tragedy they will get into, involving firing firearms in the recording booth, and the kidnapping of a child whose mother will become an angel of vengeance over alongside her slain husband, will make Hellbent the most fascinating of American indie curiosities. Genre is vague here, which is for the better, and yes, I cannot talk of this without the late eighties fashion access and colour choices, from red skeleton earrings, and earrings everywhere even on the men, to red cling film sex dungeons which comes from the same aesthetic tangents of Rinse Dream films and late eighties excess. The film's tone wildly swings directions between goofy to serious, from men inexplicably bringing watermelons to a punk concert to yet having a compelling plot where, yes, Tanas is going for the cruellest if contrived revenges for a grievance he had for Lemmy and his band.

[Major Spoiler Warnings]

Tanas is actually Satan or a devil, the supernatural suddenly kicking in at the finale, adding a final touch that worked for the film and its strange air when the phantasmagoric erupts in the conclusion. That this all resolves around Lemmy's band having mocked him onstage is itself the kind of eccentric touch which works. That this ends with the curious touch, after all the happens, with Lemmy being reincarnated as a folk hippy preaching goodness and salvation adds to the many curious touches of Hellbent.

[Major Spoilers End]

There is a lot to Hellbent which is absurd - Satan's plot, if like this, would be undermined if a punk band bothered to play like Motorhead, or to a lesser extent a more energetic punk band from this era, rather than kill a snake onstage, especially as they had managed to get the riffs quicker and better beforehand. This is however a film where the female coroner, at a crime scene, proudly and blankly informs a newly christened widow of how her husband was precisely shot in the head, so Hellbent is clearly made with a sense of humour. The film is just one of many from the decades of independent genre cinema from the United States, and the amazing thing is that this is another I have found which is just as interesting, managing to have a story which is compelling. Director-writer Richard Casey had previous made a film Horror House on Highway Five (1985), which is held as being just as weird, maybe more so for a slasher film with a fake Richard Nixon masked killer. With no other feature films in his career after, baring a return with Horror House on Highway 6 (2014), sadly we lost an idiosyncratic voice just in Hellbent. It is a shame as Hellbent does exhibit all the personality (and eccentricity you would wish from such a film). Certainly, the tone, once it figures itself out, works in Hellbent's favour; with the soundtrack filled with obscure but good punk/post-punk music, and performance art appearance to everything, this has its own compelling logic that wins you over. We can only presume, since it is entirely of its era, we had enough to enjoy here and any more would spoil it.

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1) Or when Alice Cooper, very early in his career for him and his titular band, accidentally got a chicken ripped to shred by a crowd because he failed to realise they do not fly and chucked it into the audience.

Games of the Abstract: Ninpen Manmaru (1997)

 

Developer: TamTam

Publisher: Enix

One Player

Sega Saturn

It's cool.

There are many Sega Saturn games - the tragic nature of the console is that, out-of-step of trends, and Sega making huge mistakes when Sony entered the console race with the original Playstation, a console which had secret gems became marginalised and affected access to these games. All because they faced new competition, dominating the generation even over Nintendo, which had the tenacity of a young boxer slaying the legends in its footsteps in the ring, many games are difficult to acquire on modern consoles. Even the way the Saturn was built, where the polygons were four sided than the standardised three, alongside being built with dual-CPU architecture and eight processors means that even emulation by fans was difficult for decades.

It has made preserving these games more difficult, and aside from bootlegging, you have many Saturn games selling for inordinately high prices, more so as Sega in the West did not commission titles to even leave Japan which became cult hits. Ninpen Manmaru is not one of those games - this is not a Radiant Silvergun (1998) or even a Princess Crown (1997), those two in particular helped by being good enough they were re-released - but it is a fascinating curiosity. In the early time of the three dimensional platformer here is another game in that genre literally waddling out of the gate, when Nintendo would create the gold standard in the world's eyes in Mario 64, and Crash Bandicoot would appear for the Playstation, only in 1996 a year before. It is obscure game from this genre, a licensed title for the Saturn when the console had, over its lifespan, a history of struggling and trying to wrap itself around polygons for successes and failures.

Ninpen started as Manmaru The Ninja Penguin, a manga by Mikio Igarashi started in 1995. Published in Monthly Shōnen Gangan, that was actually part of a multi-media empire including this manga imprint that is Enix, who many of us know more for videogames, especially when they and Square joined in 2003, but was in the nineties publishing many games. This is an era of cult hits like Mischief Makers (1997) on the Nintendo 64, and many strange and fascinating games in general for many consoles. The developer TamTam, obscurer, may have allegedly had its roots in the high school computer club its founder Atsushi Kanao came from, creating the studio in June 12, 1991¹. Going on over the decades on multi-consoles, from Playstation 2 to the Nintendo DS, sadly TamTam entered bankruptcy proceedings in November 2017¹. Most of their titles, if not all of them are obscure to the West. There is however Shinseiki Evangelion: Eva to Yukai na Nakamatachi (1998) for the Sega Saturn, a mahjong game based on the legendary animated franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), but one which not only includes female characters from that anime, but from others also created and owned by studio Gainax at the time, including Gunbuster (1988-89) and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–1991).

Ninpen also had a forty eight episode anime from 1997 to 1998 when this video game tie-in was released, when it was decided to strike when the iron was hot on this franchise. This may also addresses why the game was never released in the West, as much anime which never came over to the West even in the modern day, as much as this being the problem that Sega barely released legitimate cult hits to the West in general for the Saturn. Clearly, from the cut scenes in a cutesy and almost crude form in the game, still images like children's very skill doodles, this was a family show for kids.

Ninpen is as cute as you can imagine, a female voice actress (Haruna Ikezawa in the series and the game) providing the squeaky voice of the character. Ninpen is a male penguin member of the Nenga clan², welder of the divine art. His titular master Nenga, a sombre purple bear, however thinks his potential is not fully used. Bribing his with golden origami paper, because origami paper is a treat for Ninpen, and golden sparkly paper will be a treasure, Ninpen has the confidence to follow Nenga's task - to go to certain points on a map, a journey towards the ninja mansion, facing members of the clan in tasks Ninpen must complete, under a strict time limit, to proceed to the next area marked on the map he is provided.

The immediate thing to notice is how, in context for a 1997 platformer for the Sega Saturn, how distinct this looks. Never was there proof of the surreality of platformers, in this bright and abstract world of floating platforms and a sky rich is bobbles of cloud. It looks gorgeous in context, with the additional surreality there. Inexplicably your opponents, Ninpen only able to jump and avoid enemies, are for many stages anthropomorphic stationary, like sentient pencils and thick waddling erasers, even if the stages are more abstract in grass land and general multi-colour fragments than, say, the Picture City stages from the 199-5 Rayman platformer set in a stationary world. The music alone, scoring this, offers a shot of pure joy, where baring one snow stage with purplish-pink ground that allows a larger jump, and the Ninja Mansion looking like a Mario level crossed with a death trap, most of this feels like the vague fantasia of the mind in a good way.

The gameplay itself is a bit more complicated. Actually, the better term would be, for a game you would sell to children, deceptively evil even when you find charm in this. This presents intentionally a platformer which is difficult, but also how this shows how 3D platformers struggled to figure out aspects like movement and the camera. Ninpen drives like a tank - at points, I found myself with the cruelty, and guilt, to swear internally at the poor creature because, unlike even Crash Bandicoot from this era, Ninpen has a sluggish turning speed of a tank alone even if he charges about. Forwards goes forwards, but backwards will mean literally turning back than a shuffle back. Left to right are arches, and the shoulder buttons on the Saturn joystick are vital for precise turning moving or still, when you turn to shift where to head, as this is a precision platformer. Ninpen cannot attack, but his special move is the super flip jump. This however can only be done when you jump three times in succession, which offers a new challenge in that, with precise floating platforms, including those you cannot reach without the super jump, you have to plan when to do the three jumps, even in a tiny space, and pray you got it right.

The controls, once you figure them out, work, but any game unless entirely broken and impossible to beat can, technically, be played; most of Ninpen is pretty simple, that you avoid enemies, jump, and that the only collectable are coins, a hundred getting a life, all very simple. The levels play, in their tiny form, with being slight puzzles, as you have to find switches to unlock the direction to go, which offers an interesting take on the platformer. In mind to its mechanics however including requiring a special jump to reach some to progress, and that some feel like mazes, there are moments like some leaps of faith which do cross the line to not fully fleshing out this new genre's sense of fairness, and at times being mean. The bosses, less battles baring one, with your clan members are the moments I could live without and do undercut the game in quality badly. The platforming, once you accept its limitations, has virtues. The bosses are, depending on the challenge, not fun if completable. Not actual combat they can vary from chasing after the most coins in a stage, one being a maze with one switch to find, one bumping the other off the stage, and the least fun involving having to run away from the other until the time limit ends. The final boss, the final stage, which with master Nenga involving this is a long two minutes or so, and is a chore leaving a bitter taste to what is, warts and all a charming game.

Baring this, the only other gameplay aspect of note are the poseurs, which are coloured bubbles with negative and positive effects. Positives including health replenishments, or a super jump, whilst the negatives add a curious challenge, either restricting your pace from the constant run or preventing jumping, all alongside an inherent cuteness that, say with the negatives, their iconography include doodles of stickmen having headaches/migrants and/or anxiety attacks, befitting a rather anxious and unconfident penguin ninja you play. Considering, if you run into a wall, Ninpen at full speed will knock himself silly briefly, it is cute even in a game with some mean tricks up its sleeve to have a protagonist who is a lovable klutz. The meanness I felt for the penguin is contrasted by how utterly cute and sweet the game is as much as he is, in its bright polygon aesthetic to the music adding to this.

The game is a flaw creation, aged from the attempt by a developer to try this genre which was frankly new and, even closer to the 2000s, would have still struggled with mechanics like of the camera when the fifth generation of game consoles went into the sixth. Alongside the diehard fan base for the Saturn in general recovering games like this, the charm alone has so much to appreciate, and as an attempt at this for the Saturn, visually and in presentation this is a commendable effort for those involved to produce. You just have to bear in mind its limitations.

 

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1) As documented on the Sega Retro site for TamTam.

2) In 2022, an English fan translation, based on one partially completed as far back as 2002, now exists, a pertinent reminder that, whilst games like this are not held as worth being preserved by companies, the fans will preserve and even provide Western translations themselves.

Cuatro Paredes (2021)

 

Director: Matthew Porterfield

Cast: Bárbara López as Karla

Ephemeral Waves

 

Even with a small steak, you're still eaten the whole cow.

Sometimes it is better not to have a review, but instead create merely a diary entry for some films. Less a critique, amateur or otherwise, but a document that a film exists, a short film in this case from Matthew Porterfield, an independent director from Baltimore, Maryland who directed feature length films like Putty Hill (2011). This short film, shot in Mexico, begins hinting at a lighter tone than it may suggest, that as a young woman named Karla (Bárbara López) is driving, only to bring up a blue balloon and begin blowing it. Sounding less pleasant as it goes, the non-diegetic soundtrack continuing to suggest she is doing so one does with a paper bag, as we see the car driving through the countryside, Cuatro Paredes is marked by more.

It is a short film made in mind to the passing of Porterfield's father. Set within the first anniversary of her father's death, the film's scenario was composed in two days, shot in two days, set in the area Porterfield had moved to and improvised from this scenario of a small timescale to work with¹. The film exists in a world where Karla is the only figure onscreen, baring the cats who were in the area Matthew Porterfield with his girlfriend¹, but she is still connected to the world. The film, more abstract in tone, is a literal short story based on mood.

This is where, rather than review Cuatro Paredes, this is more of a diary entry for me, to mark the film's existence, that within twenty minutes I experienced a fascinating work for that small time. The film's mark in reality is there - the mark of a character morning their father, that the film is in tribute to one of the cats onscreen¹, the one actress Bárbara López sings to on the bed with a cough, which I had wondered about watching the film only to realise that was real. It is also a fascinating film to watch to see how one, in a small timeframe, tells a story but without need nessecarily from a plot structure. That mood is the dictator for what progresses: this is something found in avant-garde cinema in what one experiences when a film, of any length, creates a fulfilling experience, but also a character piece like this reaches its meaning in a perspective found than event.

The film is also more about presence. That even separate from everyone, there are people there for her, phoning her, leaving Karla messages, ones which are more abstract in how they match her own contemplation of herself, her thoughts, in mind to her father now becoming absent. Karla's thoughts on the drive in the morning, debating what exists and passes through a person's mind in a random memory, expresses the sense of consciousness. Her ending monologue, which Bárbara López memorised in a slight time¹, becomes more interesting in imagining the connections of her real life as much as cinema and storytelling itself, the interconnecting pieces. Trying to build a memory palace whilst on acid, Karla recounts her palace and an elaborate story of a soldier who married the mother of the child he killed, the daughter their sire who grows up into a sex worker, a vast complex that reminds me of a Italo Calvino passage from Invisible Cities (1974) in its tone or, with a further push, fully into Jorge Luis Borges' territory.

This was my first Matthew Porterfield work at all, requiring more than one viewing to fully gauge with; as a text, it offers the idea of cinema being more elusive and drawn to forms that are more curious than to merely tell a narrative. That may seem vague but, whilst a film from a North American director that just happens to be made in Mexico, with non-English dialogue, this evokes how I got into world cinema because of its complete unpredictability, that even when with more fully formed narratives they were more character pieces when they interested the most as dramas. Obviously, if this has to be a review, I recommend seeing the film if you can; for interesting for me however, to mark its existence if it lasts for decades or is forgotten, is more how this, as a literal fragment on purpose, has a lot to ponder in just twenty minutes and that writing the review is in respect for its creators' hard work.

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1) A great contextual piece comes from Matthew Porterfield himself, from his MUBI premier piece Matthew Porterfield Introduces His Film "Cuatro paredes" from April 13th 2021.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Bram Stoker (Original novel); Mark Godden (Ballet)

Cast: Zhang Wei-Qiang as Dracula; Tara Birtwhistle as Lucy Westenra; David Moroni as Dr. Van Helsing; CindyMarie Small as Mina; Johnny Wright as Jonathan Harker; Stephane Leonard as Arthur Holmwood; Matthew Johnson as Jack Seward; Keir Knight as Quincy Morris; Brent Neale as Renfield; Stephanie Ballard as Mrs. Westernra

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

[Intertitle] Betrothed by a scream...

I vividly remember Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary screening on Sky Arts, a satellite channel in the United Kingdom for "cultural" programming. Alongside John Cassavetes films I was sadly too young to appreciate, unless I have made up the memory, I swear to this was a broadcasting choice too. I would not be surprised if it was true too, as this is the one film, alongside its old DVD release from Tartan Films that many have likely seen this film Maddin and few others until his later productions after. Sadly, now, this does reflect an unfortunate realisation, that Maddin when being "artful" was easier to sell than pure, unadulterated films from his career. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is still a good film, undoubtedly, and I will not dismiss it at all with that comment. Instead, it does present the fact that, originally produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), this ironically managed what Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) was supposed to be, a more mainstream version of the auteur's style, only for both to be with their quirks. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs felt the more mainstream of his style, one which both felt a weird and distinct film, but trapped with trying to restrict his visual down to something more digestible. This is contrasted in Dracula, adapting Bram Stoker's novel with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, a more appreciated film that, continuing the style of stylisation from his tribute the silent cinema instead, did succeed.

Maddin is still here, not hiding for example that this is a metaphor for xenophobia and fear of immigrants in England, as this skips directly to when Dracula (as played by Zhang Wei-Qiang) travels across the sea to England in a casket full of burial earth. The quirks of Maddin are here, depicting this in his monochrome fantasia, be it Lucy Westenra's mother living in a glass box or when, as Dracula has bitten her and started feeding from her blood close to her death, Van Helsing literally rests her on an entire bed of garlic. Jonathan Hawker and his wife Mina do eventually appear in the narrative, and Jonathan's trip to Dracula's castle in Europe is eventually depicted as flashback, but this is fascinating for devoting its first half entirely on Lucy, a figure who is a minor if important one within Stoker's novel. Having Lucy centre of place, though her narrative becomes tragic and gruesome as in other adaptations, does really stand out as a distinction for this adaptation; more so in that with Mina Hawker, especially in versions by Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog (even F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922)) taking centre stage in a few prominent adaptations. Mina here does too, but arguably to lesser extent.

The decision to tell the tale through ballet is distinct. I will be brutally honest in saying some of Maddin's style, wonderfully on display with intertitles and fast editing, does not work simply because he cuts around the choreography too much at times. It is clearly intentional, but it feels out of place when the pair could have coordinated together perfectly. Other times, however, it works a treat. At one point, with Dracula trying to get into Lucy's bedroom, with pirouetting demons bounding around the bed, even pole dancing on the bed frame for a lack of term, feels like Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922) if adapted for ballet. Using the style he fully embraced by this point with films like The Heart of the World (2000), juxtaposed with uses as a monochrome film with striking colour (usually blood) painted on the images for effect, Maddin's take on Dracula is still a good version. Using the dance performances to retell the story adds its own logic too. For even those meant to represent fight scenes, having scenes which are depicted in the dancers' emotions in movement, with intertitles helping for context, makes sense for the director to have done. Considering how unconventional his storytelling aspects are in other films, to have his most conventional narrative told in this distinct way is an apt contrast.

It is a version told with fascination of the material even if it subverts it. It parts it is faithful to the tone. This proves you cannot cast a bad Renfield unless you really screw the pooch, and likewise here Brent Neale does a great deal just by gurning and looking as appropriately mad. Zhang Wei-Qiang as the silent but dashing Dracula really does a great deal, when Dracula can and has been cast badly, such as Lon Chaney Jr., try as he might, not really working even back in the Universal Horror days of Son of Dracula (1943). Maddin's sense of the macabre is found here eventually, where Renfield experiences interrogating by trepanning, and in mind to the sexual metaphors the vampire can have, with Mina just flat out trying to seduce her husband only for his experience within Dracula's castle to be unabashedly homoerotic. Only knowing Francis Ford Coppola managed to get away with a high budget Hollywood film with explicit nudity and gore undercuts what this has returning to the film; that this is still a more accessible film from Guy Maddin, a gateway production, but is a more subtly grittier take on the source until you start getting into the more exploitation adaptations; this is quaint next to Maddin's other work, but the tone is there.

Maddin's take on Bram Stoker's famous story, retold in ballet and silent film storytelling, is still an incredibly unique film. It is for me not one of his best, but it is certainly a little gem in itself, ironically one that would the perfect way to sell Maddin's other films, the gateway film. It is, with what it does, a jumping off point as rightly would champion this work's great virtues and lead to the others.

The Zodiac Killer (1971)

 

Director: Tom Hanson

Screenplay: Ray Cantrell and Manny Cardoza

Cast: Hal Reed as Jerry; Bob Jones as Grover; Ray Lynch as Sgt. Pittman; Tom Pittman as Officer Heller

Ephemeral Waves

 

Numerous Plot Spoilers Throughout

The Zodiac Killer is literally a film made to catch the real Zodiac killer. Why not begin the review with the truly infamous aspect of a production even when it is screened? Helmed and created by director Tom Hanson, there was even included a prize of a motorbike which was designed to catch the killer during screenings. Whilst the Zodiac Killer was still out there terrorising San Francisco, Hanson, who had previously owned a chain of Pizza Man restaurants¹, decided to enter cinema, the same year Dirty Harry (1971) came with a Zodiac killer stand, with the attempt to catch the figure that would be ultimately uncaught. Considering that Dirty Harry with its "Scorpio" killer came to theatres six months later¹ to The Zodiac Killer adds the cherry on the cake of this film's deeply strange origins. Well, that and Paul Avery, the journalist famous for investigating the Zodiac killings, who was even brought in as a consultant at one point¹, so this strange film has even further links to the real killer. The entire aura of this figure never captured for their murders, which many will know in cinema through David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) from decades later, has left its mark on cinema, and a production like The Zodiac Killer deserved preservation for how idiosyncratically part of the history it is, even if it also happens to be a bizarre crime narrative in itself.  

Unlike another film from this era riffing on real killers, Another Son of Sam (1977), which has nothing to do with the Son of Sam murders later in the seventies, The Zodiac Killer neither lingers, starting with random murders whilst the killer monologues that he could be the person next door and the regular person on the street. It is also the miserable life of a mailman named Jerry (Hal Reed), a bizarre melodrama of one who hates people, hates women but loves rabbits, weeping at their graves of why bad people still live when the bunnies die. He is also effectively Satanist, least in iconography though the logic to his killings is revealed later. The true Zodiac killer as depicted in this world, with the spice of Reed's melodramatic acting performance in depicting strange rollercoaster of characterisations throughout, openly improvises on this elusive figure of real crime in its own logic. Nowadays this would be a more contentious and controversial thing to do in a film, and none would be able to get away with depicting an ongoing spree of murders without moral outrage online, but seen in the modern eye, it is strange and Something Weird Video approved, Something Weird where this film was preserved with before being inherited by the American Genre Film Archive in collaboration.

The Zodiac Killer is of its time in many ways, as a fascinating cultural item, but also because casual misogyny is up the wazoo here, with everyone sexist or even misogynistic as a man; one older man's rant of younger women turning in crabbing older ones is exemplifying this, especially calling for "leftovers" from Jerry's courting. Some of this dialogue is undefendable, but it does have more to it even accidentally. All the toxic masculinity is still un-pc - where if you do not like girls, you're the f word, and they prefer "dumb" women, even use the paper bag metaphor for physical appearance - but it is noticeable none of the misogynists are good people. Jerry is revealed to be the Zodiac killer, whilst his friend Grover the truck driver, when not wearing a ridiculous fake wig to impress the ladies on dates, is a detestable man who gets mistaken as the killer to his doom. Due to his violent outbursts, caught in a domestic antagonism with his ex-wife, waving a handsaw of all tools to have acquired, before dying in a pool by the police, Grover looks the buffoon and the deviant especially nowadays with his misogynistic language.  

A female diner waitress, an older woman, when she chides Grove for calling her cheap in drunken comments the day after really exemplifies it was also clearly meant for point, as much as this is the dated nature of the film, especially as she is soon after a victim of the Zodiac killer. With the purpose of the film meant to catch the real one, it feels on point for Tom Hanson and his screenwriters to create one, alongside a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, to have this rancid attitude to people in him. It also presents the erratic nature of these types of films, of their slips in tone and whimsical music cues. Shot as an independent American production, it is a weird film. It recreates the Lake Berryessa killing among others, which David Fincher did in Zodiac, only with the killer in an all-black costume with a white target on his chest to be instantly recognised by; inherently the Zodiac killer in their attitude, with cryptic codes sent the newspapers, is a strange concept, yet one entirely real as a figure who was doing this, but this film manages to go further with the same film, recreating murders like this, having an extended sex gag of this killer being dragged into a house by a lusty woman, or leaving zodiac signs in salty on a bar counter.

The film's qualities are definitely in mind to its lacksidasical pacing and tone, a curiosity whose notoriety in what it was made for is matched by how odd it is onscreen to, especially when Jerry the postman posits a new theory of the Zodiac Killer, that of having killed people so they became his followers in the afterlife when Atlantis rises again. That was made up, confirmed when in an interview decades later the director summed this as "made-up shit,"¹, but even this adds to this as a cultural item as, made in the early seventies, occultism is naturally here too. This includes the Zodiac Killer talking about Atlantis, one of his female victims claiming to be psychic, or when Mr. Castro the psychic briefly makes an appearance, a character brought in for one of the most surreal and best scenes; hired by the police, and also evoking the ESP psycho craze that would culminate with the likes of Uri Geller in popular culture, in this film Mr. Castro in his short time onscreen, a David Lynch character who never was, has credible powers to add more to the film's psychotronic strangeness.

Considering this is a film where anything can happen the next minute, the fact its history as a production as much as the content is as idiosyncratic makes this a true one-off even if some, understandable, may be put off by its chaotic nature. It befittingly stays this curious throughout its running time too. At its end we see the Zodiac Killer having the psychological conflict where his father is in a mental institution, Hal Reed's chewing the wall acting notwithstanding an attempt to humanise this real world killer, only to follow this with a disabled man being pushed down a hill like a Naked Gun gag. That just exemplifies the absurdity of this, and finishes this curiosity perfectly.

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1) Taken from Zodiac Hunter: An Interview with Tom Hanson, a blog interview for the Temple of Schlock published on December 31st 2012. With a fragment included in the AGFA 2022 British release Blu-Ray as a booklet, the content related to the film's intentions, and the many possible brushes with the real killer, are as curious as the film's fictional content itself.