Games of the Abstract: Pachinko Sexy Reaction 1 & 2 (1998-1999)

 

Developer: Sammy Company

Publisher: Sammy Company

One Player

Arcade

 

In terms of “ephemeral” games, those which are made in mind they will be replaced with newer versions down the line, not focused on as a long lasting franchise, gambling machines are today's example to examine through a curious pair of entries in pachinko's history. Pachinko is a phenomenon in Japan, and one factor to consider in this is how most forms of gambling in Japan are banned by Japanese law with a few exceptions¹. One example which is exempt is horse racing betting, which is apt for a video game review to bring up as, when Nintendo even as far back in the late eighties tried to bring in online connection for the Famicon (the Japanese NES), with the Family Computer Network System in 1988, there was also the JRA-PAT (Japanese Racing Association-Personal Access Terminal), horse-race betting software for the add-on.

Pachinko is not a gambling game but has managed to get around these laws too, including how prizes won at pachinko can be exchanged at nearby stores for cash², and the lucrative nature of pachinko means that countless licensed machines have existed over the years and earn a lot. For the anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), held in high regards in the West and in Japan, its variety of pachinko and pachislot machines have had 2,380,000 cumulative unit sales by 2020 alone³. In mind to this, it is not surprising if tragic how, when Konami went weird in the 2010s in their licenses, the joke they would make pachinko tie-ins to the likes of Silent Hill and Castlevania came from a logic. Something like CR Pachinko Akumajō Dracula (2015) becoming notorious when it a) even existed for Castlevania fans, and b) was promoted for having 'Erotic Violence' content⁴, but unfortunately, at a time Konami were investing more in areas like pachinko machines than video games⁵, it made sense nonetheless for them. To invest in this industry considering how prolific it was in Japan was clearly them, as with investing into mobile gaming, a sign of how these vast industries like pachinko were lucrative even if not what we wanted from a video game developer to focus on.

The irony is knowing these pachinko machines came to Japan originally through a children’s game called the Corinth Game (or Corinthian Bagatelle), an early 1920s game produced in Chicago and based on the 1819 French game Bagatelle⁶, in which there was a shooting plunger designed (unlike with marbles originally) to fire silver balls, both helping to innovate pinball in its existence too⁶. Corinthin Bagatelle, or the Korinto Gemu as it became, was first imported into Japan in 1924, where kids could win sweets playing them. The term "Pachi-Pachi", which means the clicking of small objects or the crackling sounds made by a fire, came from this target audience and in itself was a term around the machines that would eventually christen the future ones influenced by these initial pieces of entertainment⁶. Adults would eventually play these games for small prizes, and also bear in mind too that a British wall game called The Circle of Pleasure, invented and distributed in 1910, brought scoring pockets, a vertical configuration where the balls stayed on field and other innovations which would find their way to influence the first pachinko machines, starting to be created by 1929⁶. This is a long prologue but all video game genres are inherently of interest for their backgrounds, and ephemeral genres, those rarely preserved and re-released, merely with new titles for them, are usually tapping into cultural concepts of great interest.  The obsession with fishing in human culture (and Japan’s) from official games let alone the fishing mini-games in others in one such example, to mahjong in all its normal and strip based varieties which get released into the West, based on a variety of different forms of mahjong, originating from China, and in certain cultures is also a game played with money on the line. Pachinko’s arcade and home console interpretations, not the actual machines, stand out for this reason too, most if all never getting released in the West, yet appearing on home consoles over the decades let alone in the arcades. Today's games being covered, as digital arcade pachinko games not played for prizes of a physical kind, could be dismissed especially when you get into their salacious content, but with their historical origins, they already have a lot of cultural background to prod with fascination.

It is also important in mind to the creator of these two games, the Sammy Company. Sammy Company got into the mechanical and electro-mechanical games industry through pachi-slot games in 1982, and continued to into the modern day, but not without taking a passing period into video game publication and development too, not just pachinko games like the Pachinko Sexy Reaction games being covered. Their bread and butter in pachinko and pachi-slots would continue over the decades, but we have to thank Sammy Company, who merged with Sega to form Sega Sammy in 2004⁷, for distributing a large portion of Arc System Work’s Guilty Gear franchise over decades, both arcade to home console releases of the cult fighting game franchise, and the non-pachinko games just from picking them out from the softography are tantalizing if obscure to learn about. For examples, Dolphin Blue (2003), a side-scrolling run-and-gun for the arcades that sadly never got an official port to consoles; Deep Freeze (1999), a Japanese only action adventure game for the original Playstation; or Higanbana (2002), a sound novel for the Playstation 2, another concept more frequent in Japan sadly neglected as a concept in the West. Sammy also, for the most part, produced a lot of pachinko games for the arcades and consoles, and whilst it may make no sense with no ability to win prizes to have these games exist, bear in mind mahjong is prolific in the arcades and consoles, and casino games for the West without the ability to gamble real money have existed in multiple forms. Even onto the Nintendo DS, Sammy gave you the likes of licensed titles like the legendary manga franchise Fist of the North Star in pachinko form with sequels.

There is another aspect to Pachinko Sexy Reaction to bear in mind, which might cause one to blush and avoid covering it, but is an incentive to play the game if there is not physical prize you can win. It is an adult game franchise, but in context that the closest thing to adult material, where even Japanese hardcore pornography is censored for their laws, is topless animated nudity and nothing more explicit. Alongside the fact that pachinko, like other games, do touch on a compulsive aspect of human beings, to be hooked on stimulus, these two games are also based on being able to see female characters you encounter slowly take off more clothing as you win. It is still a game of chance here, which presents an obvious aspect about the game being a pure coin guzzler, as ball bearings in real life let along digital, bouncing off pegs, are unpredictable to coordinate, to reach the areas you need to send them in to succeed. This was meant to be a game to eat coins unless you can figure out a perfect technique to fire the balls, chance in physics only challenged by the option to change the side the silver balls are fired to. This is also a rare “sexy” pachinko game, when most versions for game consoles are straight forward pachinko replications. This was also a fascination with this double pack of games, being covered together, simply as much as a rare choice. Next to mahjong or clones of Qix (1981), for Sammy Corporation to have chosen pachinko in terms of a game about selling sexy female characters you can see nude, it is an eclectic choice and clearly one, based on the belief clearly there was another audience with their main games of choice, a chance to wider their audience to their regular pachinko and pachi-slot games in a variety of forms.

The only real issue in terms of the game’s erotic content is that, to be blunt, some of the characters in the first game are uncomfortably young in their design, both in visual appearance and in the choices for the female voice actors with the pitch of their voices, a cast of which we will get into later as they include prolific figures. Beyond this, this is cheesecake, where over three rounds for the first game, you get animated cut scenes of the women, for the main character, getting undressed into more fetishistic and skimpier clothes, won by reaching the number of silver balls won on their tables. The game is like a teenage heterosexual male, obsessed with female breasts, exaggerated in the character designs which, beyond this, follow the tropes of what was popular in female character designs in this era of anime and manga. This is in terms the style of eye size and the other little touches which could be ignored, such as having eyes on female characters drawn in oblong circle shapes to depicting noses beyond a dot, using the likes of the hiragana kanji "ku" for the shape and being more obviously prominent as a result⁸.

With the first game having a stand-in, a slightly dimwitted attractive blond guy playing pachinko to get women to dress in clothes less likely to hide anything as the rounds go on, there is a concern as to whether this type of erotic game in presentation is acceptable. This is more an issue for the first game in the uncomfortable use of cuteness, by way of youth, in some of the characters, and that some of the characters, whilst not threatened, are still not pleased at all with the challenge they have accepted, not happy with you even putting another coin in to get more silver balls to play with. Beyond that, the notion of the male gaze has been complicated as more female gamers, and more pro sex female fans of pop culture, make their voices known, as with the wider voices for LGBTQIA+ video gamers which means a “gaze”  needs to reconsidered for a wider spectrum. This now has to consider individual gamers in terms of their sexuality, what they are attracted to and/or what would be sexist and/or purely crass to them. This means the standards of what is acceptable for good reason are more complicated even for a game like this, which was targeting a heterosexual male audience in Japan.  

The issue is that too, due to tendency for video games to once focus on male players, and electronic machine games too over the decades beforehand, we ended up with games which eroticize women rather than also eroticize men with equal interest. Unless Fist of the North Star has buff macho men who attract you, which I write that hoping someone out there does find their pleasure in, sadly there is no Pachinko Sexy Reaction game yet with sexy shirtless men getting changed into skimpier clothes unless it is obscurer then even these games. Decades where the concept of the erotic or even sexy video game being for a male audience, and being of female characters only, has made it strange to look at a game like this. Nowadays, gamers of all gender and sexualities exist and a vast level of eroticism has never been touched at all in genres like this before hand when the industry came to be properly, let alone dealing with the fact that a variety of body types, let alone a LGBTQIA+ and female perspective, were ignored. The obsession here with large breasts barely contained in clothes by itself, from female characters who are still depicted as thin figured, does feel like a self contained and small fraction of what is considered potentially attractive to any player, as much likely influenced by Western figures like Pamela Anderson and Western interpretations of beauty from outside Asia from the time. It in itself does brings up the very limited idealizations of beauty in terms of appearance and body shapes for women, let alone cis- and trans-women and men as an audience and subject for desire, something you need to point and accuse the Western gaming industry of doing so too. It is deliberately an exaggeration of the female character designs too, which also has to be factored in, as between the ability to summon an actual angel on the final pachinko table who helps you out, or the bright sensatory aesthetic of the stages, sumptuous in their own way, the entire game as with the sequel is an openly cartoonish game mixing sex comedy and pachinko that, whether it has aged or not, looks like it could have been a tie-in to a straight to video sex comedy show which had a broad sense of humour and had the slapstick as this does in its animated cut scenes.

The other prominent thing about the first of these games is that, for this production, it is quite a lavish game in context, with the animated scenes short but fully animated, hand drawn if interpreted on an arcade machine, and with full voice acting even if un-translated into English, as a work never released over in the West. Whilst clarifying the accuracy of this can be to debate⁹, this is where a real surprise comes in the established voice actresses who worked on this project, all part of how, as talented figures, voice actors for Japanese animation and video games still work, and their CVs can swing in so many tonal shifts. Kumiko Nishihara will be known for many for Perona, a prominent One Piece franchise character over the series and film tie-ins, alongside many cute mascot characters for the Pretty Cure/Precure series, a magical girl franchise of series which is explicitly targeting a young audience, a veteran since the eighties in the voice acting industry. Konami Yoshida is prolific especially in supporting roles but also with main ones, the one of note being one of the leads for Magic Knight Rayearth, a CLAMP magical fantasy mecha story with a notable Sega Saturn tie-in game, Magic Knight Rayearth (1995), an RPG which ended up being one of the last Saturn releases for the North American market despite being a 1995 game. Masako Katsuki, prominently the support character of Tsunade from the Narato franchise of anime, alongside Sailor Neptune for the Sailor Moon franchise, is another veteran starting from the eighties. Yumi Takada, who became a casting director for the Metal Gear Solid franchise, was prominent as a character Ayeka in the Tenchi Muyo! franchise among other roles. And finally, breaking up the alphabetical order, is Ikue Ōtani, as she is the one who really shows how voice acting in Japan is a job where one works in titles for all audiences, adult and for kids. She is someone most will know as, without being seen, as she is the voice of Pikachu, the beloved yellow electric mouse, over the Pokemon animated franchise, alongside other main and supporting roles, starting her career in a tiny role for My Neighbour Totoro (1988) by Hayao Miyazaki. This is neither to shame any of these actresses, if this is all confirmed in terms of casting credits, just a funny realization, completely unaware of this until researching for this review, of how voice acting in Japan, which goes from anime to redubbing Western films and television, is a job which you live on and means working on any project to live. Even if it means voicing the sexy female character in the office suit here, who bust size would have had Russ Meyer, the film director famous for his obsession with them in real women he cast, raise his thumb in approval of, it is still work for pay. It is still work, even including having to talk seductively to the player at a Japanese arcade as they try to earn as many silver pachinko balls to get more from them physically. I tip my hat off to the actresses who did the work, and just wonder what the recording process for them was like even if it was banal and quickly finished with.

The game is simple – pachinko, with three stages for each female character. The first game is straight forward, whilst you get to the 1999 sequel and have more video game logic to how you progress, such as how the bonus stage, meant to unlock more images in the first game, is actually required to be accessed and finished to complete the stages. The bonus stage in both games is slot machines reels in the centre of the stages where, when you land a silver ball into the slot which starts them off, you need to get the same symbols on them to access the bonus stage, the games sometimes emphasizing the turning reels for drama. The bonus round for the first game, unlike the second, are an optional challenge, providing additional images of the female characters as prizes, multiple ones, the further levels you can reach. Additional points, alongside the vast waterfall of silver pachinko balls you can win and fill digital buckets full of, can also be won.

Even if there was not the promise of nudity, between these games is a sensory overload of colour and noise over both, even a racket in terms of noise as you spam the firing of the pachinko balls. To bring in a really esoteric reference, in 1998, German artist and musician Eckart Rahn, founder of the Kuckuck Schallplatten record label, released the ambient field recording album Pachinko in Your Head: Non-Linear Music, which is literally an hour of experiencing being sat in a pachinko parlor, something that I have come to now with a fresh perspective envisioning a hundred of these machines, minus the voiced dialogue from the on-screen characters, in a row on both side blaring in unison or off-tune to each other as the Rahn album allows you to experience. These games can be accused as still being sleazy, but the bigger accusations, alongside those uncomfortable younger female cast members, can be made in terms of this as a sugar rush of stimulus, inherently designed to sink a person’s money over a long period of time, unless you are innately (suspiciously and supernaturally) knowledgeable of how to beat a digital pachinko game.

There is a great game you could have built from this, removed from its monetary point, and this pachinko hybrid, if you were willing to commit blasphemy, would be fascinating to remake if you had more control over the silver balls you fired, like a sexy version of Peggle (2007). Even in terms of the original game, for all its accusations of sleaze, the lead for the first game is a doofus who, by the end, after even a couple of the cut scenes having him beaten up by some of the women, also becomes the boy toy for a group of women now, out of his depth The cut scenes do suggest the tone was closer to a fun sexy comedy if with tropes, also found in anime and manga, which have not aged well. A fun sexy comedy in pachinko game form with some changes, with this game franchise’s vibrant tone, would find an appreciative audience, and the second game was becoming more ambitious a mere year later, with visual novel cues, and the ability to choose different paths, between two options of a female character to play against in divergent paths. Set around a variety of locations you wander around, needing to complete the bonus games to continue on the three stages per female character, you meet anyone from a woman in an animal mascot costume, to hitting gophers for a buxom tiger woman or patrons in a cinema for an obsessive female cineaste.

Barring your plucky female friend that tags along with your faceless protagonist, who is the last figure you play against, no one else has the uncomfortable look of being young as she does, feeling less sleazy and becoming a palette cleanser as a result. Sadly however, with the turnaround time very short between the games, there is far less actual animation and a sense less production value was being spent on this sequel, despite there still being elaborate pachinko table stages as with the first game, full of noise and colour. Than this franchise became barely more than two games, as Sammy Corporation even when they continued with this genre for home console released into the 2000s stuck to tie-in franchises, moving away from original intellectual properties and the nothing of sexy pachinko as a concept elsewhere.

The two games are curiosities – technically erotic but very tame, still with questionable choices, but bright and vibrant like a sexy comedy anime from this era. Their “sexy” content is not dissimilar to what you could get in some anime and manga even into the modern day, some of which can be much worse and more possible to accuse as sexist or even misogynistic than this ever will be. Worse games too exist even on Steam, with actually pornographic content nowadays as long as it is just animated characters, which makes this, if anything, merely juvenile and silly in its breast fixation. These are weird footnotes instead, preserved from the likes of M.A.M.E. yet having (least for the first game) a lavish production design placed onto them to sell to punters, knowing their developer would forget about this premise and franchise in favour of big franchise tie-ins.

Sammy Company would move away from video games, and into the 2010s, their output was pachi-slot and pachinko games from home consoles or mobile phones. Their ideals on their official website are the likes of being “Able to provide machines equipped with innovative gameplay through outstanding development capabilities and imagination.”¹⁰, all in mind that pachinko/pachi-slot machines as an industry is one alien to video games, an industry that likely earns more than even AAA titles for video games and yet is one prominently more focused for Japanese audiences and markets open to the machines only. This is an audience of its own rather than a worldwide audience for electronic entertainment as the video game industry is, separate in its own world and why Konami got mocked for its tie-in games then actual follow ups to their beloved franchises. These two games are forgotten, items that could be dismissed because their modus operandi is sexy nudity, even if the equivalent of a topless photo spread and nothing more explicit, but their history in context is worth talking of. They are fascinating to consider even in terms of if anyone ran with their style and game play in the modern day, considering the glut of low budget erotic games you can find just on Steam itself. Their tie-in to a business in pachinko, one which, by 2021, earned 2.39 trillion Japanese yen¹¹, is also significant in itself. This industry is a titan even larger than arguably video games will ever be in Japanese culture, and yet still felt it had to wiggle itself into video games with the likes of these two games, which is a strange concept to even consider in terms of a tale now finished for today.  

 

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1) A general introduction to gambling law in Japan, written by Anderson Mōri & Tomotsune for Lexology, published on May 11th 2022.

2) The Secret Life of Pachinko: How Japan's gaming parlors really work, written by David Kushner, and published for IEEE Spectrum on October 1st 2020.

3) Fact Book 1 (PDF) by the Fields Corporation, published February 17th 2020. p. 29. Retrieved March 17th 2020.

4) 'Castlevania' Pachinko Featuring 'Erotic Violence' Proves Konami Hates You, written by Zack Kotzer for Vice, published July 30th 2015.

5) 'Silent Hills' Is the Latest Sign that Japan Is Losing Interest in AAA Games, by Zack Kotzer for Vice, published April 28th 2015.

6) History of Pachinko, written and published for Pachinko Planet (© 2010-2023 Pachinko Planet LLC.)

7) Sega Retro's page for Sammy with its softography.

8) '90s Versus '00s Moe Character Design Examined, written by Scott Green and published by Crunchyroll on October 5th 2013.

9) This is going off the staff credits, including voices actresses, from Moby Games for accuracy.

10) The Business Outline for Sammy's corporate website (in English).

11) Gross profit generated by pachinko halls in Japan from 2013 to 2021, taken from Statista.com.

Detention (2011)

 

Director: Joseph Kahn

Screenplay: Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo

Cast: Josh Hutcherson as Clapton Davis; Shanley Caswell as Riley Jones; Spencer Locke as Ione Foster; Aaron David Johnson as Sander Sanderson; Walter Perez as Elliot Fink; Dane Cook as Principal Karl Verge; Erica Shaffer as Sloan Foster

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You have the arms of an anaemic spider monkey.

The follow up to Joseph Kahn's debut Torque (2004) as a feature filmmaker, a post Fast and the Furious motorbike action film from a director originally prolific in music videos, drops a gauntlet down immediately in terms of whether you can appreciate its tone or hate it. From the first scene of a high school girl talking to the viewer in a very reference heavy, but bluntly vapid, dialogue with masses of text and on-screen graphics morphing on the foreground, the film immediately stands out as something very different from the post-nineties slasher films which were already being meta-textual. Detention now is a film from an entire different era of culture too, but by 2011 when it was first released, it existed in context to how Scream (1996) and its self awareness for the slasher genre had already become nineties chic alongside the boy bands and the fashion of the era. Knowing this later film, despite being about a slasher killer, is going to involve a time travelling taxidermied bear and going to 1992, Detention manages to be both irrelevant and bouncing off the rubber walls.

Greg Araki with his nineties films could frustrate people, from The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997), with their irrelevant mashing of sci-fi, teen sex and abrupt gore, and if anything, Araki's naive nihilism of his characters was at least sincere. Aptly, he released Kaboom (2010) which contrasts Detention. Kaboom was an older director reflecting on his obsessions in the then-modern day in a wacky apocalyptic cult scenario, whilst Detention is a film made by Kahn, who started his career in music videos in 1995, reflecting on two decades worth of pop culture, the nineties and the 2000s, he was a part of building himself, all in a mass of post-ironic prodding in the template of slasher films and teen films in general. From a man who worked with the likes of Korn, Destiny's Child, Wu-Tang Clan, Mariah Carey, literally figures who were popular in these two decades among others, his sadly sparse filmography is contrasted by all the music videos he worked on in-between them. Kahn (born in South Korea and moving to the United States as a child¹) is someone who is clearly proud of his work in glossy movies but also deliberately prods and mocks the pop culture too². With this, he is taking an entire generation of young adult culture, and the one before it, and transforming it into an abrupt, multi-text mirror back towards this past.

At Grizzly Lake High, a killer dressing up as a fictional prom queen slasher villain, a mix of Prom Night parodying the Saw films known as Cinderhella, is picking off high school students. What this is from this springboard is less a full slasher film in the usual plot tropes, but drawing from the pop culture of the 2000s and 1990s through this context, the film centred around the lone, alienated female student Riley Jones (Shanly Caswell) who has nothing to live for to the point her fellow high school students gladly walk over her prone body on the hallway floor without realising her presence. Around her is every stereotype of high school culture, including herself, from the jock to the nerd, melded with vast areas of filmic culture, from high school dramas to, of all things, Cronenberg body horror, pulled together by Riley’s relationship with failing outsider Clapton Jones (Josh Hutcherson) and a serial killer who has literally jumped out from a slasher film series in the story’s world. From there, stereotypes are bent plastically into shapes unexpected, and referencing multiple pop items at the same time, going through the countless sub-chapters on even minor characters which disrupt the film with stories-within-stories which do not even have direct connections to the Cinderhella killer. It becomes apparent that, while there is a clear plot line with an ending, Detention is as much a purposely abstract movie, and gleefully so, whose tangents are meaningful in how out-of-place and silly they can get.

The film will put people off. Immediately it is clear this is a film with heavy levels of referencing that have become of the time it was made, the dialogue intentionally arch to the point it could cause the film to feel pretentious and obnoxious to others in conjunction with its tone and visual barrages. However unlike another work, say the animated television series Family Guy which made its bread and butter a lot of references to old pop culture with thin bare stories wrapped around them, Detention still has a core that is both cute with its referential jokes but have a clear, razor tongue in them, the erratic bombardment of music references, film homage and quips reflective of the age we live in. Even the stereotypes themselves, both meant to reflect the ordinary lives of real teenagers and abstract archetypes, is part of this, whether it is parodying (in a film-within-a-film) when they are cast with thirty year olds, or that there is even a reference to a seminal eighties film about teenagers, The Breakfast Club (1985), in having the titular detention also happen on a Saturday in the school library. The film has many visual gags, but especially with the many passages of text onscreen, this was an early film figuring out how to depict an age of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and many decades worth of the internet from the nineties onwards to take into considering in culture and cinema. With the countless forms of media on many tiny or large screens, the rapid fire nature of Detention visually is a picture of what all this would look like if it was fully part of our lives as breathing is.

The overriding nature of pop and geek culture both good and bad – hipsters, retro fads, cult films etc. – has reached almost everywhere in Western society, and this ironically was already riding on jokes about the nineties making a comeback in fads, something that prominently would start to be mined into the next decades in mainstream culture themselves. The film avoids making itself merely a parade of references by showing how pop culture can fade and become old quickly, even for the next people a few years later, and is also regurgitated, coming in with the subplot of Ione Foster (Spencer Locke), who fixation on the early nineties in trends is explicitly part of a curious Freaky Friday scenario in one of the many strange tangents in a world where anything can happen. Even the tangent about half fly-boys, the Cronenberg parody, would have gotten David Cronenberg's approval as it leads to them growing up with a literal television on their hand, which is not really a reference to pop culture saturation, more of a strange joke, but really feels apt for a film about culture itself. This stays to the late 2000s and the early to mid nineties in terms of the jokes, but looking at my own upbringing even in Britain, I think of all those nu-metal and pop punk bands I heard on Kerrang TV over here. I think of how they have flooded the second hand stores now with their albums between the likes of Dido and Coldplay, representatives in terms of popular radio hits, let alone NME magazine and the crest of indie rock they promoted which has moved along into the mid 2000s. An inspired highlight is a reverse timeline from the film’s main setting to 1992, depicting the music and fads from 50 Cent to Hole along the way, a 360 degree repeating camera spin, helped by simple optical effects, that depicts the changing trends of culture.

It helps that the film is so amused in its oddness, that despite being conventionally made when stripped of its flourishes, in terms of structure and still having to resolve itself in some form, it is still immensely weird. The time travel, the cultural references from both decades the film is set in, and the collage created plot threads, lead to some bizarre and absurd ideas made more prominent by how they can be casually done. This feels less intentionally strange in a hollow way, something you could have accused other films from this era of parodies and pastiches, but something when this has plot details which could have made whole movie narratives. A sequence involving a film-within-a-film-within-a-film-within-the-film-I-watched, work prints-within-work prints downloaded off the internet, even a porn parody, was the scene back when I first watched the film which won me over to Detention, even if the use of Ron Jeremy, a porn star who became famous for cameos in the mainstream between the nineties to this point, has not aged well due to real life (and horrifying) criminal convictions.  This sequence, the bravado it has, is inspired for how absurd it is, adding to the complete disregard for solid dimensional reality to the film. It made me realise the film should be embraced as a non-narrative blitz on its material references as well, following what Airplane! (1980) was after with its amount and frequency of jokes on-screen, pushed to the stage of anti-narrative cinema with its silly walks and bloody pie shots to the viewer’s face.

It still is a genre film which needs to end with a resolution, and any flaws the film has is that it has to lead to a conventional conclusion rather than what Greg Araki could pull off, let alone the fact that, despite actual nudity here and some surprising gory sequences, Araki's films were far more transgressive. Proudly anarchic, proudly bisexual (and horny in general), and proudly subversive, Araki's films for all their pretensions really struck the tone right for how weird the strangeness of the nineties were. Kahn's film here is more openly a parody of these characters, with a distance kept, and it still has to be ironic even if mocking "post-irony", something Araki's films did not do at all even to the point of alienating an audience more than Detention could do in how sincere its characters' angst was meant to be. Credit to Kahn though, despite this, he still makes something good here, and that Kahn’s director credit, looking like alphabet spaghetti, is puked out into a urinal bowl by a character shows a self mocking from the get-go that emphasises people made this production with a sense of fun and with a reason to its parodies. That opening credit sequence along, before you get to anything else, also presents so much more creativity on screen than many parodies I remember from this time.

By this point, in mind one dialogue sequence is a digression into the legacy of Scream in Detention, the famous slasher franchise had came back this year with Scream 4 (2011), after a long period of that series not being continued and as an old franchise being rebooted. Even the slasher films in its wake of divisive receptions were nostalgic by this point. The meta text here could not be a mere parody of straight faced slashers unless it had managed to reinvent the wheel again, as the original Scream had both done this.  Here we have Detention fully breaking down the films of the past, even making jokes about the idea of post-irony with a mocking glance, and then having Patrick Swayze and Steven Seagal have a metaphorical fist fight. This eventually becomes a film that has broken so many rules of logic it clearly does not care as long as it entertains and still pokes itself savagely in recognition of the silliness of it all. It is telling, when it comes to its film-within-a-film, Cinderhella, Kahn is parodying the Saw franchise, and the "torture porn" genre films, Saw from 2004 to 2010, before a huge gap in time, releasing films each October each year for a time as horror trends themselves had changed.

Detention sadly has become an obscure film, one of many that came to DVD and are ready to find a cult audience - call it the cult era of just before Netflix became the streaming service and still rented out discs - and sadly in Detention's case for Britain, it came out in a generic looking DVD and, unless you were aware of what it was or stumbled across it by accident, it became the kind of film you may thankfully get for a couple of British quid still but gets lost among all the many copies of big blockbusters also found on the charity shop shelves. Jokes about how long it took Avatar (2009), which gets name checked here, to actually get a sequel aside, even that film by now on DVD fills the same shelves too, and both feel like time capsules of their eras, both becoming the type of films Detention if it had been made in the 2020s would have parodied in terms of a characters obsessed with the early 2010s in music and fashion.  As someone who grew up in the early 2000s as a teenager, the days of rap metal on Kerrang, the seeds of hipsterism and the shiny little monoliths known as the iPods about to invade music culture, all jostling in my mind as I write this and in said mind as countless other memories from the period, this is a film that speaks to my generation as well as the young audience of 2011 it was intended for. Nowadays, with some of the references likely to go over a new audience's head, even some of the jokes in this back then feel deliberately obscure or obfuscating references people would have gotten on purpose, such as the guy in a Sigur Rós t-shirt trying to steal peoples' iPods whilst listening to Aerosmith. As a film along tackling the 1990s, which I grew up in as a child, with its pre-Millennial panic and post-modernism Ouroboros eating its own tail, Detention could have only been this much of a mess on purpose to tackle it. Far from perfect, as a horror film which is secretly a parody of pop culture, it does so much to admire.

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1) The Bio on Joseph Kahn's own site.

2) Joseph Kahn, the infamous director of Taylor Swift’s music videos, tells the ugly truth, written by Wesley Yin for the Washington Post, published on August 5th 2016.

Games of the Abstract: Daytona USA – Championship Circuit Edition (1996)

 

Developer: Sega

Publisher: Sega

One to Two Players

Sega Saturn

 

Poor Sega Saturn – never was there a console which should have been a more appreciated machine, or least with its software more readily available and not as expensive to buy second hand as it is nowadays. Some of its failure in the West was the fault of game critics, their fickleness and jumping on the bandwagon that polygons were of greater importance over two dimension sprite games, but let us not kid ourselves in how Sega made huge mistakes with the system. Even as a Saturn fan boy myself, the console that Segata Sanshiro even beat kids up about not playing in Japanese advertisements, whilst a success for Sega in Japan, was a console whose failure in the West was the company shooting themselves in the foot at a time when Sony would enter the hardware market for the first time, and do so much right from the first attempt with the Playstation. Nintendo, even if they made similar mistakes with the 64, had a rare advantage of being late to the party and being able to ride a wave of hype with the games which were also well regarded. Saturn with its great games however had poor luck with poor management, be it an ill advised surprise release in the North American market which instead antagonized retailers to many games simply not being released, or least not outside of PAL European territories, or visa-versa.

One of its most contentious aspects, which could have not been a problem if the guides were there, was the console's twin processors. Saturn even to emulate roms in emulation was a challenge for a long time to preserve games, even decades after, let alone with even creating games for the machine, but that could have been resolved if companies were provided with the tools and/or guides to make the process easier. The lack of third party games eventually was a huge factor against the Saturn, when there was a hurdle in releasing titles for the machine, a healthy backlog of games available something which could have actually led the Saturn to surviving longer in the West even if the second place niche machine The tale of Championship Circuit Edition itself begins with how, at first, even Sega did not fully produce games that took advantage of the machine’s virtues without drawing unfavorable comparisons to the Playstation.

The game’s origins come in mind to the 1994 release of the Saturn itself and the first attempt to convert the 1994 Daytona USA arcade machine to the home. With a lasting legacy into the modern day, Daytona USA machines (the originals, not just the remakes) can be found at British seaside still among the ticket winning machines. Daytona USA is a special game for me, but ironically the Saturn version is the one I am familiar with since childhood, knowing full well it struggled under a harsh public glare with notable compromises for the conversion. Next to Namco’s own conversion of Ridge Racer (1993), their arcade racer, to the Playstation, Daytona USA for the Saturn has notable issues even I admit exist, such as the popup of everything just before your car on the racetrack. Bear in mind, though, that the original Daytona USA arcade machine was a game with a lot of moving parts despite having only two cars and three racetracks, being a premier title for Sega’s Model 2 arcade board with aspects such as thirty cars onscreen for the Beginners course to the opponent AI which were built into the machine. Sega, to be honest even in terms of these games not being released on modern consoles decades later, have struggled converting their arcade machines from the Saturn onwards, because theirs were so innovative in terms of graphics and their machinery. The other irony is that Daytona USA for the Saturn is still an exceptional game in terms of gameplay – the problem was that, rushed as a launch title for the console like Virtua Fighter (1993), it was compromised for the home release. Launch titles and/or anything rushed are usually not perfect at all, but Daytona USA’s release was clearly such a notable one that plans would be afoot to try a reinterpretation.

A lot of work was done with a few of the Saturn titles over the next years. Very quickly after Virtual Fighter came Virtua Fighter Remix (1995), which for a limited time even was free to acquire¹. Notably later arcade conversions, with the sense of time being taken to convert them graphically and in replication to the home console, would become some of the machine's most acclaimed games with the time passed. The conversion of Virtua Fighter 2 (1994) became one of its best regarded games, and thankfully among its cheapest to still buy, and Virtua Cop (1994) was a well regarded tale of success in terms of being converted too. Another of significance, become also another of the console's most well regarded games and the cheapest to still buy, is the conversion of Sega Rally Championship (1994), which is significant for this review as those behind that conversion worked on Championship Circuit Edition.

The original Daytona USA itself, for the Saturn, is still a great game only with the visual signs of its graphics not being perfect; even with how unconventional the twin chip hardware for the Saturn was, it was a conversion that should have been delayed to fully correct its notable weaknesses, something to consider in how launch games for almost every console, almost all of them, are some of the weakest of their entire systems. The Saturn version is still visually rich and a great game, not with nostalgia glasses on, in that the energy of the original machine, the bright “Sega Blue Skies” aesthetic to Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's music, is still there and the challenge is too. You could practice the game, even with a controller, and learn tricks to play on the original machine with actual peddles and a steering wheel, a testament to its successes. The conversion's shortcomings were entirely that, for a debut on the new machine, a huge success for the arcades, its visual appearance would have been seen as a black eye regardless of the game's quality in gameplay. The resulting game to make up for this, however, is a very different game. The creative decisions pose a significant aspect to Championship Circuit Edition, which is still a good game, a huge growth graphically to the first game and even in new content, but not really Daytona USA the arcade game at all. It is its own sequel, with reworked mechanics, which has to live under the shadow of a game with huge legacy.

There are notable updates, more cars with different performances, two more race tracks to the original three, a two player mode, which was missing from the Saturn original, and Time Attack mode. Due to how few race tracks the original arcade game had, and still with only five here, those first three tracks were able to have their own personalities as much as iconic levels to platformer have been able to. Daytona USA’s legacy, and why its aesthetics are iconic, are in mind it was never a realistic game in tone at all, and those three race tracks do show the personality of the game fully. Ironically, whilst the franchise is named after the Daytona International Speedway, the most prestigious racecourse for NASCAR, only the Beginners track (named Three Seven Speedway here) is close to the source, starting with its ironic rolling start with your Hornet car already moving, driving a fully circular track where you go left only. You still need to negotiate the track, especially if the time limit between checkpoints is still on, one which is the huge challenge for first players until they learn how to negotiate the race course without losing speed. The other cars are more obstacles than opponents through this franchise, the main corner at a cliff with Sonic the Hedgehog’s visage carved into it the first test in learning how to get past corners quickly without crashing, a huge skill you need to learn as you play.

The visual iconography, as much as Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's music, is what lasted with Daytona USA, not realistic at all with Three Seven Speedway, still with the iconic cliff face or the giant slot machine over the race track, on which secret button combinations can be stopped in certain ways. Intermediate is now christened “Dinosaur Canyon” due to its most iconic aspect and its toughest corner, a huge corner you need to slide pass so not to spill out off the track, with a whole dinosaur skeleton exposed in the cliff face, and Seaside Street Galaxy was the Expert track, a two lap and vast dash across a city, over the bridge through streets and pass the statue of Jeffrey from Virtua Fighter, the challenge of negotiating huge corners including through the bridge’s underpass and around a hair pin at the dock where large ships are to be found. Championship Circuit Edition adds between Beginner and Intermediate National Park Speedway, which is based on one very specific corner, and a few smaller ones, with a rollercoaster off the course as playful visual detail. The highest difficulty track denoted is Desert City, where corners come out of the gate. These two tracks, speeding past a freight train for the last one, feel closer to the Sega Rally Championship courses in tone, but they have their virtues. Sadly unless you have access to the Daytona USA Deluxe release for the PC, released in 1996, you cannot have access to the sixth course, Silver Ocean Causeway.

This moved away from the bluest of blue skies energy from the original arcade game, and there are also the facts the driving mechanics themselves are different from the original game. It is prominent how the games play differently to each other in how the vehicles handle, and that is not factoring in how the new cars (with varying degrees of Grip, Acceleration or Max Speed gauges) actually can make the game easier. Arguably the challenge to Daytona USA in any form is that, with all the other cars baring the first are merely obstacles in your way, the challenge is to successfully negotiate all corners, even if willingly bouncing off a wall, whilst still retaining top speed, being fast enough to catch the elusive first place vehicle just out of reach unless you can negotiate those corners perfectly. The new cars add an advantage unlike the original in that, say, if you want a ridiculously fast car and can figure out how one without grip can be piloted without gliding directly into a wall, you can and have a new advantage in being significantly faster than with the default car.

Nothing is amiss about Championship Circuit Edition in terms of the gameplay. With the Time Attack mode, the two player mode the closest thing yet to the arcade machines having the full cabs able to be connected, and unlockable cars to win, and this is a solid overhaul. The graphical overhaul itself is a success by itself, showing an admirable work in using the Saturn’s virtues; whilst its tech was the likely culprit behind many games not being released again in the modern day, and a pig for some programmers back in the day to program with, those who were given the time and knowledge, as this shows, could match the Playstation. It has a more muted aesthetic look closer, which is where also out of a preferences, my heart is still going to be for the original (if graphically compromised) Daytona USA conversion even if I have admiration for this as its own game. The original in its brightness, even if compromised in the Saturn conversion, will win me over, as is the legitimate crime Championship Circuit Edition does commit, not having Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's music at all beyond instrumental remixes. They are still memorable here, but there is something wrong with the lack of his voice, one of the series ' most iconic details. That is not even a slight against the couple of vocal tracks you do get here, rock songs sung by Eric Martin, who was the front man of the band Mr. Big. Sounding like Sammy Hagar of Montrose and of the "Van Hagar" era of Van Halen, Martin's work is cheesy American rock apt for the game, but Mitsuyoshi's voice still should have been here.

His would, as the legacy of this game is that it had multiple versions, not just the PC release mentioned earlier when some Saturn games got PC ports. The Japanese release of Championship Circuit Edition had so many prominent changes of its own that it became Daytona USA Circuit Edition (1997) instead, which allowed all the original and new music to be optional to choose between, alongside much more significant touches and improvements, such as in terms of the graphics but also inclusions closer to the original arcade game in driving mechanics. Daytona USA: CCE Netlink Edition would be released in North America later as its own release, a tie-in to the Netlink, part of bringing online access including multiplayer over the internet to the Saturn, including titles like Virtual On: Cyber Troopers (1994) and Sega Rally Championship among those that used the system. Sadly, as with many things with the Saturn, this was for a brief time in the West, whilst the ultimate irony is that, among all the versions of Daytona, the original arcade game is the one that has lasted. Championship Circuit Edition is a good game, in context a real gem for the system, but it faces peril to driving games, like sports, having an ephemeral quality that it could have been easily replaced with a sequel with more improvements and new tracks. Ironically Daytona USA, even with its early polygonal graphics, even with its remake in new glossier ones and the ability to see your face onscreen driving available, has lasted and because of the likes of its cheesy brightness and Mitsuyoshi's songs, the traits that made it stand out as a game which had a personality you could not replace with a new yearly release.

 

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1) Press release, Sega "Knocks Out" Sega Saturn owners with free Virtua Fighter Remix giveaway, published August 2nd 1995.

Forbidden Paris (1970)

 

Director: Jean-Louis van Belle

Screenplay: Jean-Louis van Belle

Ethereal Waves

 

Built from stories not used in a documentary Jean-Louis van Belle was staff on, Paris Secret (1965), van Belle's Forbidden Paris is not one of the more shocking or notorious mondo films in existence, and is fact ultra obscure. It is not even one of the most ambitious of this genre of documentaries, a subjective term of they were notorious for elaborated and controversially set up moments, but this has its interesting side to itself. Innovated by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, mondo documentaries are controversial in the modern day to as many can be challenged for their offensive and politically incorrect content, but they can also be upon reflection more complicated and deliberately provocative in ways that are challenging upon reflection; Jacopetti and Prosperi themselves reached a zenith, of this moral complexity and controversy, with Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971), a docu-drama about North America’s history of slavery. Mondo Cane (1962), the film they created which innovated the "mondo" documentary, also led to a lot of films trying to follow in its success in lurid "documentaries" which were about showing titillation and shocking content, whether they were actually transgressive or not, and Forbidden Paris belongs to this category among many of this ilk.

Forbidden Paris however offers a fascinating spectrum, set within Paris, of how many unconventional and diverse viewpoints exist hidden within the city, set up immediately with one who has planned to deal with the upcoming apocalypse. With his family, his wife and infant son, they have shaved off their hair, and he has set up the precaution of acquiring an anti-radiation suit and radiation proof moped he rides to work even before the bombs have dropped. He is not the only one preparing for the apocalypses either in this film, as the Great, Great, Great, Great, Great grandson of Noah hosts a doomsday orgy rejecting Earthly wealth. It is a reminder that human beings are strange, a species capable of abstract thought but also vastly different from each other entirely even within one single metropolis. In this snapshot, even if exaggerated in sexploitation sexual content, you see how diverse and different they can be. In contrast to the conformity that likely existed in the world at the time in Paris, there is also a man who encourages human polygamy and openly kissing everyone, regardless of gender, reaching God through love and getting pestered by the Parisian cops for being a nuisance on the streets. Fakir classes are transpiring as seen here for women, to learn to be able to lie on beds of nails or pierce one’s cheeks with needles without pain. The exploitation edge is seeing the male teacher sticking a real pointed tool across his throat, but the reality more fascinating in imagining that in late sixties France, as this material was being collected, this would have been just one pocket of culture happening at the time next to other curious outsider communities hidden between apartments.

“Regular uniformity” as is spoken by the narrator at one point, and how it has led to these tangents and exceptions from its subjects is what the theme is and can be found in other mondo documentaries at the times, even the deeply problematic ones which took authoritarian roles whilst lusting after the material they condemned. Even if sold on titillation and the lurid, a work like Forbidden Paris, more obscure, feels instead more interesting as a document of the period even if any of the material is fictionalized. It envisions a more realistic reality that, even if people have day to day jobs and are expected to behave a certain way, you learn they have secret lives. It is salacious in a tame way here, but one can imagine that housewives have hired a male teacher, who also sells them sexy lingerie, who teaches them how to striptease. Naturally both sex and death, two taboos in most societies, become centre of this underground side to ordinary life, such as with the male hairdresser who expanded his work out to the recently deceased. Arguably one of the grimmest moments is a woman having her late pet dog taxidermied, if only because the process is shown, and even that adds a sick punch line which emphasizes this taboo– how, using a vinyl collection of dog barks for the initial choice, your taxidermied dog can bark with a voice box inserted inside among the sawdust, like in a singing Christmas decoration, if requiring AA batteries.

And it can be progressive here even of the language is politically incorrect, such as a marriage between two trans people, at least two people (a man and a woman who dress and perform in a different gender to their birth together on stage) who are shown in a positive light as figures who are gender fliod. The narration of how the abnormal is actually normal in context becomes pertinent to all these subjects in the documentary, even if the film is not one of the most elaborate or startling from this notorious exploitation genre. Likewise, this emphasizes that even if something may have been lost in translation old rituals still linger in a metropolis, the pagan and heretical finding itself still flourishing in the likes of the worshippers of the flame, who cremate the dead to liberate their souls, unlike burial which traps it longer. Their only concessions to the modern day, alongside having to work around the law, is that even when it comes to mock cremations with mannequins, they have found it cheaper and more effective to use Shell brand petrol in them. That is not even a joke on my part, found in the narration, and it is as funny as it reflects, for what is a period of the late sixties now of the past, how these secret sects and groups have had to adapt and improvise even in the little details, even if they are hilarious to learn of.

If there is one reoccurring theme in Forbidden Paris which is not progressive, but unfortunately is more timeless than one presumes, it is how a lot of the communities we see here involve a lot of older men with cult of personalities around them and involve younger women around him as students and helpers, a reminder that a form of charisma can make a lot of men dangerous in taking advantage of people. One example here is not actually dangerous, but he still finds himself falling into the stereotype even if he is entirely innocuous – Gen Fenn the American photographer who is a photographer who puts wanted ads for female models who have masochistic tendencies and are happy to participate in New Age photography rituals involving nudity, most of which could be exaggerated as performance for this film. Considering the likes of Charles Manson from this era, however, it does raise concerns of how among the lot we see here – the Fakir teacher, our Noah great grandson et all – even those here that are harmless do show anyone can acquire a circle of likeminded figures who will follow their advise. Fenn’s only sin is a narrow view of female sensuality and women not all conforming to what he views them to be, old fashioned sexism, but unfortunately more dangerous figures, the least likely to win over people, could exist and have won too many people over. Into the Millennium onwards with the likes of incels you get cult of personalities which are far more dangerous, and do not have the innocence of most of these in this film.

One such example which is not innocent at all, and the one certain trend older than one presumed, is the Nazi club we see the rites of. Unfortunately we have this section, whether staged, with people allowed to be shown onscreen, but alongside rightly being called a “cut price SS group”, they have to be included for a reminder of how even corrupt pockets of community also exist. Even if nowadays you should not give them space on cinema to voice their opinions, and there is a lurid sexploitation edge to filming their rituals, it is poignant in Forbidden Paris to know not all this underground series of community are wholesome. This has the one moment which feels uncomfortable with their existence already stinging, in one of their female members being stripped naked and painted with Stars of David and swastikas to be “persecuted” briefly, but with the image of a few motley Neo-Nazis trying to march up Champs-Élysées, only to scamper off, their appearance here is to be mocked. It is sadly pertinent to have this section; even in mind that, only three decades earlier, Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II, we learn there were Nazi sympathizers even in France itself, the narration holding them as ugly but an unfortunate truth, the unfortunate other side of the coin.

Thankfully this is the one group who are complete villains. Even if some of the subjects are more lurid in their depiction, they stand out as eccentricities, outsider and those who cannot be defined in conservative values. Conservative values really cannot apply to the “last vampire”, even if his life as talked of offers almost a sitcom I wished had existed, merely going about his day, occasionally getting a nice blood supper from a freshly killed horse, one scene that needs a warning even if the animal is humanely killed onscreen, and talking of being pestered by one of the older women in a store who clearly is smitten with him. His cameo in The Sadist with Red Teeth (1970), Jean-Louis van Belle's weird pastiche of Euro horror cinema, about a man who is effectively brainwashed into becoming a vampire, really means a lot more as van Belle blurred the mondo reality with the fictional film with this figure having a key role as a turner of vampires.  In vast contrast, what could be seen as the most exploitative moment, as it deals with the disabled, becomes the best and the sweetest moment in what, contextually, is a minor film in this sub genre. That of a ballet school for the disabled where they embrace dance as much a physically possible per person, to discard their false limbs outside and even drink champagne after the sessions.

Films like Forbidden Paris are fascinating to see, these obscure titles from exploitation cinema time capsules where for all their dated content and the fact they were greatly sold on sex, show a lot still of these types of figures, those on the fringes of society who lived hidden lives. Even in mind to these films knowingly fictionalizing their content, and unsavory content like exoticising non-European cultures, there was also a streak that could be found of seeing the underbelly of cultures, the maligned and that rarely talked of. It was unsubtle in a lot of the films made by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, and others taking advantage of their success, and rightly they can be difficult films in whether all their content was justifiable, but this minor effort from Jean-Louis van Belle even shows these can be rebellious films forcing those rarely given a voice, and subjects rarely done as well, their stand onscreen. Those I have talked of with the most positive voice, even the eccentrics, have been immortalized thanks to the film, which in itself is a subversive act which is worth the film's existence.

Folies Meurtrières (1984)

 

Director: Antoine Pellissier

Screenplay: Antoine Pellissier

Cast: Magali Bernard, Elisabeth Carou, Carole Chapus, Mireille Duruisseaud, Samya El Alaoui, Jean-Pierre Fonzes, Marie-Pierre Fosse

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

Looking like a 16mm family film I would have scanned through, for a volunteer period at a regional media archive, Folies Meurtrières is not that wholesome, be it the woozy synth to the starkness of the film, still retaining the dread of something found in someone’ attic as we establish a young woman being stalked by a masked figure as she is out swimming. An ultra low budget slasher film, Antoine Pellissier’s dazed old home portrait movie, in aesthetic, is told mostly in visuals baring some narrator exposition. It could have been told entirely as a silent film, which is a virtue to Folies Meurtrières. That it is not does not detract from the mood, where the sound and music is there for mood which adds to the material, and that the colour film here, not only being less expensive, embraces the fact it is also a splatter movie too. The blood needs to be red, starting from when it seeps from a wardrobe, where a male friend has been stabbed and chained up in, and progresses from there in the quantities seen.

You will need a taste for something deliberately sordid. This strips down the slasher genre to its barest, reduced down to just people being stabbed and killed until its ending reveals an explanation for what is a series of vignettes, the masked killer targeting multiple women over the length of a film under fifty minutes. The resulting film feels avant-garde as a result, following a killer on their merry murdering way, because Antoine Pellissier stripped out pointless exposition scenes and dialogue entirely from this sub genre. This tone is what, with further emphasis on experimentation, Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet would deliberately stylize further and amplify for Amer (2009) and their experiments in genre like giallo, only Folies Meurtrières is a rare piece of French horror cinema, from a period before the Millennium when more of them were more known globally, and from the no budget territory. This has its own distinct touch in just how grungy it is, the style in taking a slasher film, which were still quite lavish budgeted productions even as Canadian and American independent productions, and stripping even that further, to the point you are in a pure white mining area involving a left over chainsaw, stripped of any glamour or sheen, without any of the style of the eighties at all.

The biggest concern for anyone, whether they can appreciate this or not, is that this is a nihilistic splatter film, a string of murders where the victims are all women. There are also a lot, a comical amount in fact, of dead guys in white t-shirts who turn up already dead, so our killer is equal opportunity, but until the ending expands the film’s reasons for these scenes, this will be off putting for some for the peril of these women, very unlikely to survive. That this is a splatter film too, like a grimier Herschell Gordon Lewis production and more about the gore set pieces, is not going to be for everyone either. It is the tropes of horror even from before these genres reinterpreted, even having a cat jumping out scare, but Folies Meurtrières more than even the slasher template is about the scene with a vice to the head, or a chainsaw to the guts with fresh (animal) guts used, about the homemade prosthetics. Even in terms of a no budget genre film, this could be an acquired taste because of how ultra minimalistic the film is, a mood piece to an audience who may prefer the dialogue and playful fun of something shot in someone’s back garden which is more indulgent.

[Major Plot Spoilers] The twist is a sudden surprise, that our killer is a woman who is picking off the women her male lover cheated with after killing him. [Spoilers End]. The twist does not necessarily defend the content before, but in the heyday of the original slasher boom, where there were few films with this touch, it is a compelling choice and a subversive one in context, and the sudden turn to a supernatural ending, with an additional nihilistic streak of comeuppance, really does stand out. Antoine Pellissier would continue to make films, but with only a few over two decades, with Maleficia (1998) the last. That does seem a shame as, whilst there were genre films from France from before the Millennium, it would have been fascinating just as the boom in French horror cinema came for him to have taken his own interpretation from what he made before. An obscure film that is not readily available, Folies Meurtrières was, for those ready for it, an experience distinctly of its own.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Minimalistic

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