Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

 

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Rio Kishida

Based on the work of the Marquis de Sade

Cast: Renji Ishibashi, Seiran Li, Kôji Shimizu, Yasumi Hara, Kimiaki Makino, Kumiko Tachibana, Minori Terada and Miwako Yonezawa

Canon Fodder

 

Prosperities of Vice takes us to the Taisho era of Japan in the 1920s. A group of upper class men and one women, Sadean figures of power, are being served at a long dining table by topless, submissive female maids, and they recount their tales of sin and debauchery, be it turning a public officer's wife into a pet, or executing an innocent man as a judge and being aroused by it sexually. One of them, a nobleman calling himself a Marquis (Kôji Shimizu), runs a theatre and sets about adapting the novel Justine by his namesake the Marquis de Sade using real criminals, murderers and sex workers as the cast. It is all with the intention to show the deepest desire of people secretly to commit crime, to "teach the pleasure of vice" to audiences.

His wife, the beautiful Seiran Li, a former sex worker herself bought by him and playing the titular character, is shown mirroring Justine herself, having become a sex worker out of losing her family and being left an orphan, a real life example of the character without needing to live in a world of period appropriate French dress costumes. The Marquis however made an ill-advised decision in doing this, as he decided to cast a thief in the lead male role (Renji Ishibashi), even going as far as have him seduce and take his wife for his voyeuristic pleasures behind a peephole. The thief and wife fall in love, undercutting the ideology of vice with their true love beyond Sadean ideas. Also significant is the historical date as, with the thirties approaching, here as in real life Japan, there would be a military uprising would lead to the end of the Taisho era, and the push to a far right wing military leadership.  They would invade other countries and, leading the Pacific and Second World War's aftermaths, and would cleave through dissidents considered "anti-Japanese" to the new leaders the moment they got power.

An eighties Japanese film with a very glossy look that is unique to Japanese cinema, it is a late era Roman Porno and still as much an erotic film if undercut by its melancholic air. This is in mind to its director Akio Jissoji, whose style completely takes the period erotic drama here into a fascinating direction. He was a fascinating director in general still needing more attention given to him. With his debut This Transient Life (1970), and his other films for the Art Theatre Guild, he created very striking existential dramas, the debut itself with each image and scene playing out with continual movement of the camera or with something important and distinct in each shot. Yet he was also directing tokusatsu films and television series like for the popular Ultraman franchise. He would juggle genres and themes over the years, even adapting Edogawa Ranpo tales by the nineties, and here he presents many distinct, eye catching images and sequences, all centred around this illusion which is broken by a real murder in the theatre midway through.

The film is very subdued and is drawn back in its plotting, its sensuality and even the sense of depravity marked against its mood, which slowly re-tales Justine against the inevitable tragic end to the tale. Even in mind that the Sadean lot are not good people, the irony of their depravity to the militarisation that comes, and how its defeat radically scarred Japan literally and culturally, is not lost. There is a lot to take in that would need multiple viewings, which makes the rarity of the film more disappointing, its elusive tone pulling the plot further from being fully conveyed conventionally on purpose.

The film is more fantastical than This Transient Life, of clocks and a small cramp hideaway full of life sized mannequins. The concept of de Sade's virtues of vice are forced to be re-evaluated when a real death takes place, the real world encroaches on your desires, and someone you control goes against your wishes by falling in love. The film splits itself in the real and the abstract. The machinations of real life, seeing actors getting into costumes and rehearsing, are contrasted against the actual theatre stage. The film cuts from one time period to another, the play reflecting what is happening off the stage, and when the otherworld is brought up by the end, the theatre becomes an internal construct of the characters' minds as well.

In terms of sexuality and debauchery, it is as subdued. Baring a scene of said maids being forced to eat sea cucumbers, which turns out to be the most grotesque scene even next to all the perversions depicted, it is as subtle as its tone. It is not Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) either. It is still a very erotic film, but it conveys it through image and mood rather than actual sex even when that is shown. For a film which even has an explicit scene of necrophilia, it is depicted with a matter-of-fact eeriness which is less shock value, but portrayed through a baroque tone as a heighted dramatic denouement for some characters.  Unlike other depictions of Sade as well, it is about the ideas being conveyed through words and thought rather than the whips and chains of, say, Jess Franco's adaptations. Like This Transient Life, it matches this with a visual texture to make everything, the actors' naked bodies to the environments around them, sensual. Even when he adapted more fantastical genre work, like Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988) with its time hopping tale, including the Taisho era, of the war between Tokyo and a magician wishing to reduce it to rubble, the director was just as fascinated with the visual textures and mood of his work. Its depictions of the occult and the monstrous felt from the same director of This Transient Life, making his career directing the likes of Ultraman even more compelling to contrast to these films.

The result is very unconventional. The concepts of de Sade are placed against reality itself, of political strife and emotional strife, the Marquis and his friends as isolated in their perversions as the four leaders in Salo... while the world changes completely for them outside the buildings they are housed in. The virtues and vices cannot be easily separated as his wife proclaims at one point she is neither Justine nor the good Juliette, of the other Marquis de Sade tale that was written as a mirror, instead her own person with her own thoughts, ideas, and her own forms of virtue and perversion. The plan of the Marquis to bring the joys of vice to people through the play does not bear in mind that the people he is around already act out their own delights, and like most people, he becomes hostile to it. Despite the heavy subtext this and This Transient Life have, they are all about where people place themselves when they are separated from perceived texts and concepts, and have to think about their own existence. Mandala (1971), which could be a deeply troubling film nowadays to some to watch as it followed a religious cult who practiced rape to bring in subservient members, was a pretext for themes this film had with hindsight for me. Like the Japanese cinema and culture I have been able to view so far, it is very much an existentialism that goes as far as the soul, and does not shy away from the perverted and vulgar in answering the questions, or mixing it into "vulgar" genres like pinku films. Nikkatsu, who produced the film, abandoned the roman porno movies that kept them afloat by the time this was made. Those films are still there for me to view, but it is befitting I became aware of the one which breaks the ideas of sexuality and perverse delights down and scrutinises them.

One day, I hope this particular film gets rediscovered and brought in full restoration due to these reasons talked of in the review, a film which does scenes that are deliberately erotic even if playing with taboos, in green dream haze flashbacks having politicians' wives crawl naked with their sleek figures and black bob haircuts on chains like a pet, but contrasting it with the deconstructions of these philosophies. It contrasts them with the absurd naivety of the Marquis' last meal, starting with a mere olive stuffed into an animal carcass than insert that into more animal carcasses so that the olive itself, with the rest disposed of, takes all the succulent flavours of the earth to the sky in one single bite. Decadence is shown but with a moral knife point, where the philosophy meant to free people of organised religion, government and guilt in the West is shown here as being as complacent and as capable of being a tool for the elite to hold power against the public, eventually to be swallowed by another elite iron fist which was not complacent in real life. 

What becomes true liberation is how, in the romance in the centre of the plot even to be lost, eroticism is found even within the actresses' makeup, sensual even without the sex or nudity. The eroticism that is pure and sensual is in how much coloured gel and decor there is as well as the intimacy show, fully liberated as much as in how characters talk to each other intimately bonding as much as the sex. Dolls populate the environment and they move, opening their eyes or turning their heads. A pubescent girl doll spills from her stomach vibrant, sexually red strawberries. The artificiality of the Western European clothes in this Japanese film give as much a sense of the unnatural especially as, until we see the chaos in the real world once or twice, it is entirely closed within its own existence. It is a film which ends with unexpected half-clown makeup and dress, and feels appropriate to the tone of the work, a sense of art and pulp that sent a shiver down my spine.

Medousa (1998)

Director: George Lazopoulos

Screenplay: George Lazopoulos

Cast: Eleni Filini as The Mother, Thanos Amorginos as Perseus, Vana Rambota as Katia, Haris Mihalogiannakis as Spyros, Dimitris Karageorgos as Mitsos, Mitsos Sioris as Archegos, Frosso Litra as Christina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The blues guitar licks on the score are unexpected for this film, but Medousa in general, as an obscure Greek film, is openly something out of the expected. This takes ancient Greek mythology in distinct modern direction with the prologue establishing the idiosyncratic tone: it starts with a teen boy named Perseus and his friendship with a professional knife thrower, saying goodbye to each other before the boy leaves with his mother. However, he catches the glimpse of a mysterious woman who wears sunglasses which leads to the disappearance of his mother, and ten years later as an adult, Perseus (Thanos Amorginos) finds himself tracking down this ageless figure. For obvious reasons, with the title of the film, George Lazopoulos' sole film as writer-director does not hide it is portraying a modernised take on the Medusa story.

Medusa, the most famous of the "Gorgons" in Greek myth, has her story told pretty accurately in this version. However, alongside the protagonist not being the Perseus of the past, but a young man who practices knife throwing with replicas of legendary paintings like the Mona Lisa, and with a taste in cool Batman t-shirts, Lazopoulos attempted to bring this mythological figure into nineties Greece and figure out how she would exist within the massive centuries long changes in human society. For a part of its form, rather than overt horror, this plays like a crime drama, only with the police presuming that it is not a petrified victim in a hotel room, but somehow a life sized statue that was managed to be hiked there for inexplicable reasons. The surrealism of Medusa's known aspect, petrifying her victims into stone when they gaze on her, is taken advantage of in how, whilst horrifying, there is a weirdness to the sight of all her male victims petrified in stone. This is a really idiosyncratic story because the horror is not overt gore or threat of mutilation but the fear of this permanence if in a form that can easily be destroyed. There is a sense of humour if a sick one, replicas of men still wearing their clothes which have not been petrified, all due to an older woman in sunglasses the police and eventually Perseus are pursuing. It is a nice way to portray this, with a sense a humour at first, where one case is seen as an art piece to protest environmental damage than a male victim in the park, but there is the sense of disconcertment with this as it goes along, with the missing people who are replicated by the statues. When we find ourselves in "Ms. Meda's" home, when being robbed, it offers an even more gruesome image with a room of statues, some with limbs broken off and placed together.

As people close in on "Ms. Medu", we see this mythological figure be drawn as a distinct take on this myth, a drifter who survives by stealing the money from petrified victims to live on. This is more so because I have explicitly only referred to male victims, the twist of what happens to women who see her without the sunglasses certainly idiosyncratic and a great conclusion for the film. Whilst we have a lick of synthesizer occasionally used in-between all the guitar licks, which feels of the decade before, this is definitely a nineties film slowly encroaching onto the Millennium. It still feels pre-web and pre-dominance of mobile phones, but we are still within modernised European metropolises and towns which this gorgon can still hide covertly inside.

As the plot has Perseus' group robbing her home, an ill advised decision which will be doomed for most of them, naturally this story starts to link to the country's past and culture whilst riffing on horror tropes from the universal language of the genre. It makes sense, for example, the exposition comes from an orthodox Greek priest, one who became involved due to his mistake of ego and wants to learn more of the gorgon from Perseus' upcoming quest. Matched against its central idea, of how if these figures of legends exist they would hide in among humans as wanderers, eking out lives, there is a lot to admire with Medousa especially in how small scale the narrative is. It is sad, as a result, this is George Lazopoulos' only film. I have come across this a few times now as a film viewer especially in horror, the one-offs or creators who did not follow up with a large filmography, and whilst a part of me hopes that this was a case George Lazopoulos at least got to make the one film in him he ever wanted to make, it feels tragic that this fascinating one-off was not followed with this director-writer taking this tone to other subjects.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

An Abstract Candidate

 

When I first approached Teenager Hooker..., there was no wonder I hated this, as I had a zero taste for micro budget films which went against the norms of genre cinema just in terms of budgetary limitations, let alone their unconventionality. Now I love these films, and Teenager Hooker... is an idiosyncratic production for those who share that similar taste. It has a premise you would expect from Japanese films made with an eye for the West as from Sushi Typhoon in the mid-2000s - a schoolgirl prostitute (So-yun Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a older woman's apartment, the son the schoolgirl's teacher (Dae-tong Kim) who gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin. The twist is that this is a South Korean production just in the cusp of their great cultural wave in terms of Korean cinema getting huge recognition in the West. Director/screenwriter/cinematographer Gee-woong Nam's filmography sadly stops into the mid-2010s, but it delights me that he managed to get a long run from his debut here, include a TV movie, which I will bring up later.

Suffice to say, I was not prepared for what is on the surface a premise I found in a lot of films from this DVD era I got to by the late 2000s and hovered old DVDs from the early half of the decade even a few decades after; this was a time not just of the "Tartan Asian Extreme" era, in reference to the side label the late British film distributor Tartan managed to ride a hugely successful wave on at this time, but the time of the likes of groups like Arts Magic who brought lower budget films, including early V-Cinema era Takashi Miike to our sources, who is a good comparison in terms of the abrupt curveballs this has. Even then, his films were ones I liked back at a time when I hated this one, which turned out to be an eccentric mood piece. The immediate thing to bring up beyond how distinct its soundtrack cuts are, between Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes (a Chemical Brothers remix) to Mozart, is that this is a standard definition digital camera film which looks even more unreal nowadays as the images have become more blurry. Taking a while even to start as a sixty minute film, languidly letting our female lead wander dingy dark streets, you have the harsh lighting of the format that film was shot on, where blue parts of the streets mix with the orange yellow of artificial street lighting that immediately started to win me over rather than put me off as my younger self may have react to.

Visually as a result, this absolutely would have disappointed someone expecting a film Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008) from Japan; while it belongs tentatively in the same camp as this area of eccentric genre films on lower budgets coming from the East Asian countries at the time imported into the West, this is a far and away more confounding one to sit through. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially as that led to why I once hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw, all because the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine, and I went out of my way to see it. Instead of the obviously weird, I ended up witnessing something much more using its idiosyncratic plot and moments of lurid content in very obtuse ways.

The result feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have six minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits as mentioned, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to him "chasing" her with a Cronenbergian phallic gift, and then (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice. The production design here also emphasises Gee-woong Nam was deliberately taking advantage of the eerie nature of his standard definition camera as much as it was a practical choice, as he shots the widow's scene in a darkened room with painstakingly lit candles, multiple candles to the point of having been a nightmare to collect together, as the main source of lighting for the scene. This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, which to this day I cannot decide is a prosthetic or his actual magnificently rubber face, catching the schoolgirl working at his home and waking his grandmother up. This leads to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music.

The film goes along from here with a mix of styles with avant-garde leanings even if by accident, a lo-fi visual I can justify comparing to video art installation work, specifically from an older review I did a long time ago to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting and style if shot in digital. Back then, this was a credible comparison as Viola, an established American video artist, with that project was shooting on eighties video cameras around places Japan and thus (even from my own faded memories) emphasised the artificial urban lighting in certain locations chosen, something you find here as Gee-woong Nam is working around a lot of real locations and the liminal spaces in-between, especially as night where artificial lighting would be needed, between public bathrooms to obscure diners. This is set around a very low budget movie tone that includes the slow pace, emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and interspersed splat sticks prosthetic effects driven content. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly. You can go from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a opera singer, set to a piece from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air after she gets blasted through the stomach by the teacher with a gun.

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography, actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals as an aesthetic in its own right. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it is in the eye of the beholder, and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting, a style as much as the richness of celluloid film or the clearness of high definition in later low budget genre films. Some very striking images start to come to be because of this, such as that incident in the bathroom which is shot in luminous green lighting, almost Vaseline smeared, with the deliberate harshness of the saturated lighting insanely stylish. The more overtly lurid moments, such as intercutting between the teacher and three brothers having their way with the lead, sawing her into pieces, or actress So-yun Lee bravely dealing with nude scenes and/or strapped to machinery built from metal beans and tubing, are contrasted by ones I would expect from video art I have watched, such as intercutting to an actual opera singer never addressed by the cast singing in the scene nearby. These later details now I see are more overtly unconventional choices on purpose.

Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes video art from a variety of decades as mentioned by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look. It almost takes one back, for a moment of unintentional comedy, when I spotted a prominent KFC restaurant out of nowhere in a moody scene over turntable music in real South Korean streets. The music is surprisingly strong as already mentioned, and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier as mentioned, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it. These tonal switches are further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the time though closer to Takashi Miike's, in both how he abruptly undercut these premises with moments of quietness, or that when he did ramp up the absurdity, he was glad to. The crotch gun that ends this film, subverted as a phallic object inside a man's mouth from a woman in this case, is something he could have done in one of his films.

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone one which would catch a lot off. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, but I have come to love this as time has gone on, where you find yourself both with the pacing of a more atmospheric film, but contrasted by your antagonists being a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashing continually with these creative decisions that now win me over. We can only thank an early DVD release by Third Window Pictures in Britain for licensing this - an unsung hero especially for Japanese cinema like Shinya Tsukamoto to Sogo "Gakuryū" Ishii on Blu-Ray - in fully translated English subtitles, as we never got any of the other films from Gee-woong Nam.  As a director, he would continue with these very idiosyncratic titles - Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl (2002) furthers this eye catching title with a premise about a jar the former finds that allows him to turn snails into human beings, whilst Never Belongs to Me (2006) sounds like a premise to a Shinya Tsukamoto or Miike film we sadly never got, of a man who on request of his girlfriend in an act of revenge has his penis replaced with a gun that fires on orgasm to use on those who did them wrong. Whether they were any good or not is entirely not for the place of this review, but if any of them demonstrated the style and idiosyncrasies of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine, that would make them more enticing.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam aka. Turkish Star Wars (1982)

 

Director: Çetin Inanç

Screenplay: Cüneyt Arkın

Cast: Cüneyt Arkın as Murat; Aytekin Akkaya as Ali; Necla Fide as the Queen; Hüseyin Peyda as Bilgin; Hikmet Taşdemir as Sihirbaz

 

I considered films through a black and white viewpoint when I was younger. They had to have clear narratives and be well made, something which made “Turkish Star Wars”, as I first learnt of it as, one of the worst films I had ever saw when I viewed it at sixteen or so in a bender of Google Video viewings. Now my views have changed, where films of immense quality become greater but I can appreciate something like this, which comes in the context where Turkey’s film board was not allowing Western films like Star Wars (1977) into the country¹, leading to one of the most infamous “Turkploitation” films to be produced by a director known as a “jet director” for getting films made within ten days¹. Let us not kid ourselves, even next to other Turksploitation films, this is one of the more erratic I have ever seen, its infamy deserved for its shamelessness and how, honestly, it is an utter mess even if its unpredictability is something to also admire.

After centuries of change where atomic wars have decimated most of it and pieces of the continents have drifted off into space, Earth (which suspiciously looks like squashed Death Star) is under attack by an immortal wizard. With the planet protected by a force field created from human brainwaves, the wizard needs human brains, or at least one, to destroy it and attack Earth, forcing two Turkish space pilots onto his own planet where they must face his bizarre hordes of monsters and stop his plans of galactic destruction. Turkish Star Wars is infamous, as a low budget Turksploitation film, for taking footage from Star Wars and using music from everything from that film to Flash Gordon (1980). The montage of attractions theory created by Sergei E. Eisenstein is decimated by the slapdash editing of this, where even the use of music and sound clips is as hastily put together as the visuals, and yet has a drastic effect on the viewer when viewed together in this narrative. The difference is that, while Eisenstein wanted to elicit certain emotions from the viewer, this film causes stupefied amazement instead.

Turkish Star Wars, revisiting it, is a glorious mess, the plot synopsis my attempt to comprehend a film which can suddenly lunge forward, even into the middle of a fight without warning, to the next plot point, where monsters suddenly appear out of nowhere and the theme from Indiana Jones, used behind the main hero, suddenly battles with the villain’s Flash Gordon synth within the same scene. Random zombies or the fact there are nunchaku in space are the less strange aspects to this film, which is frankly a disaster in terms of the material being put together if you were to judge it severely for its technical qualities.  Even with the English subtitles over the years not being perfect, this as well in terms of the script feels an over-elaborate take, where its lead actor Cüneyt Arkın, a well regarded and prolific figure in his homeland, got to write the script too but it feels like everything he wanted to go with too ambitious for its production craft. For what is a simple tale of heroes versus a human blood drinking space wizard who just wants a human brain, not plural, to destroy the Earth he was once a person on, this lost a lot of the point with everything else Arkın wanted to include for profoundness. The result in watching it, and trying to understand it, is like becoming a paper bag in the wind which drops you off by the end confused and alarmed.

The decision to use so much pre-existing work is as much part of the confusion, as using the Star Wars footage for production value makes less sense as the film goes, a detriment to sanity as none of the re-appropriated Star Wars footage makes sense, especially if suggested (by the Death Star in another role) the Earth is destroyed at one point only to not. It is as much a collage of pre-existing science fiction and fantasy works beyond that film, in its premise and pieces, including things that were not directly included in the film but evoked for me accidentally, as the creators of the film could cram into a single movie and made into a cabinet of baffling curiosities. With our main hero (played by Cüneyt Arkın), who bounces around like Taylor Kitsch in John Carter (of Mars) (2012), and his womanising friend whose famous whistle to attract women accidentally conjures up skeletal horsemen to his annoyance, we see them fight everything from TV headed robots and cybermen from a fifties b-movie, toilet paper mummies out of genre, and to paraphrase a description my younger self used when he viewed this the first time, the bastard feral children of Elmo from Sesame Street. There are even henchmen clearly wearing budget Fu Manchu and Devil masks among the goons. My struggles with the film still are softened because of this, where the film does drag but, if you can tolerate its tone, is starling and hilarious in a positive way. Between the lengthy narrative exposition, it is effective a series of long, continuous fight scenes where anti-war philosophy and appropriated Western iconography is matched with a beast having its head karate chopped off or a severed head thrown at another so hard they explode.

The philosophy and mythology in the film adds the cherry to the top of its cake, where knowing its lead actor is writing this provides a sympathy for the film even if, from the first few minutes in with the narration trying to explain the world it is setting up, his script did not translate onscreen in a way that would be coherent for everyone. The film is a stream of consciousness of unconventional ideas, quaint ideas of hope, and erratic science fiction ideas that adds to the incomprehensible but delightfully creative mass you see (and hear and read) onscreen. That it includes religion, with an Islamic subtext, adds to the sincerity of the film that is an unexpected turn as well, even if it goes towards putting context to a sacred sword and a brain. There is also the bromance between the leads which also is admirable, one so strong your brains are psychically linked and, regardless of the running gag of one of them believing himself to be a womanizer, becomes the real romance of the production.

The flaws even in terms of this type of cinema is that it does rush through so much of itself with far more concern, for all things, for its lore about the “13^th Tribe” of Earth’s ancestors blown off the planet, literally, rather than making sure the work is a little bit more cohesive to appreciate its simple premise. When it can stay for a minute and take a breath, even some of its goofier moments also become better for this, like the training montage of punching rocks, tying them to ones legs to run and jump, or just kicking then as projectile weapons. It is a film on a purely silly level something you are glad exists, because it has someone karate chop a monster’s arms off and then impale them claw first into their torsos, and it would be improved simply if this had been a little bit more cohesive then what we got. What you get nonetheless, as an artefact from filmmaking history is nonetheless compelling if you have the patience for this.

For those people, over eighty minutes, this is the kind of janky spluttering that would be a breath of fresh air for those willing to experience it. There is more pain to be experienced with something which is technically more cohesive but has no effect, whilst here the vividness of Turkish Star Wars and its own unpredictability is worth cherishing even if we all admit that would never win any technical awards for quality. It is a film you need to see once, even if you hate it, and now that my tastes have changed and I can see its virtues, I look back at my younger self who found it unbearable and ponder how much of a naive sourpuss he was.

 

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1) The strange case of Turkish Star Wars, written for Esquire Middle East.

Wild Zero (1999)

Director: Tetsuro Takeuchi

Screenplay: Satoshi Takagi

Cast: Seiji as himself / Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf as himself, Drum Wolf as himself, Masashi Endō as Ace, Kwancharu Shitichai as Tobio, Yōko Asada as the voice of Tobio, Nakajo Haruka as Yamazaki, Kazuko Yanaga as the voice of Yamazaki, Taneko as Hanako, Yoshiyuki Morishita as Toshi, Masao as Masao, Fusamori Tawaki as Mori, Murata Akihiko as Toshio, Shiro Namiki as Kondo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders!

[Update: This review was written before the announcement of Wild Zero 2, which was revealed with a trailer in early 2024 to at least be a film intended to be finished and released.]

Dismissed in my youth, the older self sees how much of an idiot I was back then with my opinion on Wild Zero, though I see the aspect which likely caused such a negative reaction, that this is more of a film enjoy its wacky premise than fully executing it in an elaborate way. In Britain, you would have to have the Beatles make as weird a film like Magical Mystery Tour (1967) or Yellow Submarine (1968) because of their reputation, The Monkees in the United States making the ill-fated decision at the time to make Head (1968) to rise above their reputation as a manufactured band, and in this case, Guitar Wolf as a cult rock band having the advantage instead of the vibrant Japanese genre film industry between V-Cinema and straight-to-video productions to theatrical. That and your director Tetsuro Takeuchi being the man behind your music videos, as a figure you can trust, and shooting this film in Thailand¹.

This particular film, before they in general became a pop culture concept in the mainstream fully, is an early example of taking the legacy of George Romero's zombie films, and the concept of zombies, and returning to them even as here in a playful way of fans of the films. Already in a film like this you have characters bring up Night of the Living Dead (1968) and whether each one in the moment has seen it or wants to in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. There are probably too many characters in general in Wild Zero too, but the personality is there, set around what is actually closer to the premise of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), where aliens only seen in gold UFOS are resurrecting the dead, leaving a motley series of characters to cope with this transpiring. Ace (Masashi Endō) is our proxy, a Guitar Wolf fan who earns the respect of their titular leader Guitar Wolf (Seiji), and can literally whistle them from a town away if in danger. Guitar Wolf the band, starting in 1987, have been continuing over the decades, even after the tragically young passing of Bass Wolf ("Billy") in 2005 at only thirty eight², and here they live the rock n roll music ideal of being outlaw enough to shot people but with a personal morality; Seiji himself is the leader who can appear, figuratively as much as in the flesh ,as the Obi-Wan Kenobi to guide Ace to act as a rock hero should whilst Bass and Drum Wolf offer back up. Tobio (Kwancharu Shitichai, with Yōko Asada as their voice) is the female lead and potential love interest for Ace, and there are also two lovable thieves who botch a convenience store robbery when we met them, male and female, and a female arms dealer whose business with the yakuza was halted by the zombies. The later, standing out as a side character physically, especially shows a moral ambivalence that, even in this silly premise, emphasises figures that can be on the fringes of society, and even in her case more interested in survival and money, but not be the villainess. The villain in this world is a shady club owner, who wears wigs and rocks stylish sets of hot pants, who has a casting car seat for female singers, deals with drugs, and wants revenge on Guitar Wolf and their lead singer in particular for fingers shot off during a standoff.

On the type of urban/country landscape, the luminal space and the wasteland, I find compelling in Japanese pop culture between cult films and anime, even factoring in that this is actually Thailand standing in for its setting, you get a pot pourri of scenes between guitar picks as throwing weapons, matching grenade launchers with said hot pants to go out on a night of the town for revenge, and the equivalent of throwing the kitchen sink in a cult film with abrupt eye lasers. There is also the least expected story of love and overcoming bias to someone you could ever see appear in a cult film, as this has a trans female lead in Tobia. Some of how it is dealt with not aged well and clearly played in the same wackiness as when the digitally added golden UFOs are spliced over famous world landmarks, but in the end, it becomes actually beautiful in how it plays out and progressive with hindsight. Of all the films to deal with this subject, the least expect where someone like Ace has the horrible reaction he initially has, only to feel remorse, realise his true love for her, and have the Guitar Wolf of the band be the one who tells him love exists beyond boundaries and nationalities, is spectacular more now time has passed. It is not something you find in cinema dealt with enough decades after this film was released, let alone dealt with, in an applaudable way, in a film where the military female character has to put on a plaid one piece due to zombies ripping her cloths up out of spite. It is as punk rock in the truest sense as a major subplot just placed within this tale with a happy conclusion.

A lot of this message fits the entire ethos the film has in terms of rock n roll music. Ace's introduction in his room shows the history of music, including Western bands, on posters on his wall, and it goes back to the likes of Burst City (1982) by Gakuryū "Sogo" Ishii in films showing the underdogs in their own world, in these bands or their fans. This ethos is one you can even find in other mediums within Japanese pop culture, such as with Daisuke Ishiwatari, the mind behind the Guilty Gear video game franchise. A creator of a fighting game franchise which references rock and heavy metal even in character names, he has also went out of his way to point out a character he created named Bridget was always meant to be a transgender female character, regardless of fans' attitudes and previous translations of the games in the past³, and depicting characters who straddle moral ambivalences who are still heroic or just badasses.

That Wild Zero itself is merely playing at its premise with humour will be something that will annoy some, as I found when I was younger, but that in itself befits this ethos. Considering you have a soundtrack where inexplicably Bikini Kill's Rebel Girl blasts in out of nowhere, you should see Wild Zero as a film made by fans of this type of music and movie making what they think is cool, and managing to actually make it stand out in many great ways such as its moments of showing this music truly meaning its progressive, anti-authoritarian nature even when being goofy. Even a joke about lovers meeting again as zombies and having their own happy ending, played off as actually sweet as much as funny, fits this tone perfectly. The plot becomes less a priority, the zombies merely cannon fodder and your aliens only depicted as those UFOs, and instead it is the ride that stands out. Sadly its director Tetsuro Takeuchi, barring work with Guitar Wolf and musical groups, has not directed much in terms of cinema, whilst Wild Zero itself feels like it is ready for a proper revival as a cult film, i.e. not on old DVDs being the way to see this, and allowed to be seen in a pristine restoration with the possibility of learning how the film came to be. Even if learnt to be a fun improvisation throwing caution to the wind, it would be a pleasure in itself to learn how this ride came to be.

 

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1) Wild Zero review by Ken Eisner, published for Variety on November 5th 2000. [Some of this has aged of the past even if slight.]

2) Guitar Wolf Biography by Mark Deming for All Music.com.

3) Guilty Gear Creator Clarifies Once Again That, Yes, Bridget is Trans by Kenneth Shepard, published for Fanbyte on September 14th 2022.

The Lion Has Seven Heads (1970)

Director: Glauber Rocha

Screenplay: Glauber Rocha and Gianni Amico

Cast: Rada Rassimov as Marlene, Giulio Brogi as Pablo, Gabriele Tinti as the American Agent, Jean-Pierre Léaud as the Preacher, Reinhard Kolldehoff as the Governor, Aldo Bixio as the Mercenary

Canon Fodder

 

Shot in the Congo during a turbulent history, liberated in 1960 from Belgium, and in 1971 about to enter a dictatorship, renamed Zaire, until 1997, Lion has enough material to deal with the issues of colonialism and abused power. I will admit I was disappointed, as someone who saw Glauber Rocha's acclaimed trilogy of films in his home country of Brazil which blew me away at a younger age - Black God, White Devil (1964), Entranced Earth (1967) and Antonio das Mortes (1969). I still have admiration for a deeply flawed experiment with a noble heart, but it is flawed. Lion, originally called Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, with the title an amalgamation of languages, is a director whose country was going through a dictatorship at the time, going to an African country which suffered through colonialism from the West, and visibly seeing the parallels from two different Third World nations of the turbulence of power and control.

This is a stream of consciousness from Rocha, which feels appropriate as, with the Republic of Congo formally a colonial country, you can dissect all the history with greater ease than trying to use a regular story framework. Though the emphasis on non-local foreign actors poses one of the biggest issues with Lion, it certainly feels apt to begin with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mad priest, first introduced in a shredded and dirtied white robe, losing his mind with a wooden mallet in hand and talking of the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations to a befuddled group of local women. Alongside imaging how fascinating his career has been, able to go from this to Jacque Rivette's Out 1 (1971) just from a couple of films in a rich decades long career, Léaud is the one figure I would have kept even if I would entire rewrite the film's structure. As the literal import of Christianity to the country and continent, he is both captivating in how he commits to the role but apt, alongside cynically being a bankable actor for a very avant-garde film, appropriate as a character to have, dealing with those who joined the colonisation of Africa as a whole continent under the belief of noble causes, only to be left deranged by the truth. There is a lot you could unpack if playing to a series of sketches as this at times, and in mind to all the themes to unpack, it feels apt to see such sketches and the liberation of this fictionalised version of Congo as a sudden cloud burst of emotions.

Rocha stages the film like series of theatrically performed images and emphasises this point - the anti-colonial protestors carrying their own that have been slain, to the white soldiers wandering to-and-fro in choreograph in a scene with guns. This is clearly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard as well, with the Dziga-Vertov Group era felt here the most, all part of movements who found narrative a way to lie and not able to carry themes of great political weight to viewers, a symbolic essay form used within them even if this one still retains plot beats to thread them. Ironically, this style is far more difficult than stories, or even surrealist subversions of narratives which still flesh out the depth of characters and/or the scenarios.  

One of the biggest issues, which Godard's Dziga-Vertov films had, were how naive and simplistic they came off being without the sense the simplicity being on purpose. With Lion set around a revolution, its leader trying to amass locals and tribes to free themselves, alongside the evil white colonialists, none of the film does not try for the complicated and difficult issues of a revolution. Central to this is instead the comically broad villains who without moustaches to twirl instead of just maniacal. They, as I will get into, still work for me as pure evil, whilst a lot of the bigger concerns is the lack of priority in the figures meant to overthrow them, including the wife of one of them Marlene (Rada Rassimov), who is there to have Rassimov be nude for large portions of the film as the whore of Babylon stand-in. There is also the Latin Revolutionary, in capitals for emphasis, which raises the issues with Lion being set in Congo but not really telling the tale of its people, as this figure becomes integral for multiple scenes, including Léaud dragging him around with the mallet, when they should have been given to other characters.

As this is directly telling you what the meaning is, you really get a very simplistic work at heart, the earnestness of Glauber Rocha accidentally using his setting as a mere pretence for a film which could have been shot anywhere. Slithers do work, and open up the idea if this had focused on the local casting, as Rocha is not a fan of peaceful revolution, a jaded man in terms of where his country of birth originally was. The closest thing to peaceful here involves making a puppet first president, which becomes one of the strongest sequences. Though he has a wonderful saxophone trio with him for speeches, this black local presidential figure is tellingly depicted having bought a new suit like an 18th century French dandy, including the white wig, as a satirical nod to the idea that anyone can be bought by the colonial invaders. The revolutionary, the local leader and not the Latin exile, has some of the more interesting filmed theatre scenes, and should have been the central focus of the whole film and scenes which are instead given to the Latin figure. Be it being circled by dissenters, or his speech to a local chief explaining his string of miseries being unfair and unnecessary, and you see here what Rocha could get into, an equivalent to the raw energy Antonio das Mortes beautifully hit in using Western tropes, but here using more theatrical avant-garde pacing instead for a change of pace. This could have been the more experimental take on revolution, but the character who should have been the hero is a minor figure in his own film, which causes immediate issues.

What this accidentally becomes is Rocha the tourist, and whilst it does involve the least expected nude crucifixion transpiring in the final scene, I think the best moments of The Lion Has Seven Heads reflect its comically evil white colonialists for what they represent, mining all the resources and eating fruit off a dead local, contrasted against the actual country and citizens. Contrasting these broad, ridiculous monsters with their over-the-top acting and exaggerations from the Western nations against the real people of the country the film was shot in, seeing the real scenes of the local tribal dance rituals, and the local women looking on in amusement at Jean-Pierre Léaud screaming at the sky performance, is some of the more striking images. They show the figures that should have been central but were marginalized, whose scenes are all serious and thoughtful in contrast to the manic lunacy of the non-Congo figures that would have made a perfect contrast. I am glad to still see Lion, and as time goes on, I hope to grow a fondness for its virtues to admire here, but it is with having to accept this felt like a production compromised by how it was put together.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

 

Director: Kerry Conran

Screenplay: Kerry Conran

Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow as Polly Perkins; Jude Law as Sky Captain; Giovanni Ribisi as Dex; Michael Gambon as Editor Paley; Bai Ling as Mysterious Woman; Omid Djalili as Kaji; Laurence Olivier as Dr. Totenkopf; Angelina Jolie as Franky

Ephemeral Waves

 

Why did I hate this once? Likely, I was not gelling with its tone, and big budget Hollywood films from this when my family used to rent them constantly eventually started to put me off by the 2010s. In the time having past with a wider and more open taste in cinema returning to titles, this particular one also has an underdog nature to it I have to admire to, as this was literally a passion project for its creator-director-writer Kerry Conran, who grew up loving the pulp work this was inspired by, wanted to make a film like it, and managed with nothing else in his resume beforehand to get the production off the ground as a Hollywood film.

Sky Captain is also a work where you see a prototype of the digital green screen use in later Hollywood films, Conran in his own way having been ahead of the curve in terms of productions using CGI, something which was new and being experimented upon the 2000s with films like Sin City (2004), Casshern (2004) from Japan, or Immortel (ad vitam) (2004) from France among others. These films were ahead of their time, but also of them alongside their storytelling need you to been on their wavelengths to get a lot out of. Sky Captain in particular is pure spectacle as an action film built from its then-innovative special effects, which for my younger self was clearly a slog. It is a  work with a very basic plot entirely surrounding its then-radical "digital backlot" production, where barring the actors the sets are entirely in computer effects, something which was relatively new and being experimented upon in the 2000s but has wider implications decades on when even costume and hair design can be digitally altered on actors.

Set in an alternative 1939, this is pulp thirties to forties pulp storytelling brought together - some noir trappings, giant robots flying over New York City emphasising the science fiction and adventure - surrounding missing scientists and a doomsday scenario involving reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the Sky Captain Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), the later an independent pilot and his mercenary team brought in when global thefts of resources by giant robots happen. The limitations are now visible on a film which was ahead of its time but also working around some limitations, that this cast is (almost) entirely on green screen and that barring extras, there is a noticeably small cast here, trying to work around an elaborate pulp story in terms of bringing it to screen in a then-unheard of process unless you had seen world films like Casshern. Even next to CGI in the later 2000s, this has obviously aged, but it has a style even with the heavy emphasis on muting most colour and grey which is distinct. What it feels like, even as a passion project, is a film which, if elaborate in tone already, could have blossomed into a wider franchise if it had been successful. It's tone taken from old pulp work which had sequels is found in the few titbits we see - that Sky Captain is a figure all nations calls to, and the small cast, including Angelina Jolie as Franky, --, the captain of a flying airbase, and surprisingly for me comedian Omid Djalili as Kaji, a comedic sidekick but one who is never a butt of jokes. As a one off it tells enough, but without wanting to get into the potentially credulous world of movie franchises, there was enough here to expand out into a more grander world if it had been be a hit even if the original film is dealing with the potential apocalypse. Future stories, especially as other influences such as forties cinema and the touch stones of fifties sci-fi could have easily slid into this.

It has the tone you would find in a pulp paperback, and that in itself does entice, and I grow to admire this barring how, truly, this does feel a film still playing it very safe. This is one of the more notable things in how, whilst elaborate, there is not a lot of risk in the story telling. Even as a work based on old pulp, that does mostly soak away to become like the action films from the time, only with the fact that, as our sole main characters, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law are clearly tapping into screwball comedy love-hate bickering in-between those scenes (and within them) to flesh them out. Like many titles from these films, and even animated films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), whether good or bad, their greatest flaws is how the plots are quite conventional, likely to be able to get them off the ground as productions when their budgets were focused on getting the technology off the ground; Casshern and Immortal are stranger films, and Sin City comes with the knowledge Robert Rodriguez, its helmer, made his name making films as independently as possible. The passion is here, before anyone thinks I want to dismiss Kerry Conran's hard work, but barring some quirks, like a cameo of a tiny elephant or a brief trip to Shangri-La, a lot of Sky Captain could have been remade with traditional Hollywood production from the time, the innovation in the flair for its time period aesthetic. One thing which does feel like it was ahead of its time, and complete missed when this subject is more a topic of great discussion, is the casting of Sir Lawrence Olivier in a key role. Olivier had passed in 1989, so this in his use, a hologram in the film, is ahead of its time in terms of depicting and casting a passed actor in a film, something which became more a controversial subject into the 2010s. Be it Peter Cushing returning for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), or the attempt to include James Dean (replicated onscreen digitally) in a Vietnam War film that was seen as a taboo¹, this is a contentious subject in terms of memento mori. Olivier's appearance does show how ahead of the time this was, when Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow itself has become more of a cult film in time for what it was attempting to do, and people merely batted an eyelid to this inclusion.

Reading into how this was a project Kerry Conran wanted to make before he even gotten into Hollywood has made me soften to this, and truth be told, it is a fun film. My older self's absolutely hostility to it comes connected entirely to how these type of films once were like a white noise once, which has changed entirely now in the modern day. Tragically, this was not a box office success, and Conran has not helmed another theatrical film; thankfully he at least got to make a film in a way he clearly wished it to turn out, and returning to Sky Captain, I have nothing but respect for its existence now.

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1) Filmmakers Say James Dean’s Family is ‘Fully Supportive’ of Bringing Back Actor for Vietnam War Drama, written by Dave McNary for Variety, and published November 8th 2019.

Schizo (1976)/The Comeback (1978)

Director: Pete Walker

Screenplay: David McGillivray [Schizo] / Michael Sloan and Murray Smith [The Comeback]

Cast:

Schizo: Lynne Frederick as Samantha Gray, John Leyton as Alan Falconer, Stephanie Beacham as Beth, John Fraser as Leonard Hawthorne, Jack Watson as William Haskin, Queenie Watts as Mrs Wallace, Trisha Mortimer as Joy, Paul Alexander as Peter McAllister

The Comeback: Jack Jones as Nick Cooper, Pamela Stephenson as Linda Everett, David Doyle as Webster Jones, Bill Owen as Albert B., Sheila Keith as Doris B., Richard Johnson as Macauley, Patrick Brock as Dr. Paulsen, Holly Palance as Gail Cooper

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Never mind symbolic sunshine...it was fucking here!

Immediately from the opening images, Schizo will not be a sensitive take on mental health, not just by the title but even in the opening narration, where even I without a psychology degree am aware schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders are separate concepts. It sets up a lurid thriller bordering on the horror genre, a snapshot not only of this era and how mental illness was depicted in cinema, but a snapshot of old England including the old Co-Op logo on a milk delivery float, or a supermarket with discounted baked beans. It sets up a distinct tone to this premise even if it is indebted to its American or Italian brethren, as we start with an older man incensed about a newspaper about a young "ice princess", ice skater Samantha Gray (Lynne Frederick), about to marry, taking a knife the size of a machete covered in dried blood and bloody pieces of broken glass in his travel case on a mission, to see her in London. One of the clear selling points behind Schizo, central to this, is Lynne Frederick herself. Her career has probably been shadowed by Peter Sellers, the legendary comedian she was married to until his 1980 death, and his own complicated career, whilst her filmography is full of cult films like this or Phase IV (1974).

She does okay in what is a film where the plot twists are obvious, but the lurid spectacle is emphasised, as this is from Pete Walker, a British filmmaker known for being one of the genre filmmakers of the era who made more edgier productions, infamous for films like House of Whipcord (1974) and Frightmare (1974), films which ramped up the gore and sexual content of old pulp genre tropes. He is merely adding to a story which is timeless, as premise wise this story is one you would have gotten in a thirties/forties production from Hollywood or an earlier British shocker. This belongs in the tradition of gristly thrillers which has been updated to the newer decades even if the seventies aesthetic here is charmingly quaint. The film leans into horror genre in terms of the more overt gruesomeness of the murders which begin as Samantha is being stalked, arguably in debt to the Italian giallo, even in terms of the black gloved killer. A subplot about the maid's psychic sessions with her daughter being telepathic feels like a British take on a scene from Deep Red (1975), where a psychic catches wind of the killer telepathically. Admittedly, Dario Argento would have not had a moment talking about the free tea and biscuits for four pence as found in this meeting.

Even when Samantha is stalked, it is obvious what the final twist is, its mental health plot set up with the factors of her family ties being very vague with no one at her wedding reception on her side of the family tree, or how the stalker is set up blatantly from the get-go as a prominent character. Instead, this becomes the tropes shot through its British personality, an intercontinental exchange of plot tropes found in similar films from others countries at the time if with pithier one-liners from characters. Some of the more rewarding scenes are with characters casually having extra marital affairs and even leaving plastic spiders in the soap dish to scare the newlyweds for a joke. The laxness of security for the wedding reception, comical in the modern day for a thriller as someone can casually get away with slipping a bloodied knife by the wedding cake, actually becomes one of the best scenes for casually touching on this sense of personality you only get in British films, less logical but in terms of morbid humour nestled against the ordinary locales. By the time someone can manage surviving being impaled on a bed of spikes, to the point an eyeball is hanging out from a spike going into the head, we are not dealing with a film to take seriously, but charming in its own perverse way as a film from my home country.

The Comeback opens up, coming after Schizo, with a nods to the slasher films whose tropes would be fully codified into the eighties, with a murder scene in the opening that certainly would have been censored for British VHS with a hand graphically lopped off with a scythe, followed by that person's death with the weapon by someone wearing an old woman costume. The film itself, whilst the plot is conventional in set up, is a lot more idiosyncratic than this though. The premise is that of an older American pop star, a former teen idol Nick Cooper (Jack Jones), returning to Britain to record his comeback album, and finding himself staying at a traditional British manor house whilst he is recording the album. Jack Jones himself is an American singer, which is a meta moment of casting I do have to appreciate especially as, befitting how lurid the story becomes, his casting is perverse on purpose for sick humour if you learn a little about him. Jack Jones sang songs like Lollipops and Roses, and the opening theme for the Love Boat American TV series, which makes his casting here, eventually dropping f-bombs and having a sex scene, adding a much more perverse touch to the film knowing that this man with a two time Grammy winner of wholesome music. This was naturally at a time in his recording career where he was doing renditions Little Feat's Dixie Chicken, and a tribute album to the band Bread, so this feels close to the bone of a man who could be like the Nick Cooper character as a star trying for one last grab at success after his sixties pop success.

The grotesqueness of the ex-wife's corpse being left in the old crib after the murder feels apt to the perverse melodrama this turns into, with not as constant need for such shocks as a giallo or a slasher, but with those moments coming when need be. Pete Walker clearly also had access to all the live maggots he could get to depict decay of gruesome corpses just to emphasise that fact. At its heart, this is the updated form of the gothic creepers of yore, where an older singer is effectively being tormented psychologically. It is not just creepy Harry (Peter Turner) who sets the tone, a minor character obsessed with getting Nick's items out of the penthouse, or women's breasts, which he will talk about at length menacingly to a potential love interest of Nick's, a man who makes woollen hats creepy due to osmosis to his personality. No, it is the gothic horror trope of the voices and horrible sights only Nick sees whilst at the manor, the crying and screams from a phantom woman at night, or the current occupants looking after him, "Missus B" (Sheila Keith), an older woman with ominous gravitas to her voice, or her husband who talks of the ancient tree in the garden he tends to screaming due to the carving of a couple's love for each other into the bark, or reading a book on Chinese mythology and Buddhist Hell because he cannot find his tree surgery book.

The plot twist is obvious in hindsight in The Comeback too, but this is a delightfully weird amalgamation of tones. This is a film where the potent red flag of this film having aged like one of the corpses, when a key character is revealed to dress as a woman in the privacy of his own home, is not a red herring even or proof of anything suspicious, but a character beat abruptly placed in the middle of this simple minded shocker of more going on in his mind, the weird sense this genre film with a few more of these turns could have become something even cooler if it had been more unconventional. Both The Comeback and Schizo are conventional, in pace and plotting, which are really the biggest issues with both, but like the best of cases, even weaker genre films as here can have these unexpected turns and delights in them worthy of praise.