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.

Jungle Trap (1990/2016)

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: James Bryan and Renee Harmon

Cast: Renee Harmon as Dr. Chris Carpenter; Frank Neuhaus as Dr. Josh Carpenter; Heidi Ahn as Betsy; Tim de Haas as Jobe Ortega; Valerie Smith as Janice; Rhonda Collier as Rita; Glen Sarabian as Mark; Linda DiNardo as Bena; Bill Luce as John; Jan Vanderberg as Obie DuBois; Bette Bena as Madame Trudea

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We return to planet Renee Harmon, the figure that collaborated with filmmaker James Bryan numerous times since they encountered each other, Harmon her own personal voice in the independent films they made. This however has a fascinating back-story, and comes into the issue of how cinema in general like all art forms has a history of unfinished and partially destroyed fragments. Those films which never came to be, or finally did as we will get too, happen to anyone and with James Bryan, there were a few. One such project was Horror Con (1989), a slasher film set around an aforementioned horror convention, which never came to be and is merely a fragment. American Genre Film Archive preserved this fragment, and it has connection to the subject of this review: actors like Heidi Ahn and Obie DuBois returned for Jungle Trap, as did the conventional poster too. Jungle Trap itself however has a much bigger and even more elaborate tale, which was a whole film brought together and finished thanks to another group called Bleeding Skull.

Bleeding Skull was a website founded by Joseph A. Ziemba in 2004. It became the growing ode to independent and niche filmmaking, as the no-budget was admired, the homemade loved and as a site named after a type of novelty candle, it presented its reviews without irony, which accepted the silliness of these titles, their accidental joys, as much as sincerely appreciated how bloody hard making a film actually was. They would collaborate with American Genre Film Archive from 2018¹, and among the projects AGFA would pick up was a project Bleeding Skull had already released through a Mondo Video collaboration, taking a film they had discovered unfinished and finished off. They became fascinated with Renee Harmon, the German war bride who immigrated to the USA with her husband, trying her hand with cinema with self financed work where she was centre stage. Her frequent collaborated, as mentioned, was director James Bryan who would find admirers in Bleeding Skull, to the point they got to look at his archived materials. Alongside finding one production Run Coyote Run (1987), a bizarre re-mixing of footage from multiple films together found in a car boot², they found too a shot-on-video jungle horror adventure Bryan made with Harmon but never finished. Thus Jungle Trap, technically a 1990 film but officially completed and premiered in 2016, came for revenge. Even Joseph A. Ziemba and Annie Choi, novelist and a later member of Bleeding Skull, put their efforts in as, having a band named Taken by Savages together, they acquired time appropriate synthesizers and scored the film with the apt soundtrack for the mood. Jungle Trap was first a release Bleeding Skull distributed through their deal with Mondo Video, a brief collaboration of VHS releases of obscurities like Heavy Metal Massacre (1989), only for most of them to slowly be reacquired by AGFA in the time passed.

Jungle Trap is probably one of the more easy sells to anyone to the world of Renee Harmon too, as when you get to films re-using footage from Lady Street Fighter (1981) as she and Bryan did by the mid-eighties, things get weird even for my standards. It is still an acquired taste, but it has enough to entice someone with its curious home-grown nature, about a haunted hotel in the jungles and head hunters, all clearly shot in someone's backyard. This is its own world. Pre-existing footage, from action films or documentary footage of deforestation in the Amazon, is weaved into static new footage following Dr. Chris Carpenter (Harmon) and a group of archaeology institute members going into the forests after a rare artefact. It emphasises an admirable homemade quality where, to stage a train cart dialogue sequence, you redress a room as one and have the extras play appropriate locals as much as they can, alongside with when the jungle is staged onscreen with a lot of plants, "Jose Diaz for Greenery" the credited person to thank for the production design. A scene in a plane involves splicing pre-existing footage of one in the air against a cramped homemade box of a set, whilst staging a car crash means between existing footage and newer material, though they still have a fire stunt even if in the foreground of the car needed to be put out once cut was uttered.

I have to raise the obvious. I like old jungle adventure tale aesthetics, but be it film or video game, we have the issue of it coming from white expansion into third world countries and the problem, here with white actors playing head hunters who decapitate and preserve heads, that they are usually using symbology racially loaded to demonise non-white cultures. Jungle Trap is a goofy film, so I will not damn it, but just bare this in mind as this was clearly riffing on old jungle adventure movies which by themselves had these problems openly with them and this is merely a spin on. It is to the film's credit, whilst it plays to the sinister head hunters, one of its key points to the plot is how it is about white civilisation trying to force that tribe to leave their land, killing them off, and building a hotel on their remains, so credit to the film it is about the sins of colonisation in a shot-on-video cult work.

Thankfully, as well, Jungle Trap instead decided to riff on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) on a budget, and the power of video effects editing, so most of this is negated once you get into the jungle, actors playing staff of a hotel in the middle of a forest that was seemingly abandoned. With these hotel figures vanishing in an edit, or turning into head hunters, reality is distorted and it settles for this for the rest of the plot. Alongside a troupe of idiosyncratic cast members, from Renee Harmon's acting style to an occasionally seen drunk pilot, or Jan Vanderberg stealing scenes as the grinning older Hotel Bell Captain with his brightly ominous comments, you can also add soap opera to the proceedings. In-between a member secretly on the side of the tribe holding the skull artefact they are after to the backstabbing - Harmon's lead and the male leader are a divorcing couple, he dating a significantly younger woman (Heidi Ahn) - this provides a curious turn for a film with already a lot of curious touches. Genre is more interesting, as no budget shows here, when it ingests curious little plot contrasts like this.

Jungle Trap, as a result, does feel ambitious. In context, this is James Bryan having to work on lower resources, but it is more elaborate than a few shot-on-video productions from this era. Certainly next to Run Coyote Run, a mind bender but one by this point from Harmon and Bryan recontextualizing old Renee Harmon film footage, this is ambitious in trying to limit this and having to make a film almost entirely with new footage. It is one that is incredibly entertaining even to the point there is clearly two moments where the cast break character and find humour in the moment without breaking the fourth wall, which is sweet. This is before you take into account the rebuilding of the film by Bleeding Skull. Fans of this type of cinema, they edited together the footage with James Bryan for a film which, in context, is slick in comparison to some of the more padded, rambling and haphazard work that is loved too. The music is a huge virtue, with droning synth from the era that stands out in mood from Taken by Savages, with a little bit of nineties techno in there as well. This proves in itself the danger of losing this if the technology cannot be recreated over time, particularly as the love for scores like this or to John Carpenter having a second career as a musician proves that a specific sound to these synthesizers from older horror films was distinct to other electronic instruments from the decades after.

Jungle Trap is a curiosity, and it delights to see this managed to get a British premiere in 2022 from 101 Films. In the early days of DVD here, we got some surprising stuff from niche labels to the 2010s in the shot-on-video and shot-on-standard-digital formats, but retrospective releases were going to have an issue with a sustainable market in Britain especially as the cost of having these films going through the British Board of Film Classification, mandatory by our laws, is always going to prohibit a healthy access to niche cinema as in other genres and areas. It is, with this, amusing and great we did get titles like this arrive when they do, and on high definition of all things, alongside the greater ease in seeing these films online allowing a widening audience for this area of cinema that the likes of Bleeding Skull in the USA have helped with. It is telling what kind of film Jungle Trap is when at the end, despite there being death and betrayal, a lot of off-screen and prop severed heads involved, it ends on Renee Harmon and another cast member being happy and able to laugh on a bright day. That sense of entertainment and joy in these films is felt by this film's finale, with the story of even this film coming to life through Bryan and Bleeding Skull after two decades in itself a happy conclusion.

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1) Bleeding Skull's About Us page.

2) Bleeding Skull's page for the Mondo Video release of Run Coyote Run (BSV-003), written by Joseph A. Ziemba and published November 28th 2014.

Treasure Island (1986)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Based on the novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Cast: Melvil Poupaud as Jim Hawkins; Vic Tayback as Silver; Martin Landau as the Captain; Anna Karina as the Mother; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Midas; Sheila as Aunt Helen; Lou Castel as the Doctor / the Father; Jean-François Stévenin as Israel Hands (The Rat); Yves Afonso as  the French Captain; Tony Jessen as Ben Gunn

An Abstract Candidate

 

Don't hit a blind man if you want to find treasure. Let a blind man hit you.

Among the curiosities Cannon Group produced or/and released, they secured a film by Raúl Ruiz, in the midst of his glorious eighties era, adapting Robert Lewis Stevenson's legendary pirate novel. The film we received, likely acquired due to the cache the novel has, is one which would have not been suitable for a family audience, in spite of the amount of death in the source novel, and is one that would befuddle many. Ruiz however loved the author, so this subversion of the text is not to destroy it at all, his own drastic adaptation not an absurd project he ended up on, such as Cannon financing Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) where Godard completely went against the plan, but one Ruiz deliberately turned into the film it became.

It was a film too, mind, which he would come to revisit, the resulting production here fascinating as a mixtures of those who got involved with the film just in the cast - Martin Landau as the sea captain who visits our protagonist Jim Hawkins' home and begins the narrative, Anna Katrina as Jim Hawkins' mother, and Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mysterious writer following Hawkins as an outsider to the story itself. The dubbing adds to the strangeness to what is a film fully from this phantasmagorical era of Ruiz's career, set in the current day yet existing in a dream world. With the romantic music, of the tone not of a love story, at one point a constant in the early scenes, it feels unreal as we meet Jim Hawkins (Melvil Poupaud), a young boy living on an island at his parents' inn, only to be violently contrasted by the grimness of just content in the first act. This is not a film for the family as previously mentioned, for its tone and because this becomes a tale of a Jim Hawkins who, as a bystander, finds himself going through horrible events the adults play. As much as in the original novel, this includes the reoccurring theme for Ruiz of the menace of death. A blind man, as from the novel, signals the first outside threat when at first a sea captain (Landau) stays at the inn, leaving a glass eye as a threat. There is no innocence here, as before he even reaches Treasure Island, Jim will be traumatised by thugs raiding his home, being punished by them with belt shots, or his father's many staged suicide attempts finally succeeding.

But credit to Ruiz, his take on Treasure Island, whilst drastically altered and eventually a meta-textual interpretation fully retells the story in some new form, including nodding the source as a text within this world itself. It is an obsession for characters, the film eventually becoming a meta-dissection whilst reinterpreting the source, the adults actually playing out roles with Jim Hawkins a reluctant stand-in for this lead. It offers Long John Silver as Silver (Vic Tayback), the shoe maker who runs a Lebanese restaurant. Even if he makes a great omelette, done by using a syringe to extract the egg yolk, he is still the nefarious Silver, and this still involves ships and eventually getting to the titular island. The aspects which are entirely Ruiz stand out more as a result, torturing someone to know what their favourite song is, or this character believing all, regardless of virtue or sin, go to Heaven and thus a socialist.

Production wise, there is clearly the fact Treasure Island, if you attempted to film a faithful adaptation, would have been expensive, and there is the other fact that between Errol Flynn to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), pirates in cinema were not financially successful, in 1986 as well Roman Polanski's Pirates, as well as being a tumultuous production, was not a box office success at all as a big budget "proper" pirate film. Treasure Island is curious in its production companies as well, handled between Cannon Group, BFI Production, the film producing arm of the British Film Institute, our most significant institution in Britain for cinema, and Les Films du Passage, who produced other Ruiz films. None of them, even Cannon with their attempts to with the likes of Lifeforce (1985), were companies who specialised in big budget works either, so Ruiz's adaptation is as much improvised as throughout his career, shot in Senegal for a portion of the film, but changing galleons to modern ships and with the pirates their modern equivalents with assault rifles.

The sense of adventure is still there with only the edge of the morbid added. The compositions also stand out; shot by Acácio de Almeida, a regular collaborator at this point and prolific in Portuguese cinema, Treasure Island has Ruiz's trademarks of deep focus scenes (figures and objects like cats in the fore ground, characters in the background), and his vivid use of colour and lighting. Once we actually get to Treasure Island itself, the pace of the film fully, proudly, becomes its own spin of the source text as the meta-textual nature fully takes over, that this story and the character names are literally personas, for a game even with real casualties that has continued over many times. Arguments about game theory transpire over gun fire, whilst the one native on the island, the Ben Gun equivalent, has been using the treasure, diamonds in this world, as the perfect slingshot ammo. By the point of the finale, any question of wanting a faithful adaptation dissipates as this drastic reinterpretation of Robert Lewis Stevenson stands out as an admirable and strange adventure. Works of canonical legacy, especially when they enter the public domain, gain so much because the source text still exists proud of its virtues, with this one absolutely the case, and that the adaptations can vary so wildly with their own flourishes as the tale survives in multiple forms.

The first take of this tale I grew up with, with fond memories of, is a musical version with the Muppets and Tim Curry as Long John Silver, for Muppets Treasures Island (1996), and it is perversely appropriate that it can co-exist as Ruiz's, dimensions connected by the same text, even if Ruiz's has more cursing and significantly less Kermit the Frog. Ruiz's even takes its playful unrevealing of the reality into the oneiric, with a reoccurring obsession for Jim Hawkins being an action television show set in Africa the adults around him may be the stars of, which blurs the lines between what is real for him in the world, and what is staged and he needs to not take seriously for his safety. Sadly, even as a Cannon Group release, this has become obscure, Raúl Ruiz one of my favourite filmmakers still doomed to hazy VHS images even if appropriate for the sources, including if you find it with Spanish subtitles. It is a credit to Raul Ruiz that, in 1986 alone, he also released four others films, so Treasure Island even if an imperfect work was contrasted by the vast tableau of titles which came at the same time. It is telling he returned to this film, with the 2008 novel In Pursuit of Treasure Island, which in itself befits the project and his entire career, a text which can grow and change in new telling within another text.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

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

The Mummy Theme Park (2000)

 

Director: Alvaro Passeri

Screenplay: Alvaro Passeri and Antony Pedicini

Cast: Adam O'Neil as Daniel Flynn; Holly Laningham as Julie; Cyrus Elias as the Sheik; Helen Preest as Nekhebet; Peter Boom as Professor Mason; Paola Real as Damcer; John Gayford as Richard

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You think the Sheik will like my boobs?

I encountered director Alvaro Passeri for the first time with Creatures from the Abyss (1994), an incredibly lurid and ridiculous Italian nautical horror from the nineties, a film who marked the end of the golden era of Italian genre films with a sense of aware absurdity. Alongside Passeri having an obsession with giant stuff animals in his set decoration and automated bathrooms with A.I., this film as his follow up nonetheless also marks him stepping into a new world of cinema, that of the straight-to-DVD era. From its title, it looks like a cash-in on The Mummy (1999), the big budgeted reboot for Universal of its original 1932 horror film with Brendan Fraser. I would not be surprised if The Mummy Theme Park was actually titled that way for the brand recognition, but I do not point fingers negatively even if proven. Considering Italian genre films ripped off or built themselves on what was popular in North American cinema, I consider it befitting and a compliment if that was the reason behind the title. Only that it might have undercut this film's chances with a quick dismissal are against it as a choice, as the title does nothing to show what the film to my surprise actually was.

More of a concern is that this openly goofy movie is built by love from Alvaro Passeri, deciding in this of all films to invest techniques from models to superimposition, film techniques from as far back as silent cinema, and I admire the results. This is all for a film effectively about cyborg mummies, which adds a joy, when in truth Passeri commits to an aesthetic more vast in production than some of the golden era Italian horror films from the eighties, all in the name of making the silly premise actually live up to expectations rather than be disappointing. Namely, that this has the ridiculous premise about cyborg mummies and, even if not pushing this to the level some audiences may want, replacing the potential disappointment with a joyfully over-the-top tone and spectacle to compensate for that audience still. An American photographer, taking his female assistant and love-of-his-life with him, is assigned to go to Egypt and promote the titular theme park. Created by a powerful sheik, after a fissure in the earth has exposed a secret burial site, he has decided to commit complete sacrilege of the dead, creating a theme park about ancient Egypt which has no qualms about rebuilding centuries old corpses in their original form, operating them by machinery and forcing to dead to be undead animatronics. Even how they start to go berserk, by photographic flash, evokes Itchy and Scratchy Land from the famous Simpsons episode, how everything went to shit in that episode with the mascots going on a rampage, only with someone in charge whose lack of qualms and greed for this makes this suitably karmic when it goes wrong for him. Not even skeletons are safe from this reanimation by the Sheik's scientists, and the one woman on staff who is secretly communicating with the angry ancient Egyptian gods is going to make sure he gets his comeuppance.

You have the paradox that Alvaro Passeri's take on Egypt is questionable, the one issue you have to get around with enjoying the film. It is problematic, that this Egypt feels like it is from a different century, with harems and armoured guards, one from a European Western view of Egypt that reality. It is the fantasy of the Arabia, despite modern technology being involved, from fantasy narratives outside of real Egyptian culture. Also of note is that everyone, including the Egyptians, is clearly a white European in prominent roles, Passeri's style clearly evoking old Hollywood films which did not think carefully about casting, or even one of Fritz Lang's last projects, the two part The Indian Tomb and The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), a film which had locations shot in India, but alongside interiors in West Germany, has prominent roles even for Indian characters for an Indian epic played by white actors. In that case, it felt less offensive on purpose, more a really misguided aspect to what are still compelling pieces of adventure narrative, only stung by the bad surrealism of a European actor in obvious makeup passing off as West Asian, in rich fifties colour film images to emphasise this contradiction. In cases like this, it is understandably going to raise questions from a non-Caucasian cineaste, even the most forgiving, for justifiable reasons. The problem is here with The Mummy Theme Park, and you cannot justify privilege of exempting this film either from this problem, only admit I enjoyed the film but that it was a strange decision, more so at the turn of the 21st Century, even for budgetary reasons.

The aesthetic without this problem would have been enough, even if in danger of exoticising Egypt as merely fantasy, not of thereal place. That is because, ironically, the film whilst with its problems with this is nonetheless about exploitation of Egyptian culture even from within for Western tourists. How befitting even this proud b-flick, probably better without subtlety, will mock and parody all the transgressions done to ancient Egypt and sacrilege of the dead, only beyond an Egyptian film like Shadi Abdel Salam's The Night of Counting the Years (1969) to actually contemplate the transgressions committed to Egypt as a culture and a land to have their history stolen from them. In history where the British (my nationality) are not guiltless either in our transgressions, in raiding tombs and stealing another nation's artefacts in a colonial form, Alvaro Passeri, even if a twisted humour and a love in the set decoration in depicting it, sets out as perfect a metaphor for this even in a silly genre film as you could get, Egypt now desecrated as a tourist train ride where popcorn and pizza are available at the concession stand.

The film is absurd. You can distract a mummy with your cleavage here, and Passeri for some will need a slap on the wrist for how much lewdness there is, even for a film still suitable for fifteen year old in Britain in the age rating, ogling scantily clad or nude female cast with a considerable horniness on display. When you get a melted cat mummy man, in a moment of playful glee which is less an issue, it is with the bizarre aspect of them roaring like the MGM Studio lion in the sound clip choices that feels more on purpose than I would initially presume. The English acting, like Creatures of the Abyss' dub, is just as ridiculous here as there, and again it feels more aware of this than other Italian genre films from before it. The theme park sets, all depicted in models, has a giant dinosaur skeleton as a prominent prop clearly for the hell of it, and I can even manage to squeeze in a justifiable reference to Karel Zeman, the legendary Czeck animator and filmmaker who would literally built his worlds in films like Invention for Destruction (1958). Here Alvaro Passeri has built most of this world, barring stage sets, from model work, projecting backdrops around his cast, and techniques that are artificial but, honestly, feel more tangible and compelling than just using green screen and CGI when it lacks the encouragement to flourish. All of this to for a straight-to-video film is even more spectacular to consider in hindsight.

Passeri's films so far for me have their crassness, that lurid old era of Italian genre films we fans admits exist but can put people off them, but I think Passeri would admit to this himself as I learn of him. His heart is for the construction of the films, to play, and even the obvious CGI here, to reference that again, feels less like a necessary but a new tool he realises in like a new type of paintbrush. This has gore, some nasty practical effects, but I think less of this as a horror film, but a goofy supernatural jaunt which allowed Passeri and his production team to have fun, and that is taking into consideration one such scene having a man's tongue grow engorged and be vomited out of his mouth. In this gaudy world of straight-to-video cinema, that a craftsman is having fun and being a great craftsman at that is something I cannot believe few are even still aware of nowadays, and despite the title being a potential put-off, the film is so much more interesting even when it is ridiculous.

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Cast: Jean-Bernard Guillard as The Sailor; Philippe Deplanche as Tadeusz Krasinski, The Student; Jean Badin as The First Officer; Nadège Clair as María; Lisa Lyon as Matilde; Claude Derepp as The Ship's Captain; Franck Oger as The Blind Man; Diogo Dória as The Sailor's Sister's Fiancé

An Abstract Candidate

 

Don't stare or you'll end up like me.

Initially, I could almost view Three Crowns of the Sailor as being more subdued than some of the other productions I have seen just from Raúl Ruiz's eighties period, but then again his films can be subjective, and as this French production continues its world becomes more and more dreamlike as it continues. It is certainly one which is structured carefully and simple to grasp - a student (Philippe Deplanche), after murdering hsi professor, encounters a nameless sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard), who will help him escape onto his ship providing he provides him three Danish crown coins before dawn and listens to his tale. Set in (mostly) black-and-white, this bookend follows on, in full colour to the sailor's experiences when he encountered the crew of the Funchalense and left home. The ship, naturally, is mysterious, travelling on its way from Singapore to Tangiers, the sailor encountering various people who will become memories to create a new family from when he has left his.

The crew themselves are eccentric and alien. The captain is obsessed, even in his dreams, of singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and there is a cruel hierarchy including that those loyal to the ship have letters marked in tattoos to their skin, connected to a tapestry the captain is sewing with the letters on in his spare time. When one crew member decides to throw himself overboard in disgust to his lot, he immediately appears the next day obvious to what he has done. They do not even use the bathroom; at least defecate, as the sailor learns when instead they sweat maggots from their skin. Obviously, something is amiss, [Spoilers] as Ruiz is adapting the Chilean legend of the Caleuche, the ship of the dead, from the Chilean director. [Spoilers End] But he is less interested in the obvious narrative then the sailor's journey, which in itself is an ode to the world of storytelling, where Ruiz himself in his career would have tangents, diversions and layers of stories upon layers which is continued here.

The sailor's life on the ship will lead him to encounter in Singapore a doctor in the body of a young boy, aging backwards like Benjamin Button if not fed, to a young woman in a Columbian brothel called Maria whose meek manner is contrasted by her living quarters, a bedroom where on the bed and even hung on the ceiling are many dolls, with glowing ominous eyes, and where she keeps her possessions in a full sized coffin, including marking all the men who come to her on the lid in chewed up multi-coloured gum she has had. To see Ruiz's work, especially in the rare moment you are graced with a fully restored version than the VHS hazed rips that a lot of his career exist in, shows how exceptional he is as a filmmaker but also how unconventional. The eighties was his most prolific and weirdest part of his career, and with the legendary Last Year in Marienbad (1961) cinematographer Sacha Vierny with him, Ruiz's world here is a thing of eerie beauty. Rich coloured gels and lighting dye the world, filmed in natural locations, from the purplish of purples to the reddest of reds. One thing, seeing his work as it should, which stands out is his curious and inspired framing of shots which keeps one off-guard, inspired by his love of Orson Welles and his use of the visual frame. He is obsessed with objects and figures in the foreground and background, taking advantage of the three dimensional space in the two dimensional image, whether a hand buttering food, a cup or even a scabby wart covered foot.

The most amazing thing about this beautiful aesthetic is that Three Crowns of the Sailor was originally commissioned as a made-for-television film. That is not a bias against made-for-television films, as if anything with a man who made moving images in all mediums as one breathed oxygen, Ruiz here with Vierny, ­his wife and frequent editor Valeria Sarmiento, and everyone who collaborated on the project effectively show the a television commission is good enough to be shown on even a theatrical screen. This style is, also, where Ruiz can wrong foot a viewer. Sometimes it is overt - a bravado first person shot from the captain of the ship playing cards with the sailor, giant hands with cards greeting one in the image - but as the film becomes more and more haunted, and weirder, the style is able to effortlessly bring this about in mood. Three Crowns is subdued at first, a slow burn as the sailor enters the world of sailing, but even this is marked in oddness. The celebration for his leaving by his family and the neighbourhood is heightened, even before a frame or two is edited in of men with masks on, and whether a result of damage of the restored negative/film source or intentional, it starts the many scenes with blue faded marks on the image itself.

The introduction to Maria, in her oblique and apologetic tone and her collection of dolls, introduces more of the surreal in the sailor's tale. His story is less overtly bizarre, fed on the influence of classic storytelling Ruiz will gladly even evoke in a library shelf of such titles in one scene, but in exaggeration. A scene with a young boy who saves his life has many globes of the world in the room, and when he does become overtly surreal, the sequences are more striking. The most striking is Mathilde (Lisa Lyon), the erotic dancer the sailor becomes fixated on, until the point he learns that beyond her mouth, her body is literally like a doll's. This can be interpreted in a crass way, that she herself blatantly says she has to do everything with her mouth, but even to the point of fake female genitalia we discretely see placed on the table, the most surreal of scenes in Three Crowns of the Sailor, and its most extreme, also is definitely one few would have expected to find in a film. It also still means something as, in his search for something real, the sailor's finds himself trapped in another illusion again as a result than what he wanted.

On a surface level, Three Crowns of the Sailor was just a wonderful, strange pleasure of storytelling itself. A work which is entirely about the spun stories of the sea, the sailors exchanging them and spiralling out in their elaborateness as they are retold by others. The only consistent, between the ship sinking only to return in another harbour to a blind man who lied so much one cannot gather truth from him, is money which proves the sailor's downfall. Even said money, in various currencies, blurs into each other in what it is. Said film, by itself, is a thing of utmost beauty even in its strangest and unnerving aspects, for the story of the student returns and, in his hasty and violent reaction to the sailor's stalling, he realises the trap he has found himself in. As a film, part of the tapestry I found myself submerged in years ago, tales-within-tales, it is an experience I am ever grateful to have had finally.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Surreal

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

House II: The Second Story (1987)

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/pdiKr
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Director: Ethan Wiley

Screenplay: Ethan Wiley

Cast: Arye Gross as Jesse; Jonathan Stark as Charlie; Royal Dano as Gramps; Bill Maher as John; John Ratzenberger as Bill; Lar Park Lincoln as Kate

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #116

Haunted house horror....to a cuddle Cata-Puppy and undead cowboys? Remembering my initial warning to myself that the House series jumped off the rails from the first sequel onwards, I was prepared for The Second Story to switch the pace up greatly. Its still, like the first film, a comedy with elaborate practical effects but it's entirely to question House II qualifies as a horror film at all. Thankfully, rather than what happened with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), producer Sean S. Cunningham and those involved decided to make the series an anthology of separate stories immediately from the first film. This doesn't neuter how drastic the changes in tone would be between films, but it at least gives a chance for this particular sequel even if it took a drastically different direction from before.

Urban professional Jesse (Arye Gross) returns to his family home only to learn of a crystal skull his great-great-grandfather acquired, leading him and his friend Charlie (Jonathan Stark) to encounter said great-great-grandfather (Royal Dano) when they open his grave to find said skull. Left immortal due to its power, he's far from angry about the near grave robbing but appreciative of his great-great grandson finally removing him out of his grave after a hundred years. The story in which random figures of different time eras, including Kane Hodder as a caveman with the physic of a pro wrestler, attempt to steal the skull through various pocket dimensions that pop up in the house is really a boy's own fantasy adventure that just happens to have a little salt on it. Baring one use of the word "fag" which dates a minute of the film to its time badly, the film could be shown to children but also appeals to me as an adult because it never becomes morose and dumb like it's surface could suggest. I usually find this type of twee happy adventure cinema from the eighties intolerable. Born in 1989, nostalgia for the era is nonexistent, with the added issue that growing up in Britain there's a visible cultural different between me and these type of American films which would've raised me as a miserable bastard, gladly popping the balloon of love of the era like a killjoy and preferring the horror and cult films from the time with an edge. But I openly confess House II was heart-warming and fun. The rubber reality of the first film returns with a vengeance, with complete disregard for realism with elaborate effects, surprisingly elaborate effects for what would've been a small budget film I can't help but praise. Where a door in Jesse's new home leads to a prehistoric environment where dinosaurs and giant rodents co-exist, and in the another you can stumble into a Western abruptly.

From http://media7.fast-torrent.ru/media/files/
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Instead of chills alongside the laughs of the first film, its sweet and full of slapstick farce, able to get away with material I would find sickly and emotionally cheap in another context. The Cata-Puppy, alongside a baby pterodactyl, the later the stereotypical puppet which causes mischief as in many a family film, would've been irritating in any other film, but immediately they stand out here due to how there's adults in the lead to bounce off them. As practical effects they, alongside everything else in the film, is treated as if this is still a horror movie like before, firing on all cylinders in terms of the quality of the animatronics and practical effects. The humour as well is also funny, helping to not only make such strange inclusions rewarding, the Cata-Puppy legitimately adorable and deserving its own plush toy for fans to collect, but emphasise that this is still a little bit more mature about its romp rather than playing to cheap laughs meant to aim for children.

From https://i0.wp.com/www.badmovies.org/movies/houseii/houseii7.jpg

That in particular is a big reason why I don't like some films from this decade outside of the eighties or am indifferent. Admittedly the eighties still allowed for more mature films aimed for children to take place but people forget that even in a film as notirously grim as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), you still had Short Round and Kate Capshaw's entire performance added as "hijinks" and laughter for families. There were still a lot of cases of utterly annoying stereotypes of children and bland, white collar families peppered between the more realistic ones. (Even more accurate depictions could've lost translation to a Brit like myself as American culture of the time, even if imported, would stand out drastically from us). Here, there's an immediate success in having two adults in the lead to bounce this madness off, a straight man in Arye Gross and his comedic sidekick in Jonathan Stark to follow. Neither of their characters of perfect and its for the better in emotional engagement. Royal Dano as Gramps, an old guard of classic Hollywood cinema in elaborate makeup, makes up a trio for fun, adding as much to the proceedings in charisma even if his character spends most of the time sat or laid down.

From https://iscfc.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/2966.jpg

House II at least scores legitimately with an extended sequence. One which manages to completely disconnect from real world logic with a cameo by John Ratzenberger, playing a professional adventurer and electrician, frankly terrible as an electrician but surprisingly well versed in parallel universes and proficient with a sword he always carries in his toolbox. It's the sequence, involving a Mayan sacrifice being interrupted, where you either hate House II or like it, managing to be hilarious and gleefully strange at the same time for those who are the later. It's within sequences like this, or teaching an undead cowboy how to drive a modern car, that I came to fully appreciate House II. It really doesn't qualify for a horror review in the damned slightest;  barring a couple of undead characters, it only makes sense to have covered the film because it's in the midst of the House series. But considering both its prequel, which was also good, and where the franchise sadly drops off in the third and fourth entries, this will turn out to be the best of the quadrilogy for me. Because what usually breaks out a rash for me is actually fun and sweet to experience in this context, including the cheesy happy ending. The sort of film, including the prequel, that younger viewers could get into horror during their childhood and still have spice to them an adult like me can appreciate. Having never seen them for the first time until now, because of their creative decisions and hard worked craft a film like House II is utterly rewarding.

From https://i2.wp.com/www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/wp-content/
uploads/2015/04/house-ii-dog-caterpillar.jpg?resize=1024%2C576

Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) [Mini Review]

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/again1.jpg

Director: Robert Fuest

Screenplay: Robert Blees, Robert Fuest

Cast: Vincent Price (as Dr. Anton Phibes); Robert Quarry (as Darius Biederbeck); Valli Kemp (as Vulnavia); Peter Jeffrey (as Inspecter Trout); Fiona Lewis (as Diana Trowbridge); Hugh Griffith (as Harry Ambrose); Beryl Reid (as Miss Ambrose)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #1

[The following is a project to help boost my productivity in creating blog posts. While I felt 1000 Anime needed its own blog, the impracticality now of writing long form reviews for a thousand or more horror films alongside the main meat of this blog and the other, especially as it'll be a large category of films to go from than the abstract and anime, means that I'll stick to shorter reviews. Some will get longer posts on them, especially if they fit into the Cinema of the Abstract guidelines, but the shorter writing piece style feels more appropriate and will free me in my ability to write reviews. After a thousand films are covered, it'll be likely I'll go to a thousand more or at least change the title.]

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) is absolutely worth seeing. As someone who admits that his own country's horror cinema can be exceptionally disappointing at times, the first Dr. Phibes film is a deliciously strange comedy horror. It's very loosely horror in honesty, but ghoulish enough to fit the genre perfectly, finding it better than Theatre of Blood (1973) in terms of a curious sub-genre of the early seventies about Vincent Price killing people in unique ways, standing out more for its Art Deco retro vibe and how the humour feels even more morbid in Dr. Phibes because of its elegant style and restraint. It stands out with a strange air that's more compelling, Price not speaking a great deal throughout the film and having to command the screen with his face, the strangeness of the murders in general, and touches such as the first ten minutes of the film having no dialogue, the first line of dialogue uttered after someone gets savaged by bats and gets the thrills going.

Dr. Phibes Rises Again is clearly a sequel meant to capitalise off the back of the original's success, and like many sequels it completely rewrites the original ending and tries to add new back-story which doesn't make sense to include in the slightest. In the same logic that through in pagan mythology for Michael Myers decades later, Dr. Phibes has now returned and is going to Egypt with the resurrected Vulnavia (Kemp) to revive his late wife through a river of life documented in Egyptian lore, terrorising a team led by Darius Biederbeck (Quarry) who also wants the immortality of the water for himself. Whilst it was established Dr. Phibes was a professor in music and religion in the first film, killing people by replicating the ten Biblical plagues that were sent against the Egyptian pharaoh oppressing Moses and the Jews, the film does slip out from the campy absurdity of the first film into full-on supernatural territory, not as bad as making a magic sword to kill Jason Voorhees in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) but still a strange change of place alongside rewriting the original film's perfect ending and the fact Phibes was just extremely go at making and planning elaborate methods of killing people.

The notion of turning the Phibes sequel into a turn of the century adventure film isn't that bad of an idea if you're willing to go along with the second film existing. Despite rewriting the original film it's not a bad idea to run with an Egyptian adventure aesthetic especially as the first film obsessed over twenties jazz music and interior designs. Making an entire film including the plot soaked in this style would've been perfect...until the very limited sets leave no sense of scale, just sandy dunes, and cameos from the likes of Peter Cushing as a ship's captain or Terry-Thomas wasted without the glee of the first film. The policemen from the first film Inspector Trout (Jeffery) and his superior Superintendent Waverley (John Cater) appear again, but unlike the important of the characters in plot and comedy from the prequel, they feel completely wasted, going out of their jurisdiction to Egypt and not contributing anything to the finale. And as an antagonist to Price, Quarry is very weak, who when placed against Joseph Cotton from the original is merely adequate in charisma in comparison.

It neither helps the plot is gibberish either and not fun gibberish in the slightest. This is signposted by Vincent Price has far more dialogue and narration in comparison to the first film; while Price had a magnificent voice which makes almost any dialogue sound like Shakespeare, Phibes was an exception where less was more for Price, better when he's mostly silent and allowing Price to relish the dialogue that did appear for the character in the prequel with greater emphasis.  Instead here his continuous amount of exposition is a part  of the sluggishness of the film in pace with the type of endless dialogue that I hate in many sixties and seventies British horror movies. The only really interesting aspect of the film in general is its style. The Art-Deco style is still as strong, hieroglyphics of top hated dancers in Phibe's new lair part of the wonderful kitsch in small details, and the deaths separated from the narrative are just as interesting even if they're not as inventive as the first film, from the use of a giant prop bottle to clockwork snakes around a pool table. It's unfortunately that this continuing high quality in the technical side has a less than interesting plot as its connective tissue, the result a pointless continuation.

From http://photos.bravenet.com/272/478/925/3/9ED3039E9E.jpg