2001 Maniacs (2005) / 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010)

 

Director: Tim Sullivan

Screenplay: Tim Sullivan and Chris Kobin [and Christopher Tuffin for 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams]

Cast:

2001 Maniacs:

Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Giuseppe Andrews as Harper Alexander, Jay Gillespie as Anderson Lee, Matthew Carey as Cory Jones, Peter Stormare as Professor Ackerman, Marla Malcolm as Joey, Gina Marie Heekin as Kat, Brian Gross as Ricky, Mushond Lee as Malcolm

2001 Maniacs - Field of Screams:

Bill Moseley as Mayor George W. Buckman, Trevor Wright as Falcon, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Christa Campbell as Milk Maiden, Ahmed Best as Crow, Adam Robitel as Lester, Nivek Ogre as Harper Alexander, Andrea Leon as Val Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You’re boning your cousin, and I’m a pig?

Full Spoilers Ahead

I want to return to a lot of films I once hated with a more positive outlook on them, but the 2000s remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) sadly belongs to that category of those where I had my initial issues with grow, cultivating into a clear and understood view of why I cannot vibe with them. More so as this time I saw the 2010 sequel, which also establishes that these films belonging to an era of cinema I grew up with which is now old, not inherently a criticism in itself, but with these unfortunately belonging to the side I glad is less common nowadays. The edgy opening of the original, splicing real Civil War photos with creepy music and slashes in the soundtrack, alongside immediately raising the concerns of how the remake series tackles the Civil War, fully shows the mid-2000s aesthetic of horror is now old after I grew up with it. The first film was produced by Raw Nerve, Eli Roth's company with Scott Spiegel, and Boaz Yakin which produced his two Hostel films, marking this particular aesthetical era, even in a more overtly comedic case here, of a grungy and more explicit type of American horror. There are also, unfortunately, obnoxious frat boys as the leads, who after being very bad in their Civil War classes thus end up ironically in the past whilst trying to get to a party Florida. They end up, as in Lewis’ version, in Pleasant Valley, a Southern Confederate throwback which openly wants to get revenge on the North for the Civil War by luring and killing Northern Yankees.

The obnoxiousness is there, as no one is likable even if you are eventually meant to sympathize with them, to the point I cared more for Eli Roth in a cameo as a guy who throws dead armadillos at passing cars, claims they ran over his pet, and guilts them into free car rides with his dog Dr. Mambo. The sequel has the same issue, even if parodying the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reality TV show, The Simple Life, which lasted from 2003 to 2007 with its obnoxious reality TV blonde stand ins and its small crew. Only the two films having male characters who are gay or embrace it is a nickel of empathy, and this tellingly comes from Tim Sullivan, as a LGBTQ horror filmmaker, whose entry for the anthology film Chillarama (2011) having the evocatively named I was a Teenage Werebear which plays to the slang version of “bear”, not just the mythological idea of bear men. I wish this was the direction we went more with, alongside the streaks of camp as these are horror comedies, as all my problems with both films begin and end with them attempting to play to taboos with these Southern hick stereotypes, with racism and various taboos, which comes off as a terrible strain of ironically nudging to these for discomfort humour whilst still having the stereotypes and racism.

The Pleasant Valley locals are evil, indiscriminating killing and eating Northerners, but they are mean to be anti-heroes which you whoop for despite the fact the first film plays to their more overt racism unlike the original film, especially as Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, the head of the community, is a really good casting choice as a lead. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original film never addressed the uncomfortable issues of how the Southern Confederacy, whilst only lasting from 1861 to 1865, fought the Civil War for an idealized view of the South based on plantations and slavery, yet he managed to find the right balance and even melancholia for the film made after Blood Feast (1963), where he invented the splatter genre, that had a great high concept premise. It had a playful goofiness which undercut the premise's moral implications, but fully took advantage of the themes as it was set hundred years after the Civil War with the literal ghosts of the South against the North. Whilst out of context the song he wrote is a problematic earworm, and becomes more so in the grungy metalish version in the remake films, The South's Gonna Rise Again, in context it is a perfect opening song for the tone in context and fully informed the themes of his lurid little drive-in production with the right sick humored tone. That being a Southern town in the past, random bystanders in the war, who were destroyed and had become the hate driven killers against a cast, including Blood Feast’s William Kerwin, who are actual adults and actually sympathetic. Whilst never dealing with the truly problematic nature of the Confederate, even for a wacky sixties gore film which is deeply silly and made by a filmmaker who even laughed at the notion of artist pretense of artistry in cinema, the film managed somehow to get the idea that these Southerners, once tragic side casualties in a war which killed both sides, became these gleeful limb lopping psychopathic ghosts but with the Northern Yankees figures you want to see survive. You can challenge that sentence, and the film, for glossing over the South's history of plantations and slavery, and you are absolutely right too dear reader, but there is no sense of the film being pro-Confederate either, or worse smudging the tone, just an exploitation film perfectly tapping into a history moment like an old wound in a good example of bad taste.

Here, playing these Southern stereotypes’ more overt racism in the 2005 film, with an African American character with his Asian girlfriend the stick of this, the ironic humour around tackling this becomes as problematic for me for that attempted irony, which gets worse in the sequel and is attempting a detachment which cannot past muster when it falls into an un-PC attitude we challenge nowadays. This is not just even morally but, with respect for Tim Sullivan and the co-screenwriters for both films, that for me, trying to be edgy deliberately in ways like this comes off as the wet fart of humour. There is a scene of Englund, part of a group of cannibalistic ghosts, with a pair of chopsticks talking about having Chinese food which, as a British lad with awareness of his culture, evokes the worse of the lame British comedies of the seventies and so. Forgetting just the political correctness, this type of un-PC humour, for deliberately provocation nowadays against the "woke" or here in irony, is a deuce chill culturally evoking a lame uncle ruining the mood with an off-colour joke, or a bad comedian in an old English pub. This especially amplifies for the sequel, but it is found in the prequel to, which is juggling this with gory set pieces undercut by the humour.

The stereotyping of the Southerners is an issue too, as there is a precise difference in criticizing the Confederacy, with the Confederate flags on display in these films more uncomfortable for me as time passes, as a viewer not even from the United States, to falling to a stereotype as bad as the racist lines played for ironic humour. There is a sheep shagging joke that continues into the sequel, where they probably could not afford an actual sheep, and it felt like the obvious joke to have whilst we have these stereotypes. The ones in the original sixties film were stereotypes, but not as heavy handed, and they were even felt to have more period accurate costumes; whilst the sequel has a shift in budget, to the point they decide to move and have a touring Pleasant Valley, rather than using a set, the costumes especially on the women of the town, who tempt the men folk from the North, feels like sexy Southern belle costumes from a party shop. This is neither a criticism as I do not punch down on budgets and production design, especially for the sequel, but it unfortunately emphasizes the sarcasm and broadness for the first film, with a larger budget, to exaggerate in questionable ways, that this is a horror comedy in how broad and eye rolling it is on the premise, than with Lewis' entire career even with his more nastier films where the premise is taken seriously, but the one liners and pity sense of dialogue made them funny.

The aesthetic has aged in funny ways – there is music from what sounds like Smash Mouth and I wish was, and there is a 2000s horniness which, whilst with copious nudity and that interesting subplot with a gay male character, never really gets sexy in the truest sense. There is all that nudity, a lot of gore, and acid moonshine that burns through a bed used, alongside a guy getting a poker through the arse, but what is meant with a sick humour as the original film becomes broader than Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original, which is said loving his films as a viewer but admitting they were never subtle. That ironic detachment, alongside the ending where the melancholic epilogue of the original is rushed and the survivors die, letting the Southerners win, really was what I was not a fan of this film originally, and stuck out now as a much older guy. The same set up happens in the second film, with the villains winning and even less an attempt at sympathetic leads as a pretense, and magnifies the issues of the previous film more greatly.

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams opens with a comic book prologue, but raises the issue that this is more overt in tackling the maniacs’ origins even as a horror comedy, the details that Herschell Gordon Lewis avoided where, yes, the Civil War likely led to innocents on both sides dying, but the Confederates becoming a problematic lynchpin that ignores slavery as a concept. Even if you ignore this, I have with Field of Screams a film that even with brief moments, and someone like Bill Moseley replacing Englund as Major Buckman doing his hardest to raise my spirits, a charismatic actor even in the most dire of viewing experiences, where I found myself miserable viewing the film. This is considerably rare nowadays as my concept of taste and pleasure with cinema is sometimes likely to baffle others.

There is a definite shift in the tone just in terms of the cameras used. We have gone from the 2000s to the straight to video late 2000s/early 2010s, a huge shift in horror cinema where, as mentioned, the Maniacs have completed disregarded being ghosts tied to one locations and go on tour, by bus, to a new location to get to more Northerners. A huge shift is felt too in how, whilst both of them are horror comedies, the prequel has a foot in the time of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and other extremer horror films, whilst the sequel even with its own gore, with a buzz saw going through a woman in a deliberately ghoulish way, is at a time when the post-Grindhouse (2007) and more pastiche nature of gore movies came to be. Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008) is notable to name check from this period, as Moseley came from that film, as did Nivek Ogre, member of the industrial band Skinny Puppy. This is parodying the then-finished reality TV show as two stereotypes of blonde airheads filming a reality show only to end up at the new travelling Pleasant Valley, one of them in the one weird joke that vaguely worked for me having a pet dog named Biscuit who already died and is kept taxidermied, talked to by the owner as if still alive. By this point, this is not even trying to have serious moments, with the leads all deliberately obnoxious, the sheep one of the maniacs is having a relationship fake, and shenanigans with Mayor George W. Buckman more of a horny old dog than a threat.

And yet there is also a Jewish stereotype, and whilst the maniacs have a more diverse cast, with a Chinese woman and African American proudly among their cannibalistic peers, it leads to the former, China Rose, speaking with a stereotypical voice, and an ongoing joke about a returning maniac, Granny Boone (Lin Shaye), having a relationship with the latter, alongside a fantasy sequence of Buckman's with a black female Northerner, which play off uncomfortable themes of plantation sexual relationships with an obvious end credits punch line that has aged like a fine murder. The post-ironic humour had aged badly from the 2000s onwards, and arguably it is worse as this is trying to be sarcastic and edgy on these types of stereotypes, but slipped into a pretense to even have. This even starts to slip into being wacky in a way that does not work, like an abrupt Southern aerobics joke, and at that point I realize that I find ways to appreciate most films but I have my limited. Even those with wavering acting performances, lack of budget or production quality, tangents away from plots or lack of plots, and all the half marks seen as "bad" cinema are things I now do not care for, and can love films for, but I still find both questionable jokes and forced wackiness like this are a toxic combination for me.

I can now enjoy silly, messy horror films many would dismiss as terrible or even the worst films, but Field of Screams, even with some fun and Bill Moseley on top of his game, was pointless and painful in the way I used to hate films of the past. There is no hate nowadays, only numbness, and it is not the curse of wokeness, but feeling like this type of humour is the equivalent of smearing your own feces on yourself as a protest, next to the fact that next to the original film, there is none of the camp fun, only this sense of sarcasm which I cannot vibe with well. Even as lurid horror comedies, the first has a generic plot pace for me as a viewer, and the latter is neither a plot with a point nor a weird tangent fest like horror cinema at its weirdest, so I find myself a fan of neither for countless reasons.

9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976)

 

Director: Abel Ferrara

Screenplay: Nicholas George

Cast: Pauline LaMonde as Pauline; Dominique Santos as Gyspy; Joy Silver as Nacala

Canon Fodder

 

Yes, that title is an eyebrow raiser. Just as this hardcore film starts, there is real oral sex with a man and a woman set to pure seventies porn groove music. And this is how Abel Ferrara, the legendary and controversial director of films like Bad Lieutenant (1992), actually began his career rather than with The Driller Killer (1979). Until the work of Vinegar Syndrome, an American restoration and distribution company who alongside genre films also have persevered the Golden Age of hardcore pornography, 9 Lives... was one of the more difficult films to see in Ferrara's career, a title now for a period of films in the 2000s (Mary (2005)) caught in rights issues. This is not an absurd film to have in his career mind, as even his "respectable" films have dealt with desire and the human, body and soul, in condition, so a pornographic film about desire makes pure sense in context especially with the earlier films in his career, written by Nicholas George, were mostly genre films which had an edge to them even in purely their moods. The problem up front with 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy comes from the compromise, along one problematic sequence, that undercut this one of being a film sold as pornography, that this era allowed these film to be interesting and creative, but that they could have easily been films prioritising the sex than adding interesting touches to it.

9 Lives... at seventy one minutes with these extended scenes of sex struggles to flesh out enough of the "what-if" with its ideas. The little fragment is fascinating and, in mind to Ferrara's films having themes of Catholicism for a key period of time, it is as much because this is also a mystical New Age occult film as well. Gypsy (Dominique Santos) is receiving letters from a former lover named Paulette (Pauline LaMonde), a free spirits whose recounting in them of all her sexual partners is the only solace for Gypsy beyond opium fantasies of this former love. Eventually, in the little plot we get, as Gypsy narrates and explains to the viewer from her sanctum home, we learn she has supernatural powers and intends to find a way to return Paulette to her. It is a compelling idea for a film, softcore or hardcore, ennui to be found here as Paulette casually wanders through relationships, be it the perfect male sex machine who is cold elsewhere, to an attended at a gas station bathroom whilst with the former, to a Nigerian princess.

It is structured around the sex scenes, but the idea of a figure who is purely of desires, and the other woman who still thinks of her, plotting as her guardian witch, is a fascinating idea especially from Abel Ferrara, whose films evoke a certain aesthetic even with his later work, suggesting tantalising ideas of how he would deal with this subject matter. Bluntly, the film is not profound and struggles for its slightness. It could have worked, especially as this is still a time of porn cinema where, unlike the emphasis on scenes in the modern PornHub era and some films, there was an emphasis on theatrical films which had surprising amount of production design to them nonetheless. The soundtrack alone is strong too, even if one song does suggest it is going to turn into a Status Quo track, tonally inappropriate in terms of this review, and the most British reference to bring in, but impossible for me to ignore. In terms of its subject, the concept of the film as a series of erotic segments including reinterpreting a Biblical tale from the Old Testament offers a lot that is not out of place for Ferrara to tackle.

And moments do show that something very interesting was here. Even the un- Ferrara choice of jazz fusion does not undercut one scene when the film is focused, Gypsy's sexual desires for Pauline depicting envisioning the later in a space entirely nude in a blinding white light as a reality. Even a scene which would be understandably seen as unacceptable now suggests what this film could have been, which is the reinterpretation of the Old Testament, that of Lot's daughters, which is retold with Paulette's grandmother, whose she shared her face and soul with, and her sister with their father. Containing Ferrara in an onscreen role, through with a stung body double and clearly not a Swedish old man just from his accent, the segment will be uncomfortable because it is non-consensual sex and incest, but is fascinating in literalising a real Bible passage which is contentious in itself, that it is Lot's daughters getting their older father drunk and conceiving children with him, the later never explicitly talked about in this version. Due to how the film feels threadbare in content, there is no ability to make this type of scene have any meaning, with one of the more transgressive aspects being that the film has real sex for all the scene including this one, even if the film is of actors choreographing scenes which just invoke real sexual contact at the end of the day. At least with that scene, shot lacksidasical which undercuts the discomfort, the idea it is tackling dealing with Paulette's heritage, and tapping into taboo sexuality which is found even in the Bible and is a tale of rape even in that context, makes it something that, in another film, would have still been a challenging and problematic work but still to consider with pause for thought.

Not defendable in the slightest, uncomfortable and even padded out, is the rape scene of the Nigerian princess which exists only for the disquieting idea of being erotic, something which back than would have been an easy red target for an anti-porn feminist like Andrea Dworkin to show if she had been aware of this. It is part of the uncomfortable schism in seventies erotica of trying to be serious, even with this type of controversial content, but clearly made with titillation, a schism where you get films which, even if uncomfortable, were intentionally aiming for something truly challenging, and then films like this where the scene here is lacksidasical in depiction, last a while and most would not even be interesting in debating, quick to dismiss it. Baise-Moi (2001), a controversial film from two female directors, was a rape-revenge film where the sex, consensual and not, was depicted with the actors actually have real sexual contact, which can be debated in terms of whether it was justifiable for that film, but was part of a film that was meant to shock and make people uncomfortable for a reason. With 9 Lives..., I cannot really defend the film at all for this scene, because its purpose, especially as there is not a lot to the film around it in actual material that can undercut and/or change how one is meant to interpret it, especially as the character barring some relationship with Paulette leaves the film soon after never to be seen again.

Moments like this undercut the fascination 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy can have, as even his scuzzier work from later one had deeper thoughts, or were a film like Fear City (1984), which was so brazenly ridiculous (and sincere) you had to admire it. This film instead suffers from having to tick boxes for being a porn film, which alongside the moral concerns with some of the content, also reveals how much of this is really a first attempt at making a film that found it not fully becoming its creators' own take on the genre. Even The Driller Killer for all its luridness as a Video Nasty fits Abel Ferrara as an auteur in his obsessions like a glove.  A slither of interest in here, the mysticism, becomes the most enticing idea of the film, ending with Gypsy turning into a man to have sex with Paulette, in the middle of a twilight reality with a protracted shot of the moon like the pinpoint camera hole in a black screen. This idea, even if the film had been longer and had more sex scenes, offers at least the idea of something very unconventional yet befitting the type of films its creator would go on to do.

This instead is still however porn in the dismissible way for large parts of it, not one of the creative ones which managed to possess something special, or just suit the point of the genre of titillation in a way which was actually admirable in a pro-sex good way. An older Ferrara film would have tackled this subject, even in softcore, with something truly compelling, and it is with praise knowing his next film, The Driller Killer, fully cemented his trajectory fully. This feels like the first attempt, and if it had been without the rape scene, and had more time to flesh itself out, literally in content and in its ideas, I would look to 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy with more than curiosity. Even the title feels absolutely inappropriate for an Abel Ferrara directed porn film, the clumsy first film which has its intrigue undercut by the context of what the film turned out to be.

9 Fingers (2017)

 

Director: F.J. Ossang

Screenplay: F.J. Ossang

Cast: Paul Hamy as Magloire; Luc Catania as Delgado; Damien Bonnard as Kurtz; Lionel Tua as Warner Oland; Alexis Manenti as Springer; Elvire as Gerda; Lisa Hartmann as Drella; Diogo Dória as Le Capitaine; Pascal Greggory as Ferrante; Rafael Mathias Monteiro as Le barman; Gaspard Ulliel as Le docteur

An Abstract Candidate

 

One man, Magloire (Paul Hamy), is like many in a crime narrative, stuck in a scenario that is doomed for even everyone else, where failure or betrayal means your body is cut up into pieces, and burned for waste disposal. Magloire is barely accepted in the gang he is under, a bystander left home with the two women of the criminal group, Drella (Lisa Hartmann) and Gerda (Elvire), when the robbery of a safe does not turn out well, forcing everyone on a cargo ship with the titular 9 Fingers the unseen figurehead pulling the strings, who gained that name from subtracting ones for punishment. This is already a crime noir scenario few protagonists would want to be involved with, but Magloire is in an even worse situation, that the safe box had radioactive material, polonium.

The scenario on the cargo ship is a deadly one, a bomb having gone off when the material was taken, leaving one of the members of the gang with radioactive sickness, all in an apocalyptic scenario in what could be caused with the quantity they acquired. This is just the tip of the iceberg to 9 Fingers, and outside the film, it is sod's law I am only now prepared for the films of F.J. Ossang, and his work is difficult to access. Ossang is truly a cult figure, in terms of a director from another country, a French filmmaker, who is prolific (least since 1985) and has a fan base, has a distinct style blurring genres, but is despite his career being laced with crime and pulp tropes someone who has never seen access least in the British Isles. Streaming from November 2018 to January 2019 temporarily, I was lucky to have seen the MUBI curated F.J. Ossang: Cinema Is Punk¹, compiling all his feature films up to and including 9 Fingers; sadly, I was not at the right time to appreciate the films.

I was violently hostile to the films in fact, only won over when the films were beginning to be taken off by Doctor Chance (1997), his idiosyncratic full colour crime film which did end the festival positively with finally understanding his work, with Elvire, found here, as the female lead and Joe Strummer of The Clash in a prominent role talking about gonads. 9 Fingers is not conventional either, as all his films were, the genre director on the surface but with fascination for talking and mood, the tropes of noir and crime here, but not the same. The set up is here, where on the Sri Ahmed Volkenson V, the first name of the cargo ship, there is a dangerous substance in the cargo bay, with the added issue that Magloire has fallen for Drella, whose brother he got killed, and develops a jealous hostility in their leader Kurtz (Damien Bonnard) towards him as a result.

Where Ossang caught me off-guard originally is when you have long contemplative films within the genre tropes he used, rather than what you would have presumed from the punk filmmaker/musician/poet with an interest in noir tropes and characters wearing black. Case in point, Magloire's only solace is a senior member of the cargo ship who talks to him, an older man not happy with his position within this, with his books marks by when the authors died. Ossang is a true punk filmmaker in attitude, yet his dialogue with that one character gets into talking about revolution, but also about God and the Devil existing with plans for the world as mankind has freewill. Ossang for 9 Fingers shots this as a chamber piece, a lot of dialogue with the form of genre here in its moodiness. Especially with how striking the film is, Ossang whether working with cinematographer Darius Khondji on Treasure of Bitch Island (1990), before his memorable work for David Fincher on Seven (1995) or with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, or Docteur Chance being his only colour films, presented with a distinct hue in itself, 9 Fingers with Simon Roca as the cinematographer when you get its groove is eerie. It feels it was more indebted to horror films of a certain vintage than a crime film, whether Val Lewton or Vampyr (1932). Not a lot "happens", which is significant, but paranoia aptly seeps in, not surprising when you have a leader named Kurtz in change, slowly breaking down, on a ship where radioactive polonium is there and eventually a mysterious doctor appears on board that takes power.

The film's pulp tone, stuck at sea drifting past countries, is timeless, modernity but, with Kurtz fixated on an ornate map, ageless in form as much as its fixation of black trench coats and glasses is very "punk". The strangeness is emphasised by when Nowhereland is introduced, an alien island which is the straw which breaks the camel's back for the narrative. Befittingly, it adds to the influence of old horror and pulp melodrama when all goes wrong, even if nothing evil is actually on the island, entirely bare and nowhere in the sea. The film's nihilistic tone, and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster's Psychosis Safari on the end credits, is punk, but it is a perplexing mood piece in crime trappings, eventually stuck on a void wasteland of an island, and an unseen gunshot for emphasis concluding before Psychosis Safari kicks in. Ossang's work is the kind, with the right frame of mind, that could win people over, but my original frustrations were clearly from how he undercut the expectations, like a three cord three minute punk song, of something fast, edgy and venomous for something more ethereal. He is, with this film's ink black monochrome appearance, more esoteric, the shots of the moon cutting through the black, and growing tensions (and alcohol consumption) on the ship, providing a compelling air now I am aware of Ossang's tone for his work.

Again, shame F.J. Ossang's work is not easily accessible, his being the kind of work which is "niche" but, with the right frame of mind now, I get into greatly.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

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

 

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1) F.J. Ossang: Cinema is Punk, with a link to the main article, The Paradoxes of F.J. Ossang, written by Adrian Martin and published on November 9th 2018 on MUBI, to present 9 Fingers and Ossang to a new audience.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief            

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief      

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

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Enjoy them, the nuts of the Germans.

[Major Plot Thread Spoilers]

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

8 ½ Women (1999)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: John Standing as Philip Emmenthal; Matthew Delamere as Storey Emmenthal; Vivian Wu as Kito; Annie Shizuka Inoh as Simato; Barbara Sarafian as Clothilde; Kirina Mano as Mio; Toni Collette as Griselda; Amanda Plummer as Beryl; Natacha Amal as Giaconda; Manna Fujiwara as Giulietta the Half Woman; Polly Walker as Palmira; Elizabeth Berrington as Celeste, Emmenthal Maid; Myriam Muller as Marianne, Emmenthal Maid; Don Warrington as Simon; Claire Johnston as Amelia, Philip's Wife

Canon Fodder

 

That's an unrecognisable blasphemy in Japan!

A word to describe Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway? Esoteric. The former employee of the Central Office of Information (COI), Greenaway made short work on architecture and current trends in the seventies alongside progressing to experimental short films. His debut The Falls (1980), a three hour plus fake documentary set within a Britain hit by a bizarre disease that turned people half bird, pretty started off with his intentions he would carry throughout his career. An obsessive compulsive interest in lists; an insanely encyclopaedic view of art, literature and other mediums; a profane and at times controversial attitude to the body, be it equal opportunity nudity to violence which came in films that came after The Falls, and a pitch black sense of humour.

What changed over the decades is that he wrote narratives with actors soon after The Falls. This did not stop him from pushing the experimentation, to an extreme by the nineties as he would eventually fragment and multi-layer the screen (in Prospero's Books (1991)), or to discovering computer editing for The Pillow Book (1996). He also found talented individuals for behind the camera; this is after composer Michael Nyman has moved on in the early part of the decade, but 8 ½ Women is important as the last collaboration with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, famously the cinematographer of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and who Greenaway first worked with from A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) to this film. (The film is co-shot with Reinier van Brummelen, and Vierny would pass in 2001 not long after).

8 ½ Women, even as a fan, was the one Greenaway film I was hesitant to revisit as its the film, in a career of someone who pushed buttons and upset people, which has two men (banking mogul grieving over his wife's death, and his son) build a harem of eight and a half women catering to their fetished images of women. Paying for them, or even using blackmail, to have them in the elder's home, they varied between Toni Collette as a former nun to Kirina Mano from Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) playing a woman obsessed with kabuki theatre and wishing to be more "feminine", becoming a member of the harem as a stereotypical geisha. Thankfully, even if it involves throwing Federico Fellini under the bus, the film is skewering this premise from the get-go, mocking their fetishes when this idea stems from the elder's lack of sexual experience, having watched Fellini's legendary film 8 ½ (1963) in a theatre to grieve the loss of the mother/wife figure, referring to a sequence of Marcello Mastroianni's lead having a fantasy sequence, one where the women of his life are in a harem including those who eventually become ignored and rebel back.

The question of where Greenaway is going is to prod and skewer this fantasy of his film's two leads, beginning with the question if cinema is a way for a director to create his sexual fantasies, and the stereotypes of feminine identity in male fantasy, including a debate on whether a Jane Austin heroine would be more sexually exciting then one from a Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy work. 8 ½ Women plays to the double sided coin of the harem fantasy, that a) a man even if he had one might not be able to keep up physically and mentally to the fantasy, and b) that these women are strong and independent figures who buckle the image and argue back, especially because of Palmira (Polly Walker), the only harem member who is not bribed or blackmailed into this scenario, but willingly did so for a lark. The film has aged, but not necessarily of the premise, where the women eventually turn the tables on their male dominants with ease, whether secretly planning to poison them or with Giaconda (Natacha Amal), a woman who loves having children and being pregnant, who is so fertile that it forces the men to have to contemplate children. As Palmira has become the object of obsession for the father, distract entirely by her, the sense of the film aging is more that Greenaway's caustic and corpse black sense of humour here has a couple of moments which will raise eyebrows, such as a character believing he can keep a concubine by blacking himself up like Othello or that a large part of the humour is two very privileged men, one entirely closed in, making crass remarks about the outside world.

The knife-edge Greenaway manages to walk on is that we see the humanity of our lead males in spite of some tasteless witticisms, that the harem is an inherently misguided decision but only because it stems from two men grieving the loss of a loved one, the establishing first half a lengthy part of bonding between father and son. Once the harem is created, it is entirely clear their fantasy will crumble, due to real women not being like the fantasy, some taking umbrage to their position, and even a supernatural amount of earthquakes, also involved as the son (Storey Emmenthal) evoked one is speech and has seemingly caused them to follow him around.

The female cast, far from marginalised and in various states of undress, are not props just from the fact that Greenaway was always open to having his male cast do full front nudity, both in his obsession to replicate and evoke classic art, and as a scholar of what we call the human flesh and all inside it in gristly detail. That and that he casts a surprising batch of distinct figures for the titular women. Vivian Wu, lead of The Pillow Book, returns as the accountant; it is still strange casting her as a Japanese character again, despite being Chinese, but she is good in a smaller role. Kirina Mano, who I did not realise was here, is probably most known for Bullet Ballet, standing out there, but is distinct as a character here too whose mostly speaking in the state of kabuki half sung voice. The rest of the cast is an eclectic mix, from European actresses like Barbara Sarafian, the prolific Canadian-American actress Amanda Plummer, playing a woman who liberates horses from owners and has an openly sexual relationship with a pig named Hortace, to Polly Walker, another prolific and hard working actress for cinema and television who carries a huge bulk of the film in terms of the lead female character. She is also the one who has the most scenes as an eroticised state as, whilst frank in talk, this film is more restrained in spite of its premise in terms of sexual content and even nudity for Peter Greenaway, which has an effect of the film avoiding becoming potentially crass.

It helps Greenaway, despite his claims over the years of cinema being dead and arguments that it is an inadequate medium, has always both been a distinct visual director who explored the medium, and also a distinct and good writer. He can be crude and erudite at the same time, wisely always taking a structured plot with a reliance on actors, building up on his ideas through listed or ordered themes to progress, and a lot of corpse black humour. A lot of the film, despite having aged in ways, is still funny in the modern day like contemplating the human prick as a piece of architectural brilliance, meant to be as absurd and thoughtful as that sentence sounds. In terms of his cinema, this is one of his most straightforward narratively. By this point, he had pushed the medium in some very experimental films, and would so past this through his career, but 8 ½ Women does not necessarily challenge structurally as others do. It has taken from his previous use of digital editing and layering the images from The Pillow Book, but baring touches like having images within images, showing pachinko players in scenes in the first half set in Japan, or superimposing parts of the screenplay itself over the images, he is more restrained after the radical nature of his nineties films.

From then on, this plays as a rebuttal to all the initial set up, where not long after the harem is set up it is clearly doomed to fail. The moment the two male leads acquire their goal, the soon after it starts to crumble, and we follow on with both tragedy (and even final happiness) for the characters even if through a very questionable choice of life decisions, Greenaway taking no sides even if some of the material will come off as profane or questionable for some viewers. It is in a position, unfortunate to also disappearing in time, of being a Greenaway film not talked about, which is surprising knowing films from this period and throughout his career (especially Prospero's Book) which are more divisive and more talked of which have not even gotten the basic decency of a sole DVD as 8 ½ Women at least got in the director-writer's homeland. As with all his films, this does add a great deal to find and see.

1-Ichi (2003)

 

Director: Masato Tanno

Screenplay: Sakichi Sato

Based on a manga by Hideo Yamamoto

Cast: Nao Ohmori as Ichi / Shiroishi; Teah as Dai; Chihara Junia as Onizame; Chisato Amate as Satomi; Yuki Oikawa as Nao; Eiki Kitamura as Hiromi; Kazuhiro Mashiko as Hide

Ephemeral Waves

 

Where has the God in his fists disappeared too?

When Takeshi Miike became a popular figure in the West in the late nineties and early 2000s, one of the most notorious of the productions which cemented his reputation was Ichi the Killer (2001). I would like to return to that film, adapted from a manga by Hideo Yamamoto, but in spite of how controversial and dark that film was, it was a complex film in spite of all its horrifying violence and sexual perversity. On the surface it was one of his most extreme films, including a little bit of censorship for the British release, but it was also a film that subverted and provoked the viewer with a lot of difficult content, even deliberately disappointing the viewer's expectations in the finale for the ultimate provocation, by suddenly after all the content of before having an anti-climax and disappointment for its own characters.

Two follow ups, prequels exist. Ichi the Killer was about a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano) who, with his gang being targeted by an unknown assailant, learnt that the figure was Ichi (played by Nao Ohmori), a young man brainwashed to have his sexual desires intermingle with his penchant for violence, in a way that even his controller (played by cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto) showed a moment where he was scared of his own creation, part of that film's lasting sense of immense dramatic complexity for me. The prequels were stories of Ichi and how he came to be. One was an animated prequel Ichi the Killer: Episode 0 (2002), which is not good and definitely fits the perception of a nasty, difficult-to-defend piece of violence including sexualised forms with female characters. The other, a straight-to-video production I have wanted to see for years, is 1-Ichi, helmed by the second assistant director on the original film and assistant director on a couple of Miike's films from the period like Gozu (2003). A prequel which, baring one poor tonal choice, is a much more interesting film as a very low budget but unconventional piece of pulp which does not really fit any genre but its own.

This is definitely another example of why I am fascinated and continually returning back to low budget Japanese pulp cinema, especially the period from the nineties into the 2000s, when digital cameras would have been brought it, and this is as much in knowledge that I came to these films as I got into cult cinema in the late 2000s and may have a bias. It is very much an era of Japanese genre cinema, before irony and Western funding did mar it into the late 2000s, which is insanely vast even with what did get a DVD release, usually in the United States, back then. Why I find these films fascinating is that, set here in the average world of a small town between the arcades and back alleys, they are films where the fantastical and dark are never separated off in their own unreal worlds, but happening in ordinary everyday Japanese streets, as does happen here.

In this prequel, one of the students at the school is Dai (Teah), a boxer who becomes aware of Ichi when he was once just Shiroishi, played again by Nao Ohmori, an awkward student who is beaten up even by children in a judo class but is still going to become the future figure, an extremely dangerous figure whose libido is fixated around violence, something that from Miike's film was depicted as horrifying and part of that film's insanely dense emotional rollercoaster.

This is the lo-fi, miniature version of this idea, in which most of the film is Dai being antagonised by Shiroishi's existence, not actually doing anything himself beyond occasionally watching, whilst eventually plot events will lead to him slowly being transformed into the future figure. Most of the film instead has a broadly comedic edge, notable because whilst Dai himself is a dour serious figure with a boxing background, his two friends provide comedy. One rocks up to a fight with what is called a "granny perm"; the other, in the funniest touch, is obsessed with only watching the part threes of film franchises thinking they are inherently the best, whether The Godfather III (1990) or even Let's Ride the Pervert Train 3. Surrounded by these two, this film is a comedy with dark moments of violence, partially as much a slow burn psychological drama of young males being aggressive and trying to be tough by fighting each other, most of the film Dai trying to goad Shiroishi into trying to fight him out of a sense of needing to prove himself despite his toughness and capability in a brawl.

I have talked about my love for low budget Japanese genre cinema before. If I have not, (forgive the slip in memory), there is something about the ordinary environments of Japan even in animation, as recreations of environments is comment, which are inherently photogenic even at their most banal. Especially like micro budget films in the States, these slightly bigger budget productions allow you to see real world Japanese urban environments being invaded by weird genre films. 1-Ichi is a stark looking film - one which is not effeted by what is clearly a lower budget to Miike's, which had to work around its production value as much, and it arguably helps this film and its tale of pent up, frustrated young men being violent they are in bland environments, where the most idiosyncratic details are two female classmates dolled up in exaggerated fashion and everything else is so bland baring them or the arcade that punching each other in spats makes sense.

Notably as well, when it comes to the sexual aspects of this frustration, the perversity is much slower burn as a result than Miike's film, which got the spilt semen in the opening credits. Here, most of the film could be seen as a dark high school drama of young men, then suddenly someone is tied up at a baseball diamond, and being hit by baseballs thrown at them until something snaps and, after a scene away, all there is the aftermath of carnage and split semen dripping onto the ground. That sentence, even using that term twice in one paragraph, could raise a reader's eyebrow, but especially if you did not know about the original Ichi the Killer film or its source material, the sudden turn due to the low budget nature of this movie works in its favour in having this subject aspect suddenly appear like this violently. And this uncomfortable metaphor of sex and violence entirely from male characters, with only talk of women and watching lewd films, makes this sudden burst into this material actually more provocative in an interesting if creepy way.

There is one moment in the escalation that does become uncomfortable in an inappropriate way, unlike Miike's film which, whilst far more extreme, had the tonal shifts carefully structured. Here the tonal issue is the problem, jarring in how there is a scene of non-consensual sex, whilst not explicit, in a sports hall closet which involves strangulation that is meant to be disturbing if played in an absurd way. It involves the character of Onizame, a transfer student who is insane and evil from the get-go, breaking a male student's arm with ease and brutalising him, so he is deliberately seen as a horrible figure. Tonally however it jars for a film that was entirely a curious tale of all-male obsession, where fighting has an eroticised edge and a very dark humour, only to suddenly include this scene of rape against a side female character and then try to go back to comedy, in a hospital with the male victim recovering and talk of third parts of film franchises again.

Beyond this one bad creative decision, 1-Ichi works as a strange story. Ohmori being cast again is important for the film from when it was made, but this can work without any of the original context, that it is all about something in Dai becoming obsessed with Shiroishi in spite of the fact, following the original film's inspired goal to deflate expectations, he is just a bystander who would never be able to beat him or even survive a fight if Shiroishi ever found his killing instinct. Though Shiroishi stays extremely timid and way of fights to the point of being mocked, when the turn comes not one would win against him when he turns into the future Ichi, strong enough to bend a metal baseball bat with one of his kicks. Baring that one ill-advised choice early on, as a dark comedy it was compelling, particularly as much due to its look and tone providing a strange energy.

3 Women (1977)

From https://art-s.nflximg.net/5a5c7/52bd45a08943a
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Director: Robert Altman

Screenplay: Robert Altman

Cast: Shelley Duvall as Mildred "Millie" Lammoreaux, Sissy Spacek as Mildred "Pinky" Rose, Janice Rule as Willie Hart, Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart, Ruth Nelson as Mrs. Rose, John Cromwell as Mr. Rose, Sierra Pecheur as Ms. Bunweil

In a period of great stress, his wife going through a major illness and in a hard period of his own career, Robert Altman had a dream. His dream, produced by 20th Century Fox, would be set in the desert community of Palm Springs, California, all within a world isolated by vast dusty desert road coloured pronominally yellow with the additional boldness of mid seventies decor, where an apartment block can have purple sage railings and a character befittingly nicknamed Pinky (Sissy Spacek) weats bold pink.

Pinky is a new employee at a health spa for the elderly, who is at times incredibly childish or frankly alien, attaching herself to Millie (Shelley Duvall), a waif-like figure who at first seems to be a popular sociable figure until you realise she is a figure who talks constantly in a world of her own with no one else listening, an incredibly isolated figure not particularly liked who gains most of her knowledge of the world from magazines. Theirs is a curious relationship, but as is their world. A place of a languid melancholy, Altman shoots the film in a hazy state as Millie becomes aware of her disconnect whilst Pinky is visibly stealing pieces of her personality, even if it is by accident due to an incident at the apartment complex pool.

The title references three women mind, the third Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of aging former stunt man Edgar (Robert Fortier), a buffoonish cad who, operating at Dodge City, a bar that looks like an old b-movie western set with an abandoned mini-golf course and everyone firing guns at a range at the back, is secretly having an affair with Millie and is eyeing up Pinky as well. Willie's one form of communication, the character only speaking at the ending, is peculiar mythological and sexual murals of female and male humanoids that, like the swimming pools, are the most reoccurring motifs onscreen.

3 Women's world is a curious one, stately and utterly banal but weirder as a result. Here is ordinary life, where Millie is obsessed with all the cooking recipes she finds in magazines than anything profound, store bought consumer food like squirty cheese a third reoccurring symbol of the film, all whilst Pinky is a literal chameleon in how she can change, from blowing bubbles in her drink to becoming a tempestuous glamorous figure as she becomes. The central figures, Duvall and Spacek are (not surprisingly) incredible in the film. The exact nature of the film, knowing Altman originally dreamt it and the final work is a creation of multiple sources, author Patricia Resnick and a lot of improvisation from the central actresses themselves, is subjective to an extreme in the sense that the film really does not play out as anything but a very subdued character piece for its length, scrutinising these figures, alongside characters like Willie and Edgar, through the contemplative nature that was Altman's specialty.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGFiYjczMGEtNDVhOC00NmEx
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David Lynch has possibly seen the film, which is something I can make a promise on, noticeable when Pinky's parents are meet, two exceptionally old people whose flat pronunciations on bland things, like a sign for the kitchen they get her as a gift whilst she is in a coma, feels like a prototype for the state of perverse normalcy that Lynch tapped into. Noticeably it's to question whether they are even her parents; as with everything else in the film, entirely subjective, even if it feels part of the habit of Pinky's to try to reject her past life, a Mildred to match Duvall's Mildred who also prefers a nickname, there's a deliberate obfuscation of what it of truth without ever becoming un-natural in tone.

Ultimately a great deal of the film, barring one nightmare sequence, is entirely grounded in a reality that has been made abstract the moment one of Pinky's new co-workers is revealed to be one of two female twins, as much done to deliberately catch the viewer off guard at the beginning of the film as her. Unlike Images (1972), another of the Altman productions which was more overtly surreal in as a psychological horror, the mannered tone at hand in 3 Women is even stranger.

The sense of dream logic is from how the film, as well as with mind to Altman's trademarks in improvisation and grounded characterisation, never follows the plot outline I've suggested as to where you'd expect it. What happens to Pinky and Millie is not what you expect, instead the titular three women morphing completely. It's a curious experience, also a wonderful one, a distillation of American drama slowed down enough to be truly weird. Even the abstract score, by Bodhi Wind, has a calmed quality of disruption based on woodwind instruments, a quiet dissonant quality appropriate for the content.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Psychodrama

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

Personal Opinion:

Something very different because of how, on the surface, 3 Women follows known of the conventional trademarks of an "abstract" film; instead it finds that, when the drama is hovering over a plot which is vague, where the characters seem to shift into one another, and even without its origins from an actual dream, a sense that the film is entirely inside its protagonists' head (or an outside figure's dreaming all this for us) without telegraphing it is just as strange to witness. Its argubly sad that, in his prolific career, Robert Altman didn't make many films like this in his career; thankfully, there are at least a few that, whilst not necessarily going to be like 3 Women, are all potentially weird in their own right.

From http://www.capricorntheater.com/wp-content/
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964 Pinocchio (1991)

From http://www.strangevice.co.uk/img/products/
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Dir: Shozin Fukui

Screenplay: Shozin Fukui, Makoto Hamaguchi and Naoshi Gôda

Cast: Haji Suzuki, Onn-chan, Kôji Ôtsubo, Kyoko Hara, Rakumaro San'yûtei

97 mins

Synopsis: A brain washed "sex doll" (Haji Suzuki) tattooed with the code "964 Pinocchio" on his shoulder is tossed out into the streets by his owners for being dysfunctional in his assigned purpose, left to wander the urban environment as a disorientated baby-like figure with a tiny stub of hair stood tall in his forehead and dressed in medical garb. By coincidence he falls into the lap (literally) of a homeless woman Himiko (Onn-chan) who takes him in. Dubbing him Pinocchio from the branded tattoo, the two bond while she teaches him to talk and looks after him. When he regains his awareness however a horrible transformation occurs to both of them, he physically, Himiko losing her sanity, and desiring then on to harm him, when she regains suppressed memories connected to his past purpose. At the same time the secret company that "made" Pinocchio, ran by an eccentric megalomaniac, is horrified to learn their (illegal) sex slave is in the open free, sending lackeys out to drag him back for reprogramming and to snuff anyone out who knows his existence. Anarchy ensures.

The synopsis above is an attempt to clear up the establishing plot to 964 Pinocchio. While in the same category of Japanese cyberpunk films like Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), there are differences as there are similarities, fitting as Shozin Fukui worked on Tetsuo in the production crew. Like Tetsuo, it is a pulpy, transgressive sci-fi story which has extensive use of abrasive editing and practical effects. Tetsuo is in the same camp as 964 Pinocchio, with extra leanings into old kaiju films and avant-garde gruel, but it proves to be an apt start to its director Tsukamoto's career as, while its more about the visceral nature of the content, it has hints of Tsukamoto's obsessions with human emotions by way of extreme body changes. 964 Pinocchio is more about the upfront effect of the transgressive content on its characters and is significantly more heightened in tone in comparison. It is closer to Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) in terms of a spiritual sibling.

From http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/1081162/
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964 Pinocchio could come off as more cartoonish and weird, even more a living manga than Tetsuo, despite the strong connections Tsukamoto's has to them, because of the passionate, hyperactive tone which you find in a bit of manga (and anime). Very exaggerated performances, swear words in the Japanese language track bleeped, (probably for effect), and violence that is abrupt and visibly abrasive when it takes place. There's also a lot of running and shouting. As with Tetsuo, the environments used are far removed from those one would presume to be in a cartoon, urban and industrial realism from a supermarket interior to wasteland. The film adds to this verité with its rough aesthetic, shot in colour, contradicting the content of the film and creating a greater intensity as a result. Like Possession, there's a tightrope walk between intensity and the silly that 964 Pinocchio takes a risk walking on. From the beginning you have a level of absurdity that is clearly meant to be funny or at least silly, starting with a villain who raves about his plans to control sex and eating from a bowl of cherries he willingly lets his beautiful, bespectacled secretary drool un-human amounts of water from her mouth into first.  This with the moments of realism or brutality, including an un-concluded subplot about a lackey wanting to adopt a child, creates a stew of emotional states that whips you around in various directions you don't find in many others films.

From http://www.eibonvale.co.uk/strangereviews/asia/pinocchio/cap070.jpg

Pinocchio is depicted as a literal child, wandering around in immense confusion muttering incoherently. A prolonged scene at the supermarket, with a continuous moving camera, shows him being dragged by his hand as he paws at food to eat indiscriminately with no control like a young child. Shozin Fukui, like in his short film Gerorisuto (1990), takes advantage of shooting with real bystanders on location rather than extras, the guerrilla style of capturing the scenes emphasising the chaos of the narrative when the bystanders react and look on at what is taking place. The most extreme of these moments, the bravado moment of the whole film, involves Haji Suzuki as Pinocchio when his character is chained to a metal square pyramid^* by his neck and hands dragging the prop behind him as he runs through a large and crowded metropolitan area, a sea of people splitting in half as he cuts through them for the scene.

From http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images/964pinocchio06.jpg

The performances are completely selfless from the cast for their willingness to push themselves to extremes, more so the most with Onn-chan as Himiko, who steals the film with a level of insanity to the performance, after the character starts off as a quiet, good natured person in the first act, that delivers a level of elastic facial expressions and nakedness that very few actors would be brave to act out on camera. Full of manic shapes and fits of deranged noises, from skipping and weaving between pillars in an underground corridor to almost changing her facial features into a different person's when she bugs out, it does evoke the Possession comparisons the most in lieu of Isabella Adjani in Zulawski's film. The infamous subway sequence from Possession is evoked, as well as a key sequence from Gerorisuto^** being reinterpreted, when Himiko is involved with one of the longest puking sequences I have seen in cinema which leads to the character rolling in an amount, possibly done with rice, that is inhumanly impossible for any person to project out from their body.

From http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images/964pinocchio09.jpg

Technical Details:

The skill in which the use of tracking camera shots are used in the film stand out for the movie's willingness, on a low budget, to push the level of kineticism possible despite the production limitations. Inventive use of camera shots and framing, more so in places than even the more famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man, litter the movie and the moments of heavy editing do cause the recommended effect of battering the viewer's senses in. The film is intentionally subjective in what its plot is about - why the synopsis I've written is as detailed as it is - and uses quick-frame editing techniques for background content and memories characters rediscover to add to the confusion they feel. Also adding to this these moments are either in monochrome or in heavily saturated colour lighting.

The pulpy, transgressive content will sate a cult movie fan as well. Knowing of old Japanese sci-fi films from studios like Toho will actually make the film, like Tetsuo, even more entertaining in this area because the clear influence is there, from the eccentric costume designs to plot devices like the gas gun the size of a bazooka being giving to one character for clean-up of anyone who gets in the way. Far from tacky it adds to the energy of the film when its content is as exaggerated.

From http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images/964pinocchio14.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic

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

In terms of what the plot of 964 Pinocchio is actually about, I personally prefer to see it as a moody genre piece than try to give it a philosophical slant. For both this film and Rubber's Lover (1996) though, Fukui does have a theme for them of catharsis through physical pain, and while it is the later film took this idea to its fullest extent, it is visible here too but in an embryo form. It is not hard to see the story of a sex doll developing his cognisance through this concept. The ending, which involves a face being pulled off and a ridiculous mushroom head that reminded me of the floating stone head from Zardoz (1974), not to mention a cameo from the Eifel Tower, does show two characters after their traumatic experiences becoming one entity and finding peace^***. The coda, out of context of the film's plot with the two main actors being filmed at a concert, adds a sense of cathartic release linked to a snapshot of people dancing to a noisy, electronically backed rock music in a dance club.

Rubber's Lover is a much more polished and consistently toned film, which streamlines the eccentric humour in favour of more intensity and dreamlike content. The black-and-white look instead of colour adds to its mood. Said to be a prequel to 964 Pinocchio, if there is a linking back-story between them it's that, after the disastrous experiments in that film involving psychic power, it would be that someone cleaned up the bloodbath that took place and, instead of trying to unlock ESP abilities, found it better to lobotomise people and turn them into sex dolls to sell to bisexual, tattooed women who want a third wheel to enjoy with her diminutive girlfriend who dresses as a maid. Both films are in the high range of "abstract" cult movies, Rubber's Lover for its atmosphere, 964 Pinocchio for its energy and sentences like the former one I've just written based on scenes as strange as they sound.

From http://www.cca.org/blog/images/p964/eating-cherries.png

Personal Opinion:

Finding Shozin Fukui's first two films, still sadly obscure in cult cinema as a director, was a revelation. While it is difficult to pinpoint exact reasons why this is very different from Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the films are very different in mood and tone even though they have clear similarities and connections. It does emphasis the richness of this type of cinema when I've barely scrapped through the many Japanese cyberpunk films that exist, and can still claim to have seen how the medium technically and content can be pushed in innovative ways. Rubber's Lover is my preferred of the two, Fukui's career still productive in the 2000s but sadly not as large or accessible as Shinya Tsukamoto's, but 964 Pinocchio is no slouch in quality either.

From http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/
2010/07/964_pinocchio.jpg

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^* A literal square pyramid made from metal found in a landfill. It makes no sense where it came from, but considering the prelude of Himiko looking so happy in her derangement running around a DIY store with a shopping trolley and a welder's helmet on, I won't complain about the absurdity of the object's shape.

^** Gerorisuto is a series of events involving a young woman losing her sanity. Scenes in the short include a prolonged moment of vomiting and an extended one on a crowded street at night time when she interacts with (real) bystanders who step away when she grabs or clings to them. I wouldn't be surprised if this short became a test run, even if in hindsight, and was cannibalised for key moments in the director's debut feature.

^*** Strangely that also evokes Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996), thus invoking the Third Impact and Synchronisation with Sean Connery in a nappy in one sentence. Whether any other films I cover can top that juxtaposition is up in the air.