Frenzy (1972)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer

Based on Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern

Cast: Jon Finch as Richard Blaney, Alec McCowen as Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford, Barry Foster as Bob Rusk, Billie Whitelaw as Hetty Porter, Anna Massey as Babs Milligan, Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Brenda Blaney, Bernard Cribbins as Felix Forsythe, Vivien Merchant as Mrs. Oxford, Michael Bates as Sergeant Spearman, Jean Marsh as Monica Barling, Clive Swift as Johnny Porter, Madge Ryan as Mrs Davison, Elsie Randolph as Gladys, John Boxer as Sir George

Canon Fodder

 

One of the last Alfred Hitchcock films, Frenzy stood out in his career with its impact making sense in context. By the seventies, Hitchcock had not made that many films since 1964 next to his prolific golden period from 1950 onwards, having struggled with his attempt to be an independent producer of his own work in the late forties and failing. His golden era, which gave us films like The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Psycho (1960), and did not have producer David O. Selznick involved as his forties career, for good and for bad, ended in the mid-sixties with him considered a huge unreliability. Hitchcock is a controversial figure for how he depicts women, his obsession with the "Hitchcock Blonde", and for me, it is everything with actress Tippi Hedren where I agree is the uncomfortable moment where he crossed a line. I cannot defend what happened with how he treated her on both films they worked on, but it also clearly crossed a line to even alienate those close to him and studio executives at Universal. The first film, The Birds (1963), was a box office success, if one which would have got him cancelled for the story of what happened with Hedren on set, but Marnie (1964) was not, and was the straw which broke the camel's back.

Frenzy's genesis likely comes from a project Universal confiscated from him, Kaleidoscope, a proto-Frenzy which was meant to be very explicit, sexually and in terms of violence, influenced by the like of Blow Out (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, to be shot with handheld cameras, natural light and location shooting. Personally the films which we did get after Marnie have their virtues if their problems are felt in their sluggish paces and having his creative power pulled from - Torn Curtain (1966), as Hitchcock has to put up with Paul Newman, as someone who hated the method acting style, has this issue as does Topaz (1969) - but Frenzy feels alive and still disturbing decades later. As a lower budget film shot in his homeland, as someone who was an old man by that point, he nonetheless got carte blanche to make a film which does not feel antiquated and with a sick humoured tone. Frenzy is the most explicit and adult film in his career, but this tale of a serial "neck tie murderer" killing women in London, despite it being lurid subject matter explicitly invoking rape and strangulation of these victims, is more startling because of its sense of humour contrasting this premise. When members of the police trying to deal with the case in a pub talk of the psychology of said killer, only to say having a sex murderer is good for English tourism, it emphasises the gleeful misanthropy felt fully throughout this film.

This will make some very uncomfortable for Frenzy, but in context, what has aged is ye old seventies London, and that feels like a time capsule to what locations we still have, starting with the opening by London Bridge and the Thames, only to undercut them with from the get-go with a public gathering interrupted by a female corpse floating in the river. The set up is the traditional Hitchcock wrong man scenario, in which the obvious red herring is Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a former lieutenant of the air force reduced to a bar man fired for drinking on the job and forced to sleep at a Salvation Army hall when he has no money. It is very obvious and not hidden who the killer is, his friend and market fruit & vegetables seller Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), with the reveal a disturbing one which places Richard as a suspect, as it involves the murder of his ex-wife. To the film's credit, and why it's more salacious and sick humoured aspects work rather than feel inappropriate, is that when it is about the awfulness of these murders of women, they are meant to lead to revulsion, whilst the humour is felt in terms of how, as throughout Hitchcock's career, he has an obsession with this twisted side of the human consciousness, its obsession with crime and murder, where the humour is the relieving puncture of the tension.

The parallel plot is Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford (Alec McCowen) who is investigating the murders, and this is where the humour especially comes in, that his wife is also into cuisine cooking. It is surprising in context to how explicit and grim the film is, the sole one to be fully able to in Alfred Hitchcock's career than imply such themes, and yet this is one of the most distinct parts of this entire film, funnier when you are aware of his and wife (and important collaborator) Alma Hitchcock's love for cooking and cuisine, thus presenting us with dishes of a solitary quail on a plate with a few measly grapes, or a soup full of fishes heads, when all Oxford wants is an English breakfast. There is still the style of older Hitchcock films here too, which was only briefly seen in both Torn Curtain and Topaz, the flashes of his deft hands when a tragic death of a main character is perfectly depicted with the camera in one take leaving the environment back out onto the street, without needing to show us what we know is going to happen. There is also the set piece with a truck full of Lincolnshire tates (potatoes) which mines tension against the sick humour from the act of disposing a corpse, including rigor mortis and a neck tie pin that needs to be retrieved, all despite the figure involved being a complete monster now in peril. You should not be laughing either yet the farcical nature of such a gristly scenario is felt to ease the tensions.

What is also felt particularly that here too, despite the character of Oxford who happens to be the one person, including the wisdom of his wife, to think, is Hitchcock's long standing paranoia and distrust of the police and the law, especially when people are quick to put the kicks in Richard as witnesses, like the male bar manager who fired him. Throughout Hitchcock's career, including adapting a real life case of a man put to trial as an innocent The Wrong Man (1956), ever since he was put in a jail cell as a child which created his long standing fear of authority, Hitchcock has always shown the frailty of the system. Even the murderers in his career do their acts for petty grievances, or here have compulsive sexual dominance obsessions but look like nice blokes who sincerely love their mothers, and that is probably the most misanthropic aspect of Frenzy as well as Hitchcock's career. Barring his forties work where he decided to fight real fascists by pitting his characters against reel ones, his work as always had this, and whilst the adult content here is strong, the more potent aspects are the gullibility of law and the matter-of-factness of such disturbing crimes taking place in a world where you could still smoke in pubs. The air of downbeat grungy London, like a lot of more lurid genre films from this era, makes its way here too, adding to the macabre nature, emphasising all these traits and adding to the atmosphere, and whilst I would argue his final film Family Plot (1976) is deeply underrated, I see why Frenzy is a late era Alfred Hitchcock film that is held in high regard for good reason.

The Football Factory (2004)

 

Director: Nick Love

Screenplay: AJ Lovell

Based on the novel by John King

Cast: Danny Dyer as Tommy Johnson; Frank Harper as Billy Bright; Tamer Hassan as Fred; Roland Manookian as Zeberdee; Neil Maskell as Rod; Dudley Sutton as Bill Farrell; Jamie Foreman as the Cabbie; Tony Denham as Harris; Calum MacNab as Raff; John Junkin as Albert Moss

Ephemeral Waves

 

Jesus, I was expecting cornflakes and a morning wank.

Produced at a time when the likes of FHM and Loaded magazines existed, for a young male demographic in the United Kingdom, post Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (199) adaptation, and produced by Rockstar Games, the British developer at the time when Grand Theft Auto was making waves post Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) onwards, The Football Factory presents a contentious subject for a film about football (soccer) hooliganism. The opening credits play to this contentiousness with newspaper headlines, but the irony is that, returning to the film, it really is not about the beautiful game in the slightest. All the concerns of this promoting hooliganism from the time come to a film which merely mentions the sport, never shows onscreen games, and is more about a ritualistic world of fans of different teams getting together in an underpass to fight each other, all disillusioned and bored working class men with not much else to do.

My hostility when I first watched the film, back when I was in college at the late 2000s, the NME magazine era of indie bands like the Noisettes and emo to time stamp when this was, was entirely under the immediate presumption to hate The Football Factory for presenting lads being violent and racist. What this is now in the modern day, when those lad magazines with topless model photos are now gone, and films about crime and geezers is not as much of a trend as back then in British cinema, is a film which should have been more braver and transgressive but spends its time trying to be cool. It is a tonal choice which makes no sense as, to an outsider like me, these are desperate characters whose acts of standing in a line in an urban wasteland beating each other up into the hospital, or spending all their money down the pub, is not heroic but tragic. The Football Factory's tone, meant to be heroic but within a grey Britain, is its own worst enemy and the real flaw to something which could have worked. Considering the first brawl has a woman with a pram call it out as idiocy, only to undercut it with Dyer's thoughts that at least it is a good Saturday's activity, the film is clashing with itself. This could have led to something about a world of drugs, brawls, racism and people stuck on council estates as kids, subjects which are deserve their time to be detailed upon even with a chirpy sick sense of humour as this tries to have. With these subjects however, arguably the film is far safer with hindsight than one realises, and at times is being safe to the point it makes certain moments more an issue with hindsight, such as the racist cab driver, a semi-frequent side character that represents all the worst anti-immigrant ideas, who called a wanker and is a butt of jokes but is allowed to spiel monologues without actually tackling why racist cab drivers even exist and what makes them tick.

Context really comes to mind with The Football Factory for me, less nostalgia but more an artefact which brings up a lot of the aesthetic and tone from this time period throughout this movie, seeped within this period and thus difficult to separate without going off into a tangent. This entire period into the 2000s can be seen through this film for me, where one on one side you have the music promoted by Q and NME magazine, some of which scores this film, and on the other side you had the aforementioned lad's magazines, which in tone you can find in all the times the term "bird" come in when describing women the cast are attracted to. It was a time when you saw Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008), about the notorious criminal Charles Bronson, on a Tesco's supermarket DVD shelf with a British Union Jack in the background of the cover, trying visible to sell this type of film to a guy's market of being cool, about crime and men, despite films like Refn's especially being far more complicated in its subject and even style. The most infamous I remember, promoted with Danny Dyer's face on the cover and also spotted in the same Tesco store, was The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), a forgotten work which would have been a disastrous marketing choice to sell on Dyer's popularity pre-EastEnders era; from director Thomas Clay, it was a British entry in the wave of extreme cinema in the 2000s like Irréversible (2002) which pushed extremes including the depiction of rape. These films were finding themselves being slotted to specific audiences even when they probably should have focused on being sold not as crowd pleasers. The Football Factory is no different as a film, in scope a lot more complicated in its themes, particularly as the original novel by John King, his debut, is one I think would be rewarding to read. It comes off as a much more complicated and elaborate piece on this subject and the themes it is tackling, the film feeling like it glances past so many for the briefest of macho cheers.

In the centre of Football Factory too is Nick Love, the director whose career up to American Hero (2015) has moved towards executive producer roles and television, whose work around this time into the 2010s includes work about criminals and remaking Alan Clark's The Firm (1989), another work about football hooliganism. His entire filmography is remotely alien to my own personal interests, which I admit a bias to, but what concerns more with The Football Factory is how there is enough grain of interest here and that, in a twisted irony, a far more misanthropic and transgressive film on this subject, bearing in mind it would have to work around being a novel adaptation, would have been far more successful. It may take risk of being more offensive and being misinterpreted as being pro-hooliganism, but it may have gotten to the themes more successfully if it had pulled them off. It begins with how much heavy lifer Dyer himself has to do in terms of narration, where there are large portions where the term "show don't tell" really would have been necessary even if I have no qualms with narrative heavy films existing. The influence of Trainspotting cannot be denied, but whether you think that film was good or not, it carried with it moments of horror as much as gleefully leant into its world of heroin addicts.

The style is also a clear influence, in spite of the fact that, as mentioned, football barely if tangentially is part of this world. The arranged brawls between teams, with only one full length one actually happening by its ending, are more the existential crisis of working class men, something which also can be seen as a link to the Boyle film in how its down-and-out addicts were miscreants of society. Whilst their arguments they would prefer their drug filled life over a materialistic one were in themselves liable to be challenged as juvenile, the closest thing here is the lowest of hanging fruit, the middle class woman one of the characters dates which is just an excuse to mock the middle class, insult her with sexist language, and really not prod at class biases with anything trying to leave a justifiable scar. The one time the film is catching onto something, but barely covers it, is the elderly character who acts like Tommy's father figure, who is from the source novel. The World War II veteran who now, with his friend, lives in an estate with the only hope for life being Australia, saving his pension, his story raises where this film could have gone. He complicates this film and offers a tantalising subplot barely covered, especially as whilst a war hero, his anger also comes from how, having fought the Fascists, he now has to live in a place where casual racism against minorities happens on the bus in front of him. Played by Dudley Sutton, stealing the film, his contrast to Dyer's Tommy, the surrogate grandson who has willingly given himself into violent hooliganism to compensate the ennui of his life, is something you could have expanded upon.  

The stylisation of the film in itself is also something of its time. I do not mind the almost magical realist tone of Tommy's journey, in which an event in the future returns to him over and over, presided upon by an angel of ill omen with bandages on their face. The attempt at being cool as mentioned however struggles. Miss Lucifer by Primal Scream is a good song, but its use here is less appropriate, meant to be for a fist pumping film when the brawl comes, but in reality about guys struggling in what their lives are even if they try to find it by punching Millwall fans. It is not glamorous in context, and should be more cathartic ugly in tone, especially as there is never a football stand or pitch where these events transpire; likely this is due to the controversial subject matter, and trying to film it, but the grey urban locals and CCTV footage are not what I personally would call "chic" for a edgy hooliganism film. The dark ambient of the score makes more sense, especially as the one fight the film reaches is where all the premonitions of ill omen, shot in grey in an underpass and a brick being used on the skull, transpires alongside the lasting physical damage when it finally comes to be. Examples like this, or the weird use of The Jam's Going Underground, which makes no sense with its politicised lyrics, clearly undercut the film. Like that song clearly being one where people only know of it through singing the chorus, the film really is not as confrontational as it should have been.

This is also aware that, with certain Blu Ray releases of The Football Factory as I had, Nick Love's 1999 short film Love Story shows what he should have stuck to only on a significantly higher budget. A tale of two drug addicts, one a pregnant woman about to have a child, the production restrictions on that film would have worked perfectly for a film about football hooliganism. He has a personal touch, having written that short unlike the theatrical film, dialogue from working class characters who cuss all the time, but is distinct and interesting to hear. The emphasis on Love's dialogue, the c-word up the wazoo, and longer scenes using diegetic sound make more sense to have brought over to The Football Factory, only using the style of the feature film and certain songs like Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes when needed. Love Story, a series of vignettes around this central pair of characters, but also following the likes of a lonely cab driver hiring sex workers or the unexpected cameo of Ewen Bremner, aka. Spud from Trainspotting, could have easily been made into a feature film and a rewarding one, intertwining in this world of the homeless and the poverty class interesting characters. Alongside the prowling camera, spinning around the cast and following them like Nick Love used a wheelchair to carry the film camera on, and it is an admirable work set among the graffiti covered public bathrooms and streets. Considering too its use of licence songs works fully, suitable for the slower tone like electronic musician Surgeon or Portishead's Undenied, and it exposed the real issues with The Football Factory. This is a film whose surfing on what was considered hip for the time would make it a far less interesting and far less brave film than it presumed itself to be.

First Name: Carmen (1983)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

 

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a health clinic, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff. "Uncle Jean" as he is explicitly called by his niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, is a filmmaker who refuses to make films again, lost to his boom box matching classical piano pieces to combat sounds. Said niece Carmen, part of Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, comes to her uncle, during his stint in getting stick every week to find somewhere else to live, to ask to use his paid up place at the coast for a film production she is currently in the middle of with friends. This is however a cover, as she is part of a gang, posing as a film crew, who intend to rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, due to his concerns of trying to be a political filmmaker, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. The thing about his films however, in the same way as with the original run of his first successes in the sixties, is how he would structurally undercut them in presentation.

First Name: Carmen is narrative drive, among films where he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interested in the experimentation around the plot. This is also at the point when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse, and their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter. She would also work as an editor, and as a general collaborator, which gives her significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, or a female cleaner left to sort out the mess with her mop, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. With this central pair of Carmen and Joseph hiding out in Uncle Jean's apartment, the later falling for Carmen fully, there is still the set up of a poetic story, contrasted by scenes of a string quartet that score this narrative almost entirely outside the main narrative. This drama is sincere even if with the scenario undercut by grim and absurdist moments of humour. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in attitude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected from Godard's career, because of the iconography of his sixties films was what codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, alongside when he fully embraced colour in magnificent visual choices in films like Pierrot le Fou (1965). By the later renaissance in the 2010s, that final era before Godard's passing in 2022 was experienced in real time when he was already canonised as a filmic giant.

In contrast, something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960), its own rich art style of naturalism constantly punctured by the experimentation. Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. This does admittedly provide his humorous side including the delight of how he would parody himself, here lovably goofy as an older befuddled man in one scene who just wanting some baked productions and a wardrobe woman to mend his coat. He is riffing on a man who exists out of time and even bumbling in-between a second fake film shoot, to kidnap a man and daughter at a casino, channelling his love of Jerry Lewis in awkward form. Even this character though has his moments of clarity and show Godard's mood from this era, the quotation opening this review his, of a man who has seen time continue, and neither likes the threat of nuclear war nor the consumerism of the time.

First Name: Carmen is almost the least experimental of a lot I have seen from the eighties period barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using Godard's beloved Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

In terms of the melancholia the film has, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still as mentioned - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind whilst two people handcuffed together attempt to negotiate around one of them needing to pee whilst he is in the same bathroom - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.

Fruits of Passion (1981)

 

Director: Shūji Terayama

Screenplay: Shūji Terayama and Rio Kishida

Based on Retour à Roissy by Anne Desclos

Cast: Isabelle Illiers as O, Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen, Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie, Peter as Madame, Keiko Niitaka as Aisen, Sayoko Yamaguchi as Sakuya, Hitomi Takahashi as Byakuran, Miyuki Ono as Kasen, Kenichi Nakamura as Le jeune homme, Ogaku, Akiro Suetsugu as Obana, Renji Ishibashi as Kato, Takeshi Wakamatsu as Le gardien de la maison, Georges Wilson as Le narrateur

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fruits of Passion feels caught between an unfortunate schism, a compromise between two sides which fits the legacy of a sequel novel by Anne Desclos, the original novel itself caught between the schism of being criticized by feminists for a tale of a woman becoming the ultimate submissive to men, yet also was a work by a woman who, even if hiding under a pseudonym until she finally revealed her authorship, was intelligent and as much writing the book as a challenge to the person she held the dearest, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française literary magazine, in his belief no woman could write an erotic novel¹. In general the erotic films of the past, specifically the ones this is linked to from the seventies, are always going to be challenging in terms of whether their ideas and tone can be defended or not, but this one is also matched by a director in Shūji Terayama, with his collaborators, who was unsung and interesting as he found himself her stuck trying to escape the cage of the genre as the lead herself symbolically wishes to. The film’s central premise of transgressive is questioned by the film itself, as it becomes a pretext which clearly sold the film, with its nudity and sex, but as the most un-erotic of erotic films and more concerned with its tale of Western imperialism on the East, gender and the denizens of a brothel we find ourselves with.

Terayama’s films have been generally difficult to actually see officially, which has made them a Holy Grail for me as a fan of surrealistic cinema, with Fruits of Passion one of the few more readily available as a French-Japanese co-production with a wider reach, one of a couple from a time where Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) was another Argos Film production they funded and the most notorious. Its presentation as a generic sounding erotic film with the potential for problematic content would have not necessarily been a promising introduction to this figure, in which the notorious actor Klaus Kinski, as Englishman Sir Simon, takes a young woman O (Isabelle Illiers) to 1920s Shanghai to become a willing/unwilling brothel sex worker for his fantasies. It is a subject that may prove a concern, but is shot through the eye of a director with a complete lack of interest in eroticizing this, and even in mind to the film feeling like a compromise, shows his voice in a distinct direction, as he brought with him his cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki and composer J.A. Seazer to drastically undercut the direction of the premise. Also important is the co-writer, Rio Kishida, a female playwright and collaborator with Shūji Terayama who wrote plays explicitly dealing with the lives of women, such as the play Thread Hell about women working in a silk thread factory in 1939. That she wrote among multiple films Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (1988), Akio Jissôji's sexually explicit erotic drama set in the 1920s and based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, she had no qualms about dealing with transgressive sexuality as much as feminist ideas.

This is felt with a sense of a film which is running away from its central premise as soon as possible. As much of this comes from O’s story itself as, barring some moments, it is not of real interest for either screenwriter. Shūji Terayama does evoke moments, like a childhood memory of her father abandoning her symbolized by a chalk outline as a child she cannot escape from, which show more to her psyche, but she feels like an outsider to the material as well as with Isabelle Illiers really feeling uncomfortable onscreen having to be continually nude, so much so a client of O’s comments about it and asks if she ever gets cold. Ultimate her plot barring its symbolic template is more rewarding than her dramatic arch, as it is visibly clear the brothel as a whole, and Shanghai under the influence of corrupt Westerners like Sir Simon, is the greater concern. Whilst a curious concoction of a Chinese setting, French co-production credits with French or English dubbing on the cast, and a Japanese production team behind the camera and Japanese actors onscreen with European figures like Illiers and Kinski, you also get a cast of idiosyncratic faces. Legendary model and Steely Dan album cover figure Sayoko Yamaguchi is one of the women working in the brothel, and whilst the brothel mistress is played, whilst dubbed, by Peter, the actor from the seminal LGBTQ film Parade of Roses (1969), and would later appear in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), looking as glorious as you can get whilst also emphasized as a more complex figure in the little he gets. Whilst initially presenting a strict punishment regime including punishing prayer, the mistress is revealed to actually be a caring woman in charge of a family of women and some male assistants who are just trying to survive.

The complete disinterest in being sexy feels on point, in contrast to the aesthetic beauties that are Terayama’s trademarks, such as the use of colour lighting, the surrealistic and melancholic sequences in-between, and the general lush aesthetic style, both attempting to be realistic to the time period but due to the curious co-production history showing its artifice at times. Attempts at a more distinct plot – as a young man who works at a cheap restaurant just by the brothel becomes smitten with O – are interesting, but it’s a fragment of an entire eighty minute film which in that short running time does show potential evidence that the film was compromised on its way to being completed. It feels like it was not given the potential to expand with the grace Terayama’s other films, even a piece explicitly about sexual desire, the mini-feature Grass Labyrinth (1979), could show.

The most compelling fragments from what survived come from the side characters and the context, which in its use of exotic aesthetic, whether defendable or not, evokes the works of Josef von Sternberg; the set up without the explicit sexual content in the thirties would have been a film Marlene Dietrich could have been the star of. The little of the historical plot is the most dynamic in how, with his desire to corrupt O, whilst also having a mistress on the side named Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle), Sir Simon is a terrible person. Kinski’s real life is one I do not want to touch with a barge pole, but he was a compelling figure especially in his antagonism with Werner Herzog. Even dubbed, the twisted aura he always had whilst too uncomfortable at times in certain places fits here, apt for the corrupt figure who thinks he can play games with the Chinese locals, even on a whim funding the Coolie Rebellion, trying to liberate the country from Western influence, and finding himself on a knife’s edge due to this. Even here the erotic set up makes sense as, being a voyeur wanting to see O degrade herself, the romance with the young man in the restaurant and his precarious gambling with life, literalized in metaphor in a casino, is his downfall spiritually and physically when money cannot get what he wants.

Alongside the humour which crops up, like a soldier being spanked for stealing the fictional underwear of his metaphorical mother in a BDSM mistress-client fantasy, or the weirdness of the swan rocker, briefly seen as a combination of a rocking horse and a sex bench, which cuffs a person in it belly first with its rib cage-like mechanics, allowing them to flap their arms like a swan, you see the side of this film which is Terayama’s, and it stands out. Alongside undercutting the illusion of its premise, like J.A. Seizer long before his work in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) indulging in some time inappropriate but awesome prog rock, there are plenty of times this is undercutting the expectations. It has a lot of bird metaphors in their freedom symbolically, from cutting to a dead one filmed floating down the river, or the dream sequence of Illiers naked and chained on a bed, on the roof outside with birds tied to it flapping about, or really poignant scenes not involving O, such as the life of the former actress who is one of the sex worker. She has the most interesting route, from the humour of her role plays in imaginary films with clients, with male staff playing the director with a fake camera, or the tragic “adieu le cinema” that finished her story, which has the set up of a grand piano being talked of in the river pay off in a beautifully haunting moment when it rises out of the nearby water with a corpse being lifted on top of it.

This definitely counts as a flawed gem, especially as it has very little time to fully dissect the complex gender politics it had clearly in mind, something out of the ordinary in this especially when a few years later, you get the likes of Bolero (1984) with Bo Derek held as infamously bad, and erotic cinema would drastically change against especially into the nineties. It feels like the weakest of Shūji Terayama‘s films I have seen entirely because it feels compromised by its production history, working with material to the best he could, and that we were able to get makes this still rewarding. Only the fact most of his career is difficult to officially see, unlike this film, feels the sour aspect to all of this.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike

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

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1) The Story of the Story of O, written by Carmela Ciuraru for Guernica, and published June 15th 2011.

Fungicide (2002)

 

Director: Dave Wascavage

Screenplay: Dave Wascavage and Mary Wascavage

Cast: Wes Miller as Major Wang; David Weldon as Silas Purcell; Mary Wascavage as Jade Moon; Loretta Wascavage as Mother Purcell; Edward Wascavage as Father Purcell; Dave Bonavita as  "Titus" Ignitus; Antoinette Cancelliere as Lenny; Dave Wascavage as Jackson P. Jackson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Fungicide is a ridiculous film, my introduction to the micro-budget world of Dave Wascavage, a Pennsylvania based figure who has been chugging away with his own independently made genre films since Fungicide itself, founding his own company Troubled Moon Films, and with this production the cinematographer and editor as much as the director and co-writer. Fungicide, about homicidal giant fungus, came as a surprise for how woozy and unapologetically its own weird thing, where the opening is intense, all harsh noise and a man in his family, in almost a trance, experimenting on a chemical composition which will have unfortunate consequences he will be happy about when it brings forth the nightmares of the title.

It is scored like a Playstation One game, atmospheric drum and bass, which knowing this is about killer sentient mushrooms, with the limited special effects at hand and CGI valley shots like a late nineties game, makes this almost befitting like you have wandered into an obscure American role playing game as a result, one set at a mountain hideaway, a resort to rest at which is doomed to fungus related terror. Ran by a nice hippy woman who however has a bad tendency to use the wrong choice of words, and turns into a Sarah Connor Terminator killer when enough is enough, it also sets up very early on in the film the eccentricities on display here. Fungicide is really peculiar, an automatic writing of a genre film at times, which is not going to be for everyone. You get this with the characters placed into the scenario: our female lead even in the face of regular grocery store mushrooms attaching themselves to people like leeches reacting to them with a blissful tranquillity, a real estate agent who is there to try to get her to sell the house, and eventually just becomes a third wheel, the scientist who starts speaking like he is actually an alien, and a random army man who appears, having wandered off a reality TV show he was a contestant of, named Major Wang. Then there is the professional wrestler, who is written like a stereotype of one and needs to unwind from his temper at the hideaway. He also has to take pills prescribed to him by a medically cleared doctor to prevent spontaneous combustion, which is now a sentence I can write and does become a major plot point eventually.

Simply tripping up a wooden step unleashes a serum capable of inhuman biological growth, and between the scientist speaking like the aforementioned alien, the music choices and stock scream effects, and the homemade psychedelic visuals, and this film became far weirder in tone than I had presumed of it even before the homemade mushroom puppets with giant teeth appear. In-between the leads just hanging out in the house in the woods, for prolonged periods which would-be frowned upon in most horror films for padding, this becomes a cavalcade of peculiar sights, where briefly a puppet literally plays a mushroom victim and is so obvious it becomes surreal. Obvious computer effects are layered onto the film in place of what Dave Wascavage could not practically pull off, be it the breaking of a glass door, to the panning shots of the valley, or the larger mushrooms, who drift around using spores to grow more, seen spawning out the graveyard at one point. The regular ones, not either the baby mushrooms as played by real store bought ones, are the puppets, which are cool and quite cute, and the actors in white sheets with a homemade toothy mouth and mushroom cap, armed with silly string projectile with acidic properties, using regular silly string, and able to grow arms.

The film knows its absurdity and guns for silly, as Wascavage filmed a scene of a mushroom attempting to eat a garden gnome, or as they learn human abilities as they eat people, one being able to drive a car and pick up a female sex worker to eat her. There is an entire dream sequence, as the scientist is delighted by the possibilities of being King of Mushroom Men, where he images himself playing video games and Go Fish with one of the puppets, which is hilarious. Mantango (1963) by Ishirō Honda this is not and you have to accept the logic is its own, alongside the padding that leads to an extended cast versus mushroom fight scene involving extensive obvious CGI and no one with clear combat technique. It does not detract from its charms, if you have basked in this region of micro-budget cinema, a film where balsamic vinegar is the solution, and is apparently more volatile and explosive than nitro-glycerine. You need to come with expectations that Wascavage's work, created visibly with his own times and resources, as his first attempt in his career is a film you could see having to be shot on weekend where the cast could get together, with members of the cast including the female lead (and co-writer) related to him. It is its own work to befuddle, admire and get a few belly laughs from, and as of yet, the threat of a sequel involving killer apples as the film ends on has yet to happen.

Frankenhooker (1990)

 

Director: Frank Henenlotter

Screenplay: Frank Henenlotter and Robert Martin

Cast: James Lorinz as Jeffrey; Patty Mullen as Elizabeth; Joseph Gonzalez as Zorro

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

My enjoyment of Frankenhooker means more knowing this was not a fun film for its director Frank Henenlotter to make, knowing its origins was a hastily improvised pitch at the desk of producer James Glickenhaus, director of exploitation film The Exterminator (1980) who also produced genre films. The premise Henenlotter wanted to pitch was James Glickenhaus, a bizarre insect related piece that was too weird to produce, and not wanting to lose his chance, Henenlotter instead improvised both sequels to Basket Case (1982), the cult film which made his name, and Frankenhooker itself.

Frankenhooker and Basket Cast 2 (1990) were made back to back, and even the film's special effects artist Gabriel Bartalos even admitted that this could have been a terrible and tasteless film if they did it badly¹. Neither helping is that they had to acquire a second director of photography mid-shot - with Robert A. Burns of The Exterminator - which lead to arguments between him and Henenlotter¹. It is a title, instantly standing out, that thankfully did not turn into a mess under this context, tasteless and absurd but, unlike other films, thankfully living up to the premise. The tone is set up with just the introduction of our lead Jeffrey (James Lorinz), our Dr. Frankenstein stand-in who, with his medical and electrician's knowledge, is working on a brain with an eyeball on the kitchen table at the barbecue birthday of his girlfriend's father. An unfortunate lawnmower accident which the flame of his life, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), making her into "tossed salad", leaves him grief stricken and wishing to rebuild her.

It is, for a low budget title which Henenlotter was struggling through, still an achievement for a lurid premise which, in another's hand, would have been a cop-out and lack personality, just a catchy premise and a poster, something seen far too much in genre cinema. Frank Henenlotter unlike others, for example, in all his films has premises which go with their ridiculous ideas to their fullest, how into their absurdity they run with idiosyncratic streaks and how you are interested in these characters in these stories even if their stories are insane, or there are quirks like Jeffrey giving himself trepanning with a drill to help his mental faculties. And with credit to him and co-screen writer Robert Martin, Jeffrey is a balancing act in how to make a character who is likable in a very naive way but also with his own folly in his desires, helped considerably by James Lorinz playing him. James Lorinz is an actor who could have had a bigger filmography in terms of roles with a lot of time onscreen, including a small (but memorable) role in Street Trash (1987), making this one of his biggest position in terms of this.  

The joke becomes as much that Jeffrey is a man who thinks he can rebuild his girlfriend into the "perfect" one, not just to resurrect Elizabeth. It does become about commodification even if the film is openly playing to it in a crass way right down to the title, where Jeffrey despite being sympathetic is so because of how much a lovable doofus he is, someone who in vast contrast is yet the butt of the joke for objectifying the sex workers he will need to use as literal body parts, not different from the pump Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez) who deals crack and brands his women with "Z" on their shoulders. It is a sleazy film in idea, reflecting how on the cusp of New York City soon changing into the nineties, Henenlotter was clearly inspired (filming the likes of Basket Cast there) on how many sex workers he said to have seen filming in New York on the streets at night, where also the "Super Crack" idea came from, a subplot reflecting the crack epidemic of the same period¹. It is however poignant, for a film from a proud exploitation film fan who does not skim the luridness, that this even as a horror comedy makes the joke most of the time a guy's terrible desire to turn his girlfriend into his ideal, which will bite him in the butt to comedic and perverse effect as this goes. Considering scenes within the film, like Jeffery measuring women for the perfect parts, and how he is not the dominant person, the sex workers the stronger voices, and by the time Elizabeth becomes the titular figure, and Patty Mullen gets to stretch herself with her gurning and her vocal calls, and it is established that he is the fool in the story, even if a lovable one, rightly to be damned in the eye catching final scene. [Major Spoilers] Henenlotter always ends his films with eye-catching final scenes, and with Jeffrey in a woman's body due to circumstances, and with the dialogue repeated from another's mouth, it becomes a deliciously macabre morality tale for a funny finale [Spoilers End].

With NYC footage stolen without permits, Frankenhooker is a labour of love in spite of its rushed origins and Henenlotter's stresses about the production thankfully led to a good film. It fires with all cylinders in whit and imaginative perversity even before Mullen starts stealing the film in her purple hair piece and giant Karloff boots, even before you get to one of the more ridiculous scenes involving the aforementioned Super Crack. A mere McGuffin to get around Jeffrey being too evil in carving women up, it however leads to one of those real out-there scenes in horror cinema especially as it is set up with a literal guinea pig being blown up first. It would be horrible to see in real life, but the scene of exploding sex workers, with no gore whatsoever and the right side of tastelessness rather than offensive, even with a lot of female nudity, is insane, ridiculous and took months to even create. Consisting of exploding the mannequins made from the actresses involved, from the adult film industry and centrefold models, and a lot of sparklers, it is a one-off scene for any film to have and will stay with you.

Gabriel Bartalos himself deserve his credit for this film, from the rich era of great practical effects designers who put their own voices on the films with their directors and writers. Here Bartalos is able to bring in over-the-top images to life, like Elizabeth's character in her full rebuild appearance, still absurd but looking like she was built from human remains regardless of similarity, or the creations accidentally made from the spare body parts, an estrogen based fluid Jeffrey uses to preserve them and lighting, coming from the storage fridge as hybrids beyond human form. It is an underappreciated art, Bartalos someone, with those who work with him, who has spanned high art and genre work without discrimination. He worked with artist Matthew Barney as a practical effects designer on multiple films like Cremaster 3 (2002) and Drawing Restraint 9 (2009). If Drawing Restraint 9  led Bartalos to work directly from musician Björk, then Barney's wife, than he could on the opposite side of the coin work with the Insane Clown Posse, which shows how diverse and interesting a career of a practical effects artist can be, deserved as figures like him honed their crafts with the likes of Frank Henenlotter.

Even without a cover quote from Bill Murray of all people, the result of technical production on this film being done in the same studio as Murray's Quick Change (1990) was, and Murray being intrigued by the rushes he was seeing¹, Frankenhooker comes with numerous virtues as a mad, inventive and sincerely made genre film. In his sadly small but strong filmography, Frank Henenlotter may have been inspired by exploitation cinema, but he thankfully avoiding the part about conning viewers out of their money with just the sizzle of the promotion, something Frankenhooker is an attachment to.

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1) Taken from Your Date's on a Plate: The Making of Frankenhooker (2012), a production directed by Calum Waddell from High Rising Productions.

The Funhouse (1981)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Larry Block

Cast: Elizabeth Berridge as Amy Harper; Cooper Huckabee as Buzz; Largo Woodruff as Liz Duncan; Miles Chapin as Richie; Kevin Conway as Freak Show Barker / Strip Show Barker / Conrad Straker (The Funhouse Barker); Wayne Doba as Gunther Twibunt (The Monster); Sylvia Miles as Madame Zena; William Finley as Marco the Magnificent

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

When you're stoned, Charles Manson is a terrific guy.

Tobe Hooper plus Universal Pictures equals a Video Nasty, and this is a higher budget and prestige title among the Nasties, normally independent productions or non-American studio films, and evidence that no one was particularly safe. In the case of The Funhouse, far from the nastiest of the slasher movies from this era entirely, I entirely suspect the infamy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) filters through this, the film which Tobe Hooper as a director immediately gained a reputation and notoriety for. (There is also another theory that this was mistaken for The Last House on Dead End Street (1977), which was titled The Fun House on British VHS¹, a film which for another day has to be seen to be believed as well as being legitimately gruesome in content). This presents an important part of Tobe Hooper's career, as it was the one made after Salem's Lot (1979), Hooper's seminal and (large scale) TV mini-series/film, his first steps into mainstream filmmaking. This as a result is a change of pace, with Hooper clearly interested with the carnival setting itself, enticed by the chance to film at a real one, an east coast production shot in Miami, Florida in reality¹, and with real rides and numerous extras onscreen to bring out the atmosphere.

I have a bias for carnival/circus films, so naturally I like The Funhouse even without factoring in it being a solid slow burn horror film, where even marginalized titles like Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which people thought stole the 25th Best Picture Oscar from High Noon (1952), is a favourite for depicting historically this fascinating area of popular entertainment. Carnivals and circuses I realise are very different things, but they form a connection in my mind, as travelling entertainments which feel marginalised in the modern world, of spectacle and the reality of them, alongside the graft and in the case of carnivals, the ways they exist entirely on selling spectacle whilst even only providing the illusion. With their own worlds of aesthetic and figures that have to travel in the shows, they are all enticing, and in terms of the carnival by itself, The Funhouse is the same even if it plays to the stereotypes of them being places of the marginalised and the dangerous. Carnivals, more so than circuses, have had a legacy in cinema which is not just the infamous Tod Browning film Freaks (1932), but even film noir in Nightmare Alley, the 1947 and 2021 versions, of places ran by outsiders and with their own rules. Their posters displaying the now politically incorrect freak shows to their faded colours on the rides have a palpable energy to them which The Funhouse fully succeeds in bringing in.

Opening with a fake out twist combining Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978) in one, if with the creepiness of a little brother inappropriately terrorising his older sister in the shower, we are also already seeing the time when slashers were prolific for this one to be commissioned, and could also nod to their lineage. The set up is simple. Four people - our female lead Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), on a date with her boyfriend Buzz (Cooper Huckabee), with their male and female friend - are at a carnival haunted with rumours of two kids killed there in another town. The film is methodical, where a large portion of the film is entirely feeding off the mood of the location, a world that makes the film compelling to witness if of another age. No carnival would be allowed to be like this one nowadays - we could probably get the exotic sexy dancing tent for an adult show, but the idea of an erotic female strip show near the rides kids are on reveals the layers of this culture from the past. The same goes to the carnival freak show, where alongside the prop things in jars here involves real animals born with physical deformities brought into the film, sad cows you wish to pet, with twin heads melding together or missing part of their face, immortalised onscreen. Even details you may miss add to this world, such as the fact one of the leads, actor Kevin Conway, is playing all three of the carnival barkers, not just the fun house's who is a central figure, adding layers in whether they are separate people or related.

As a slasher, it barely qualifies due to this lengthy set-up, where the terror comes in very late as, deciding to stay in the funhouse overnight, this ill-advised decision leads to the central quartet to witness a murder. This is not a bad thing as, alongside the fact it allows William Finley to cameo as a drunk Dracula magician, it gives the film so much more emphasis on the characters within pure pulp, not a lot of deaths transpiring for the genre but a lot more atmosphere produced as a result, drawing the viewer in to engage. Sometimes the style and presentation is enough, and being able to soak in a natural fairground environment for a large portion was worth it in sacrifice of the tropes of the slasher genre expected from the time. It helps this is the best funhouse you wish did exist; even if Humpty Dumpty is inexplicably there in the foreground at one point next to stereotypical cannibalistic tribesmen, the production design is exceptional when the film is mostly confined to this location in the finale, a vivid place especially with the creepy but exceptionally made animatronics, made by people who specialised in this in real life. Helping as well is that this is Hooper's first film in widescreen, the unrelenting and unnerving energy he had in his films before transitioning into a new style for him, with the cinematographer for Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979), Andrew Laszlo, and production designer Mort Rabinowitz in tow to give this ill-reputed Video Nasty a credible style.

The intensity of Hooper's films before, when the chaos starts, is still here, and it is apt that by the end, this wonderland of lights and rides ends with traumatised figures of various ages, even if the body count would be considered pitiful for many. How this managed to get on the Video Nasties list is curious, as speculated in the first half, but I am glad with hindsight it did, as this underappreciated film in its director's filmography, about to enter a period of vibrant and even weird films in the eighties, was allowed to grab attention even among the more notorious movies form the list.

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1) Slashback! Something Not Quite Human is Waiting in THE FUNHOUSE (1981), written by Gregory Burkart for Blumhouse.com, published on February 16th 2016 and preserved on web.archive.org.

Fire Dragon (1983)

 

Director: Chester Wong Chung-Gwong

Cast: Chung Kwan as John; Yi-Chan Lu as Jessie; Chien-Ping Li as Jessie; Hung-Lieh Chen as Sai-ichi; Ti Chin as Wesley; Jackie Chan as Alan (archive footage); Brigitte Lin as Lily (archive footage)

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is nice to know, early in his career, martial arts superstar Jackie Chan’s filmography gets into the more unashamed luridness and exploitation of Hong Kong cinema, where it is not enough to fire guns at a car in the opening scene to kill the driver, but to drop a giant net over it, as nets even confound automobiles let alone human beings, and then blow it up with a rocket launcher. The opening theme is going to break out into Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Hi-NRG dance music, and between this and Fantasy Mission Force (1983), Chan has even in just two films has a surprising amount of times where Nazis have been the villains, which is fitting as, part of its own tradition in this region’s cinema, this shamelessly recycles and re-contextualizes Fantasy Mission Force footage into a new film from the same year that film was released.

That film can be viewed as an early production in the “mo lei tau film” genre which the likes of Stephen Chow became famous for, which as a phrase can be translated as “makes no sense”¹ and in itself explains the tone of Fantasy Mission Force perfectly. That film was already weird and on purpose, with actors abruptly in a variety of costumes from steel helmets to dressing up as Scotsmen in kilts, to its tonal shifts from slapstick comedy to a jarring serious ending with characters dead. Fire Dragon manages to be its own take on what is usually equated to Godfrey Ho and producer Joseph Lai, a duo infamous from this period of re-contextualizing existing or unfinished films into what I have called for myself cut-and-paste ninja films, and here Fire Dragon shows this was something others did themselves, with the added peculiarity that the director of this film, Chester Wong Chung-Gwong, only has this film on their Internet Movie Database page. This possesses the same unpredictability of a Godfrey Ho film, when you can have someone get decapitated underwater abruptly by a motorboat engine passing by, or killers jumping out of birthday cakes to knife someone. The use of Fantasy Mission Force alone, a film where Chan was a comedic side character who took centre stage in the ending, is to the point of retelling a new story from it even when it makes no sense to, the scenes involving a haunted house of real ghosts from the previous film, strange in themselves, more strange here to use to introduce the characters, leading to actually bizarre results.

There is new footage here, a plot involving Chinese Nazis, nefarious individuals connected to two new heroes to fight them, a man and a woman, whilst the original cast of Fantasy Mission Force (including Brigitte Lin, a star in her own right including in Wong Kar-Wai films) are reused and attempted to be linked to as a band of criminals after gold. Jackie Chan gets ridiculous dubbing here as in the older film, more goofball with random blues guitar licks scoring his fight scenes here rather than the Godfrey Ho-like English dubbing he got earlier, reintroduced as in FMF fighting an evil sumo for his first scenes. It is clear this also comes when Chan started becoming a big name in his homeland, as there is a stand-in used in scenes whose face we never seen, even introduced in a room with posters and photos of Chan himself from other films used for the close-up shots instead of an actual face. Martial arts cinema had done this before Fire Dragon with Bruce Lee after his abrupt death in 1973, but there were actual actors playing Lee such as Bruce Lai as “Bruceploitation” stars, with their faces seen, which makes Fire Dragon a very odd contrast especially in mind that, decades after this film, Chan was very much alive and breaking in Hollywood by the nineties.

Adding to the strangeness is that this stunt double, alongside weaving new footage around Fantasy Mission Force (and old costumes from that film), does their own elaborate fight scenes with comedy and that blues lick. That is certainly memorable, and it explains touches like having the Nazis, or that they have women in cave women costumes, even fighting to the death, reflecting the scene where the leads (as reused here) encounter a village of Amazons. Fantasy Mission Force was already a bizarre film, and needing to match the footage here for a new narrative, the results get even weirder at times here even if they co-exist as equals in different ways of strangeness. It is also clear this managed to even access unused footage, or more versions of Fantasy Mission Force exist, as there are a few scenes that I never saw and feel hallucinated from out takes there, like torture involving German shepherds licking one’s feet on pain of a metal ball hitting repeatedly in the head when you twitch your legs back. There is also an attempt, not well, to link such scenes, such as the potential death by snu snu with regular sized, petite model-like Amazons for one too-lucky male figure. Fire Dragon, for someone not used to this type of cinema from Hong Kong, would not be viewed as good film making, not how cinema is meant to be constructed this way. Even Bernard Hermann’s legendary shower scene score for Psycho (1960) is used at one point, this region of martial arts cinema its own mad delirium that has to be accepted on its own terms.

It is the kind of film you still also have to admire for the chutzpah, where people were still filmed as extras on crucifixes at the Nazi camp, there just because as set dressing even if it would have cost more to film than add more spare old footage, the logic not found yet still earnestly trying to be entertaining if still exploitation. The story is thread bare, and yet as a Frankenstein’s project to retell a new film with vast limits of new footage, that in itself if you are prepared becomes the pleasure in its own form, the mechanizations of trying to make a new film from an old one like an experimental game, including the Jackie Chan factor, adding to the curiosity factor.

Abstract Spectrum: Random/Weird

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

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1)      Stephen Chow & Hong Kong Mo Lei Tau Comedy, written by Nick Dodet and published for Pig China on March 8th 2016.