Jungle Trap (1990/2016)

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: James Bryan and Renee Harmon

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

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=====

1) Bleeding Skull's About Us page.

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

Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Agent D.T. Gagano; Agustín Mateo as Palmer Eldritch / Batfro; Guillermo Llansó as Stalin / Roy Mascarone / Agent D.T. Gagano (Cartoon Version) / Stalin's Assistant; Solomon Tashe as Batfro; Gerda-Annette Allikas as Malin; Rene Köster as Captain Lagucci; Lauri Lagle as Alfons Rebane; Carlo Pironti as Mr. Sophistication

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Stop sodomising me agent, and try to find a way to wake up.

I think it says a lot about Llansó's film that even its country of origin is bisected into many. A Spanish filmmaker partially filming in Ethiopia, which was the backdrop for his theatrical debut Crumbs (2015), but also Estonia and Latvia. The one thing we can confirm is that the resulting product, helped into birth by Kickstarter funding, is eccentric.

Effectively imagining if the Cold War existed in a pop culture morass, this has the C.I.A. against the Soviet Union in cyberspace over the Psychobook, an imagined world in tech accessed in chunky old virtual reality helmets. As expected, the virtual world is not so safe, as is to be found with the unfortunate end for a C.I.A. agent whose eyes get burst. Instead, Palmer (Agustín Mateo) and Gagano (Daniel Tadesse), the later the star of Crumbs and the lead, have to take over. The later, planning to retire with his girlfriend Malin (Gerda-Annette Allikas) to fund her kickboxing academy, and maybe take his obsession with pizza margherita to creating his own restaurant, has however to do one last mission. Tragically, this leads to his consciousness being lost in the Psychobook whilst a computer virus in the personification of Joseph Stalin, by way of a paper cut out which is stop motioned to speak on an actor's face, is trying to acquire power through hacking his enemies.  

It feels apt that, in this genre mash-up, that two of the co-producing territories are Estonia and Lativia, formerly two Soviet controlled territories behind the Iron Curtain, time having turned real history into Cold War pulp stories which Llansó has deliberately bastardised here. The other espionage films, though, may have not had Ethiopian kung fu masters named after pasta dishes, post-dubbed voices, and Batfro (Solomon Tashe), a man in an Adam West era Batman costume (with the insignia blurred on his chest), who is probably a villain but definitely hates drugs, in spite of the fact a Soviet propaganda film playing on a "Better-Ethiopian" television shows him snorting blow at his swanky mansion. A film like this, in the modern form of cult film, can be a double edged sword in that they skirt the line between reward and the danger in their style and weirdness, where after their fifteen minutes of fame they can disappear after being hailed as new cult films. This film to its credit has the advantage that, just two films in his career, Llansó has a style entirely of his own. Something which depends on whether he can, even if he decides just to make pulpy weird genre films, sustain a compelling world of his own from the virtues he has here.

A huge thing in his favour is that, having to work with a low budget he had to sustain with a Kickstarter fund, Llansó's solutions are completely unique. The world of the Psychobook for example, whilst in reality and having real actors, brings in a curious form of stop motion where some actors move with herky movements, encapsulated by the bizarre and even profane decision to have their faces paper cut-outs, rendered to speak, of famous figures. Palmer and Gagano for example, though the later becomes himself trapped in the virtual world, compete their spy work with the faces of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor as talking masks, the former in hindsight Llansó showing some savvy, or even unintentionally, by evoking Three Days of the Condor (1975), a "proper" conspiracy thriller fed from an era of disillusionment and paranoia whose lead's face is replicated here. It feels befitting, rather than trivialising the true sadness of the Stalinist regime, that Joseph Stalin, a despot behind many purges, is now reduced to the visage jerkily moving, and visibly wearing Nike shoes as one zoom in shows. Once a figure whose visage was likely seen on many framed pictures in Soviet Russia, that he is now surrounded by Mr. Sophistication (Carlo Pironti), a man so cartoonishly accented in his Italian accent to compensate for being an elderly man, and Batfro, is an apt punishment in terms of being embarrassed in death.

A lot of the film does feel of a post-ironic era of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, which I have become more averse too simply because too many of these films come about, get praise, and then suddenly disappear because they are not with much after the initial reaction, even if you are fond of them in the initial afterglow of the theatrical experience. Truthfully, the intentionally absurd edge means Jesus Shows... is not abstract to me at all, because it shows its hand in being ridiculous immediately and never really comes off as dumbfounding in what weird thing it does. What it does however, and I am hopeful for Llansó in regards to, is that this is made by someone willing to be brave in their work, including the fact there are moments from its three directors of photography where they clearly shot on film, 16mm to be precise, which is a surprise to think was done for production value and adds a texture to the world onscreen.

Llansó also clearly knows the references he is winking at, as he even has the Adam West Batman, uncensored, in the film even if it is a bizarre television advertisement playing in the background with Batgirl talking about finance. Pre-existing footage of submarines jars with chiptune music, and old archaic tech matches with video game logic, where an unseen voiceover says "Round 1" when the pasta named kung-fu masters fight an Ethiopian Shaolin monk protecting the "Ark of the Covenant".  An old portable television, now housing a man trapped without a body, evokes melancholia and sadness in the same think where, returning to the kung fu fighters, suddenly one has to think of Wakaliwood in Uganda, and that one day we will be getting even more martial arts films from the various African countries with all the people who can perform actual high kicks in the continent as we also see here.

There is a danger, if a hundred years passes and cinema lives still, where one has to ask who will get any of these references but in a way Llansó is treading into references some people even now do not get, like Redford being a face, or that inexplicably fly men with laser eyes appear to evoke old b-movies, one of which may have been Jesus Christ trapped in a controlling monster costume full of variety box chocolates of enlightenment. Inexplicably in the middle of writing this review, I am thinking of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a film full of references most will have not heard of in just forty to fifty years, both films subsuming the viewer into the past and forcing them to rethink symbols, and even if Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has to be released with a glossary of references in a hundred years, like a Penguin Classic film release, it at least is a film of its own quirks as much as references. It is distorting the references, and even if you do not get any of them, the film sustains a logic and compelling nature that, if it wins you over, then digging into the references will grow and nurture your admiration for it. Even if I strongly suspect it is closer to the pastiche films of now then a legitimate alien oddity I am drawn to, to the film's credit Jesus Shows... has so much I admire that I did love it, so much to see Miguel Llansó one day pulling out a real alien on me when I least expect it.

Certainly, he does so much right. The thing which won me over was that, whilst there is chiptune in the score, also good in a soundtrack made by three different people, he has for the score mostly jazz. An exceptional jazz band soundtrack, between cool jazz to avant-garde, which is not a score you usually have in a wannabe-neo-cult film, would have needed time to composer, and is beautifully idiosyncratic. His casting is also something unique and admiring. Daniel Tadesse, who is a compelling screen figure, is in real life a hunchbacked man with dwarfism, whose character whilst called a dwarf at times or worst (by the villains mostly) once or twice is never played off his appearance but his acting charisma. His girlfriend Malin is a big, statuesque woman, not a conventional thin figure but a big sturdy figure, and there is never a joke about Tadesse and Allikas' visible physical differences as characters as a joke. The Ethiopian setting, even if the cast are cartoonishly post-dubbed, is still people from the country, including the aforementioned individuals playing kung fu experts who are competent, making the comment earlier about wanting African martial arts films something likely to happen one day and being prayed for. Llansó's decision to even have the film partially set in Ethiopia, like a curious Werner Herzog of gonzo weird cinema, is felt with love and with none of the film being patronising, taking in the natural locations and locals as something to admire. Even if the film has characters named Spaghetti and Ravioli, said film is paradoxically also going to make its weirdness progressive and encompassing the world in all forms at the same time.

And returning to the idea earlier, one has to ask what will people reflect in the historical books on the Cold War in a century's time? Here it is reduced to conflicts between unseen figures, where even the C.I.A. will make their agents disposable, burying the bodies in the beach and cremating them in the sand, with the paper masks literally leading to a mask hiding other masks. Will anything from history of that era mean much, as here Llansó has to express it through video game fight scenes and post-dub silliness? Spirituality is strangely more relevant as, whilst he is proven not to be the Messiah, the Jesus here with his boom-box crucifix is the path to freedom and as much shows the meekness not to presume Himself a divinity, merely a guide to help another. More so especially as the film gently falls into subjective reality twists Philip K. Dick might have raised a thumbs up with, as naturally reality as is can be questioned with reality-within-reality-within-reality concerns.

In fact deciding to put everything into the blender like most neo-cult films, with the danger still there of this not having lasting impact, is at least helped because Miguel Llansó has a film which, straightforwardly told for all its weirdness, does have an emotional current and characters we like. With Daniel Tadesse's Gagano as a figure we follow in this farce and feel for, it helps the film especially when it brings in its own weird logic, like the human mouth being used for a credit card machine or Batfro, and having something to follow having to adapt to all this. Certainly, after seeing this film, I have nothing but positivity and optimism for Miguel Llansó as a filmmaker and can see him, if he can, staying in relevance if he works from the virtues here and hones them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

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

Juan of the Dead (2011)

 

Director: Alejandro Brugués

Screenplay: Alejandro Brugués

Cast: Alexis Díaz de Villegas as Juan; Jorge Molina as Lázaro; Andros Perugorría as Vladi; Andrea Duro as Camila; Jazz Vilá as La China; Eliecer Ramírez as El Primo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #180

 

Hey, Papa Smurf, fuck you!

Zombie tales are so ambitious that you can get sick of them. It takes, however, one enticing idea to prove the figures still have worth to them. Namely, what would happen if a zombie outbreak broke out in a place like Cuba? A genre from a very different geographical location is always enticing - Cuba has a rich cinematic history, but most may know of it from the sixties to the nineties, and not genre cinema. Most may know I Am Cuba (1964), a Cuban-Soviet co-production directed by a Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov during Cuba's embrace of being a socialist country, but still an important film. That being the film most know Cuban cinema, whilst in danger of ignoring films like Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), is a perfect set up for what Juan of the Dead has in terms of meaning in its choice of country of origin.

I Am Cuba was a Soviet co-production, which celebrated the country as an idyllic world. Through its elaborate and legendary tracking shots, it was a tale of a socialist paradise. Move decades later to Juan of the Dead, a Spanish-Cuba film by Alejandro Brugués, and Havana now looks rundown and, in this cinematic universe, is now overrun by zombies when the outbreak starts. Inherently this is a tantalising concept. Now this is an entirely different country in terms of culture and political history, which changes a generic horror narrative from the tropes found in their cousins up in North America to something very different, such as the initial attacks call by their news media as the work of "dissidents" from the United States.

Cuba's history, becoming a socialist country, and the importance this plays to what the country's history is, and even world history, means that this island country has its own distinction cultural place before you consider how distinct the country looks here. It does however in pop culture have a less known place than you would think. That episode of The Simpson with Fidel Castro ("It's full of what?!"). The American film Scarface (1983), despite Al Pacino not being Cuban but Italian American as he played a Cuban immigrant becoming a drug lord, and to an extent the professional wrestler Scott Hall, who took the Pacino character into the wrestling ring. And the image of Che Guevara, whose image is seen in this film, and whose visage I could seen even on posters at the English university I went to, despite the chance the people who sold and bought his image probably do not know what he did and the history he was involved in that lead to the Cuban Revolution. (Even the fact he was not even Cuban, but born in Argentina. With the titbits of historical references you get here, Juan of the Dead is fascinating as a vast contrast.

At the start, it has a lot to offer. The central location, Havana, is completely distinct with its vast and tall buildings contrasted by the streets below. From the get-go mind, and to my surprise as Fidel Castro was still alive until 2016, Brugués through his characters such as the titular Juan, an older womanising crook, distant from his adult daughter who scrapes money together from whatever he can get, are blunt that Cuba is not in a great place for them. His best friend Lazaro, a chronic masturbator who should never be allowed to hold a spear gun as the narrative proves, hates Cuba and it is always considered by all but Juan to either go to California, such as for Lazaro's son nicknamed California, or swim over to Miami on the sea. The old traditions, pride of the free land of socialist Cuba, is merely a boring night out as Juan with friends go savaging in the sea in the day or just pickpocket people. Zombies in this context are so odd, they do not even know what they are between them. They know demons and vampires, apt as one of the only other Cuba horror films is the animated comedy Vampires in Havana (1985), but zombies baffle them even if they figure out quickly head trauma is the only effective way of dealing with them. It is never explained why the dead are coming to life, baring that even death by itself is enough to become one in the early parts before bites and scratches carry the infection.

A lot of context is likely lost even with a straight forward plot. Juan has more than enough reason to cope in this outbreak, with combat experience due to an "Angola conflict", whilst there are continuous comparisons to what happens in this undead outbreak to the "special period", which is a reference few may know of when in 1991, post-Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsing, Cuba started a violent economic downturn with food and fuel shortages. Reading even the barest of history of what that reference actually means really adds a striking note to when, whether characters merely make reference to it as Havana eventually becomes an undead wasteland, or that someone like Juan was able to survive the period with ease, it gains poignancy with little prior knowledge.

I will be blunter later, but sadly, Juan of the Dead does turns into a generic zombie film, but the what-if of this premise, the context, is enticing. It would be like, and I doubt this would ever happen, if a zombie film was set in Mainland China in the midst of what is seen as their government's controversial politics, with restrictions to the likes of the internet and their spiky relationship with Hong Kong; imaging a fantasy scenario where how a country's politics and culture reacted to such a monumental and disastrous event, such as here with Cuba its own country with its own cultural aspects referred to briefly, is a fascinating concept if usually likely to be controversial or not even created. Real life issues, like the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, have probably made this more uncomfortably close to home, even in countries like the United States and Britain in terms of how politicians and even regular people react, but zombies like other horror tropes are as used as much as metaphors for real life events if anything else, so it feels not tasteless but an apt comparison to be made. Especially as any horror or genre scenario which shakes the normalcy of an environment down and reveals what would happen in a speculative fiction is itself a commentary.

Unfortunately, most zombie films, like a lot of horror, never feel enticed to follow this through. In the beginning Brugués with his metaphor also managed to get some budget for his film too, or really good resources, promising a lot whilst set up as a blackly humorous horror film with energy. He has to use some obvious CGI, but I would only be harsh on that if a production has the resources, like a big Hollywood film, and managed to use them poorly; here as well, barring a bit of digital blood, he uses it for material it would be difficult for anyone to practically pull off, like an exploding helicopter, landmarks collapsing (usually for comedic effect), or even zombies on mass under the ocean which includes a funny nod to Zombi 2 (1979) and the zombie vs. shark scene. He has enough resources in contrast to have large crowds of real extras running around, literally in a stampede at one point, as victims or zombies to show a sense of scale. He even has some impressive stunt and practical effects, be it vehicle stunts to a possible use of wires when Juan runs on zombies' heads briefly.

It is a shame that, once the film set outs with a small cast trying to put up with the outbreak, this set up leads to something stilted. Stories of surviving a zombie apocalypse, whilst I have not burned on them, can work but not when they boil away the psychological grit into generic plotting. It definitely loses a great deal of its personality when it reaches its middle, characters suddenly becoming generic, a very manly film even if by accident which is not really with deep characters and interest to even run with this aspect into interesting territories. Women become bystanders or victims; the daughter eventually idolises Juan but has little else; there is a lot of gay humour, which goes beyond being the characters to leaving a bad taste, which is annoying considering one of the best characters here is China, a transgender figure who, with a beau who is a killer fighter but unfortunately feints at the sight of blood, is this glamorous figure that stands out and has a damn good aim with a slingshot.

Ultimately, the problem is one which defeats many films. Maybe it is just me, but I want the idiosyncratic in my cinema and find most action scenes in movies boring unless inventive. Horror for me is closer to drama baring the likelihood of shock and the grotesque, whilst the action beats zombie films eventually grew into, which Juan of the Dead follows, transform into something tedious. The little details that add personality are rich - everyone flees to Miami on boats, a protest against the US Embassy is attacked by zombies - but they are lost in the tropes and bears you can find from a zombie film from the capitalist USA, which is ironic to say the least. More nuances are found in signs and banners in the background, promoting the pride of the socialist Cuban, left abandoned and useless with mindless hordes around. Played mostly as a black comedy, with a lot of gory slapstick, Juan of the Dead is okay, but even with this same tone, a great deal is left on the table un-used that could have made something a lot more rewarding in terms of a fun zombie film and being a Cuban film where such a narrative is rife for ideas.

The Jackhammer Massacre (2004)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Daniel Benton and Joe Castro

Cast: Aaron Gaffey as Jack Magnus; Kyle Yaskin as Mike Fletcher; Nadia Angelini as Sam; Trudy Kofahl as Tori Magnus; Jill Moore as Bobbie; Bart Burson as Zach; Evan Owen as Brian; Desi O'Brian Wilson as Nelson; Christopher Michaels as Roger; John Sarley as Darren; Joe Haggerty as Borris; Scott St. James as Taylor; Staas Yudenko as Vic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #156

 

If you don't understand, you need help!

The Jackhammer Massacre exists in an unfortunate time period - that, whilst films from the early 2000s have been restored by the likes of Arrow Video for Blu Ray, it is late enough that, whilst so many films from the eighties have been restored regardless of public consensus, this and so many from the early days of straight to video are in obscurity still and do not have the aura of their era¹. In Joe Castro's career, this is a shame as this is arguably his most cohesive film, flaws and all, if you ever wanted a micro budget and equally bleaker take on Abel Ferrera's The Driller Killer (1979), at least for the first half, combined with a slasher film. Even if it is still with boilerplate plotting and restrictions due to his budget, I have to admire Castro and co-writer Daniel Benton, the later who I criticised for Near Death (2004), for a film that is interesting even if you feel dirty watching it.

And bleak is the right term as, set up to start at the middle of the tale only to go backwards to the beginning of his downfall, the film follows Jack Magnus (Aaron Gaffey), a newly successful businessman who is also unfortunately into drugs. Never was there an appropriate anti-drug horror film, as his friend ODs on a new narcotic at the dealer's, before Jack himself loses everything and becomes a vagrant, working as a dishevelled night time guard to a storage building. And here, the budget and aesthetic really help as, shot in Los Angeles, nothing looks glamorous in the slightest, casting unknowns as meth addicts and ordinary environments without any heightened glamour to them appropriately bleak. The result is far danker than its grim tone even initially suggests. Even when two female actresses, one of them adult star Rachel Rotten, are willing to act entirely topless in their small roles, everything is so seedy to the point even the casual nudity is uncomfortable.

Joe Castro has always had a greater visible affinity for more nihilistic tones, his practical effects realistic and grotesque, so having this premise is actually to his advantage. Daniel Benton, who only worked with Castro here and on Near Death, wrote one off episodes for television like Dynasty in the earlier part of his career, so a melodramatic tale where Jack is paranoid, in debt for his addiction, and eventually seeing the ghost of his friend telling him to kill people is just an exaggeration of plots Benton likely has worked with. It can be unbearably grim, hence The Driller Killer comparison is apt, only becoming absurd when a drug dealer shots him up with a concoction of PCP, heroin and meth to kill him, only to push him over the edge and grab a jackhammer. It is not dismissible to Ferrera, playing the central lead in him film, acquiring a drill powered by a backpack battery and assaulting the homeless as part of his own bleak film.

Alongside getting a forearm so swelled and malformed, due to how many needles have pierced the veins, that he has a gaping elbow with enough room to store things in, Jack also hallucinates about beings with needle faces and the D.E.A being after him, part of Castro's growing interest in computer effects alongside slowing down footage to show drug effects or have his best friend, as a hallucination, be transparent talking to him. When Jack decides to go on a rampage and kill anyone who enters the tool shop, his best friend informs him that his paranoia is right, leading to him fully going off the deep end....

....which leads The Jackhammer Massacre turning silly when it ends as a slasher film, where a removal team (a group of men and one woman) come to catalogue the contents of the storage building, but it is strangely charming. After all the darkness of before, and that this has been a slasher film which has actually built up its villain with for more detail than most films in this genre, it actually feels successful for the last thirty minutes to indulge with this genre shift. To have characters, even at work let alone with someone being missing, to suddenly make out, or the clear excuses for many shirtless muscular men onscreen, is still silly, but for once a slash plot is not padded out for ninety minutes and feels a nice change of pace.

Certainly in context this is far from a great film, but truth be told, this was a pleasant surprise from Joe Castro. That is in mind that two-thirds are as bleak as hell, but the sucker punch of what felt like a grim horror drama, only to spring out as a slasher film where the serial killer has been build out in depth, actually is interesting and applaudable. Aaron Gaffey's performance, as everyone else's, is shaky but the film does manage to go from a dishevelled drug addict stumbling over to a drinking fountain for water, than later this same character becoming a jackhammer welding manic ranting to a victim that he knows where the hidden cameras are, whilst making it all make sense. The premise, because drugs are a real concern, can be seen as tasteless, this film having a tightrope to walk, but it manages to succeed. Unlike the many contrived ways Freddy Krueger managed to come back, this at least had a (PCP laced) logic of some form.

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1) We got David DeCoteau's Final Stab (2001), his take on Scream (1996), on Blu Ray from Massacre Video, so anything could happen. 

The Adult Swim Infomercials I

In 2009 Adult Swim, a cult adult-orientated night time programming block for Carton Network, broadcasted the first of the "infomercials", an umbrella term for these short films which are designed to catch people off-guard late at night, becoming a staple into the current day. One, the first I am covering Too Many Cooks, even got cross over interest with the mainstream.

Starting in 2001, Adult Swim is an utter obscurity for me, a curious sidebar of Cartoon Network that has become its own institution as work for adults who craved something weird, anti- or post-ironic humour. For every title I am personally interested in like 12 oz Mouse (2005-7) to popular titles like Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000-2015), they have however shown the dangers of post-irony when they were bitten by Million Dollar Extreme Presents World Peace (2016), which was created by a comedy troupe revealed to be alt-right in politics and before the show's cancellation had caused enough outrage in Adult Swim to have people wanting to leave.

The infomercials I've covering here, thankfully, do run a gamut instead of innovative, creative and proudly weird to the point the ghosts of the surrealist movement would be delighted with these, particularly the first...

Too Many Cooks (2014)

Director: Casper Kelly

Screenplay: Casper Kelly

The "infomercials" are named after the concept of paid commercials, a concept that on public access television in the United States could entitle any strange broadcast that abruptly appears at late night, something which Adult Swim ran with through these shorts produced by various little groups and released annually. Ironically the most well known of these Too Many Cooks isn't really a strange broadcast like an advert, but instead a satire on the engorged and mad spider's web of American television that gets weirder and weirder as it continues.

Too Many Cooks is effectively depicting the era when The Flintstones abruptly introduced an alien only Fred Flintstone could only see in a later series, something The Simpsons mocked in an episode in the day, or when medical drama St. Elsewhere (1982-1988) ended entirely by being all revealed to be the dream of an autistic child, playing merry hell if you believe in the theories as characters from Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-9) crossed over, and then proceeded to appear in the likes of The X-Files and Law & Order. The idea is an opening credits of a drippy and lame looking American sitcom...only for the cast credits to get increasingly longer as the cast keeps expanding and expanding, even throwing in actual cooks in for the jokes. What happens has to be spoilt to explain, that this will develop into entirely different genres including a cop show and an animated G.I. Joe parody.

I've already mentioned examples in the previous paragraphs, but before the Golden Age of Modern Television, TV had hits but also producers trying to sustain shows to the point a term "jumping the shark" were created by literally having a Happy Days character called the Fonz leaping a shark on jet skis. Suffice the say that, in among the show that never begins eventually even having a cat puppet named Snarf who can fire rainbows out of his hands appear, a serial killer picking off cast members is not the oddest thing in the entire short. The killer is arguably the weakest joke as his is just there for shock value, for sick amusement and startling the viewer with the gore and cannibalism, but Too Many Cooks doesn't conclude on him and keeps going more for a greater reward. The program does begin as mere mockery, an ever unending opening credits of cast who get their names onscreen and wink to the camera, the short revealing its hand slowly with literal chefs or the nubile young woman who appears permanently topless, close to when Not Another Teen Movie (2001), which parodied the late nineties and early 2000s sex comedies, had a European foreign exchange student character who just wandered around completely naked.

The jokes do get weirder as already mentioned, and they riff on actual programming in American television history, as even the aforementioned Snarf is not that broad a joke when ALF (1986-1990) exists, a show that was popular in the eighties and was about a cat eating alien living with a human family, made even more weirder as in 2001 the titular puppet even got his own talk show that tanked after seven episodes. The tangents into other genres and even animation is abrupt, but genre shifts could happen in the real life work the short is parodying, and the short to its credit is immaculately produced, so even that continuous theme song changes the tone for each change on a dime.

Adult Swim also laces its premise with quirky touches like Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's cameo as a pie or when credit texts and cast change places. The best joke for me is when the Too Many Cooks theme becomes a contagious disease, and the short does even get a apocalyptic vibe as it becomes almost a hellscape its cast cannot escape, something which is probably been reduced as a joke as the internet has used it way too many times in parodies, but is acceptable here as there are so many bizarre moments of note crammed into this short's length.. Certainly, for a short I was ambivalent about originally, it has grown on me just for the ambition.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal/Weird

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

Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep (2016)

Director: Kieran O'Hare

Screenplay: Joe Pera

Cast: Joe Pera

Out of the four infomercials I have watched, this was such a surprise as whilst there are dark moments of humour (and one answer phone message being stopped) this is an abruptly mellow and pleasant short. There are no shocks, no twists, no mockery of the titular Joe Pera, just a persona of the comedian who comes off as Mr. Rogers if he was permanently sedate.

The character got a series from 2018 on Adult Swim, so details here suggest there's a bit of a joke about this character being a little dull, a piano teacher with a really quiet slow voice helping you to sleep. Pera however also comes off as a sweet figure in character, contemplating a justification for Stephen Hawkins to commit infidelity on his wife, in lieu of his scientific theories on the infinite nature of the universe, only to change to contemplating how the same theories question why he should've betrayed the one woman who loved him too. Between this and his views of baseball being therapeutic, it's a nice counter to the other shorts I have seen and offers that, in reference to the controversy with Million Dollar Extreme, it shows that Adult Swim can have different sides, providing a nice warm mug of (charmingly messy) animation providing the twist of a complete lack of twist.

Abstract Spectrum: Sedate

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

Broomshakalaka (2013)

Directors: Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Screenplay: Justin Becker and Steve Clemmons

Cast: Michael McCafferty as Denny; Randall Park as Mark; Jean Villepique as Eileen; Ava Bianchi as Jenny

Broomshakalaka is playing up to the infomercial format, in which the titular object is a broom equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, breaking physical reality by having anything from a blender blade to a tattoo removal laser in its numerous buttoned options. Obviously, it goes amiss in the three person cast, the seller and two bemused spectators, as Adult Swim can get away with gore and many of the attachments are sharp and cumbersome to use on the Broomshakalaka.

Where the infomercial improves is when these shorts have a habit of being usually over ten minutes, one of their blessings as that time scale allows a one note gag to change drastically into something more esoteric and unpredictable. In this case, apparently, sells of the Broomshakalaka can resurrect the dead, which is unexpected as the punch line and goes to show these Adult Swim productions have a very good habit of undermining expectations for more idiosyncratic jokes. The cast (especially Randall Park as the rational man going through an existential crisis as this all transpires) deliver the material as deadpan and seriously as need be, gamely performing and helping the joke.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

Alpha Chow (2014)

Director: Dave Green

Screenplay: Justin Becker and Steve Clemmons

Cast: Alan Ritchson as Kent Ross; Curt Neill as Brian; Justin J. Randall as Alphie

With that in mind, the last to be covered is the weakest, just because at only six minutes, an ad for body building health diet for canines that only gets past the initial joke and little else. The result is a dog related infomercial with roided up humanoid dogs that even includes a costume furries would be proud of. It is funny when man's best friend desires humanity to roll over now, actor Alan Ritchson as the stereotypical health nut body building host perfect, and it's a very weird combination of The Island of Dr. Moreau with Planet of the Apes by way of a format that is idiosyncratic to tell the tale with. It has darker layers too; the poor guest who realises what he is involved with slowly even catching in earshot that the diet is based on 1930s research, suggesting a really twisted reference to Fascist ideas.

If anything, Alpha Chow could've become a longer product. That its only six minutes, when the others escalate to weirder levels, is a detriment to it. It is nonetheless fun and a nice way to end this review. All four of them together definitely show the best in one of Adult Swim's most well regarded trademarks fully.  

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

John from Cincinnati (2007)

From http://jfcexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/
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Series Creators: David Milch and Kem Nunn

Directors: Mark Tinker, Ed Bianchi, Jesse Bochco, Adam Davidson, Gregg Fienberg, John McNaughton, Daniel Minahan, Jeremy Podeswa, Tom Vaughan

Cast: Rebecca De Mornay as Cissy Yost, Greyson Fletcher as Shaun Yost, Willie Garson as Meyer Dickstein, Bruce Greenwood as Mitch Yost, Luis Guzmán as Ramon Gaviota, Keala Kennelly as Kai, Austin Nichols as John Monad, Ed O'Neill as Bill Jacks, Luke Perry as Linc Stark, Brian Van Holt as Butchie Yost, Matt Winston as Barry Cunningham, Emily Rose as Cass, Garret Dillahunt as Dr. Michael Smith, Dayton Callie as Steady Freddie Lopez, Jim Beaver as Vietnam Joe, Paul Ben-Victor as Palaka, Chandra West as Tina Blake, Paula Malcomson as Jerri, Matthew Maher as Dwayne

Synopsis: One day, at Imperial Beach in California, a strange male savant with a credit card saying John Monad (Austin Nichols) appears; his first words to anyone that Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood), a legendary surfer who renounced his career in disgust, should get "back in the game". Mitch suddenly starts to levity, John finds himself with Mitch's heroine addicted son and former surfer Butchie Yost (Brian Van Holt), and it's clear John is in the centre to countless strange activities, from Mitch's grandson (and surfing protégée) Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) surviving a life threatening injury in an actual miracle to strange goings-on in a disused hotel bar. All in lieu that, to spread a gospel for a new spiritual movement, that the Yost family needs to all be healed of their various neuroses and get back in said surfing game.

Ah, this is a pretty infamous series to cover. On the same night the legendary series The Sopranos (1999-2007) ended, on an infamously abrupt conclusion that still baffles people to this day, premium cable and satellite channel HBO (Home Box Office, Inc.) premiered their new surfing spiritual oddity John from Cincinnati afterwards. From the mind of producer/writer David Milch, creator of Deadwood (2004-6), in collaboration with surf noir author Kem Nunn, it become notorious as one of the only HBO programmes to only last one season. HBO started in 1972 and from that far back to today, they went from strength to strength in terms of branding, getting away with adult and edgy content including the legendary Tales from the Crypt series (1989-1996) until a series like Oz (1997-2003) could be seen as the prologue to their influence on the "Golden Age of Television", a concept talked of by critics that suggested over the 2000s to this day that cinema is in the apparent doldrums, upended and dethroned by television shows such as HBO's own The Sopranos, The Wire (2002-8), and Game of Thrones (2011-).  

Personally, I have no interest in "the Golden Age of Television" and hence never had a real desire to follow HBO as a brand, never seeing that television had made cinema redundant or that they had to be at odds with each in the slightest in the first place. I will eventually see The Wire, because it's too big, and I wished Tales from the Crypt was available in the UK. Naturally, it's the oddities in their catalogue, some successful (Todd McFarlane's Spawn (1997-9)) or failures (Ralph Bakshi's Spicy City (1997) and John from Cincinnati itself) which are the more interesting properties. Those that are not the toasts of mainstream culture like Game of Thrones but the weird, ambitious and sometimes doomed projects, John from Cincinnati a pretty infamous example and the kind of the television I'm more inclined to track down.

To keep things simple, a Christ figure appears in Imperial Beach in California one day to communicate a divine message to humanity. The titular John's not Christ, but its emphasised he's likely the son of the Son of God, still a heavenly source who decided to pass on God's message by way of a legendary surfing family. It's an odd premise, but just for idiosyncrasy, it's also an awesome one to start off with as, hey, maybe God does work in mysterious ways, and there's something befitting a messiah hanging out among the surfers, New Age post-hippies and weed heads at the beach. It's also established this figure, described as a robot by one character being sent on a mission by something skyward, has an upward battle as to do this he needs to work with the Yost family, as dysfunctional as you can get, turning as much into a tale of a spiritual cleansing of pain and anxiety from their perspective.  And as for John himself, a savant who communicates by parroting others' words in choice sound bites, the moments he speaks for himself are apocalyptic and/or overtly with mind that his goal he's been sent off on is bloody important or everyone's screwed.

Mitch Yost is a spiritual figure who has yet disconnected himself from life. His wife Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay) has become the "ultimate ball buster", De Mornay shouting a lot of her dialogue for the rafters, because of an unfortunate incident with her son. Said son Butchie is a heroin addict living in a closed hotel. His grandson Shawn, a surfing protégée, lives with his grandparents, who are divided about letting him sign with the same promoter, Linc Stark (Luke Perry), who led Butchie to drugs and ruin, and with his mother Tina Blake (Chandra West) appearing later on, she stigmatised both by leaving Shawn with his grandparents when he was born and her career as a porn actress.

This in itself is a lot but there's many others, all idiosyncratic characters with idiosyncratic dialogue. Bill Jacks (Ed O'Neill), a retired cop and friend of the Yost family who is still grieving for his later wife and (clearly with supernatural emphasis) talks to his pet birds; Kai (real life surfer Keala Kennelly), an employee at the Yost's surfing store who is the one really sympathetic figure; Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston) the new owner of the closed hotel, being kept for Butchie by Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzmán) and lawyer Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), who is traumatised from being molested in one of the rooms and has prophecies through epileptic fits; Steady Freddie Lopez (Dayton Callie), a drug dealer who comes for Butchie but finds his humanity, lackey Palaka (Paul Ben-Victor) tagging along; Linc Stark himself, going through a journey as employees are trying to push him out of his surfing promotion company Stinkweed; and Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt), who when a medical miracle happens understandably finds his scientific grasp of reality broken and has to find himself whilst being a humane, kind figure among this crowd. Its many characters to follow, arguably as much why the series was such a difficult one for many, yet for me the story somehow manage to make everyone of them have something of interest.

Probably another reason the series was notorious was that it isn't structured like many series at all. It's languid in pace, at least two episodes not really about anything but merely surrounding twice when characters wandered off somewhere, and many ending not on plot twists but casual, matter of fact pauses for breath followed by an abrupt cut to black and the credits. I eventually started to love this about the series, all before you get to the overtly strange moments which begin to happen. The dialogue is as unconventional, full of dense and very unconventional dialogue ticks and conversations.

It's also crude and profane - a lot of expletives, and some dialogue and character turns which show complexity but could be off putting in how offensive they can get. Clearly reflecting back to 9/11 and the War on Terror, whilst not feeling like Islamophobia, some characters including John use the term "raghead" a lot, and there are details that would be much more difficult to get away with having ten years later. (Though Mitch's bafflement over his wife's reaction to an ominous video, where she immediately draws a comparison to Taliban propaganda videos with their black sheet backgrounds, does also show Milch and Nunn are prodding these fears and scrutinising them too). Butchie in particular, even when he gets more sympathetic, is written to fall back into deliberately offensive comments when pissed off, a conversation using a racial epithet to his ex-wife extreme but, whether it was wise to do in the script, to show his fallibility as someone burnt out on drugs and his own worst behaviours.  

That's not withstanding how this is also meant to be a spiritual, unconventional television series which, from just ten episodes, was too weird to survive anyway. It's insanely vague even (on this revisit) if I got every plot detail and can make sense of it. The tale of a new spiritual growth from the Yost family and the journey to this point is already with one foot in the eccentric before even more overly surreal moments take place. Where a room at the hotel is a literal phantom zone for those dead or in the midst of a temporary limbo, or parrots can heal the brain dead. Times in this show it does feel like the series is striding into territory it itself is not fully confident in what it perceives but does anyway, a sense of taking a ridiculous risk in terms of coming off as ridiculous, such as a major plot point being revealed by a door-to-door delivery catalogue or that the owner of the hotel carries around a big teddy bear he talks to.

There's even the entire factor of the actual surfing to bring up, which is sparse but when it takes place gives the series an added odd serenity. The opening title credits are perfect - old footage as if one's own faded memories set to Johnny Appleseed by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros - but it also led to the casting of actual surfers in the cast which adds its own curious touch, the non-actors alongside known actors. Greyson Fletcher as Shawn plays off as a laid back teen in the tulmultous period inhis like; Keala Kennelly as Kai in contrast is my favourite character and the person in the cast who stole many scenes even among some idiosyncratic figures, the calmest figure who adds an incredibly charismatic emotional weight. Even if the show really doesn't have a lot of surfing, when it takes place it offers a respite of relief that befits the spirituality that's grown into that culture - particularly the last of the series, from an opening flying camera in the clouds up to the burst of surfers appearing in the waves befits the zen-like virtues the sport has developed.

So does John from Cincinnati work? For once, I'll leave that to each individual viewer to decide because, honestly, the issue with John from Cincinnati is that, like many other surreal works I've covered, this is one that is entirely to personal taste and is especially so with this particular example. Structured as it is, in mood and whether you can get into its headspace, is the real issue at hand with ever you will appreciate it or not. Expecting a bombastic conclusion even from a cancelled production is not possible here - the closest thing in Episode Six is a monologue that throws a barrage of dense, at times messy philosophical ideas which emphasises the sense that David Milch was stepping out of his comfort zone from a success with Deadwood and was freefalling into this odd spiritual material. I admire his risk, a small cult behind the series just for the jumping off point that, in the history of HBO, this is the one rare work which never even got past the first series, which makes its a curiosity already. But, having spoken as someone who isn't interested in the boom of television in popular culture, finding most of it uninteresting to track down, I have to admire the attempt at something very different here.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Odd/Unconventional

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

Personal Opinion:

So obviously, John from Cincinnati was going to be a strange experience even on a rewatch, argubly the fact that it was meant to be a mainstream television hit, the aesthetic and production style to such a show from HBO, contributing its own distinct personality as a result among other oddities I've covered. (How many weird creations have Muse's cover of Feeling Good in the final credits of an episode for example?) The bigger surprise is how much of a mainstream release it was just in concept, knowing these projects are usually never going to succeed. It's a reminder that, sometimes, when you put your hands together and pray really hard, strange ephemera does appear in pop culture rather than the fringes I usually cover. So naturally, I admired it.

From https://static01.nyt.com/images/2007/06/08/arts/08john.xlarge1.jpg

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

From https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d0VFerE5ktc/WQ_8CHj_qsI/
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Director: Chantal Akerman

Screenplay: Chantal Akerman

Cast: Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman; Jan Decorte as Sylvain Dielman; Henri Storck as the first client; Jacques Doniol-Valcroze as the second client; Yves Bical as the third client

Synopsis: Consisting of three days within the life of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widowed mother of a teenage son and housekeeper, we follow her everyday chores and interactions, as well as her secret interest in sleeping with various men in-between. Reaching Day Two, little mistakes begin to pile up and a sense her life is about to unravel is felt until Day Three...

Anticipating Jeanne Dielman..., all these years, it is a legendary film. A monumental work since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, as pertinent now as then. The major work of Chantal Akerman, whose career is not yet pushed into a place where the mainstream can access her work as easily as it should, but with the utter admiration as a director¹. What was unexpected watching the film, however, is that its aura as a three hour and fifteen minute film which was challenging to view has lost its lustre. In the decades past there has been the seven plus hours of Satantango (1994), Lav Diaz's career where ten hours is a minimum length of his newest film, even a YouTube Garfield parody called Lasagne Cat whose epilogue is four hours and forty minutes long; not to mention Liu Jiayin's Oxhide II (2009), which is meant to be 132 minutes of her with her parents making dumplings for a film with a thematic connection to Jeanne Dielman's long food preparing scenes. Many other examples can be brought up which forces one to not view Jeanne Dielman... and its slow, deliberate pace as an endurance test anymore, which is arguably for the better in the long run. I can view it not as a challenge, but justifying its length as a necessary slow burn, each lengthy passage of mundane activity engaging until it builds to a quiet scream heard in the finale.

Day One is deceptive. Whilst Akerman would not expect this reaction from the viewer, the first passage of the film is much more interesting for me in what happens and aesthetically than what one presume. It is, in hindsight, a deceptive lure before the severity of what happens in Jeanne Dielman's life, but I confess to have been utterly engaged with sights of actress Seyrig doing ordinary chores. Seventies French decor is far more colourful than one would presume, and there is something inherently interesting for me of a long shot of her, facing the camera at the kitchen table, preparing food². In fact there's a clear hypnotic nature to what takes place on Day One immediately. Akerman uses a very rigid style - repetition in the activities (washing, cooking, sewing) for many minutes over three plus hours, matched by the preciseness of how the world is depicted. Excluding scenes outside of Dielman's home, within the house the camera is usually at medium distance and height, head to waist with Dielman many times looking directly at the camera at tables. The fact I found the environments colourful, and the activities appealing, is not the usual reaction one would expect for this film, a document of a woman trapped and confined to a domesticated hell, but that's because when Day Two onwards begins, one becomes aware of something horrible about to happen in the midst of the environment. When the rigid structure eventually wears down on the viewer deliberately, the colourful household becomes mundane and lifeless, and Dielman starts making mistakes as simple as overcooking potatoes.

In terms of a film known as much as a format experiment, it's rewarding to know how necessary its length truly is. Whilst a minimal narrative in plotting, these three hours plus make up three single days in a woman's life fleshed out. The precise of Akerman's work, each move and cut to a new camera frame (even within the same room), brings more out of the work immensely, even at its length without sense of unnecessary excess to the ideas. You have obvious clues to events about to transpire or flesh out our protagonist, that Jeanne has been a widow for a long time or her interactions with her son. The biggest surprise for me, in a film which is undeniably Seyrig's film as the lead, is how important said son, played by Jan Decorte, is in context. He is not in most of the narrative, at school most of the length off-screen, but as the sole person consistently interacting with his mother, the conversations are interesting when they transition from the mundane to the serious. Frank talk of sex among other philosophical subjects that become an unexpectedly distinct edge to the back-story of these characters, alongside Dielman's various words on her husband and life that are pieces building up more than that seen onscreen.

Delphine Seyrig gives an incredible performance in the centre as well. Her prolific in abstract cinema³. Her performance emphasises that Jeanne Dielman... is as much a horror film as it is a drama. It does build up to a horrifying and sudden moment, but the set up towards it is effectively the most subtle of psychological horror as well, where the unloosening of her (through Seyrig's subtle performance) comes not from hallucinations or real unnatural entities but her rigid behaviour becoming unfixed and lost through increasing mistakes and moments of absent mindedness. It fact, whilst the idea of the film as merely an endurance test should be challenged for demeaning its profoundness, to merely call Jeanne Dielman... a "feminist masterpiece" without actually dealing with what the film is about is an insult to it as well. That, in spite of being a widowed woman, Dielman is still going through the motions of a married housewife of time passed, her anecdotes evoking a post-World War II period which feels severed, her actions a mechanical psychological survival process which starts to ebb away. That there is so much that is left intentionally opened is for the better, forcing a viewer to not merely expect a conventional reading of the film but ask and consider the thoughts that would be going through Dielman's head right into the final shot, a lengthy ten minute epilogue of her, sat in the darkened dining room, the cute ornaments in the background no longer seen as they were before, the agonisingly length of the moment before credits a depressurisation, an attempt to deal with the sudden event that came before for her.

Is Jeanne Dielman..., then, an abstract film? The issue out of Akerman's hands, that films have pushed boundaries in length and pace further, which has undercut that aspect of the film, but this is one of those rare, mercurial examples of a film so naturalistic in structure that it is inherently abstract in meaning. As I have continually reminded myself, back in 1975 the will would've been a seismic shock to witness at Cannes or at any cinema, even in a modern theatre having a hypnotic influence over a viewer. It emphasises what "Cinema of the Abstract" is as a choice phrase, that abstract is a contrast to the hegemony of conventional cinematic reality in motion images. That,  (appropriately for cinema which is about contradictions and paradox among others), the realistic is as effecting as the surrealistic, the disruptions of real life activity opposite from "reality" in most cinema as jarring for many viewers of merely conventional, mainstream cinema. Jeanne Dielman... is inherently abstract as homogenised cinema does not include lengthy scenes of a woman preparing food or its languid but intricate structure, an audience used to fast cut Marvel superhero films forced to experience the lengthy act of knitting with the same sense of effect as an irrational moment would. As a result, it fits among such curious relatives I have written about as, whilst not necessarily of the same ilk, they challenge conventions as much as Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles challenges the central image of the meek, quiet housemother throughout itself.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychological/Realism

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

Personal Opinion:

One of those moments, where you see a film of such a great reputation finally, and have to ingest and try to comprehend what you have seen. Jeanne Dielman... is not the "difficult" film I had been brought up with it to be, instead necessitating its length and style into what is far more horrifying and psychologically deeper than most horror films, envisioning domesticity as something even a male viewer can see as soul devouring as a result.

From https://criticsroundup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10
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1) As of 2018, alongside Jeanne Dielman... being restored, a group called the Fondation Chantal Akerman have been founded to assist in exhibiting and showing her filmography. Hopefully this will also mean making the late director's catalogue much more accessible, especially for an Englishman like myself where few of her films (including Jeanne Dielman...) are available.

2) So much so my father, who kept peering in as I watched these scenes, thought I was watching a cooking documentary.

3) Freak Orlando (1981), Last Year of Marienbad (1961), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Daughters of Darkness (1971), Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963), The Milky Way (1969) and Mr. Freedom (1969), enough there to give her a Hall of Fame entry on this blog if I ever created such a segment.