Marebito (2004)

 

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu and Chiaki Konaka

Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto as Masuoka, Tomomi Miyashita as F, Kazuhiro Nakahara as Arei Furoki, Miho Ninagawa as Aya Fukumoto, Shun Sugata as MIB

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Director Shinya Tsukamoto steps in and stars in another's films, that of director Takashi Shimizu. I can see why he brought his talent as an onscreen actor from his own films, a digitally shot horror film with a very idiosyncratic tone. Tsukamoto is Masuoka, a cameraman obsessed with the lives of others, from possible drug addicts living in the building next to his to the catalyst of the tale, a freak subway suicide he caught on tape during his work as a documentary cameraman, part of his desire to capture the fear of those who die may feel. The suicide he caught on camera on camera is not what one would presume, but a random older man stabbing himself in the eye on camera. Strange visions from rewatching this footage and ruminating on its meaning lead to Masuoka returning back to the site he filmed the suicide at and to a small crawlspace that leads into the underground.  

The resulting film is a slow burn which takes plot strands which you would presume would go in an obvious direction, only to confound them. A notable aspect to this, alongside director/co-writer Shimizu co-writer Chiaki Konaka, who I have kept up with and is a very idiosyncratic voice in his own right. I have had to put a hesitance in my respect for him in case he took the conspiracy theories he has touched upon in his work seriously, infamously creating a villain in a radio play for the Digimon anime franchise which was a physical manifestation of "political correctness", one that used "cancel culture" as an attack¹. When that happened in 2021, people learnt that his blog writings revealed to be interested in such conspiracies¹ in a time, especially in the West, where conspiracy theories have no longer stayed the likes of Area 51 but insidious ones of far-right ideologies which have been allowed to bleed into other conspiracy theories and corrupted the concept. This is something I have to be cagey about, unless it is revealed more to this contextually was lost or he apologises, as Chiaki Konaka is a very distinct writing voice I wish has not been lost in bad ideologies and just bad ideas. He only has a few live action films, and most of his career is in Japanese anime, where very idiosyncratic titles of note like Serial Experiments Lain, a 1998 TV animated series, present such idiosyncratic takes on plotting, on realities bleeding into each other, and references to culture which you find here in Marebito alongside Takashi Shimizu's collaborations.

The title is a clear nod to the references in itself, "marebito" a Japanese concept of spirits or divine beings briefly leaving the afterlife to visit the living world, which happens here explicitly just in how the older man who committed suicide will visit Masuoka. He is part of the elaborate bows around this movie's key storyline, that Masuoka will find a nude woman in this underground world through the subway station, chained to a rock, who he will take up to the surface, christening her "F" (Tomomi Miyashita). She will not eat or drink, but he soon learns she likes the taste of blood, especially human, but Marebito takes unexpected directions in the best of ways. For starters, the underground section before we meet F is distinct, Masuoka finding himself in complex tunnels built in World War II and older, where homeless people there can read your narration monologues and the dead walk, the suicidal man greeting Masuoka, and discussing the differences between the hollow earth theory and that of complex tunnels which he thinks is more legitimate. Konaka's finger prints are all over the references in this, from Madame Blavatsky to the christened F being called Masuoka's Kasper Hauser, in mind to the real figure, a 19th century German youth who was said have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and the subject of Werner Herzog's 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. F, a mute woman with Dracula-like teeth, is found in the literal mountains of madness, crystallised architecture out of Lovecraftian lore, apt as Konaka has written Cthulian Mythos works, and that there is an explicit reference to her likely being related to the "Deros". These figures wandering the place of great danger, portrayed by Butoh dancers, and are her likely kin are explicitly creations of a science fiction writer named Richard Sharpe Shaver, an American whose stories of underground cave dwelling entities called Deros which were presented to Amazing Stories magazine as real documentations of this race.

This still shows the hand of Shimizu as well, the opaque tone of Marebito created between the two writers one of its best aspects, where even when it plays with the idea this is all Masuoka's sanity collapsing, it confounds this. It never goes for the obvious, which presents a far more appropriately eerie tone for horror storytelling, where the unknown in the plot, the completely unexplained, is more terrifying. It is very different horror film in general, with the literary and mystical references. Even when an obvious plot thread comes ahead, Masuoka killing people to feed F as he comes to love her in a weird daughter/lover/pet relationship, it undercuts this on purpose when other films could drag on to less interesting escalations. In terms of the central production,

Tsukamoto is not a case of a director who narcissistically puts himself in central roles in his own films, but part of both the collaborative nature of said films, starting his career in a theatrical troupe whose put together his debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) together even if he became the auteur director, and also because he is a compelling actor in his own right. It is fascinating when he appears in others' films, just memorable in Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer (2001), and here he fits this role of a small man with a strange obsession as comfortable as ones from his own films like Bullet Ballet (1998), about his character crafting a handmade firearm in mourning of a loved one's suicide and a fixation on destruction through guns. Here, what could become a simple horror premise, which could have still been fun, becomes compelling by both the dreamlike logic and Tsukamoto's committed performance for a character obsessed with fear. Credit also has to be made, in terms of performance, for Tomomi Miyashita as F. Early in her career, which contains many tokusatsu works like multiple roles in the Ultraman franchise coming later on, there is the clear sense she has a dance background as her performance, mostly without dialogue having to convey F in only entirely movements. Bravely introduced contrasting her physical beauty against the violence of her bruised leg chained to a wall, she contrasts explicit sensuality in the characterisation against animalism, cat-like moments around an apartment which uncomfortable contrasts, of an animal which consumes blood against a sensuality, the uncomfortable schism of beastly violence and even bestiality against lust and love. Her performance is just as important and good, and it is a shame there are less prominent roles in her filmography.

Marebito never takes the expected route, and even when it hints at this all being in Masuoka's head, that within itself is a rug pull moment in an interesting twist, an existential tangent contemplating the scenario at the coast with a dead man as a thoughtful conversationalist. Chiaki Konaka has left many of his stories in animation ambivalent on the reality, not always metaphorical but literally with stories set in fictional stages, characters breaking through timelines, or characters becoming spiritual entities in the literal sense having been once robots that become of living flesh. It has a dream logic, which is apt and nicely contrasts the shot-on-digital realism shot on the streets. A random salary man beating Masuoka up for filming has no real story beat, but feels right for character beats instead, and simple things like a mobile phone in a back alley for Masuoka to answer is both a natural moment that feels surreal but could happen, becoming menacing for a horror story.

In the end, you can argue even if held in perpetual fear for all his life or afterlife, Masuoka could effectively have gained a happy conclusion if only filmed and chained to the same rock with F. It may seem an odd idea to view this as a happy ending, now her pet, but considering the perversity and tone of the film before, it seems credible even if a truly eerie ending as well. Obviously, you cannot ignore that, in between the filming of this film, Takashi Shimizu was building The Grudge franchise he started from his indie filmmaking era into bigger and bigger theatrical productions, cultivating a legendary horror franchise of his own creation. Making this in-between those, it is great he was also creating this unique production, but it is a film stuck within a legacy which could easily overshadow this, more so as this is a title from the Tartan Asian Extreme era of UK film distribution, the legendary sub label of a distributor that is long gone and thus lost to old DVD copies. This, especially in mind to the early digital filmmaking era of the 2000s yet to be acclaimed as a niche, is one of those little gems needing to be re-evaluated.

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1) Digimon Tamers 20th Anniversary Stage Show Features 'Cancel Culture' Villain, written by Kim Morrissy and published for Anime News Network on 4th August 2021.

Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

 

Director: Herbert Tevos and Ron Ormond

Screenplay: Herbert Tevos

Cast: Jackie Coogan as Doctor Aranya; Richard Travis as Dan Mulcahey; Allan Nixon as "Doc" Tucker; Mary Hill as Doreen; Robert Knapp as Grant Phillips; Chris Pin Martin as Pepe; Harmon Stevens as Masterson; Nico Lek as Van Croft; Samuel Wu as Wu; John Martin as Frank; Tandra Quinn as Tarantella

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Of course, I was not a fan of this sort of film when I was younger - cheesy b-movies back in the day would be something I would view from merely their surface in terms of their "badness". As a result, returning to Mesa of Lost Women, the flamenco guitar over the beginning, I was more at home to appreciate it, especially when the opening overblown narration, mocking humanity's constant struggle against insects, was already enough to hook me.

An oil surveyor encounters a distressed man and woman in the Muerto Desert, the book end for this couple to tell a tale about giant spiders and an evil doctor, specifically one named Doctor Aranya (Jackie Coogan) who is experimenting on the pituitary gland and hormones in humans, exchanging them with hexapoda and vice versa with a specific tarantula breed. The problem with Mesa of Lost Women, with any film like this, is entirely that they fail to deliver even for unintentional pleasures; their bizarre expedition in genre plotting are not undermined by the wooden performances or lower budgets but, as this comes to sadly, a string of bland dialogue scenes. The premise is strange enough to not need these, as Aranya's experiments have lead to human spiders - only the males are all cast with dwarf actors, as to reflect the size of the male spiders to the female, and the spider women are cast with beautiful models. One doctor's psychically controlled harem (with one actual giant spider) is contrasted by the obvious metaphoric fear of women from men that is impossible to not ignore, the paradoxical idea of women who films like this want men to fantasise about, but see as a threat in themselves for the same virtues they are fantasised about. It comes obvious as the film was sold on Tandra Quinn as Tarantella, a model and starlet whose career was sadly very short with this her most prominent production, a shame as, one of the virtues in a dialogueless role, the film for its many flaws is distinct for the likes of her character, its personification of a femme fatale. The real set piece of the production is her "spider dance" in the middle, a performance meant to be erotic but show something if off with her figure, as the spider women are dangerous and are immense to even gunshot wounds. You can view it as sexist (even misogynistic) alongside other genre films about inhuman tribes of women, but alongside the tameness of the film, its quirks undercut this instead making tropes like this fascinating to encounter in realms of pulp storytelling, reoccurring trends of men's own libidos as much their undoing as the female figures themselves, a neurosis patterned onscreen unintentionally for how many times it was raised in these genre films.

It is an absolute shame Mesa of Lost Women is sluggish eventually, its real crime as eventually every main character brought into this is stuck in a woodland to pad out the hour plus running time. Say what you want of a Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), even if a bad film to many, but before even the Tim Burton film on Ed Wood, we could see how idiosyncratic that film was, never feeling padded and always memorable, being one of its monologues or a wobbling tombstone. It is a shame as, for pure cheese, you have so much to run with in the premise of Mesa of the Lost Women. There is enough to salve the flaws, though he cannot heal them entirely, in Harmon Stevens playing Mr. Masterson, the scientist Aranya tries to convince to help him, stealing the film as he got the idea to be the Renfield of the scenario. The man tuned insane by immortal spider women, his line reactions alone alongside the dialogue itself, with disassociated detachment and innocence despite being gun crazy, won me over as the best part of the film, what the film should have been entirely in tone even if others may mock his performance as being comically broad by accident. You have possible melodrama to work with too, a younger woman on her wedding night with a vain (and unreliable) older man who falls for the male pilot, who is also more adapt to surviving their plight when Masterson hijacks the wedding plan and forces it to land near Aranya's mountain. Even Wu (Samuel Wu, his only role), a stereotype of the man servant who is docile and quotes philosophical platitudes, the dogsbody who eventually betrays everyone, is memorable as one of the only other people you could envision surviving in the jungle in this scenario, showing his bravery enough for a crazed man to even hand him his firearm out of respect.

Mesa of the Lost Women is not Plan 9, nor Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), lacking that spice of being truly unique in this realm of weirdo public domain films, even if they all have Mystery Science Theater 3000 runs written all over them. It is a shame that this is not as memorable as it is, and among the cheap DVD I saw it on originally, alongside a William Beaudine film The Ape Man (1943), a poverty row Bela Lugosi film, I am not surprised I was not a fan back in the day as it is eventually a sluggish production. Far more interesting nowadays too, whilst I had fun with this, is in one of its creators Ron Osmond. Osmond proliferated in low budget westerns in the forties, and exploitation cinema from the fifties, until an airplane accident in the late sixties devastated him and brought him to Christianity. This did not stop his film career, merely brought him to working with Mississippi evangelist Estus Pirkle on an infamous trilogy of religious films. Preserved by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn through his NWR label, those films - The Believer's Heaven (1977), The Burning Hell (1974), and especially If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), the latter Pirkle's anti-communist tale where lawnmower death threatens Americans if the Soviets invaded - make Mesa of Lost Women quaint in comparison. The older film is still fun, not too long to draw itself out, but clearly was a title that could have been better even as a cheesy production, Ron Osmond by himself far more wonderfully psychotronic than the film itself.

Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

 

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Rio Kishida

Based on the work of the Marquis de Sade

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

Canon Fodder

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medousa (1998)

Director: George Lazopoulos

Screenplay: George Lazopoulos

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

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

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

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

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

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

Macabre (1980)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Roberto Gandus, Lamberto Bava and Antonio Avati

Cast: Bernice Stegers as Jane Baker, Stanko Molnar as Robert Duval, Veronica Zinny as Lucy Baker, Roberto Posse as Fred Kellerman, Ferdinando Orlandi as Mr. Wells, Fernando Pannullo as Leslie Baker, Elisa Kadigia Bove as Mrs. Duval

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Set in the USA, specifically New Orleans with Southern accents in the dub, Macabre was the debut film for Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary Mario Bava, and it is less a horror film in conventions but a really twisted horror melodrama. The set up is a film in itself but sets up a more morbid narrative: a wife named Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is having an adulterous affair behind her husband's back with a man named Fred (Roberto Posse), creating suspicion in the eldest daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) to the point the later, in an act of psychosis, drowns her younger brother in the bathtub out of revenge for the betrayal. The drive back, panicked by the horror of losing her own son, leads Jane and Fred to crash the car, Fred losing his head in the collision with a wall.

A year later, the parents have divorced, and Jane has had mental health therapy, but this perverse melodrama with sultry jazz on the score by Ubaldo Continiello will see the repercussions of this incident for Mrs. Baker. Another figure of importance is Robert (Stanko Molnar), a blind instrument repair man who, in the prologue when his mother was still alive, let a room in the top floor for Jane and Fred for their affair, letting her take the room again by herself separated from her husband. Slow paced, I mentioned this was less a horror film in the traditional sense, and in a gruesome turn in the plot, befits its name a macabre drama in presentation. Late seventies chic of over textured and saturated coloured wallpaper and decor overwhelm the main setting, Robert's home, be it the marble wall bathroom with pure white sink to yellowish gold on everything from clothes to wall decor. Because of this, there is a sick lavishness to a sick story of love as Jane has not forgotten Fred, and someone comes to her room at night as Robert is still able to hear from the floor below.

Robert is our sympathetic figure, sweet and attractive with bold blue eyes, but they are unable to see a thing, Robert not playing a bad stereotype either of a blind man, caught blissfully unaware of Mrs. Baker ritualizing her beloved Fred, with even a portable shrine to him carried with her when she takes the room to stay in. Robert will learn the horrible truth, and even before then he is stuck knowing she pleasures herself at night seemingly on the top floor whilst he pangs in unrequited love. The story is made more complicated by Lucy herself, playing another obsessive in wanting her parents to reunite even if it means tormenting her own mother, like Lucy adding a photo of the late younger brother for her mother to find in her rented room. Wanting said parents back, in the same way Jane wants Fred back, makes up the key theme of the film, of two generations of people clinging to their past in unhealthy, destructive ways, making the film compelling as the equivalent of a radio drama extended into a ninety minute film. As I get older, this is the tone I prefer for a lot of horror, unless they can be great or fun exceptions, much more interesting to see this type of story you could tell in a thirty minute tale with audio only have its form expanded into this intriguing movie.

It admittedly has a plot twist you would have not gotten away with on an old radio show like Beyond Midnight or Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The twisted aspect is what Mrs. Baker keeps in the top of the refrigerator in the room, [Huge Spoiler] which turns out to be an act of necrophilia with Fred's head where the frozen peas should be stored. It is gross but the idea of a love so strong it turns into this obsession to even preserve what remains of him, as a talisman even if involving their actual remains, is compelling. More so as the story is actually based on a real story of a woman who kept her lover's head in a refrigerator too, Bava given a newspaper clipping of the incident by Pupi Avati, the filmmaker who also co-writer with his brother Antonio Avati¹. [Spoilers End] Even if the twist will be obvious if you have sussed up on your plot tropes, and have a sick imagination, the story is macabre literally for this sickly obsession with love in a lurid depiction.

It is helped by the lead Bernice Stegers, a British actress who was spotted through Federico Fellini's City of Women (1980)¹, made around the same time, giving a committed role as a woman lost in her own insanity. Her career is in small roles between film and television, but she would also reappear in Xtro (1982), a film which somehow managed to outdo this Italian film in terms of bizarre imagery. The perversity of the story is enough even with an even more absurd and supernatural end scene for an added jolt, because of its growing tension of everything starts to collapse. Even mother and daughter will be at war with each other in a gristly conclusion. Lamberto Bava's films after, to be honest, are not subtle in the slightest, his most iconic Demons (1985) as over-the-top as you can get, and whilst Macabre fits the director's career in the final act, when everything goes to Hell, the slow burn nature of this particular tale stands out with great reward.

 

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1) Taken from Macabre and the Golden Age of Italian Exploitation (2009), directed by Elijah Drenner.

Manhattan Baby (1982)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Elisa Livia Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti

Cast: Christopher Connelly as Professor George Hacker, Laura Lenzi as Emily Hacker, Giovanni Frezza as Tommy Hacker, Brigitta Boccoli as Susie Hacker, Cinzia De Ponti as Jamie Lee, Cosimo Cinieri as Adrian Mercato, Carlo De Mejo as Luke

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Starting in Egypt, a young girl named Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), whilst with her family, is given a talisman by a sinister blind woman, and from here you get one of a few curiosities from Lucio Fulci's career. It is curious to have an Egyptian themed supernatural film appear in his career as, whilst Egyptian iconography would find its way round pop cultural media, in terms of cinema not a lot of films really exist for this trope at some point into the mid-century. Until The Mummy (1999) offered a brief exception, it feels like something never truly in the mainstream of cinema after the early 20th century. An aesthetic usually evoking mummies and pharaohs' curses, unless you are talking about other areas of pop culture like video games to animation where the use of Egyptian iconography feels disconnected from the reality, there is the inherently problematic colonial layers to real Egyptology which may have put people off this. Including the theft of Egypt's ancient history until we had to start giving it all back from the West, this is something which has to be considered alongside the fact that there has never really been many films at all with ancient Egyptian mythology either, just an outsider's perspective. Fulci's film does not even bother with really dealing with the complexities of treating this culture, beginning with Susie's father Professor George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) helping at a dig site. It can be accused of following the demonization of non-Western culture, in how an evil cult within ancient Egyptian history continues its legacy of terror through attacking Susie, but the vague dreamlike nature of this film thankfully neuters this greatly.

There is also the fact that, for most of its length, this is in the same ballpark as Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist from the same year, of a family being terrorised with the children under threat in a New York City apartment complex when Susie brings the talisman home. It is also a work whose obscurity likely comes from the unexpected restraint this has in context of this era of the director's career, not becoming gory except for brief snippets. Barring the brief sight of an Indiana Jones death trap with Fulci violence, the film leaves Egypt to be fully set in New York City, the Egyptian curse only important to allow certain symbolism from the sand to scorpions which Fulci is interesting in depicting. Instead, this is a horror mood piece, one of the more subdued films from this period. Fulci by now was becoming known for his extreme violence in his work, which you can see the contrast to with The New York Ripper (1982) released the same year, one of his most controversial and sleaziest films of his entire career. Instead here, whilst eventually gore comes, there is the built instead seeing that the talisman's aura is also affecting her brother Tommy, Giovanni Frezza a regular (and recognisable) member of Italian genre cinema as that blond child actor, whilst their professor father George spends part of the film blinded by ancient temple lasers.

It gets bloody, but it focuses more on the oneiric tone that films like The Beyond (1980) had entirely. This is still a film where a person is pecked to death by sentient taxidermied birds, but alongside its Egyptian theming, cobras menacing a Manhattan apartment, it feels at a distance from other films of the director's from the time. This thankfully has the woozy mood to compensate for this, with plenty of surreal images transpiring as elevators become possessed and the children's bedroom becomes a portal, spitting the office clown into the Egyptian desert dead on arrival, and ruining the carpet with sand fed by the Nile. Fabio Frizzi really helps with this through the score, adding to this film that does show Fulci's morbid eye for imagery, ending with even subtle images like someone dead partially coming through a bleeding white wall. It definitely feels like a film where, in another's hand, it would have been one of the cheesier films from the Italian genre wave, and it is still a film which could have done with a touch of something else to really grow into something special. Even without this feeling though, it is an idiosyncratic title, one that showed beyond flaws that its director and the production team helped raise it.

Mad Dog Time (1996)

 

Director: Larry Bishop

Screenplay: Larry Bishop

Cast: Jeff Goldblum as Mickey Holliday, Richard Dreyfuss as Vic, Gabriel Byrne as Ben London, Ellen Barkin as Rita Everly, Diane Lane as Grace Everly, Gregory Hines as Jules Flamingo, Kyle MacLachlan as Jake Parker, Burt Reynolds as Jackie Jackson, Larry Bishop as Falco, Henry Silva as Sleepy Joe, Michael J. Pollard as Red, Christopher Jones as Falco, Billy Idol as Lee Turner, Angie Everhart as Gabriella, Billy Drago as Wells, Paul Anka as Danny, Rob Reiner as Albert, Joey Bishop as Gottlieb, Richard Pryor as Jimmy the Gravedigger

An Abstract Candidate

 

Mad Dog Time was one of those films flashed up into my attention at one point, in a context long vanished from my memory but occupying the space now given it, one which did initial come with a negative baggage whether it deserved it or not with how it was talked about. My first encounter with Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop, one of the members of the "Rat Pack" with Frank Sinatra, was negative when my younger self was not a fan of Hell Ride (2008), a Quentin Tarantino co-produced biker film, which I will have to return to with so much time having past that the old opinion has been forgotten let alone my memories of that film. That film was not helped as I was getting into cinema at the time of the "neo-grindhouse" wave of genre films, in the shadow of Tarantino's own 2007 project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriquez, which I was not a fan of back then. Ironically, Mad Dog Time found itself caught up in the shadow of Tarantino as it was lumped into the films post-Pulp Fiction, when it blew up in 1994, which led to a lot of self-reflective and dialogue heavy crime films come in from its wake. Mad Dog Time was cursed by a zero star review from Roger Ebert¹, one I am going to commit a blasphemy in saying is actually a pretty terrible review. It really does not get into anything about what the film is barring its obsession with dialogue eccentricities, such as the leads having similar sounding names, which is definitely absurd, but spends most of its time trying to think of absurd ways to describe something being pointless without actually needing a film to critique involved. This is something, as time goes on, and as I came to cinema in the time of the greater weight of amateur voices and the internet in opinion, where I find myself realising the film critics who became huge, usually the American ones like Ebert or Pauline Kael, were still figures with their own personal opinions even if they are still worth reading the reflections of.

That may seem insanely blasphemous to start this review with, but Mad Dog Time is definitely one of those subjective films you think is being too smart for its own good to the point of pretention, or you vibe with, and the Ebert review really does not get into what exactly Larry Bishop's film is, especially as it really sticks out next to other self reflective crime films I have seen from the nineties. For me, built with the help of Larry Bishop being friends with some of the cast and others willing to work on this lower budget film, Mad Dog Time from the get-go has an absurdist artificiality to the proceedings which was immediately interesting. This premise has been seen before and that is clearly the point as the film goes through with deconstructing this premise, in which a mob boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) is going to be let out the mental health hospital, and everyone is going to be dragged in and then likely dragged into a body bag, such as Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum) for being with Vic's estranged girlfriend Grace (Diane Lane). From the get-go, there is a voice-over set against the cosmos itself explaining this is an alternative dimension, starting with an illustration of a nightclub only to turn into the real set, mostly locked into artificial world based on locations and sets. The best comparison points here, for the set up, is that for a film which Larry Bishop openly admits was inspired by the likes of Samuel Beckett²  this brings to mind too Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), author Norman Mailer's infamous adaptation of his own novel which is a bizarre, sick humoured subversion of crime film tropes, and Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985), which does also fit into Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time, of being a film about "two or three characters [starting] out in a scene and [reciting] some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them will get shot"². Godard's film, which was made as much to be able to make his controversial take on the Virgin Birth in Hail Mary (1985), has more of his introspective musings on art, and significantly less people being shot, but is as much an artificial dissection of the crime films he grew up with as much as Tough Guys... is a fresh take from a veteran author who would have started his literary career at their boom in pulp literature, and Larry Bishop’s film which comes from hindsight to them too.

This Godard comparison is apt, likely as for the late Swiss director’s film, the crime genre were always artificial for me. They are films I have seen from my youth, and they exist outside the reality of crime as artificial stories of morality, unless you see the films like his or even these pulpier versions which undercut and dissect these stories. Vic is going to finally leave the asylum but already chaos is brewing. By the first minutes, actor Michael J. Pollard of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) has been shot dead, and this beings the absurdity clearly here, that this is a world of mindless violence and power games where the sole outside world is a mortician, frequently mentioned, who clearly gets enough clients to work on in the crime world he can afford on-bench advertising. Roger Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time was that this was about characters just standing around and pontificating, which would sound pretentious if this was just meant to be cool. Despite some of these characters giving their opinion on the philosophy of life, this dialogue usually leads to funny one liners or the character coming off as ridiculous on purpose. So much is clearly written by Larry Bishop as a joke, everything clearly unhinged and pointlessly violent, beginning with whatever Gabriel Byrne managed to channel as “Brass Balls” Ben London. His is a deeply odd performance just in the accented cadence he chooses, but as the film goes, this becomes one of the best performances, as a rare comedy performance from the actor, and a sign of how artificial the film is.

It can be too "clever" with the naming of certain characters and its symbolism, which seem too obvious when you realise what is hinted in them, but with the eccentric wordplay, such as imagining all of Vic's personalities visiting his nightclub, you see Bishop was never interested in making these characters "cool". They are instead amalgamations of eccentric figures inspired by crime cinema and the Rat Pack, the group his father was part of and the music throughout nodded to. You could figure out a way to stage this in a theatre performance, which is a virtue, but the production design by Dina Lipton does add a lot to its playful eccentricities. Attempting to be the Iago to this Shakespearian tale, but coming off as a lame sleaze weasel, Kyle MacLachlan's base is literally a warehouse barring the abrupt cameo by his own personal aircraft, which is a hilarious non-sequitur alongside being introduced to his cronies, even Billy Drago, eating sushi. Throughout, the fact many scenes stay within warehouse spaces or Vic’s nightclub does not attempt to hide, as much as Godard’s Detective did in a hotel, these plot clichés being forced through this world and puncturing them inherently in the locations used.

The least expected people popping up adds on a first viewing, but to this film's credit, everyone gets something to work with which would grow on other viewings. Yes, that is musician Billy Idol of all people in a small role to challenge Jeff Goldblum to a duel, first revolver to kill the opponent to win, and he stands out, looking like he wandered off another crime pastiche, Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985), just for telling Goldblum to fuck himself. This also presents the most cinematic part of the film, that all pistol duels are done sat down, usually behind desks, which is the type of thing I could see Seijun Suzuki having done, with the Hachiro Guryu team who worked on his films^a, when he dissected yakuza cinema out of boredom of the templates demanded of him by Nikkatsu studios. That is part of the reason why this grew on me as I was watching it, a film trying to be cleaver but undercutting its pretensions by both the quality of the performances and that it is deliberately exaggerated on purpose. All the films, many more well regarded, I have mentioned may be viewed as an excuse to defend Mad Dog Time with comparison, it is, but because this shares so many of their traits and their quirks, a few even maligned themselves, sharing a collected DNA between them all in doing different things to undercut this genre.

This also includes the fact Mad Dog Time is incredibly funny, with the fact that ninety percent of the cast dies by the end becoming part of its sick sense of humour, more so because the cast is full of diverse names who all get idiosyncratic touches, like cult legend Henry Silva as a narcoleptic heavy to the least expected Burt Reynolds cameo possible. That your two female leads are figures above this lunacy - Diane Lane standing as calm and collected, Ellen Barkin captivating as someone whose irritable energy is nonetheless contrasted by her character's love for Mick - does emphasis this too. The two figures who keep this world sane among the men are, ironically, Richard Dreyfuss despite being the character meant to be the ticking time bomb, playing the role in a calm of a man after having stripped everything away, and Jeff Goldblum, who radiates film noir charm that makes this, even if you hate the film, one of his best performances. Goldblum is trademarked for his nervous energy, but until he is caught off-guard and forced to try to outsmart his enemies by talking his way out of the situation, his character of Mick is cool and absolutely in control. Even if he has cheated on two sisters, in Grace, who they both know are not meant for each other, and her sister Rita, who is meant to be together with Mick in their love-hate chemistry, the character is still likable and it is because Goldblum plays the role so well.

Even that he can be rattled as a character works, because of Goldblum’s performance. Like a character from many older film noirs, he does play it like the underdog leads in that he is always precariously doomed, but always has the one liner to stick it into someone. Even one of the more abrupt turns, a fake copy of a hit man eventually played by Larry Bishop himself, feels like a pastiche from old pulp radio stories, emphasising how with all the back stabbings and shootings here, nothing is for certain and Mick has to figure out how to survive it. Considering someone pretends to have a heart condition, using Tic Tacs as a fake medication, for as long as they can for the right moment to kill someone shows the absurd lengths for nothing this deals with, the film playing to the idea of the pointless machinations of these gangsters striving for power only leading to chaos. Mad Dog Time was kneecapped itself when it was realised, one where the film won me over in the prolonged joke of Vic threatening Ben London to leave town, only to shoot him in the kneecap when he refuses and telling him to hop off from town. The pointless amount of death is the joke, and it is telling the sanest act is to decide to not draw the trigger on oneself and save another even if one last person is shot to accomplish this. Even that this ends with a sentimental finale, whilst part of the many aspects that may make this an acquired taste, made this a film that vibed for me perfectly. Film opinion is subjective, but with Mad Dog Time, it is weird now seeing this elusive film, dismissed back in the day, only to find myself looking at its negative reactions with surprise. Not necessarily because the film would appeal to everyone, truly an “acquired taste” in how much of it plays against conventions, but because whilst I absolutely see the imperfect moments and all that would put those off in its choices, I have seen a lot of films undermine the tropes of crime cinema like this even before Quentin Tarantino, the supposed reason for this film existing, and see this share all the virtues I have found in those films as here, winning me over as a result as an underrated production.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

 

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1) Roger Ebert's Mad Dog Time review, originally published on November 29th 1996.

2) Larry Bishop's interview as part of the Projection Booth podcast's review on Mad Dog Time, released August 20th 2021.

a) The collective pen name for Seijun Suzuki himself, Takeo Kimura, Atsushi Yamatoya, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Hangai.

Mystery Train (1989)

 

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Masatoshi Nagase as Jun, Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, Screamin' Jay Hawkins as the Night Clerk, Cinqué Lee as the Bellboy, Jodie Markell as Sun Studio Guide, Nicoletta Braschi as Luisa, Elizabeth Bracco as Dee Dee, Sy Richardson as the Newsvendor, Tom Noonan as the Man In Diner, Joe Strummer as Johnny "Elvis", Rick Aviles as Will Robinson, Steve Buscemi as Charlie, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ed, Tom Waits as the Radio D.J.

Canon Fodder

 

His name is Dave.

An anthology produced with backing from JVC, the Japanese electronics company did work in multiple mediums such as video games to anime, so this is not an alien concept to them alongside their main form of business, including their legacy in televisions and videotape recorders. Thankfully, among their investments was also Jim Jarmusch's 1989 tribute to Memphis and its music, the beginning of his series of anthologies over these years such as Night on Earth (1991) to compiling the Coffee and Cigarettes films started in 1986 into one film from 2003.

Mystery Train really is not a film about a dramatic plot, instead three interconnecting mood pieces, with the first absolutely setting up this greater emphasis away from dramatic tension as there is none, only the adventures of a young man and woman from Yokohama in Japan. They do argue whether Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins was better, but are a loving couple. They are tourists out of their element, star struck by the home of their favourite music, without any cheap jokes at their expense; even the later presentations of this film through Criterion went further to fix issues in the past with the subtitles for their dialogue, mostly in Japanese, which prevented viewers from knowing everything they say. They say a lot, as loving music fans who wonder the real locations of Memphis, including a confused tour of Sun Records, with a language barrier, a leather jacket between them on her, and their large red luggage case being carried by the pair on a giant wooden pole. Both of the actors, Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, stand out with personality, both with prolific careers after this. There is also the added delight that, looking the part for a youthful rockabilly here or a Wong Kar-Wai protagonist, Masatoshi Nagase became grizzled as he got older and starred, in just one year, in Sion Sono's Suicide Club (2001), Gakuryū Ishii's Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), and Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera (2001), three of the most idiosyncratic Japanese filmmakers at their most idiosyncratic and interesting.

Their story is entirely about two people talking and bonding, some arguing and the cool trick of using a lighter with your feet being demonstrated. To be honest, Jarmusch's tone for many of his films, whether a good comparison for some or not, is closer to Quentin Tarantino's throughout his career, extensive conversation from characters about their obsessions, only with the emphasis on Jarmusch further from cinema to an entire spectrum of tangents, from Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes being obsessed over a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes to Mystery Train having a tangent over one of the characters being named Will Robinson, after the Lost in Space television series, which he dismisses as dumb white people being stuck on an asteroid. Though Jarmusch has dabbled in more overt plots too - Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) - another factor to his career, unlike Tarantino, is a more warm and humane tone, where even when it comes to his horror film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), it is more about bonding over awesome old LPs and character dynamics with the horror coming unexpectedly, even as a punch line for sick humoured gags. The Limits of Control (2009), his drone metal scored assassin narrative, plays like a pastiche but not in an ironic way, and with Mystery Train, though a gun is set off at two points, it feels entirely like an empathetic ode to these characters obsessed with culture of all kinds.

Thankfully, Jarmusch has always been able to make likable characters, the first act's outsiders who go along without unnecessary contrivances against their expense. They also set up the central hub to all the scenes, as they are the first to enter the hotel everyone in the three stories reach, where you have Cinqué Lee, Spike Lee's brother, as the bellhop, and legendary proto-shock rock musician and singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, in an incredible red suit, as the hotel manager. When not eating a Japanese plum, these two are in the centre as a Greek chorus to all the other stories. This includes a grieving Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), travelling to Rome with her husband's casket, in a story where she is able to overcome this in spite of this. This involves Tom Noonan, being very creepy, talking about encountering the ghost of 1956 Elvis in the night, forced to flee him but encountering another woman lost also by herself to share a hotel room with. For the third story tension does come in, but with a comedic edge, involving Joe Strummer of The Clash, the legendary punk band. By this point, Strummer had disbanded the band in 1986 after the infamous Cut the Crap (1985) album, compelling to listen to as a strange mix of football chanting, layered audio and cheap synth beats, but understandably a misfire of big proportions even as someone who found songs likable on it. It was the ill-advised decision by Strummer to have key members of the band forced out the band, replace them and attempt to return to their roots without doing so at all. He would move onto solo projects and also start a film career, such as here or with Doctor Chance (1997) by F.J. Ossang, a French film maker whose films I wish was more readily available, where he has a small cameo talking about his gonads. Strummer is Johnny, or Elvis as everyone calls him due to a passing similarity, an English ex-pat who has lost his wife and job. Drunk, and with a loaded gun, his brother-in-law as portrayed by Steve Buscemi, continuing a career here of always getting the worst luck, having to be brought in with Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) to stop him doing mischief. "Elvis", due to one racist liquor seller later, does end up firing the gun and they find themselves hiding in the hotel as a trio, stuck talking in one of the rooms about the fact there should be a Malcolm X suite instead of Elvis photos everywhere.

Mystery Train is not a dramatic, plot driven film even by this point, and this is factoring in that the real ghost of Elvis Presley accidentally appears in a hotel room for a cameo. Mystery Train is about the characters in place, not forced to move for the sake of drama but allowed to breathe, Jarmusch liking to write extensive dialogue between them hanging out. His cinema is not as overt as Tarantino's in being post-modern or self-reflective either, instead name checking his favourite things but Jarmusch still emphasising the characters existing in the pretence of narrative structures. They are characters with suggested lives, unlike early Pulp Fiction era Tarantino where they were absolutely archetypes. Set around one specific time period, with Tom Waits as the radio announcer's voice heard through all this, Memphis itself and the cultural heritage is as much the subject, the title of the film itself a song heard in both versions by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. A warm film, it nonetheless does also tackle some serious topics in this mood; the two covers of Mystery Train in itself two also name checks the issue of Elvis being placed as a white musician seen as appropriating black musicians' work and being easier to sell to white audiences, which is a subject of discussion alongside tensions of race occasionally raised in the film. Elvis himself is not demonised, but for a fond film, which is charming and sweet, it still nods to complexities which Jim Jarmusch has shown throughout his career, as it is using these three stories to create a work about Memphis as a place with its rich history just in terms of music, let alone the actual urban landscape as shown throughout.

Mystery Train has always been a film I admired, in mind that it is a film literally about nothing if you take a simple view of it - no consequences, even of firing a gun into someone, or two, are shown at all with an open ending to the third story. Nonetheless it does feel like an experience, lived in, enjoyed, with a few one liners which are hilarious, and it wins me over repeatedly every time I return to this film.