The Nostril Picker (1993/1988)

 

Director: Mark Nowicki

Screenplay: Steven Hodge

Cast: Carl Zschering as Joe Bukowski; Edward Tanner as Vince Armstrong; Laura Cummings as Armstrong; Gail Didia as Crisi Stroud; Heidi M. Gregg as Tracy Harper; Aimee Molinaro as Brenda Kearn; Ann Flood as Jo Bukowski; Clyde Surrell as Ed Simpson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I think the best way to introduce a film with that title, though this will be a more balanced and fair review, is an old review I made when I once viewed this as one of the worst films I had ever seen:

Once upon a time when I was just an adolescent, I was with my parents in a DVD rental shop when we saw this on the shelf, with a picture of a man with a finger up his nose and a knife in his other hand on the front cover. It fascinated all of us what it was about. Years later, at sixteen or seventeen, I rented this from an online DVD rental site, and turned it off in the first quarter of the running time. Forcing myself through the whole film later that night, I realized the only good thing about this was the title. There is not even gratuitous nostril picking in the film when all is said and done. Mike will tell you all there needs to be known about how terrible this is.

Barring the weird third person switch as if I have sudden turned into Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, the story is funny to reflect on. In Britain, we had Blockbuster Video, which was less the American store with a questionable nostalgia, with censored releases and exclusive Nintendo 64 rental games that now cost thousands second hand, but just a rental store that eventually disappeared from existence, argubly lasting longer than the American original did. It was the place, with a discount section of new DVDs, and second hand copies of them and videogames, where I was introduced to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) (though on a DVD where the disc did not properly work) and Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989), as extreme as you can get in juxtaposition. Blockbuster was not the local video rental store however to my family, as this was in the city and at the time of the DVD boom in the early 2000s, as our family used Global Video for new releases. Among their new blockbusters there was, if you looked at certain shelves, the trend of then-modern softcore films where the likes of Misty Mundae (a.k.a. Erin Brown) became a name for a generation of young men, alongside the lurid titles of VIPCO. Originating in the late seventies, and a distributor of titles which would get on the Video Nasties list like The Driller Killer (1979), VIPCO (Video Instant Picture Company) returned in the early 1990s¹, releasing Video Nasties even butchered in the VHS days alongside a slew of titles usually in the horror genre. Their black covers with just the titles in gold letters from the DVD era, part of the "Vipco's Vault of Horror", are still iconic even if the releases were cut or sometimes VHS rips. They will be missed, even if I am glad nowadays pristine releases of the likes of The Mutilator (1984) are available from the likes of Arrow Video. Least for my family, The Nostril Picker is the most notorious just from the cover, and that it was one of the exceptions you found in the rental store with more than the gold text, with that image of the lead Joe Bukowski (Carl Zschering) staring down the potential renter with a knife drawn and with the other hand a finger proudly up his nostril.

The Nostril Picker, without anyone of us watching the film until I decided to track it down, was a legitimate in-joke for the family from seeing it on the Global Video shelves. Back then, when watching it, I can attest to hating the film and even turning it off when I first tried to watch it, mustering up the early days of being a completionist to finish it. So much has changed over the years in my taste that, yes, this is a strange curiosity in terms of an independently made film shot in Michigan, one I see as gleefully ridiculous if a mess. The opening is how I remembered it, a creepy guy stalking a young woman but with the issue for Joe Bukowski, he sticks out like a sore thumb as a creepy guy on the street and thus will be pulled over by cops for being suspicious to the young women of Milford, Michigan. A bearded homeless man in a hat soon after approaches him and suggests a technique, picked up from his service in the Vietnam War, that allows one to change his body if he says an ancient chant, even into that of a young high school girl. Set to London Bridge is Falling Down, and Joe is now a dangerous man, especially as overdoing the change causes mental instability, worse when he is already sociopathic. Before then however this is set up as if a sex comedy about body swapping without sex in the first half of the film, including a montage set to a "schoolin'" song, revealing this had its tongue in its cheek.

That was something I never picked up when I was younger, and with his only film as a director, Mark Nowichi's movie was originally The Changer (1988), and was never released in the United States². Its infamous name comes from its British release with VIPCO in a perversely funny touch³, and likely helped it develop some notoriety for it alone and the tag line they gave the film ("He Chose His Weapons... He Selected His Victims... He Picked His Nose..."). With a now seventeen year old Jo(e) unable to buy dirty mags for a fictitious father, the sense of humour is clearly here from the get-go even without that inspired name change. Throughout the film tonally is a mess as it implies far more disturbing ideas about Joe the killer, trying to touch into the luridness of serial killers real and fictionalised, but humour is a constant here even when inappropriate to have been.

Before one asks, I highly double gender politics and Trans politics ever came to mind here, especially as one character, given a lot of screen time in a positive way, is still a comedy character only known as "Transvestite" meant to be funny in their person's existence. It neither really gets scuzzy in terms of the body transfer concept either, as even if Jo(e) wanders into the girls' shower, when she is just inducted into the nearest school without question, it is never with any real sexual content. Beyond Joe's later victims, when they are killed, haunting him in his apartment in lingerie covered head to toe in blood like an alt-girl photo spread from the past, it really has not a lot of onscreen shock value barring some gore, and the rest implied sleaze. There is only one scene of nostril picking prominently in the film as well, as we see the school days montage from Joe in his real form doing vulgar things in the perceived body as a young woman, so that will disappoint some too.

The film, after playing like a dated sex comedy with little sex at all, eventually starts to mould into its intended genre when Joe first goes kill crazy, the tone changing with some flying fingers and a little bit of gore, still nowhere near Herschell Gordon Lewis and its own tonal issues as it tries to be a lot more sleazier and even disturbing. It is blatant, if all off screen, how Joe's victims suffer implied rape and cannibalism, so bare this in mind. This is worth cautioning upon both as even referring to it may put people off the film, and because the film tonally despite its attempt at this bleaker tone, including Joe's troubled upbringing being brought in, is too goofy on purpose and accidental to make this work. The film as well shows its weaknesses, like some of the acting wavering in quality at times, which undercuts any attempt at seriousness, especially when a subplot involves a trans sex worker being the person who gets the police on Joe's tracks, all because he tried molesting her with a dildo that squirts fake semen and rightly got his lights knocked out.

Is it un-pc? More than likely, and truthfully, even when these films are a mess they fascinate me now, which is something my younger self could have never appreciated. The times where the film struggles are where some of the compelling eccentric touches come in, and when the film does succeed, it is interesting to, such as setting one murder through snap photos on a baseball field at night in stills, more nastier as a result despite little actual violence in the still images. The film, wavering between its clear designs for a greater depth, such as hallucinations of the victims commenting to Joe, to its humour does make it a weird experience, right down to the downbeat twist ending. Truthfully, I can see why many others and I would hate the film, a peculiar beast that never quite knows what it is meant to be. For its director Mark Nowichi however, he would go on to be a colourist including for directors' cuts like Cop Land (1997), to remasters for the likes of Evil Dead II (1987), so he thankfully would continue in filmmaking in an important way. Screenwriter and co-producer Steven Hodge never returned to cinema after this, and neither did lead Carl Zschering sadly. The story though of The Nostril Picker, thanks to VIPCO, has helped the film gain a cult for those who remember the name, even finally getting a release in the United States in 2014 from Massacre Video⁴. The film is, like a few regional genre films, a very acquired taste, but it is one which I return to with a lot more I can take from it. The story too, that for my family and many in Britain this title in the DVD era likely led to amused comments seeing it on rental and purchase shelves, even if never rented/bought, is one worth remembering as it added to its legacy from the humour in that title alone.

===========

1) Grindhouse Database's index section on VIPCO (Video Instant Picture Company).

2) The Nostril Picker - DVD Review, written by Dennis Capicik and published for Unpopped Cinema on October 18th 2014.

3) The Nostril Picker review from The Bloody Pit of Horror, published on October 18th 2020.

4) Massacre Video unleashes The Nostril Picker (aka The Changer) on US DVD 14th October 2014, taken from Cave of Cult and including the promo leaflet.

North (1994)

 

Director: Rob Reiner

Screenplay: Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman

Based on a novel by Alan Zweibel

Cast: Elijah Wood as North, Jon Lovitz as Arthur Belt, Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander as North's Father, Alan Arkin as Judge Buckle, Dan Aykroyd as Pa Tex, Kathy Bates as Alaskan Mother, Robert Costanzo as Al, Faith Ford as Donna Nelson, Graham Greene as Alaskan Father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as North's Mother, Matthew McCurley as Winchell, Reba McEntire as Ma Tex, John Ritter as Ward Nelson, Lauren Tom as Mrs. Ho, Abe Vigoda as Alaskan Grandfather, Keone Young as Governor Ho, Alexander Godunov as Amish Father, Kelly McGillis as Amish Mother, Scarlett Johansson as Laura Nelson

Ephemeral Waves

 

Before North, a film whose reputation likely exists more than as a film people have seen, director Rob Reiner had a streak of films so highly regarded it would be seen as a golden run - This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Misery (1990), and the film before North which was a huge box office success, A Few Good Men (1992). After North, his career still continues, but it is with much obscurer films, with North considered a film so notorious its negativity was spoken in shudders when I first heard of it.

The vivid toys of our titular lead's room, played by Elijah Wood, nods to the strange and whimsical story ahead, an adaptation of a novel by Alan Zweibel, co-writer and co-producer for the adaptation, an intentionally strange children's tale with the high concept you would expect for that audience. North is stressed out, and whilst he could be seen as an egotist, who is so good in school and life other children's parents use him as the guilt inducing symbol for asking their children why they do not floss their teeth like North does, it is clearly meant to be an exaggeration for a gag. Whether it works or not, at least Wood himself, before going on legendarily with the Lord of the Rings adaptations, showed his charisma here as a child actor, which is needed for this quirky premise. His story is still a universal one, that fear any child has where they feel their parents ignore them in their busy lives, even the smartest and most talented here finding himself so distant from them it even starts to knock his talents off course badly. He crosses path with Bruce Willis dressed as a pink Easter Bunny, and whilst it is explained he is an employee at an Easter holiday special at a local toy store, the strangeness of the meeting is certainly a set up for the whimsical tale where, when trying to let North know he should accept his parents as they are, Bruce accidentally plants the idea in the kid's head instead to divorce his parents and get new ones.

The film's reputation for being bad is overdone, with all its issues I have seen in comedies and family films, the saccharine touches and jokes not landed universal among them. The one true negative we sadly will have to get to, the stereotypes and jokes which have aged horrifically as time as past, are that bad with time passing, but most of the film is not beyond these scenes as pointless as I had always presumed it to be. This is not that hair pulling nightmare I had been told it was, and blasphemously, I would go to say the most infamous opinion, that of acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert, was melodrama with hindsight. His reaction was clearly sincere, justified in his legendary comment on North that "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."¹. The review itself however is still spoken from a critic famous due to his published but also television film review opinions, so a person who would have made snappy one-liners to sell or dissuade his viewers and readers over films without taking too long to dissect the thing he hated hated hated. In truth, the sins of North are ones we did not dog pile as harshly as other films, and beyond those stereotypes which are awful and cannot be defended, the rest of this comes off with the earnestness of a whimsical tale.

It is telling, to spoil the plot entirely, this is all a dream of North's, that old and sometimes despised cliché in cinema, but the set up if like a milder form of Alice in Wonderland sets up that the exaggeration of a feverish mind in at hand here, naive and viewing the world with the peculiar gags as envisioned by adult men in the co-writer and director's seats, imagining the circumstances when he goes about separating himself from his parents. His father literally works testing trousers in a variety of ways, even with a rabbi in one booth bowing to see if the seams tear in a variety of different scenarios the product could be worn within, setting up this sense of colourful absurdity from the mind of a child, and thus in this world, it is set up this is not a serious or realistic take on child divorce in the slightest, but the perception of what a child would presume would be possible. S child divorce is far easier to pull off then it should be when Jon Lovitz as a sleazy lawyer suddenly drives up to him in a car out of nowhere and can get all the ticks marked for the trial to be a success, quickly as North comes up with the plan. It comes with a hitch though - North has until Labour Day to choose his parents (or go back to his biological ones) to avoid going to an orphanage, and whilst he goes off into the world to find them, Lovitz and the bright but evil kid in charge of the school newspaper take advantage of this. As the children of North's town start rebelling against their own parents in response, this pair decide that even if getting rid of North has to be done, the power they now have with Lovitz potentially up to becoming the US president is too important for North to realise he always loved his biological father and mother. The obvious cliché that North will realise he loves his parents is something we find in so many family films in structure, so I cannot dismiss this as a hoary cliché either.

The premise, as the kids back home start to mutiny against their parents for their right to freedom, definitely is based on a fun sounding young teen/children's novel, and unfortunately where the problems I have with the film begin and end are the stereotypes that make up the meat of the film, the absurd takes on all the families that make themselves known to North they would take him as their adopted son. At first, there is more a playful absurdity to Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire being so Texan as a potential new family, their limoscene is longer than some trains, and includes an abrupt musical number about everything being big in Texas to the Rawhide theme. There is definitely a children's film dream logic at play here to, welcomed, more so as, following its final punch line of North waking up and how Bruce Willis both sets this up and is the narrator, he constantly re-appears seemingly as different people with the same face in every location North ends up at trying to find new parents. It is one of the aspects which works, and sets up someone thing if as fluffy and quick to consume as candy floss, which is not a bad thing, especially if the jokes about the parents North chooses between could play to the jokes of stereotypical nuclear family dynamics.

Where the problem lies comes with the idea that, in a grimmer work, you could touch on the uncomfortable subject of how stereotypes are ingrained in kids and thus their imaginations are imbued on them, a theme that could have been tackled with sensitivity if this had been not a straightforward children's film, but a grim comedy. That is not the case however, as these are played as straight forward jokes that you are supposed to enjoy; it is the moment I do agree with Gene Siskel, who brings this up in his review with Roger Ebert on the Siskel and Ebert review, where he said the "ethnic stereotyping is appalling"², and they have aged like a fine murder. Parents from Hawaii leads to typical Hawaii imagery for a governor and wife unable to have children, if getting into the weird joke about the new promotional sign including North's butt crack being expose by an octopus for an uncomfortable gag. Worse however comes in Alaska and an Inuit couple, not called that, which involves Kathy Bates and others in brown face, which is absolutely cringe inducing when the joke could have worked. Beyond the grim one of sending grandpa out to freeze to death, which does continue into the stereotyping, there is a playful joke here of imaginary Inuit suburbia, where one needs to mow the icy lawn and the dog sledge goes into the garage of the stereotypical igloo suburban house, a production design joke I think is not offensive if it was mocking the stereotypical image of Inuit culture from their side positively. Sadly, that is clearly not the case, and more of these jokes get worse. By that point, then you get the African tribe joke about the women being topless, which fall into this type of terrible humour that we sadly still got into films decades after and other films should be found guilty of, especially as they are lazy as they are dreadful. China is reduced into the least expected reference to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1988), and even the joke about the French wearing berets and Jerry Lewis films appearing on every TV channel just emphasise the lazy, toe curling tone of a film made for kids but clearly absorbing its adult creator's worse tendencies. That is the side of North which is as bad as it sounds, and is just bad comedy in general, especially as the obvious joke about an Amish family North considers just reminded me why "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody song Amish Paradise was actually funny.

This is all a shame as, whilst syrupy in the truest sense, a weird and sometimes sick humoured fantasy exists in this premise, literally the fevered dream of a young boy, which could have worked. Ebert's anger of how the film glibly plays with the idea of a child could with ease dispose of his parents¹ does ignore that the point of the film, whether it succeeds or shoots itself in the foot by not hitting the tone successfully, that this is meant as a perverse fantasy from the perspective of a nine year old. He is angry at his parents, concocts the idea, plays it out and it is as ill-conceived as you would expect from a child still yet to fully mature, and develop through his teenage and adult years the weight of the ties to his parents. The narrative arch, whilst gleefully enjoying the idea, when North's divorce succeeds, of parents kowtowing to their children's every needs in role reversal fears, is about why North's divorce is not a good idea at all, conservative as a conclusion in its final but with that obvious, saccharine realisation the thing most of us, even the cynics, would admit is the right ending. Some may argue for a more twisted conclusion, but as a family comedy, the point is the humour from its weird journey until North realises his mistake.

When his parents are shocked by his actions and end up frozen in place, positioned behind glass at the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit for the momentous event they were part of, you see how none of this is anchored in conventional reality, but a picture book for the more quirkier of humour. Tellingly, the original author and co-writer Alan Zweibel was also a writer on Saturday Night Live from when it originally began, and a consulting producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm among his long career, so the more bizarre and more adult moments of humour fit the sense this is a stranger concoction of these earnest themes of loving your parents with the eyebrow lifts at the more twisted jokes.

The production design when allowed to play with this kid's logic in the real world, exaggerating the locations, works when allowed to be, even if one moment is a pop, in the evil corporate headquarters where the evil kid and Jon Lovitz are scheming, just because you get to see then-1992/4 arcade videogame cabinets all in a row to show their true decadence, including a bizarre (but great) animated cartoon tie-in from Konami called Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992). Bruce Willis, who did come from comedy originally and was once viewed as a weird choice for Die Hard (1988), fits as a phantom shape shifter who appears everywhere, as a beach comber to being a chain-smoking stand-up comedian hired for a smoke alarm manufacture's convention, one of the strangest jokes but in hindsight working for that reason it shouldn't. The Clarence Odbody/Guardian Angel role to push North to the obvious message at the heart of the film works, and when the North film itself plays to this whimsical tone, I think its reputation is not as deserved. Even when it gets really twisted, North ending up in New York City with a hit man hired to try to murder a child, the tonal shift fits as part of this era of mainstream nineties cinema which had these tonal shifts and sense of playful weirdness at their heart.

All my problems is that, at its centre, you have to suffer through jokes which are dreadful, but we can also look to films which were not failures and loved at the time, like the Ace Venture Pet Detective films I grew up with as a kid with Jim Carrey, and see that problematic and offensive jokes were everywhere. I deliberately choose an example with jokes far worse than those in North to point that out, even if I will not defend North's either. This feels like, for the most part, when a director in Rob Reiner managed to create so many films now considered iconic and beloved, and in a variety of genres in a row, eventually when made the one which falters, it gets a shock reaction from viewers who loved everything before. Were it not for the jokes which are problematic, the sin of North is that it is ill thought-out, the best version of this never coming to be when I find moments which work beautifully, but all from an idea that needed to be properly fleshed out. Maybe it needed to even offend Roger Ebert more by playing with the idea of a child gladly divorcing his parents, startling a target child audience and their parents with the fantasy even in a kid film friendly tone, before reaching that warming ending, like a perverse fantasy comedy take on when It's a Wonderful Life (1946) got to the Potter's Field version of its central town. The nineties, even in children's TV animation I grew up with, relished the more overtly adult and cynical sense of humour, and whilst North was clearly made with the theme of loving one's parents, the joke of children rebelling against their parents, and the wackier production design choices, should have been lent on.

North instead is a film we never got a DVD release of in the United Kingdom, let alone Blu Ray, a lost Rob Reiner film which was not a box office success at all even without the negative reviews, so thus quietly buried like a few of the more notorious films from the nineties which, due to coming from the VHS era, you cannot find a second hand DVD copy unlike the 2000s and 2010s equivalents of notorious pictures from major studios. Naturally it is a film tied to the Golden Raspberry Award, a contentious award ceremony for "bad films" in the sense they come from a more ironic time before, starting in the 1980 when Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards was also published, but somewhat lost to how in the internet era now you can not only dig up much more "bad" cinema, but you get weirdoes like myself on blogs defending a couple of them as actually things we enjoyed. Hilariously another Bruce Willis film stole the Golden Raspberry Award from North at the 15th event in March 26th 1995. That would be the erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), which will not be elaborated upon as it would be inappropriate to in a review of a film targeted to a family audience, and because that film needs its own review to unpack.

=====

1) Roger Ebert's review of North, published July 22, 1994

2) Siskel and Ebert, Season 8 Episode 44, The Client/Lassie/It Could Happen to You/North/Barcelona, aired July 23rd 1994.

Night of the Demon (1980)

 

Director: James C. Wasson

Screenplay: Mike Williams and Jim L. Ball

Cast: Michael Cutt as Professor Bill Nugent; Melanie Graham as Wanda McGinty; Shannon Cooper as Carla Thomas; Bob Collings as Roy; Jodi Lazarus as Linda; Michael Lang as Pete; Ray Jarris as Gary; William F. Nugent as Lou Carlson; Barrett Cooper as Reverend Emmet McGinty

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Let your seeds of evil grow within her!

Among the Video Nasties of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, all of them present their own fascinating history and with Night of the Demon, we find ourselves following the trends of "cryptid" culture, including the legendary 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film footage which was said to capture onscreen images of an ape-like humanoid and feed interest in this legendary figure in cinema. With Night of the Demon, there is obviously the dichotomy that this is also a splatter film in tone, where films which helped pave an interest in making them were more family friendly; films like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a huge independent success, and when Monsters! Mysteries or Myths? (1974), a TV documentary with Rod Serling as the narrator, was expanded into a feature film with new footage (and actor Peter Graves taking over narration) for The Mysterious Monsters (1975) for another hit. This is not even the first gorier Bigfoot film as, whilst its plot involves a fake one, Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) exists, but Night of the Demon among some pretty strong competition in the Video Nasties list still stands toe-to-toe with a level of extremity.

With Night of the Demon, the explanation for how it came to be explains everything about the tone and content - originally this was a suspense film, in which Professor Nugent (Michael Cutt), in a bookend disfigured and recovering in a hospital bed, recounts to doctors and the police about his trip with students to a forest region which is said to be terrorised by a bigfoot creature, only for the production to struggle to be sold and producer Jim L. Ball to film additional gore footage which gained its infamy. This is immediately established when a man has his arm ripped off, both the gore intercut to and showing this is not a friendly Bigfoot. Even without this initial context, where after a first version played off mood and tension from director James C. Wasson, you had the gore added which gained a lot of notoriety for those who had seen the film, Night of the Demon from the first time I saw it, and did not appreciate it, to a growing one for it now, is curious in its pacing and tone. Immediately after that arm is pulled off a man like a doll's, it cuts to seventies flute music over an ordinary school, a reminder the early eighties in horror reflects the previous decade in style until the hairspray came in during the mid-eighties. With the daughter of one of the male victims of this creature in tow, what this becomes is a mystery as the team of Bigfoot finders go to the woods in Northern California, where the sightings are, and first ask around before going further into the woodlands.

The gore scenes are mostly linked to flashbacks from tales recounted by Nugent, filtered throughout, be it a man swung in a sleeping bag by Bigfoot and impaled, to the infamous scene of a motor biker having his penis ripped off, which is more for the sake of spectacle splatter than cohesive in their presentation, more a series of scenes to get reaction from than a cohesive series of attacks by a cryptid. It becomes more of a series of exposition scenes, getting to the culprit, until the later half where "Crazy" Wanda (Melanie Graham), a woman living in the deepest woods, is introduced, someone traumatised by a religious zealot father and a significant encounter with Bigfoot. Alongside its tangents, like the moment involving the Bigfoot cult in the woods, there is material with Night of the Demon with hindsight which is out-there even among the Nasties, particularly as this has as a key plot point a child conceived between cryptid and human being. It is a transgressive and uncomfortable scene in presentation, and meant to be to its credit, and it is another story if one of a few of a cryptid creature in a scenario like this, if one here which attempts to be much more serious and a disturbing take on the matter than, say, The Geek (1971), a porn film which exists and was released by Something Weird Video. It is strange how many films, even as far back as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) with the Gill Man obsessed with Julie Adams, fixate on the monstrous having desires with human women, and in mind that there is a world of cryptid erotic novels, many actually written by women¹, this is a concept for an entirely different piece but is important to keep in mind with human beings fascinated by the monstrous as something to fear but also having a physicality to them that can even be sexual. In some cases it is erotic, but as Wanda's story becomes central to this film, whilst it can be viewed as tasteless in this context, one of the stronger (credibly) aspects to the production as a drama is that it is meant to be a horrifying story. Of religious zealotry distorting and hurting a young girl, and especially with what happened to the conceived child, which can be lost in the film's tone and included splatter scenes, but should be pointed to as the real attempt at a narrative within this.

There is an absurdity that cannot be denied due to how the film was put together, where you are watching in one scene Bigfoot literally forcing two Girl Scouts to stab each other, which is as ridiculous as that sounds, and the languid tone of what was supposed to be a suspense picture from director James C. Wasson is felt and does make it a slower paced experience. It is to be admired nonetheless for a regional production, knowing how hard film production is, and the figures behind this are fascinating, making this an even weirder and rewarding Video Nasty in its context. Producer Jim L. Ball, coming to this business from an obsession with Maria Montez and films she starred in like Cobra Woman (1944) as a kid², even working at American International Pictures alongside Roger Corman in the sound department. He would end up creating a trilogy of these horror films with Night of the Demon sandwiched between Fraternity of Horror (1964), a 16mm production never released until the 2022 Severin Films/88 Films Blu Ray release, and Prophecy of Blood, a video shoot mummy film that is insanely obscure. Director James C. Wasson's career is even more idiosyncratic as he was a singer before this production, a writer of songs and a musical manager, even writing the musical composition for a song written by one of the men behind the legendary Patterson–Gimlin film, which was an influence on him taking this film as a director³. Night of the Demon on screen and off-screen does gain a lot from this. As much as the production onscreen is a lurid and bizarre bigfoot film which is idiosyncratic to witness, this background context adds to the cherry on the cake for appreciating the work behind it, and its infamy as a Video Nasty has more meaning knowing the first proper release this had in distribution was in the British VHS market², and we know how that went.

Only the knowledge of Tab Hunter being offered a role, and declining, suggests an alternative version of the film I admit I wish I could have seen².

=====

1) Figures like author Virginia Wade, who even became controversial that Amazon was clamping down on their ebook "cryptid erotica", are a fascinating reminder that unconventional (and eyebrow raising) depictions of sexuality have no gender bias, as is documented in MONSTER PORN: Amazon Cracks Down On America’s Latest Sex Fantasy, written by Eric Spitznagel for Business Insider.

2) Just a Little Green Kid Outta Waco, Texas, a Blu Ray interview short with Ball included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

3) The Demon Made Me Do It, the Blu Ray interview short with Wasson included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

Nude for Satan (1974)

 

Director: Luigi Batzella

Screenplay: Luigi Batzella

Cast: Rita Calderoni as Susan / Evelyn; Stelio Candelli as Dr. William / Peter; James Harris as The Devil; Renato Lupi as the Butler; Iolanda Mascitti as the Servant Girl

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Film Candidate

 

Oh darling, what is a memory?

From that title, and the first shot of the version I saw, of an actress skipping through misty dark woodlands barely wearing a lace see-through dressing gown, we know what to expect...at least we presume to. As an erotic Italian horror film Nude for Satan in its softcore version would be too weird and esoteric for the dirty mack brigade. Even in knowledge a hardcore version exists, there is a prevailing sense here that version, as here, would still be an odd duck with what exactly is on its mind.

With the music over the opening credits by Alberto Baldan Bembo a woozy, compelling series of drones, synths and what are apparently bongos, Nude for Satan is a curious one to actually watch. Let us be frank, it is a lackadaisical film with one foot between its weird esoteric dialogue (least for the English dub), its lack of a cohesive in-depth plot, and still trying to be erotica in what is a story structure whose languid leanings undercut the sensuality. A male doctor named William (Stelio Candelli) is driving his white Beetle bug car in a night storm to a patient, only to drive past a car accident with a woman named Susan (Rita Calderoni) inside unconscious. Going to a nearby location, a gothic castle, looking for help, he is immediately sucked into a phantom world outside time which Susan will join him within separately. The castle the moment you step into it is immediately out of reality, where doppelgangers of the other person, in whimsical sex obsessed forms, dressed in gothic melodrama costumes, try to seduce the other, and with an occult eroticism around the frames.

Truthfully, in respect to the fun of Nude for Satan, in a more cohesive form, with focus or even a more overtly experimental form, this premise would have the tone of avant-garde jazz in playing to scenes out of context, mood scenes for the sake of mood. Using its mix of a really cool gothic manor and being brazenly titillating to win the viewer over, there would have been a film more ambitious than what we got with more careful construction to its form. Nude for Satan is sillier than this, from the director of the infamous Video Nasty The Beast in Heat (1977), and it is none of the above, closer instead to a half sketched out Jess Franco film, which may be seen as a damning comment as, even as a fan of Franco, I am fully aware the cult Spanish film maker made films himself that felt like they were mere fragments of a premise themselves. Instead, for those who can appreciate this film as I did, it feels like a half awake fantasy. Not even an erotic one as the sexuality can be justified as being the kind of eyebrow rolling heterosexual male gaze, prurient and conservative in form, which is the most boring kind, not the kind you would get from a Jess Franco which progresses into something more interesting and subversive. What little you get feels more part of its weird fever dreams than playing to sexual freedom, and even the message would be confusing if you attempted to think about it. It does have Satan involved, and plays to the idea of sexuality being dangerous and evil, despite wanting as much female nudity onscreen as possible, thus becoming something prurient without a subversive edge to it, only with the context of anything remotely erotic here being more appropriate “off” tonally as everything else is.

I have to still credit what is a trashy film, in terms of how really unfocused it feels, for having to courage to be this weird, a phantasmagoric soft/hardcore gothic film with some production value and where the doppelgangers talk like figures in a bizarre philosophical discussion on reality. Let us be honest even further than I have gone, you would not get a film like this even in the eighties, something very of the time in how minimal this is even in terms of an exploitation film which barely has a plot at all on its shoulders. Even if someone had made a film like this later, there is something about this time where the money existed for these European genre films, where the location shooting was affordable and not shot in apartments, and the style still there even in this obscurer work to make what thin premise there is here have a compelling mood.

The plot really is not a great deal, as it is a series of scenes, where our leads find themselves entangled in a prolonged scenario in this world of strange grinning older men, seductive female servants, and male and female doppelgangers who are proudly (gloriously) camp in their proclamations of love to the opposite sex. It is a languid oddity with hindsight before you have to explain, or witness watching the moment, when the giant spider inexplicably appears. It is a very fake but thankfully homemade one which that is a cross between a raisin and a tick in form, appearing in a scene to torment the female lead in its web, never explained nor appearing again in context. The fact there are multiple cuts means that, for the softcore version I saw, it may lack a lot of its more openly lurid for exploitation content, instead becoming a far more heady haze dream. It lacks eroticism in terms of openly being sensual, more an experience between worlds where the final orgiastic scene is less sexual than performance art dancing involving a woman with the most openly revealed ribcage possible in cinema. It is a film that, to anyone not used to the way some cult films can be less about cohesion, would be easy to despise. It absolutely is not a film you could present to someone not used to these films, but to those who are firmly comfortable in exploring these curiosities, Nude for Satan is the ambient music album of gothic erotic Italian cinema, for good and for bad.

Abstract Spectrum: Hazy / Minimalist

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

Nikos the Impaler (2003)

 

Director: Andreas Schnaas

Screenplay: Ted Geoghegan

Cast: Joe Zaso as Frank Heller; Felissa Rose as Sandra Kane; Andreas Schnaas as Nikos; Brenda Abbandandolo as Daisy; Joseph Michael Lagana as Pete; Joe Lattanzi as Ryan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

"Who dresses these people?"

"Probably their pets."

Romania 1002, and I am unsure whether 11th century Romanians would say "crap" but this is a splatter film, one where I will make the blasphemous comparison that, for the notorious splatter filmmaker from Germany behind the Violent Shit trilogy, there is no real different here with Nikos the Impaler and when an auteur like Wong Kar-Wai makes a film in the USA like My Blueberry Nights (2007). The difference is that Jude Law's face did not get ripped in My Blueberry Nights in the first few minutes, as the titular Impaler gets gang retribution against him for all his killing, but the differences are in genre here. I still can see this as Andreas Schnaas paying tribute to American horror cinema in his own way, also playing Nikos in costume, ripping people to shreds and rampaging across New York City

Even with his guts slipping out on the floor, Nikos claims immorality, and even eats his own guts Joe D'Amato style to emphasise this before he keels over before we cut to New York with a guitar solo song to explain where we are. The film is two separate pieces which connect together, one half in the then-modern day explaining how Nikos himself was a Northland barbarian who killed 300 people and hated Romania, even shafted by history itself as Vlad the Impaler came decades later and stole his thunder. A group of students and their teacher – two male slackers wanting extra credit, a girl named Daisy, two elder tourists and a somewhat positive depiction of a gay male couple, alongside the male teacher and his love interest Ms. Cane – go to a Romanian art show where a theft was planned at the gallery. Naturally with the exhibit having  a labyrinth full of old weapons, the botched robbery struggle gets blood on Niko's helmet, and resurrects him, wanting to repay everyone for this with a surprising amount of decapitations and, for a rare example of this, even the full severing off of someone’s face.

A ultra low-budget splatter film, with static early 2000s aesthetic but definitely shot in New York City, what this turns out to be with hindsight is what Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) was supposed to be but this outdoes. Jason Takes Manhattan was the last film of the original Friday the 13^th franchise, before New Line Cinema acquired the rights and made Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), which notoriously promised to have Jason in the Big Apple. Only has a couple of scenes were shot on real locations and is mostly set on a boat. I like the film, but a large portion of Nikos the Impaler is in the gallery, but once it gets to the second half, this is clearly shot in the city and Long Island. Set to eighties speed metal throwbacks, and obvious but effective practical gore effects, this starts as a traditional gorier slasher but becomes a more elaborate take on Jason Take Manhattan with far less restrictions with what it could do, both in stealing shots across the city to the ridiculous number or the number of gory head trauma deaths.

It is also a tribute to cult American cinema and a really good snapshot of what indie American genre films were like in the time period – clearly set in 2003 with posters of Crossroads (2002), the Britney Spears star vehicle, a video rental shop selling Jason X (2001), the Friday the 13^th film set in outer space, alongside The Sum of All Fears (2002), and a reference to “that wizard Larry Potter kid”. Like the wave of German splatter films from the eighties on, you see figures, recognisable or for viewers of niche fringes of low budget genre cinema, appear in this. B-movie actress/filmmaker Tina Krause makes a cameo as Eva Braun, which will be explained later in this review, and there is an extended scene, playing themselves, of a group of figures in the video store connected to Troma Films, from an actress from their films Debbie Rochon to Troma figurehead Lloyd Kaufman himself, naturally selling his own films, wearing a dapper bow tie before he is killed and truly being the Stan Lee of cult cinema. One very obscure figure, but a great nod to this era of straight-to-video cinema from this cinema, is also the cameo of Darian Caine, a regular of softcore erotic films from this era, like The Erotic Witch Project (2000), even if it is just for a gratuitous shower scene.

Even if using a gym and a cinema among places, Andreas Schnaas was filming on real locations here, a production where people onscreen worked behind the camera, and clearly made for the love of filmmaking. A set pieces running into an all-women's gay bar searching for a man uses an actual bar for the location, and the end even recreates the iconic shot from Zombi 2 (1979) with Nikos on the Brooklyn Bridge. They even managed to acquire an aerial metropolis shot, if brief, which shows a lot of care and effort into the film which is a grab bag of splatter and humour. Even when there were clear limitations as a low budget film, I admire the achievements; there are also times you need to realise with films like this, once you come to this type of cinema, that their pleasures comes from admitting their practical limitations. Case in point, when a sword able to shot lightning briefly appears, obviously you have to use CGI as here because you cannot explode a car in the middle of New York even in guerrilla filmmaking.

It is an indulgent film, where Andreas Schnaas can mock his own production Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence (1991) but can have it screening in a cinema in one of his films, yet I can respect this because there is a level of unpredictability here without padding. Random ninjas can be seen, you can suddenly have German rap metal in the score, and whilst Adolf Hitler abruptly makes an appearance, summoned alongside figures from the director’s own films from DVDs in a rental store, the German filmmaker just makes this a way to mock the dictator, Hitler complaining he is not in charge and promptly getting exploded for talking back. For those with the taste for these films, it is one of the most ambitious in how, in a foreign country for him, Schnaas still made a film that was not comnpromised and packs a lot into itself. A level of commitment too that is visible here is enough to be admired, and this even shows levels of commitment few films have as, whilst starring in their own film is one thing, most filmmakers have never sung on the power metal song about Nikos as Schnaas does here, which is a new level of dedication especially as he does a credible power metal vocal. Neither for its gore either does it feel repugnant either but actually fun for all its gruel, like Herschell Gordon Lewis films, which is the most rewarding thing. Nikos the Impaler is the kind of film you would point blank dismiss for being nasty for the sake of it, and being a series of tangents into gore scenes, but somehow knowing there is a dedication to Fanni the cat in the end credits, one of the last ones, does emphasis the makers of this were ordinary people who just got together to make a spectacle like this. With mind of how no and ultra-low budget films are being re-evaluated and preserved, Nikos is a good one to have a second life from if for the fact that, to try to sell this for an imaginary Blu-Ray restoration, this takes what we wanted from Jason Takes Manhattan, actually achieves it and adds far more gore, more personal creativity, more playful humour, and a comical amount of head based trauma into the proceedings.

Number Seventeen (1932)

 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville and Rodney Ackland

Based on the play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cast: Leon M. Lion as Ben, Anne Grey as Nora, John Stuart as Barton, Donald Calthrop as Brant, Barry Jones as Henry Doyle, Ann Casson as Rose Ackroyd, Henry Caine as Mr. Ackroyd, Garry Marsh as Sheldrake

Canon Fodder

 

Sausage. Hit him over the head with.

Number Seventeen promises a lot as an early Alfred Hitchcock film immediately, of expressionist shadows as a homeless sailor enters a house for sale, only to find another man and also a corpse there. Already you have awesome compositions, almost like a supernatural drama, of looming shadow hands alongside jump cut editing to a train to show shock. It is however, just in its title too, a weird film for Hitchcock, the kind of “weird” in terms of not a positively delirious title but something that is absolutely curious in his career. It is an oddity with virtues but a lot of issues behind its creation.

Hitchcock had to make this film, part of his career with British International Pictures¹. Despite the fact he had already made The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Blackmail (1929), and was becoming an acclaimed filmmaker, his career up to sailing to Hollywood and the United States for Rebecca (1940) includes films which stand out in premise (his personal project, the drama Rich and Strange (1931)), only to not become films which stand out the highest in his career, and titles which he made as a studio director whether he wanted to make them or not, such as the operetta film with Jessie Matthews, Waltzes from Vienna (1934). Number Seventeen, based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, has a suspense plot including one of the earliest McGuffins, if not for the first, for Hitchcock’s career in that it is a piece about jewel thieves swarming around this house alongside a detective, his daughter, a cop in disguise and the homeless man Ben (Leon M. Lion). Hitchcock however, in adapting this, decided to turn it into a farce on purpose tonally, which affects the final result.

The final film because of this is a really broad farce which does not really work. Hitchcock films can be legitimately funny, without becoming comedies but being suspense films which have incredibly dour winks at the banal mixing with the morbid – the cop in Frenzy (1972), one of his grimmest tales, whose wife is trying experimental cooking to his horror, or a key scene of Strangers on a Train (1951), whilst not played for laughs, being based on whether the lead can complete a game of tennis as quickly as he can – or incredible one-liners, such as the many Cary Grant has in North by Northwest (1959). This does eventually have charm, with Leon M. Lion as Ben, once you get past his initial gurning klutz performance, becoming lovable as a genial homeless man caught in the middle of this against his will, but a lot of the humour, being the slapstick to speed up fight scenes, goes over the head in actually landing. A lot of it being a pastiche of the suspense drama completely falls flat when it eventually gives up and becomes a more heightened crime film by the finale. Instead a lot of this feels like a stage play with Hitchcock managing to make it visually vibrant and soaked in shadows, entirely set at night, of a group of people ending up in this house all at once. The sense of this comes when one of its parodies, the female lead on the villains’ side who is so mysterious she is a deaf-mute, being jettisoned. When this character Nora (Anne Grey) just starts speaking, completely kneecapping one of its more idiosyncratic touches as quickly as it is introduced in a film only an hour long, you get the feeling Hitchcock made a legitimate mistake with his collaborators which effects the final quality.

Seventeen, by way of its finale with model trains, gets a really thrilling ending of escaping by train and the commandeering of a public bus to catch up with it, which shows how the film could have been cultivated into an ambitious and grander work by its director. The film had the potential to be a great production, full of McGuffins and plot points for the sake of getting to the next scene – corpses not quite dead, cops posing as lackeys, heroines secretly hiding in the villains’ side – as people fight over an expensive necklace. Even a scene of falling over a broken wooden railing does show how the comedic tone of the film could have mixed with suspense. What this feels like is a germ of a bigger work, and instead it is Hitchcock the master craftsman who sticks out than a successful result, still early in his career showing the mind which planned out his films carefully before they were filmed, compositions even here of the images which stand out incredibly. If it is a failure in Hitchcock’s career, but that does not mean you cannot appreciate the skills he shows here that would grow in his filmography.

 

====

1) Alfred Hitchcock Collectors’ Guide: Number Seventeen (1932), written by Brent Reid for Brenton on Film and published on August 16th 2019.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1975)

 

Director: Leonardo Favio

Screenplay: Leonardo Favio and Jorge Zuhair Jury

Based on a radio programme by Juan Carlos Chiappe

Cast: Juan José Camero as Nazareno Cruz; Marina Magali as Griselda; Alfredo Alcón as The Powerful/Mandinga; Lautaro Murúa as Julián; Nora Cullen as The Lechiguana; Elcira Olivera Garcés as Damiana; Saul Jarlip as The Old Man Pancho; Juanita Lara as Fidelia; Yolanda Mayorani as The Powerful's Godmother; Marcelo Marcote as The Child

Ephemeral Waves

 

Based on folklore, Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf tells the story of the seventh son, the last surviving son, of a widowed mother who is said to be cursed by the Devil into becoming a werewolf. He managed, with the witch who warned his mother during her pregnancy as his loving godmother, to lead a happy life into his adulthood, to the point he is a popular man in the village despite the constant jokes about full moons. His love for the maiden Griselda (Marina Magali) however brings the Devil, or Mandinga (Alfredo Alcón) to him, warning him that, now with love in his life, Nazareno (Juan José Camero) will turn at the next full moon, even attempting to bribe Nazareno with wealth beyond his means to attempt to sacrifice Griselda's love. Based on the Guarani legend of the Lobizón, where the notion of the seventh son becoming a dog-like creature comes from if different here, Nazareno Cruz... is also, in Argentina, one of its most acclaimed and successful films. Alongside Argentina's official entry for the Foreign Language Oscar at the 48th Academy Awards, but this is held as a high mark from Argentinean cinema within the country,

It is also, however, a film extremely difficult to see outside of nefarious means, which is incredibly annoying. Nazareno Cruz... is not pulpy enough for a traditional genre label, closer to drama even with its fantastical story and a soundtrack by Juan José García Caffi that evokes Italian genre cinema's own, but it is startling and idiosyncratic in beautiful ways. Its director, Leonardo Favio, is a director I was lucky enough to see a few films of through with help, but his work is generally difficult to see. This disappoints as, even going by memories, his was a very diverse series of films as a filmography, many which were just as distinct as this. Also managing to be a well regarded singer-songwriter¹, as much as an acclaimed director in his homeland, Favio could go from a traditional historical film like Juan Moreira (1973), based on the titular folk hero and outlaw, to the very strange and utterly idiosyncratic El Dependiente (1969), to Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965), a realistic tale of a titular young boy and troublemaker in an entirely different aesthetic style. The only reason his career was shorten at one point at all, just after Nazarene Cross itself, was Argentina's civil-military dictatorship of 1976–1983, where he understandably became an exile and fled the country¹.

A film of its era of the seventies, it however contrasts the obvious aesthetic touches of this time in cinema with its attempt, like many from this period, of retelling a fairy tale in a grounded reality even when it is fantastic, within a rural setting possessing a tone which stands out for such a simplistic tale. One which is a tragedy which will unfold, idiosyncrasies stand out, notably a trip to Hell as represented by caves. It does avoid wearing out its premise, folktales better off as very short length works due to their concise natures unless a filmmaker can elaborate on it carefully, which is to its advantage. The film does not attempt to depict a wolf-like humanoid, but sticks to an actual wolf, something of note as, among all the idiosyncratic side characters who steal scenes, among them include an old female witch (and apparent mother-figure of Satan himself) who is a shape shifter. The tone is enough with the film to shows a clear grasp on a folklore that is lost in a lot of Northern American cinema, unless it can escape internally or set itself in a minority community or the countryside, this film set in a part of some older period but timeless in appearance.

The personality itself, when seen from a script co-written by Favio, really does add so much to an already haunting tale. The witches, seen throughout including a young girl, future heir and student of the arts as a mere child, fascinate as dominant female figures, onlookers to this story where, in terms of any villains, Griselda's father is the closest even near the Devil himself, in his ill-advised decision to keep Nazarene from her despite their love for each other, which will lead to further tragedy in the end. The simpleton, for a lack of the politically correct term, waving in the fields gets his own idiosyncratic moment where, abruptly, suddenly he has a monologue in his ramblings about war being good, clearly going off memories of a past in conflict among soldiers, which raises so much in terms of background for him and this simple tale, a tale outside this one's scope, which feels meaningful. Even Satan himself, in his crisp black hat and erudite voice, gets to be more than the tempter. It says a lot of the film's attitude when, warning Nazareno of the curse of the full moon as is found in many films, he and Satan end up laughing together until it hurts, even if doomed to transpire as the Devil still warns. That is even before, adding an abrupt bow of real emotion to the film, Satan will eventually show humanity, bored and despairing of his lot, even wising for Nazareno, in the fate before him, to ask God Himself to talk to his fallen angel in an act of reconciliation.

Even in terms of having a fairytale magic, and some surrealism such as fishermen in the caves of Hell among other background details, within this much grounded aesthetic tone the presentation really stands out and adds to the haunting nature of Leonardo Favio's film. This, if you look into it, is legitimately to Argentina like another box office smash like Titanic (1997) was to the rest of the world in what high regard it was as a popular film as much as for their cultural cinema, which does emphasise a deeply troubling amnesia to how much individual countries, and their cinema, do not get attention and need to be taken into consideration. For obvious reasons, not doing so means you cannot see films like this, something which looks and acts very different from a film decades later in tone, even in terms of its contrast in grounded nature with a cinematic style almost the equivalent of Romanticism in context. It does come from an era, especially with the Eastern European and Czechoslovakian fantasy films from this decade or earlier, where attempting to depict these worlds in practical methods lead to tones like this Argentinean film's, with its own tonal choices in its use of close ups, of its lush score including an emphasis on vocal chants which does evoke the Italian films, and its melodrama story in its centre. A romantic scene even gets strangely more erotic in what is not seen through Nazareno and Griselda, with a female friend by them talking about how she will look after their child as she overlooks the pair, kissing in an exaggerated tone on a river with water splashing over them which implies much more happened in the scene than shown.

My knowledge of the late Leonardo Favio, who passed in 2012, only with the films I was lucky enough to see had enough effect for me to keep him close to the heart with great interest, likeminded figures like me able to get these films briefly available online and leaving their impressions on me and for those across the world too. His style could alter per just memories, pure ghosts, of those viewing experiences of the films mentioned, but they stick out, and with this one, you see someone here with this kind of honesty and reverence for traditions, one that does not extend well to a mainstream mindset that has to be assessable for everyone, and has the current and the future in its mind only, but is instead something which has to be digested with contemplation, which can also be gregarious and even profane. Satan here can be human, and there is even humour of the old men related to the witch godmother who thinks he is dying but for her, (in mind to the translation I had), is being a "fucking bum" and just lazy for many years watching on. It is a folktale that is told well in less than ninety minutes or so, and is better for it, and again this has to be a review which is designed to bring more attention to a film which should have been wider reaching beyond its homeland, long before I was writing this, but I am glad to bang a drum for.

 

=====

1) Obituary for Leonardo Favio, written for The Telegraph and published on November 18th 2012.