Odd Noggins (2015)

 

Director: Joe Sherlock

Screenplay: Joe Sherlock

Cast: Melody Berg as Amanda; Juniper Bloodraven as Miss Garland; John Bowker as the Drunk Grandpa; Emily Howard as Shannon; Richard Johnson as Tom; Bryn Kristi as Liberty; Morgan Mayhem as Tammi; Rob Merickel as Uni; Roxxy Mountains as Tami; Bob Olin as John; Kirk Sardonis as Jeff; Connor Sherlock as Jeff

An Abstract Candidate

 

Half Gator

Half Man

Caught on security cam!!!

Aliens. Always the menace, abducting women and pulling out their intestines in nightmares, but in this context, Joe Sherlock's Odd Noggins comes with the knowledge that, whilst they are integral to the film, everything you would normally expect even from a micro budget film, and what to presume with one about said aliens, flies out the window. The woman we are introduced to have these nightmares, clearly believing she was abducted by aliens, is sympathetic and takes a stance. Where things abruptly turn is the moment she dissolves into yellow custard and all that remains is a skeleton...in a film watched by another woman.

I was aware, through a podcast named No-Budget Nightmares, Odd Noggins was going to be a perplexing experience even for a micro-budget film, and there is the additional context that the original version they covered was from 2000, whilst this is the 2015 remake I am covering, still a weird amalgamation of non-sequiturs, a UFO plot and going against expectations of conventional genre films. This was where I first learnt of pimento loaf, a food item I never heard of until learning of this film's existence, and this clearly shows that director-writer Joe Sherlock either has a thing for women drinking beer in the bath, or does but also enjoys doing so himself, with drinking beer in the hot tub the more decadent option to really enjoy life. For the version I saw, it is a film that, even if shot in many people's homes, has its own gleefully playful sense of logic you have to accept or you will hate this film. Expect to be befuddled on purpose, as this repeats and refers to small details in a noodle map of logic not following its plot in great elaboration. That film within a film for starters is referenced throughout, mostly following various women who end up watching the film and/or referencing it without greater context, but there is never context given for it, even if linked to the central plot, nor considered related to the aliens in that film proper.  In one scene a male bar keeper jokes about an art house film which just leads from one person than to another's path they cross with, than onwards. It is breaking the forth wall in talking of how that is the structure here, and inexplicably, I can reference a film like Max Ophüls' La Ronge (1950), a film literally about a circling narrative of interlinked romances, as a comparable example with Odd Noggins of all things. That is respect for Sherlock himself as, playing in its own logic, this toys with leading the viewer around the garden path deliberately, so any unexpected similarities to acclaimed art house cinema from French is entirely because this film itself is structured this unconventionally on purpose too.

This follows a string of characters in strange scenarios, including a "Bellygram" dance, a belly dancing strip-o-gram figure without the nudity, a sad female clown, and various women that are part of a UFO conspiracy with many drinking beer in the bathtub, even still wearing the clown makeup. I bring that up again, and I will probably get a weird look from the reader from across the internet for this, but this is a behaviour which happens a lot here to the point you have to address it, with many of these female characters doing this. And yes, the nudity as a result by the female cast is far more frequent than even some erotic films, surprisingly so. In mind to concerns about this, if one is going to have exploitative factors like this, Odd Noggins can also legitimately claim to be a standard bearer for body positivity even when it is doing this for titillation. It is amazingly positive as, something clearly through his career, Sherlock casts a diverse cast of actresses, of various ages and figures, larger women to smaller, and Odd Noggins at least bothers to have a wider view of women of all shapes and sizes being attractive. Even as a goofy free flowing piece, it is also about its female cast, frustrated workers in a variety of jobs, whilst the men are almost all weirdoes and doofuses on purpose. The exception is the man who needs special modification and dresses like a man in black. Clearly, in his case, he is connected to the aliens and really does not count, alongside the fact he also eats large jars of mayonnaise with a spoon.

All of this is part of this film's logic, to repeat little touches ad nauseum to befuddle the viewer. This feels unlike some films from this area of having improvised their plots with little, but a micro budget film with a fixation on deliberately repetition, Twin Peaks references, and finding concepts like a Renaissance fair and pimento loaf in the abstract inherently funny as concepts. Occasionally, as want of its alien premise, people melt into luminous lemon meringue filling barring the bones, the kind you get from even English cafes underneath Perspex covers. Most, if you cannot vibe with this, will hate Odd Noggins, a film which does the "it was all a dream" twist as a standard moment. [Huge Spoiler] The actual twist is that most of the female cast are working with the aliens, to take men's heads and take them up to the mother ship in cardboard boxes. [Spoilers End] How Odd Noggins plays, since we follow the female cast, means that its finale never comes off as misogynistic symbolism of female tempters that sadly comes into storytelling a lot, but more like the men are, as mentioned, patsies. Figures like "Sir Porkalot", as he is dubbed by his girlfriend, and the rest of the male cast, obsessed with these women, are always side characters that are clueless and/or horny until the film reveals its actual plot. [Another Spoiler] Always too late when their heads are ripped off by pure strength. [Spoilers End]

The end is a pimento loaf sandwich being made with an insane amount of sauce and slices, in close up as the plot is actually explained, used aptly to conclude how this strange film closes out. This is an acquired taste, probably like that sandwich itself, but I have to credit Joe Sherlock for making something idiosyncratic. He was also also editing and scoring this, with the score itself too a compellingly odd synth score meant to evoke Theremin, drones and an end credit piece where "Shake your booty" is repeated, playing with the mood of proto vaporwave or recorded on musty tape on purpose. Throughout the film, characters also read a magazine like Weekly World News, famous for its UFO sighting claims and the cult hero Bat Boy, and that really suggests a lot of the tone. It is a film about the eccentric and the strange on purpose, and it actually lives up to the attitude that made me want to cover such films like this as a fan, of the film seemingly of "no purpose" defying expectations over and over again.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Non-Narrative

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

The Owl Service (1969–1970)

 

Director: Peter Plummer

Screenplay: Alan Garner

Based on the novel by Alan Garner

Cast: Dorothy Edwards as Nancy, Gillian Hills as Alison Bradley, Michael Holden as Gwyn, Francis Wallis as Roger Bradley, Raymond Llewellyn as Huw, Edwin Richfield as Clive Bradley

Ephemeral Waves

 

I think she longs for the time she was flowers on a mountain.

The Owl Service, first broadcast over eight episodes on regional Granada TV, between December 1969 and February 1970, is idiosyncratic; from the get-go, changing between strings to strange noises on the opening credits, this is an unconventional. Based on a novel by Alan Garner, adapting his own work to the production, this is a Welsh narrative explicitly evoking the stories of the Mabinogion, the earliest tome for Welsh legends, which begins in a manor home in the Welsh countryside where scratching noises in the attic lead our protagonists upstairs in their home, finding old china plates in the attic. These plates cause Alison (Gillian Hills), one of the siblings staying in the manor on vacation, to experience strange images. What this becomes, as well as a class conflict narrative, is not quite horror but a weird folk supernatural tale which fits at home with so many productions at the time, such as for children between this and Children of the Stones (1977), which were dealing with the peoples' relationship with the countryside.

Contextually, this is set around a single father Clive Bradley (Edwin Richfield) who remarried, his son Roger Bradley (Francis Wallis) and him going to the Welsh country home of the father’s new wife, a widow named Margaret who we never see, and her daughter Alison, who acquires the plates and becomes obsessed with their owl patterns. Their maid Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) has a son named Gwyn (Michael Holden) who is developing a chemistry with Alison, finding himself in a romantic triangle as, despite being new step siblings, there is a clear awkward relationship between Roger and Alison too. Their story ends up crossing paths with the tale of Blodeuwedd, a maiden created from flowers who was made for a hero but, understandably, is not impressed and falls for another man, leading to murder. Her punishment is to be turned into an owl, and the first scenes create the catalyst, the ceramic tea set with patterns which almost possess Alison, starting to create paper owls, beginning the cycle which starts to fully come to be with flashes to the cast in face paint for quick cuts and one being chased by birds.

The supernatural tone, as much due to the budgetary limitations, is at first merely implied, also psychological but as part of its tone, The Owl Service becoming more explicit in its plot with this as the episodes continues on. Time is repeated as Roger captures images on his camera mid-way through, clearly the current leads in the roles, of both a man throwing a spear, part of the legend, and of a motorbike, as the story includes Bertram, a cousin of Alison’s whose demise, by crashing his motorbike, may be part of a previous time this tale of Millennia has past. The Owl Service is as curious as my initial interest in the mini-series suggests, a whimsical fantasy tale undercut with grit, neither occult or horror but a family melodrama with implied psychosexual tension and an ending of explicit phantasmagoria as someone is about to turn into an owl unless love helps them. Recaps at the start of each episode will help a lot of viewers keep up with its plot, but at the same time, the legend in its centre keeps merely a frame for its story in terms of these young adults' anguishes and clashes, particularly Roger and Gwyn, as the later is attempting to romance someone "above his station" in Alison, part of a well-off family, much against the family itself, causing a greater schism for the legend to infect the present day.

The Owl Service as a result also becomes about class bias – where the family is English, staying in Welsh countryside, and Nancy and Gwyn are Welsh alongside the gardener Huw (Raymond Llewellyn), who seemingly lives in his own cryptic world, Nancy hating her working class roots due to a secret in her past, even threatening to pull Gwyn out of grammar school and force him to work at a Co-Op. He is later revealed to even have elocution records, because he feels even his Welsh accent is too prominent for him to get anywhere in his life, feeling he needs to speak “proper” English than with his natural accent. Barring in mind the limitations of the story – close up shoots of dialogue scenes, a serene 60s Britain with outside on-location shooting, apt for a supernatural tale where the tension already early on – The Owl Service stands out in terms of “Hauntology” where its themes of the past being vividly part of the present is found here. The elliptical nature of how the story is told, whilst likely to cause some frustrations to some viewers, is compelling when in tuned to its tone, the legend being told as much an outbreak of the emotions of these leads as it becomes real by its final episode. Able to appreciate this, I was able to find a lot in this mini-series which lived up to my expectations.

Offerings (1989)

 

Director: Christopher Reynolds

Screenplay: Christopher Reynolds

Cast: Loretta Leigh Bowman as Gretchen; Elizabeth Greene as Kacy; G. Michael Smith as Sheriff Chism; Jerry Brewer as Professor Jim Paxton; Tobe Sexton as David; Max Burnett as Tim

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Among the many slasher films of the eighties, Offerings was clearly made for its market. All the illusions to Halloween (1978) borrowed from it are here to that, to be considered, would damn this very late era production, but at least with a morbid tone of its own, not gleefully revealing in the kills but an actual ickiness with a bleak corpse humour, Offerings was at least memorable.

Your Killer John has an emotionally abusive mother who tips cigarette ask in her cooked scrambled eggs, which is a sin in itself, and already as a young boy he is killing animals, like his pet turtle the mother found, so his journey had awful signs from the get-go of what he will become. If this seems all intentionally humoured as a set-up for a review, this is not to trivialise an actual upbringing to real serial killers, but to point out that Offerings' content whilst gristly is also ridiculous. Some of it is accidental, but it is clear at times the creators were aware of this, from director-writer Christopher Reynolds, playing to this.

There is salvation for John in Gretchen, a childhood friend...but the other children are evil bullies who dare him to go walk around the lip of a well and cause him to fall in. In exposition, ten years later having lived in a mental institution, it is suggested this fall in the well and the damage it had caused to the frontal lobe of his brain has fully erased his morality, worse as he wakes up, gets out, and is with vengeance in mind. He will even climb an electric fence unphased, so he is that determined. From here, well, the Halloween parallels cannot be ignored. I love the main theme, some nice synth to win one over, but composer Russell D. Allen is in danger of the heavy debt it has to John Carpenter's main theme. There are scenes openly riffed upon from the Carpenter film and there is even a less efficient version of Dr. Loomis here. It is entirely shameless, but thankfully Offerings, an indefensible title as pure schlock, is one which proudly became Grand Guignol and is at the point the slasher genre was becoming self aware. Long before Scream (1996), and aware a parody Student Bodies (1981) already existed, this has the leads, the grown up Gretchen (Loretta Leigh Bowman) and a friend watch a slasher film and point out their own clichés.

This does blatantly rip off Halloween, but it exaggerates it, such as recreating Dr. Loomis going to the cemetery in one scene, at the grave of Michael Myer's family, only here with a grave digger who is too "enthusiastic" about his job. I am finding myself looking at certain horror genres like slashers with more discomfort for their fixations on "kills", and disinterest with the scares and jumps, instead finding their tangents and quirks more interesting. This at least has a black humour to its content, like the killer's electric drill not working, forcing them to have to head vice something until their head implodes. It is, depending on how you view it, still pointlessly morbid, but throughout the over-the-top nature feels on purpose, grotesque on purpose than accidental, so at least this is a grotesque for me as a horror fan with a ghoulish humour to this.

This is especially the case with the fact John, infatuated with Gretchen, leaves body parts like ears and a nose for her as a cat would present a dead mouse to an owner in front of the door step. (From cats, not killers) I can attest to having this happen as a child in the family home, whilst here in any other context this is something you would get from a grim Ed Gein-like serious horror film. Instead, here it becomes almost like a Herschell Gordon Lewis aspect of sick humour to the proceedings rather than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It adds a distinct touch to a film which, honestly, is a cheesy slasher to anyone who is not a fan of slashers, in its goofy and creepy tone. It even continues an obsession too with ordering pizza being a scary prospect in the eighties, between The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and this, but with this going further with John adding his own special meat "topping" to the order which definitely was not sausage.

Moments like this are gross, but I have to give credit to the film as, for a genre which can be extremely bland at its worse in the slasher film, these moments are intentional and memorable. Some of the film does feel unintentionally silly - even if it does require a trigger warning for dead animals being used, John terrorising a duck pond when he leaves the asylum, imagining Jack having eaten bits of the wildlife and torn them to shreds, does feel ridiculous especially when talked of matter-of-factly. However it was also clear the production realised they should fall into humour intentionally, such as the sheriff figure, searching an abandoned house, catching a teen boy reading porn magazines, which is funny. The film as a slasher is as conventional as the genre gets, with the characters incredibly generic and one dimensional, so this side to Offerings is a much needed godsend in terms of, as a thrill ride as cinema, bringing a sense of the perverse to the film. This is not perfect, and not the gold standard even in its genre at its best, but I will appreciate one greatly if it manages to be memorable like this became.

Out of Time (1988)

 

Director: Robert Butler

Screenplay: Brian Alan Lane, John J. Sakmar and Kerry Lenhart

Cast: Bruce Abbott as Channing Taylor; Bill Maher as Maxwell Taylor; Rebecca Schaeffer as Pam Wallace; Kristian Alfonso as Cassandra Barber; Leo Rossi as Ed Hawkins; Ray Girardin as Capt. Krones; Adam Ant as Richard Marcus

Ephemeral Waves

 

One among many feature length television pilots to shows that never came to be, Out of Time instead exists just as an NBC TV movie, one which never became the series it intended to be, and opens up with matte shots of a cyberpunk state in 2088. Thermo vision/night vision glasses are standard for police, looking like a pair of 3D paper glasses, in a world where there was a nuclear ban in 2012 and police work has changed radically to using technology and cerebral methods of stopping crime. Unfortunately, the great grandfather of Channing Taylor (Bruce Abbott), the man who innovated this new policing system and is held as a divine figure in police work named Maxwell Taylor (Bill Maher), is a shadow whose weight it too heavy for Channing. Channing is also a classic cop who shots first and asks questions later, now as a result in this different world a a "departmental hemorrhoid" suspended for not living up to a grandfather who was more careful in his police work. When trying to catch Richard Marcus, who in the many curious casting choices here is played by Adam Ant of all people, he first is suspended, then when Marcus is found having tried to acquire experimental time travel technology, Channing tracks him down and ends up back in 1988 as a result trying to find his man.

The cast is one of the most prominent aspects of the entire production. Born Stuart Goddard, Adam Ant's music went over in the USA, but here in Britain, a certain age group will have to think of songs like Prince Charming and Stand and Deliver, will know him as a musical icon at one point, and may not known Ant went into acting. Channing as our lead, who will be transported from 2088 to 1988 by a time machine Adam Ant wants to use for nefarious leads, is Bruce Abbott, who most know in cult circles for Re-Animator (1985), and his grandfather Maxwell is Bill Maher, an actor-comedian who would go on to be a political pundit, in hindsight a strange choice for a geeky put-upon cop his own colleagues laugh at, also played like a frankly sexist man who will use the sci-fi x-ray glasses on a woman's clothes, and is meant to be the underdog promoting non-violent and cerebal policing techniques.

Leaving behind a girlfriend, an NBC news reporter, for the past, Channing is going to effectively play out Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) of a future person being befuddled by the then modern world. That when there was the Big Library Fire in his timeline, with books a rare possession, and 107 Stephen King books having been written, suddenly he returns to 1988 where a library exists. Plutonium batteries from the future are naturally unavailable and even pre-marital sex and cigarettes baffle Channing. Honestly, barring the sombre finale, where it becomes clear he will not see his girlfriend far in the future, Out of Time does pad its length with a light comedy tone which for some will not be that interesting, unless you look at this as another curiosity of weird television premises. There was an obsession with cop shows in particular, over decades, in having cops' souls transmogrify into British bulldogs, cops who can grow toys with their dead son's souls in them really big, or serious cop shows which are also musicals, all examples of real premises and pilots which came to be, coming off as attempts to refresh a genre which on television was recycled greatly. Watching more of these, I wish a new program existed that remade all these premises within it in the same world. The grandson from the future is apt among the same police division, even if in its original context of Out of Time, some will find it a sluggish production.

It is a work whose sci-fi tropes are also clearly worked around by setting it in 1988, jettisoning most of all the opening quarter barring the sci-fi guns. The one aspect which tries to fit its sci-fi premise are some of its odder techniques in editing, especially with the time travel, where the screen distorts and shakes for long periods at a time as if, having to view this from a VHS rip, the version a viewer may see effected the content unintentionally. It is trippy, and it is the one aspect to a conventional narrative, in the end, of a nerd cop and a future cop left partially dim-witted in the past which plays out very conventionally. Even that Adam Ant is here, a flamboyant factor as an English musician dressed as if he should be in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985) does not really stand out, and only a sombre ending, involving a copy of Shakespeare's' Sonnets with a torn page which will travel through time, which does have a surprising level of tragedy to it, has anything which stands out as strong or distinct here. The TV movie exists as a fascinating curiosity, but as that, one which managed to get even a British VHS release, but is an obscurity nowadays.

Whether it could have lead to a good series or not is up-in-the-air, though there is sadly a grim reality at hand that the romantic female lead, Rebecca Schaeffer, would be killed by a stalker a year after this premiered in 1989, which adds an uncomfortable "what if" to history that is to be discretely ignored.  As it stands, there was the true likelihood, in one reality, Out of Time would have still been cancelled after one season, as unless more science fiction tropes were brought in, the time travel machine is erased as a quantity by the end of this pilot, with only the idea of Maxwell beginning to design the technology his great-grandson Channel would use, as well as find his true brave self, the last semblance of the prologue. Again, so many of these types of productions exist, were never successful, and end up fished off of YouTube and VHS rips, and with only speculation to consider, just from this one entry, it is watchable but a production which is, to use one word, "okay" with all the average connotations that suggest.

One Hamlet Less (1973)

 

Director: Carmelo Bene

Screenplay: Carmelo Bene

Based on a play by William Shakespeare

Cast: Carmelo Bene as Hamlet; Luciana Cante as Gertrude; Sergio Di Giulio as William; Franco Leo as Horatio; Lydia Mancinelli as Kate; Luigi Mezzanotte as Laertes; Isabella Russo as Ophelia; Giuseppe Tuminelli as Polonius; Alfiero Vincenti as Claudius

An Abstract Candidate

 

For his last theatrical film, Carmelo Bene after the likes of Oscar Wilde and Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly came to William Shakespeare. Starting as he means to go on, the Italian theatrical director/actor and filmmaker begins with father's ghost floating by at the moment a murder transpires, during a scene of sex on the beach at night for the first scene, with poison poured into the ear of the soon slain king post coitus as Claudius takes the crown in grainy black-and-white photography. Bene is sadly a figure whose work has not been as well known outside his homeland of Italy. As much of this, with One Hamlet Less a prime example, because his films are alien beyond the late sixties and seventies period of world cinema where experimentalism was rife and their types of experiment, to be frank, are from the period. However in terms of grandstanding, distinct and unique voices, Bene's should be more readily heard as, already audible if you can catch him, his is a compelling one as he completely dissects and breaks the Danish tragedy into pieces of his own. 

The world he depicts is over the top. It is of multicoloured costumes with big shoulders, big hats and cornettes on women, glasses which cause one actress to have eyes which are big and bug out, and where the sets, excluding the use of an actual beach, are usually white theatrical spaces with giant walls of stacked books usually the main set decoration. All his films have unique aesthetic looks, given them all character. The one aspect which may put people off, openly admitting this now, is that most of the female cast are nude, with the camera emphasising this at times, and this is the one thing which, for a film I am going to lavish praise on, is going to cause me to roll my eyes too. He has had nudity in other films, but the others have had their distinctions, whilst here it does come off as ridiculous, mainly because it does come off as emphasised rather than for the purposes in his other workl. Aside from this, the world of a Carmelo Bene film is something spectacular. He is not really the same as Ken Russell, nor Federico Fellini, and even his acting for Pier Paolo Pasolini contrasts two very different filmmakers. Even his films have unique looks to each other though they all embrace the artificial and theatrical, as this world's white sets contrasts the proto-neon hues of Salome (1972), a film even with its female nudity was more profoundly classical as it was almost eighties no wave homoerotic camp in hindsight.

Whether you need to have read Hamlet or get the basics will help, but suffice to say, the key is that this follows the basics and deviates considerably after which. That Hamlet is a Danish prince whose father was slain by Claudius, the uncle taking the throne and remarrying his mother. Hamlet, becoming mentally unstable or acting it out, bides his time in the court until he can progress in his plans, but here the film drops a lot beyond this, including the eventual plan for revenge. The result, then, is Hamlet if you know the text but not even then as you would know it, going as far as having Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, in a role as an unseen narrator who whispers his theories on the Oedipus complex (the son murdering the father, sleeping with the mother) over scenes. Or at least his stand-in, as it is actually Polonius as Freud who torments Hamlet so, as much here Hamlet is a man just wishing to stage plays as he is the Danish prince of the Shakespearean narrative. Hamlet has to play the part of the origin figure too, go insane and have his erotic desires blurred between Ophelia, his potential love interest, and his mother Gertrude.  As much of this version is a joke, a parody, as it is taken seriously, even with the conclusion for Hamlet himself an anti-climax in a graveyard.

Ridiculously gaudy, One Hamlet Less however has a deliberate gaudiness, theatrical costuming which is as much artificial with over pronounced shoulders on costumes and, for female cast members, not even anything barring headdresses and skirts as it is the heightened acting. There is a noticeable homo-eroticism, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their cameo very youthful and attractive men with pronounced red lips and make-up, to the point it comes apparent they have been actresses in fact or swapped mid-film on purpose¹. Moments of this eroticism at least showing more than the moments where the camera pans on the bodies of women which causes you to cringe, particularly as in the era of codpieces this is more internalized through the fabric.

There are scenes in the real world, particularly a beach where a graveyard has been dug into the sand, where the skeletons are brought up by the sea waves, but it is mostly staged bound sets with economic but vividly distinct sets, a huge factor to Bene's style. It is, like the other films, a dense kaleidoscope work that with patience grows in weight, Bene liking dialogue which is not natural, heavy in intellectualism, and at times shouted or practically belted out of actors like mad people. Alongside the frantic editing, his work is as much to cut and match between shots, to blind the viewer in the madness of his kitsch take on the Kingdom of Denmark, where even origin source text in this particular film in his career fits his world.

Kitsch it not an insult as, far from a surface irony, Bene's take is serious and sincere, appropriate that in Shakespeare's tale, of a nobleman who plans to take vengeance of the betrayal and murder of his father, a chaotic mass of backstabbing and politics is depicted with this hyper-coloured delirium. Hamlet whilst set in a location became its own realm outside of reality to place various meanings on, so as Hamlet here pretending to be mad wanders sets that vary between late sixties pop art and a medieval film about to kick into disco. It befits the depth of darkness is portrayed here in bright illustrious colour, and in terms of the many adaptations of Hamlet, stranger exist even in mainstream pop culture when Arnold Schwarzenegger played a version of the Danish prince for a one scene joke². The abrupt tangent to Arthurian legend, whilst the most difficult thing to grasp, even fits the tone and Bene for me as an actor is exceptional, the centre piece who keeps this working. He can go for the fence with his delirium but, as his first film Our Lady of the Turks (1968) attest too, even that is a fine art. It is telling, in the most sobering scene, he acts out one of Hamlet's most famous sequences and dialogue, the "alas poor Yorick" lines with the court jester's skull, with utmost quiet sadness and then escalates his voice louder when his Hamlet laments his place and death.

Just screenshots would be enough to show how interesting the film it. Women, laid on a white seat with dresses who hoop skirts make them look this living Christmas tree decorations, or with giant balls as improvised skirts to sit behind; anachronistic luggage cases everywhere; night scenes full of rows of candles (touches?) burning in the open air; a happy, cheery brawl to the death with a morning star spilling blood, played out like a game of tag over and around multi-coloured spheres in a white set; and enough textures to saturate the eyes, mind and thoughts. Naturally like Bene himself, it is beautiful and at times insane looking, striding through scenes agonizing on their existential existence as the film itself darts between the various figures of this weird world. Contextually, even as the shortest and in many ways least erratic of the films I have seen, this is arguably the one you try afterwards when you are accustomed to Carmelo Bene's work. It is still a brilliant piece of the whole body of work.

Abstract Spectrum: Heightened/Kitsch/Weird

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

 

=======

1) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also go with a bang, liberally changing the source text, before you ask.

2) Last Action Hero (1993).

Taiwan Black Movies Part 3

 

Taiwan Black Movies (2005)

Director: Hou Chi-jan

Since I have quoted this documentary throughout these reviews about Taiwan genre movies, I should cover this even though, as previously mentioned, its structure for myself makes it difficult to critique. As it is a talking head production with clips of films, I find that it is hard to scrutanise a production where all the content is less in in-depth subtext but the information being carried forwards.

It is nonetheless a document of great interest, one I wished had been longer as it tackles its subject where, after Never Too Late to Repent (1979) became a success, suddenly there were so many films made in its wake that, as one editor explains, he could be working on fourteen films at the same time. Or that real world gangsters wished to work on these films, starring as extras and even bending producers' arms for money to film in downtown Taiwan. A lot of the film is about the distributors continually dodging the censors, including a montage of censored scenes, an issue that eventually lead to government intervention which stopped this movement.

This is sad. Alongside those I have seen, there are films shown in the documentary which shown various tangents in these genres films which entice - Queen Bee (1981) a martial arts film where the female lead has bees tattooed to her collar bone and chest; Girl with a Gun (1983), where the documentary has a gruesome but compelling sequence from the film where the female lead is cutting up and disposing of a body, which cuts to reverse negative in the midst of for haunting effect; the evocatively titled Gunshot at 6 o'Clock in the Morning (1979); and Girls' Concentration Camp (1983), which in the trailer shown looks the most lurid, as a Taiwanese women in prison film with all the clichés, but as a film from that country is immediately interesting to see for any cultural differences.

On the other hand, this censorship is talked of, alongside these genre films already burning out by 1981, having led to the New Taiwan Cinema of 1982 onwards existing. So this means, whilst we lost this original movement, we got instead the likes of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, so one would not want to change time and lose films like A Brighter Summer's Day (1991). In hindsight, the only thing I would wish to have been different if that this original movement of genre films had gotten recognition much quicker, so many survived in better quality than what we got. None so more than the last film cover...

*****

On the Society File of Shanghai (1981)

Director: Chu-Chin Wang

Screenplay: Yung-Hsiang Chang and Ching Wang

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Fu-Mei Chang, Chi-Chun Chen, Yung-Hsiang Chin, Ji-Chi Chou, Chieh Huang                          

 

Contextually based on "scar literature", anti-Maoist literature which came in the late seventies soon after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, the first scenes of Society File is of men trying to flee mainland China only to be captured by the leaders and called unpatriotic, emphasising this point. This follows a trend of these films avoiding their Taiwanese culture, here setting itself in China where the main narrative follows the story of Li Li-Fang (Hsiao-Fen Lu), a female suspect in a stabbing of a military chief's son, a figure with a scar on her forehead, and scars on her chest and lower belly which alongside her demeanour leaves the investigating detective Mr. Shung and his younger male assistant curious to how she ended up this way. Against the will of their seniors who just want to throw the book at her, they wish to work backwards and learn why this young woman is even in this scenario.

Set in 1960, cutting to the summer of 1969 too, the film builds a narrative from flashbacks about Li-Fang's downfall, trying to learn why a woman who was a nurse suddenly contributed to the son of a major figure being stabbed by multiple men on her prompt, especially a person by the name of Wang she was close to. This films exists in how Taiwan, with its uneasy relationship with China over the years, wished to view its communist neighbours and their ideology next to their capitalist culture, though the result has much more nuisance than this even if by accident. It has absurdities, the female teacher of Li's old school, Principal Wong, is forced to wear a dunce's cap and work by young Maoists in blue uniform, broad caricature between them, whilst however contrasting this with a more profound image, of an old senile man at said abandoned school changing "Long live Chairman Mao" in his chair outside. Or Mr. Shung existentially wondering how the ideals he exited with has lost its way among broken windows and abandoned old buildings where he tells his assistant these concerns.

It is definitely a drama as much as a genre film, as alongside Li-Wang and the man she had stabbed Wang being half siblings to different mothers, the Principal his own dismissed and divorced as a bad element by his military father, there is the more sombre plot of how Li-Fang went as a nurse in 1969 to tend old figures of power in a building of rest, retired suddenly and is shown to be in a less emotionally healthy state moving back into her father's workplace. Gender politics plays into the narrative too, with her being told to marry a doctor twice her age on her father's encouragement. Her new husband is shown as being spineless and her father becoming paranoid and abusive when it is realised she is not a virgin before her wedding day. The plot reveal is not that difficult to realise - [Major Spoiler Warning] that she was raped by one of the old military members whilst caring for him as a nurse [Spoilers End] - but the build to the truth does take this seriously in between its pieces of genre storytelling, such as how most of the scars (including one she inflicts on herself) are in scenes of pure shock value. It is a compelling melodramatic film because it does take its subject seriously.

It's use of a very well worn archetype, an older and wider detective, helps immensely as a plot point as Mr. Shung becomes the compelling and sympathetic lynchpin alongside Li-Fang, always carrying a pipe with him, and showing both the wariness of his work but the skill he has acquired over the years, such as an unprofessional but blunt way to deal with a prisoner feigning madness by opening a window encouraging him to jump. Li-Fang herself, a figure as much of others' recollection as seen, is just as distinct, on one hand powerful but the other broken, actress Hsiao-Fen Lu committing to the performance. When the film does finally answer the question it has built up to, why she has ended up arrested and on trial for murder, it is a tragedy. Returning to its source, it does come off as an anti-communist China film, arguably propagandist, but more meaningful than this to a much symbolic idea of how power in general corrupts.

Also in a less then stellar print in the version I saw, looking like a VHS scan with burnt on English subtitles, On the Society File of Shanghai nonetheless closed the book on a fascinating festival of films on the right note, with the fact that that they were from a movement I had never heard of having a richer profoundness. All of them were rewarding, all sadly difficult to access and, with their restorers having to use what survives, cursed to their disadvantage in a world of smoothing over the past, a hurdle in the way of their greater access as these films, for the open minded to their scars, all have something interesting to see both as genre films and in what they were tapping into culturally as Taiwan Black Cinema chronicles. As time capsules, before the New Taiwanese Cinema came in 1982, they are enlightening.

The Old Dark House (1932)

 

Director: James Whale

Screenplay: Benn W. Levy

Based on the novel Benighted (1927) by J. B. Priestley

Cast: Boris Karloff as Morgan; Melvyn Douglas as Penderel; Charles Laughton as Sir William Porterhouse; Lilian Bond as Gladys; Ernest Thesiger as Horace Femm; Eva Moore as Rebecca Femm; Raymond Massey as Philip Waverton; Gloria Stuart as Margaret Waverton; Elspeth Dudgeon as Sir Roderick Femm (as John Dudgeon); Brember Wills as Saul Femm

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #195

 

Have a potato.

I had the pleasure to see The Old Dark House the first time during a brief British theatrical release in the 2010s. This is a rarity for me to experience as sadly such screenings have never been practical for me to access. This rare case in particular was a fascinating case, to experience a film from the era of mono sound and Academy ration framing on a large cinema screen, culturally alien to modern theatrical cinema which is post-widescreen and 5.1 sound. The film itself however is something completely alien even in context to when it was made, thankfully so. It is a film made by James Whale, in the midst of the boom in American horror films and when he made a huge iconic success with Frankenstein (1931) for Universal Studios, which is perplexing, hilarious and peculiar as something meant to be a horror film. Something I was thankfully able to experience in the dark on a giant theatrical screen in a pristine 4K restoration, rather than the history of a film once presumed lost and also neglected over the years.

And The Old Dark House is definitely a weird film. Not one of the strangest ever made in premise or aesthetic, but so peculiar. It is in premise a Universal horror movie without a main monster, and baring one major event it is a plot which is entirely against expectations for horror, completely going against its peers with a tone that is completely off-kilter the moment we get to the titular house. One which, baring of course a model avalanche nearly hitting a model car in the prologue bringing in some of the main characters, and one of two struggles, is entirely told in dialogue.

To think as well a film of this vintage was already possessing such a dark, scathing sense of humour with a deliberately sense of camp is already amazing to even consider, arguably more timeless than other peers of the era due to its and why, whilst not a major film of its era originally in success, it has thankfully grown in reputation over time. It is one of the most deliciously camp films populated by a smorgasbord of great performances firing on all cylinders, all purposely adding to this, in which a group of people - Philip Waverton (Raymond Massey), his wife Margaret (Gloria Stuart), and their friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) - end up at the titular home to escape the extreme weather in the middle of isolated Welsh countryside. The people in the aforementioned house though are just off in their entirely - the godless and eccentric Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger), his surly and religious near deaf sister Rebecca (Eva Moore), and Morgan (Boris Karloff), their voiceless hulking servant they have to keep around but is a problem whenever he gets to the alcohol. This does not even begin to elaborate on where the film goes, as another couple, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his female friend Gladys DuCane (Lilian Bond), appear, and there are secrets about the house and its lineage including the figure locked away upstairs to contend with.

I can see why The Old Dark House was not as well known like Frankenstein or another of Whale's horror films The Invisible Man (1933), but having grown to admire him as a filmmaker, he is a fascinating figure. In mind of him as an openly gay man during his career at this point, a subversive streak in the material exists just going from these horror films. Bride of Frankenstein (1935), his even bigger success, is known as the film where he was able to get away with far more eclectic, humoured and even camper content, but even The Invisible Man also happens to be a lark juggling humour alongside full blown misanthropic content. I wonder how an audience back in 1932 reacted to The Old Dark House, but in hindsight the result's magnificent and perfect for our generation of viewers to finally appreciate.

It is still at its heart a Gothic tale, capable of incredibly atmospheric moments, the scene inter-cutting Gloria Stuart and Eva Moore in fragments of reflections masterful for the era, as Rebecca berates the younger woman in her late sister's room how beauty is a limited thing which decays and dies out. But this at its heart has its tongue so firmly in cheek it could dangerously pierce through the skin. Ernest Thesiger in particular is a shining star - a feat in a film with Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff among everyone else stomping through scenes - who manages to even make the phrase "I like gin" have incredible comic timing. Even before his introduction, when we start with the lead characters trying to drive through the Welsh countryside during a downpour, the potential problem of two milquetoast characters lead the film which has always plagued these older horror films, a heterosexual American couple, is counteracted by their friend Penderel being a likable wisecrack, and a spark of dialogue which allows all the characters to have personality. When we are introduced to the house and its occupants, even a gag of Thesiger's Horace suddenly throwing flowers into the fire is hilarious.

Even the fact Boris Karloff is not with a speaking role, which might be seen as a tragedy as he had an incredible speaking voice, is thankfully avoided by his stature and the physical acting he portrays. Charles Laughton is exceptional too, which is not a surprise, and to the film's credit, with no one necessarily bad, Laughton's character of a self made man conscious of his low self esteem is lovable as its own plot. Even the fact his female friend Gladys falls for Penderel does not lead to Laughton's character being demonised, but with a lovely grace to it of acceptance and a great little subplot as a result.

The general tone and plotting evoked mid-viewing two later films I lov for this type of comedy with horrific tones. They feel like they belong on their own peculiar family tree, bearing in mind that it was only in the late sixties due to the hard work of director Curtis Harrington that the film was rediscovered and preserved, and that in 1963 William Castle, the legendary hype man and filmmaker, remade the film. Jack Smith's Spider Baby (1967) is the more b-flick version of this strangers-in-a-strange-home story, handsome in its own idiosyncratic qualities, a whit to the dialogue and with Lon Chaney Jr. a nice web of connection back to the Universal horror films. And than there was Thundercrack! (1975), the infamous bisexual porno haunted house melodrama, which is so visibly influenced by this film in hindsight, especially as The Old Dark House was rediscovered and saved in the sixties, I cannot help wonder that it would have been a huge inspiration for a production that was a collaboration between screenwriter/co-star/LGBT experimental filmmaker George Kuchar and its director Curt McDowell. Even with its reputation for actual hardcore sex in the uncut form, Thundercrack itself is just as bonkers and relishable in its own dialogue too, and its eccentric characters, that this grows as a theory for me.

And there is a lot in The Old Dark House itself to admire beyond its humour. Willing to be surprising explicitly in sexuality just before the Hays Code was properly enforced, such as Gloria Stuart in revealing negligee, able to bring in implicit gay subtext, such as the hidden away patriarch who is over a hundred years old being played by a woman, or how Laughton's character, with a northern accent just above my neck of the woods to be proud of, introduces class issues into this light hearted romp. For an American film in particular it is also incredible British and, much to my amusement, set in Wales with the appropriate level of rainfall to match I experienced when I went there as a lad. It sadly was not shot Wales, so we could not get their beautiful countryside, but the choice and the cultural ticks from the British director and a story adapted from a British novelist's work do stand out.

That the plot itself is not really about much but still manages to go through various tropes of classic Gothic storytelling, of hidden attic rooms and mad relatives locked away, bringing them together into a nice potpourri, is a huge virtue for me, in mind that a lot of these horror films from the thirties are very short, even less than eighty minutes, and this one feels more detailed and elaborate than others. Of Christianity and heathenism butting head in two older siblings who've driven each other mad, or that Karloff manages to evoke such a great deal of emotion just through grunting and speaking gibberish.

It was a wonderful experience to see this type of film on the big screen, particularly as this is a rare case of a film even back in the past that, as a Hollywood bankrolled production, would have been an oddity to witness, and in the modern day is one too but has been thankfully canonised as a gem. I think back to the dining room sequence in particular, of how a horror film, or what is meant to be one, has a lengthy scene of just characters dining at a table, discussing their lives, and how Thesiger manages to say "potato" in so many different ways within a short passage of time and make that the main excitement of the sequence. If I could ever get away from quoting anything Thesiger says in this film in my ordinary life, I would gladly do so with the appropriate relish.

One Night in One City (2007)

 

Director: Jan Balej

Screenplay: Ivan Arsenyev and Jan Balej

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #178 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

With pieces that are horror, others incredibly dark humoured, and aspects entirely of the unconventional, Jan Balej's stop motion film is in mind to its forbearers like Jan Švankmajer, with even visual and symbolic nods to the older statesman's work. As a film, One Night in One City is a series of vignettes involving human characters, non-human ones and a lovable duo of a fish and a tree man we will get to later, some segments sweet and others incredibly dark.

Like Švankmajer, the truly surreal offers the most humane aspects of ordinary life, the stop motion here absolutely is at its peak. Immediately Balej's style is very distinct of cramped apartments, timeless of an era before when there was modern technology, when this was made in 2007 with the likes of the internet and mobile phones. The human cast are far more stranger than anything else, figures who look distorted, pallid grey skin and peculiar features; the closest to two stereotypical beauties, two twin sisters who a man hires to watch him parade around in skimpies with a phallic taxidermied bird's head on his crown, look like E.T.'s sisters.

Their lives are compelling yet also peculiar, beginning with a man who in his spare time plays with a miniature circus set on his dining table, not wrong in the slightest though he does manipulate dead insects within it rather than figures, angered a live ant inspects the tiny cannon with fascination. Then there is another man who lines up the ant infestation in the apartment on his desk with sugar than snorts them up his nose. It is not dissimilar, though his was about extreme sexual fetishes, to Švankmajer's Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), to the point of that man wearing the bird head on top of his own feeling like an explicit reference to the most iconic scenes of the older film.

It does not feel like it is in the shadow of Švankmajer though, nor the Quay Brothers, with its own distinct nature due to those character designs and his tone. In terms of Balej's ideas, there is no sense of an actual genre barring the tangential one of being animation. Aspects definitely qualify as horror or at least the supernatural. One is of a bad musician who finds a severed ear that turns out to be able to grant artistic craft ([Major Spoilers] which in a great twist is actually Vincent Van Gogh's [Spoilers End]). Another explicitly is about a man entering a cafe where the ghosts of yore occasionally appear is still potent. It is weird that One Night... is tagged under the "horror" genre at all, barring those few justifiably suitable segments, but this sequence in particular is a stand out as an almost tranquil ghost tale entirely about mood.

Much of the production is a scrutinisation of humanity. This sounds pretentious, I know, but like comic strips, animation in its exaggeration can arguably tell more about human beings and their quirks in their sense of the absurd, be it Tales from the Far Side to something like this, one of the best moments perfectly showing this. A married woman, whose husband locks himself away in a room designed to play out his fantasies of being a hunter waiting in the woods, with their pet pug dog in role-play (in costume) as a bear, being wooed by an undertaker for dead pet dogs in his apartment. It is for me one of the stand out segments - funny, incredibly black humoured as that poor dog is put through a mock funeral, casket and even he playing the priest, and without any dialogue as all the film just has its human characters making noises, still possessing whit.

Thankfully, as well, in this film's shorter length, Balej's point as a snapshot of humanity never overindulgences and manages to have many segments in the short running time. His darkest material is contrasted also by the purest of joy. Namely, that one of the best story threads, the longest, is probably one of the best male BBFs you could find depicted in cinema. The only thing to bear in mind is that one of the friends is a fish, with fins and a tail he has to hop about on, and the other being a tree, feeling like a very explicit reference to the Jan Švankmajer film Little Otik (2001), where a childless couple pretended to have a log be their child, inexplicably coming to life but unfortunately also liking the taste of anything that moves. Thankfully, this tree is a gentler one; not much happening baring a snapshot of their lives as friends over the four seasons, where the fish man likes games like cards and the tree man in spring has to wait in the mornings for birds to briefly hatch an egg on his head, but it is beautiful. The fact these characters are anthropomorphic figures than people feels loaded in meaning - before, odd people with odd behaviours, not dismissed but still with foibles, contrasted with a segment you could actually show children of figures who are utterly un-human but having a true friendship. Particularly when one of them can decorate himself in Christmas tree lights or just decides to rock out in front of his window with an imaginary air guitar, the one moment that is an abrupt jump into the modern day, especially as that same scene has the tree man looking on the internet the production of guitars.

The only real exceptions among the human characters are two drunken vagabonds who find a genie able to grant their wishes for one night. Some of their decisions are grotesque - desiring women they get an amusement park ride, riding big tea cups, that goes between real erotic photos and has the exit door a gynaecological area they pass through - but it comes with a matter-of-fact humanity, between this and their immediately wishes being drink to appear in glasses in their hands. Jan Balej as a director unfortunately slowed down to a hault when it came to following One Night in One City. Little from the Fish Shop (2015), an adaptation of The Little Mermaid, was his follow up, which used extensive computer effects too, but tragically when we really need more animation to contrast the mainstream, i.e. the CGI animated ones common in cinema, a figure we can turn to in Balej has been absent. I suspect, even if he was still making animation, stop motion does take a long time to production, something to attest to in how long it took Jan Švankmajer to make feature length films into the modern day, especially with the issues of whether the funding is plentiful or not. That this particular film is obscure in itself is sad as, honestly, it was a surprise in a positive way and deserves more attention.

Abstract Spectrum: Eerie/Joyful/Surreal

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

Our Man (2010)

a.k.a. O Nosso Homem

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cannon Fodder

[Cannon Fodder covers work by creators that have had entries on the Abstract List, or of immense worth for myself, to which we delve into this short film from Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa]

A hang out for rats and lizards.

Our Man begins with a mother and an adult son discussing about moving back to Cabo Verde. The mother is wrapped up and sat up in bed, the son with dreadlocks and wearing a red shirt and coat, and they end up on a discussion about a creature, a man who slips a letter into a person's pocket. They have to go with him then, to which he will bore a hole in their head and suck out their blood. This evokes M.R. James' Casting of Runes, an evocative short story from the English author, adapted as Night of the Demon (1957), in which a slip of symbolled paper slipped onto a person's being without them knowing will curse them to being pursued by a horrifying demon. Knowing Costa's love for classic Hollywood cinema, I would not be surprised he knows of the film adaptation at least, directed by Jacques Tourneur who also helmed I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a film he had planned to remake as Casa de Lava (1994) before it became his own creation.  

Suffice to say, jumping to the ending, he turns James' premise to a profound final image, an expulsion letter to leave Portugal, nailed to a pillar with a knife in a striking final shot. If Costa ever felt he could make an actual genre film, which he nearly did with Casa de Lava originally, he would make one now that would deal with the lives of the poverty class and migrant communities from this perspective of a world that acts aliens to them.

Our Man can be seen in itself an epilogue to a trilogy of films set at the Fontainhas quarter, an area in Lisbon slim that Costa came to and has to the modern day held in such respect. The opening, set in a small shack near the city in the distance, eventually cuts to the face of regular cast member Ventura, Costa's key figure here encountering a friend who has been kicked out the house and divorced because he lost his work, and cannot make any money. Desperate enough to bring home an old, wounded dove for dinner, the segment (and most of this short) is Ventura helping this friend, Our Man a snapshot of ordinary lives playing out.

One where there is no major plot, just snippets. Where Suzete, the wife who got her husband to sign a divorce bill without him realising, is lamented over by her ex-husband slumped over a table whilst drunk with Ventura and another male friend who works in a school kitchen, not able to gave them anything else but soup as they only have enough food for the kids. Both stories do cross, as the son, Jose, meets these older men, all whilst witnessing the failed attempt to catch rabbits by hitting bushes with a stick whilst drunk. The banality of life is witnessed, that for these immigrants to Portugal they still have to live, even if anecdotes include being beaten by a group of white men, or being in an open prison when one's father had died, allowed out to help bury the body. Life must still go on regardless.

In fact, befitting the reference to M.R. James, it becomes apparent Ventura has been communicating to a ghost, conversing of not having his gold tooth used to pay for his funeral or joking a passing cat is a rabbit. Costa, as mentioned, has never made a genre film, but he has not either shied away from the unnatural and surreal, even describing the future film Horse Money (2014) as a horror film in its own right, even having Ventura trapped in a lift talking to a living statue alive with countless voices challenging him like a Legion demon.

Our Man offers in itself a fragment of Pedro Costa, these short films in danger of being marginalised in a creator's career but, especially in this case, as worthy to witness as this feels like a piece that interconnects to the others. Whilst not as evocative aesthetically, and with the surprise of how bright open environments stand out in his cinema from his usual nocturnal locations, this does show how Costa was moving in style. The film before this was Colossal Youth (2006), the first for the director with cinematographer Leonardo Simões.  The pair, alongside actors like Ventura who contribute to these films as much, would follow up with two films in the 2010s (Horse Money and Vitalina Varela (2019)) which took this film's empathetic worldview but also include an even greater sense of nocturnal atmosphere. Our Man as a result is able to exist as a chapter in this vast book known as Pedro Costa's entire filmography, as well as be the building blocks from a pre-existing veteran to work from for his new stage of work.