Sweetie, You Won't Believe It (2020)

Director: Yernar Nurgaliyev

Screenplay: Zhandos Aibassov, Yernar Nurgaliyev and Daniyar Soltanbayev

Cast: Daniyar Alshinov as Dastan (Das), Asel Kaliyeva as Zhanna, Azamat Marklenov as Arman, Yerlan Primbetov as Murat, Dulyga Akmolda as Tarzan, Almat Sakatov as Kuka, Rustem Zhanyamanov as Petok, Yerkebulan Daiyrov as Kissyk, Bekaris Akhetov as Buzau

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror film from Kazakhstan, Sweetie… is unconventional in that it prioritises itself as a comedy first for all its ghoulishness, presenting the worst day possible for poor Das (Daniyar Alshinov). With a TV in the background of the first scene, talking about the sex lives of chimpanzees and that, contrary to the belief fishing is about booze and gills, it is actually an important bonding ritual between men, the film already establishes its humour in the first scene, which is juvenile at times but done with a lot more sense of glee than laziness to it. It is apt for the tale itself, where Das is established in that scene as a stressed out guy.

Expecting a child, a credit card overdue, and a wife he loves but is the stronger voice of the pair, Das is just a guy drifting along, who just decides one day to run off with friends to fish to help sooth this issue. Despite two of them not knowing how to fish, and the van they travel in full of old school inflatable sex dolls, it will be a calming experience for him, and credit to the film, whilst this may have played up to the henpecked husband stereotype, when things go south for him, one of the reoccurring points is how Das is concerned for his wife and expected child. Despite his friends mocking him for being married, Das is clearly concerned about being there for his soon-to-give-birth wife even if he needed the brief break. Things just happen to go south beforehand.

With its deadpan humour, this feels like a crime comedy instead, as they accidentally bump into debt collectors, mostly related brothers, who were after a man they found hiding in a well. Despite the ominous gas station, with a Lenin poster in the back, which just gives off bad vibes, the immediate concern would be accidentally floating pass an accidental murder. It is embarrassing to have done so when you have improvised a floating vessel, attached to the main boat, using the sex dolls, but that you could be killed to hush up the mistaken murder just adds to the insult. Where this does become a horror film is that, within this premise, director and co-writer Yernar Nurgaliyev drops a Jason Voorhees-like slasher film killer into the midst of all this. He is a guy, with one entirely white eye and disfigured face, who wanders out of nowhere in the midst of the countryside, and introduces himself by doing some improvised optician work with a spike, and re-adjusting the human jaw to make the mouth wider.

With the closest thing to a resistance is one of the friends being a school enforcement officer, who is more likely to bolt it, Das finds himself in a farce between the likelihood of his wife given birth with him absent, and this Voorhees figure picking off the debt collectors one-by-one, leaving him and his friends last to pick off. With the debt collectors presuming they are responsible for the deeds as they are always there at the gristly murder scenes, there is an increased threat as well. Add to this the creepy gas station playing a part, as it involves someone being forced to become a husband and sire grandchildren to a grandfather who likes to watch his new grandson and granddaughter through the bedroom door, and for a film with some gruesome demises, it is played more with a sick sense of humour.

It is also a horror comedy which takes advantage of its resources, such as its wide screen presentation, where there is the great sense of isolation in the first two thirds in the middle of nowhere, contrasted by Yernar Nurgaliyev using some really cool visual flourishes. One of the best for me is a scene which extensively uses the camera attached to the actors, focused on their faces with the world moving around them whilst their panicked expressions are visually clear. The choice of music is also wildly varied, from rap to regional classic pop music, and it is used many times for perfect soundtrack cuts for jokes, like classical pop for an attempted hit and run that fails, or a beautiful use of a dream solo timed for a comedy moment of cowardice. The best way to describe Sweetie, You Won't Believe It is that this is the one slasher (adjacent) horror film where a fart nearly gets someone caught, and far from a moment of rolling your eyes at the childish humour, even the dick jokes and juvenile aspects work for the film. Especially with the one emotional current through this broad humour, this works, as Das has his friends calling him out for being a henpecked husband, to only at one point burst and proudly defend his marriage. This one emotional point in what is a purely comedic piece allows it to also be about older male friendship that just happens to have a body count.

Its director Yernar Nurgaliyev is someone who is prolific as well, which makes me delight in the film greater knowing this is not someone who was never able to make another film. He is someone whose career mostly is likely not getting picked up in the West sadly, as a figure who can juggle comedies and dramas in a clear willingly to make films for their own sake, but the one here which managed to catch attention did deserve it. It is obvious why, as beyond the nice sense of having a horror film from Kazakhstan which I would gladly revisit for its virtues, to add to the pin board of the genre from around the world, it clearly took distributors' interests for its nice plate spinning act of being as goofy as it is, with a distinct take on horror tropes, which everyone clearly did their best to make as good a film they wished it to be.

Science Crazed (1991)

 

Director: Ron Switzer

Screenplay: Ron Switzer

Cast: Cameron Scholes; Tony Della Ventura as The 'Fiend'; Robin Hartsell

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

 

I Suggest nerve gas tests in the following countries...[Long pause] France...[Even longer pause]...Canada...

 

Where did this Canadian SOV film come from? Chronologically even Science Crazed's date of birth is confusion. Some say 1991, others 1989 thus making it a film from the year of my birth, and I have belief it was at least shot in 1987 or around that period, due to a Toronto telephone directory book and how, with all the horror posters on the walls, some like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Creepshow 2 (1987) time stamp the period. What cannot be denied that, between this and Things (1989), Canada in its dips into micro-budget cinema could get weird, Science Crazed one of those true oddities from this world with the added strangeness of disembodied voices, strange pacing and random tangents.

The notoriety of this film is immediately established when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes as in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism. Half suspecting, with a shot of a book on Hegel on the left and a horror book on the right of the table, this was made on purpose like this at times, and at other times clearly by accident and by an unknown psychological influence. The opening is full of pregnant pauses, as a doctor researching a serum that causes quick pregnancies is told by the board funding him to stop the research, represented by one man. Both have dubbed over post-synch voices. The doctor, rocking sunglasses, still continues the experiment with a willing female subject where, in exactly three hours, she will become pregnant, and in twenty one hours, give birth. The unfortunate issue of a bloody aftermath transpires where the woman dies, and the male and female assistants have to cover up the incident whilst keeping the baby. Said baby gestates, rapidly, into a full grown man with a bloody bandaged head, elf ears, a bloodied white shirt and jeans, and a taste for strangling random people to death including the doctor himself, unhappy about his existence.

Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident, making insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack among the disembodied and repeated synth) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes, sometimes with one hand, and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments. Science Crazed for those who know it is notorious for its strange narcoleptic tone, the set up a traditional one for any horror, only to drift off between the VHS hiss silence between music strings. It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky detective is called at a Video Shed rental store, looking at a Rambo VHS tape, and takes the call as if at a police station whilst the clerk makes funny faces during the conversation. And of course, the film places its gonads on the table by how extreme this gets through a ten minute exercise sequence. It is what this sentence suggests - two woman, one in a pink tutu whilst the other in a form fitting piece, exercising in-between shots of the monster limping along in a corridor for what does last ten minutes of running time. Maybe because I was prepared for this notorious sequence, it did not beat me down, and was amusing instead, but it is literally the scene that makes or breaks a viewer's experience because it early on in the production. It warns you how more random, and how prolonged and dragged out, the film will get.

It is abstract? Science Crazed does eventually ware you down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the Fiend down. The production feels improvised but in a peculiar way as a result. You can struggle in padding out a film, as has been found in micro-budget genre cinema, but how does one explain the scene where a woman, behind a desk, says extremely slowly with length pauses names of countries to start nerve gas tests in, which is never explained or elaborated upon, baring that it is the definition of random improvisation? Or the prolonged scene that does make sense in context, but lingers, of a woman approaching the Fiend calmly in a room with silhouettes drawn on the white wall, caressing the heavily breathing monster for a prolonged moment, avant garde film levels in pace, all for a backbreaking bear hug as a receipt? Or the other woman with a very Canadian accent, as the camera spins around her in the dark, speaking to herself (without sound) in prayer despite looking like an eighties day glow punkette? The accidental minimalism of this monster film is its own strange experience.

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool with wooden panelling, does feel the burden of its weight if you cannot engage with its tone, as liable as it did when I first saw the film to cause the viewer to drift off into the visuals. Ultimately, between this and Things, Things is so consistently strange that you do keep alert once you understand its logic. Science Crazed in its own way is just as fascinating, but in terms of being a film that is a repetition of shots, of the fiend limping along or watching bystanders at the swimming pool, which are stretched out to an extreme. Not a lot actually happens in terms of a film, one which could have been less the sixty minutes or shorter, and as a result it is closer to a monster film distorted beyond recognition. Even for a horror fan, there is not a lot of the luridness of gore either and any practical effects, barring some fake blood, with a lot of the film following an old b-movie trope of a monster strangling a person, sometimes with one hand, which is very easy to act out but for most people is usually a sign of a terrible horror film. It is an acquired taste.

As a film openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience, this is in itself strange and unconventional, which is, ultimately, why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? There are as potentially strange concoctions done on purpose you could imagine - if Michael Snow, the Canadian avant-garde film maker, or a slow cinema director had helmed a b-movie horror film but kept in Bela Tarr length long takes. One can imagine, shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants, and whilst not for everyone, that would have been memorable in the annuals of horror cinema in itself. Science Crazed itself, for all the moments clearly intentional in structure, is not intentional at other times, and thus is something else, and part of its legacy as an obscure oddity, which is the entire micro-budget genre where some due to their form and budgetary restrictions leads to perplexing distortions in audio-visual content as much as ones which fully succeed. Many, frankly, most people would not find appealing in the slightest; however for someone like me, whether shot on videotape camera or a digital one from the early 2000s, with just limited resources, they seem to exist in their own little worlds with their own rules that are compelling to witness and their own form of abstraction. That the film promised a sequel in the end credits, the "Revenge of the "Fiend"" is almost a cherry on top to this particular example. That, with its director having disappeared entirely, it is the ultimate what-if mystery of what the blue hell a sequel to Science Crazed would have turned out like if he kept making films.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic/Random/Slow

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

The Substance (2024)

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, Margaret Qualley as Sue, Dennis Quaid as Harvey, Gore Abrams as Oliver, Hugo Diego Garcia as Diego, Phillip Schurer as Mr. Scream, Joseph Balderrama as Craig Silver

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The best opening to this review came from the male cinema usher introducing this film. In my sickest glee, but sincerely as well for its director-writer Coralie Fargeat, this film has reached a wide audience for a director whose debut was only the film before Revenge (1917), a subversion of the controversial rape-revenge genre from the French director who worked on short films beforehand.  Her follow-up The Substance, seven years later, could be seen in multiplexes like the Odeon here in the United Kingdom, but I found it more practical to go to a boutique cinema. Even if part of a trend to sell cinemas as an experience, with more lavish food options and the ability to order for this or the bar during the opening trailers per screening, it allows one a little bit more access to more non-mainstream films, and the ability to sit on comfy sofas which, even as someone who doesn't mind the traditional cinema seats, I can live more with. This also allows the experiences to have greater weight, in the additional details such as staff that are friendly and seem to enjoy their work. You can learn of the patron, because they accidentally didn't get a spoon, eating their ice cream with their hands than asking for a utensil, or that this friendliness added the best punch line for The Substance where the male usher, a guy who clearly went to the gym but with our British sense of affability, warned the patron. That, if anyone came here to see the film for its buzz but didn't see the trailer or knew it was a body horror movie, they were in for something unexpected. I was aware, and warned myself, but didn't expect how The Substance turned out to be either, so that warning even added a punch line for me to make the viewing experience even better, something you wouldn't have gotten at a multiplex.

The Substance came from a Cannes Film Festival in 2024 which helped me feel reinvigorated in being a cineaste after a sense of malaise and personal depression which pushed me out of going to the cinema often for near three years. It was among a list of films just in the official competition, even if contentious in reaction like Francis Ford-Coppola's Megalopolis (2024), which all felt they were made with a sense of them being films made individuals who desired to bring their premises to the screen, films which even if a few were miserable failures would linger in memory and worth preserving, in the ideal if they all had virtues, years after. The Substance had an additional layer, in not only a body horror genre film getting into the Official Competition, but how it was the "return" for Demi Moore, the Hollywood actress of St. Elmo's Fire (1985) to G.J. Jane (1997) taking a bold step into this genre. The film itself is proudly of its body horror mould, which is something spectacular if needs to be considered in how, with a lot of mainstream publications covering the film because of Moore, there was a lot of eyes on a filmmaker whose first film caught the attention for genre and horror fans more. For starters, there is the danger to oversimplify its themes of objectification and commercialisation of women's bodies, and especially in terms of youth, as the film complicates it. Misogyny and these ideals are the catalyst to the film's main plot, where former film star and TV exercise show host Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is fired from her career by Dennis Quaid's grotesque TV station executive for being over her fifties, wishing to replace her with a new, nubile female host who is to be between twenty to thirty. There is however a lot more nuisance that can be lost if we just jump on the themes as they are without taking in what Fargeat also as the screenwriter adds to complicate this.

The objectification by creepy old men, or Quaid eating shrimp in one of the grossest moments in a film where someone regurgitates a breast, is just the push into a work with more complexity as Sparkle finds herself after a car crash introduced to the titular substance, a toxic green chemical which duplicates a younger version of herself dubbed Sue (Margaret Qualley) from her own body. It becomes as much her own conflict with her age and body dysmorphia, with even the broad caricatures of Quaid and most of the male cast telling within itself. It is a film of sleekness, with a bouncy Hi-RNG score by Raffertie and bold primary colours. Fargeat as a female director, who also co-edited the film to have the intensity of cuts as this film can  also have, crosses a line too that would be rightly criticised from male filmmakers of fetishising Qualley's body including her lips, let alone the nudity, in lurid close-ups. There are layers of pop artificiality here that even extends to the depiction of misogyny, where the TV executive's gross gender objectification is so comically ridiculous, with the finale at a New Years Eve TV show with kids in the audience yet nude exotic dangers onstage, that the caricatures in generally show how old and prehistoric these ideas are, to the point these weird gender beliefs of women come off more twisted for how ridiculous they are. Most of the men come off as immature children who never grew up in their beliefs in women, and in a world where a political figure like JD Vance rightly get hung and drawn online for old comments about "crazy cat ladies" not deserving political influence, the kind of thing you would expect from immature boys that thought cooties were real, you see how this attitude to sexism from men needs to be spoofed like this to get the point more sharply across than take it as severely.

A sincere "feminist" story of objectification would be useless, and digested in empty think pieces, where a film this more complicated in tone and proudly embracing the explicit practical effects forces you to think a lot more hard. Because it was more an explicit horror film, with the ending matching the likes of Society (1989) and Screaming Mad George's infamous "shunting" practical effects in terms of eyebrow raising sights, there was a danger of this being dismissed, but the fact that it managed to find itself in this interesting place as a big new film for 2024, with a significant choice as its female lead, without losing that edge. It is among those interesting "art house horror films" I always love, but this is the first one where, rather than David Cronenberg eventually, the tone eventually starts to fold its serious themes not in subtle moments of introspection, but the exaggerated perverseness that you would more likely find in a Street Trash (1987) on a significantly higher budget, those crop of divisive and lurid films' attitude to jaw dropping and gross visual spectacle, alongside the poppy and at times flair to the images, being used to convey the serious message that this has. This takes infamous moments like the "shunting" of Society, the man melting into a toilet in Street Trash or the fetishishtic body prosthetics of so many eighties horror films, including Cronenberg films despite their moments of cerebral coldness, to this really uncomfortable idea of women being objectified and objectifying themselves, not playing it safe when it can be so easy, as I could accidentally have done as a male viewer, to have a cretinous and oversimplify view which would be offensive to female viewers who could find so much more nuisance in the material.

It was a newspaper piece, a Guardian interview with Demi Moore herself for the film, which gave the film more weight when I eventually saw the film¹. She came to The Substance with no knowledge of the body horror genre¹, but developed an interest with the subject for reasons which added interesting flourishes to her performance and the final film which I kept in mind for the viewing. One of the most prominent is how this becomes a war between the older Elizabeth Sparkle and her young idealised self Sue as the story progresses, with Moore noting how even if with the chance to relive a better life as a young woman again, Sue takes the job as the new sexy aerobic star and kowtows to the same misogynistic creeps who fired Sparkle in the first place, happy to such up to the same people for a sliver of attention. The Substance itself, playing into the central conflict, is promoted by the unseen creators' advertising with the caveat that even if two people are created from the cell duplication process, they are the same person and should not forget this. They must have seven days each per their rotas, with the other staying in a semi coma with food intravenously sustaining them and the spinal fluid of Elizabeth required to keep Sue stabilised. Even with this distinct logic, playing into an aesthetic of a new anti-aging cosmetic with the substance's slick and minimalistic packaging, there is a more arcane nature to the premise. I can easily imagine this as an old fairy tale from old Europe, where even if cultural and time differences were to be found, themes even if added with future audience perspective visible within the central theme of how, like so many fairy tales and Monkey's Paw/morality horror stories, the downfall is rarely because the magical/unnatural item is inherently the cause, but because it eventually gets abused or the worst sides of people ruin the balance.

This is where a psychological edge plays out where the real horror lies in the schism in Elizabeth's mind, the idea Sue is still her even if they seemingly are different people. A story exists where she and Sue can co-exist, can defy natural laws of aging, and have a happy conclusion, but the conflict and the horror of this genre film itself, even if spurned by the misogyny of men and ageism, is the self inflicted desire for personal attention Sparkle was infected with when she came into stardom and could not purge herself of when the fame ends. Her younger self, as Demi Moore realised in that Guardian interview, is trapped in the need for fame and glamour, willing to still follow the empty lifestyle and praises of gross old men, and in her need to do so, starts to abuse the contract to the point it physically starts to age Elizabeth. The real horror here, not the icky prosthetics, is when Elizabeth started to feel bored and depressed, jobless, even in a luxury apartment earned from her fame and stuck in front of a TV. Food, one of the few things not considered a taboo like sex, is effectively a more socially acceptable narcotic for depression, and some of the body horror is Coralie Fargeat as much showing its preparation and mess in a grotesque form, including the least expected place a chicken drumstick can be found as a sick gag scene. Those moments, including Elizabeth not finding happiness with the one nice guy, a goofy if sweet older high school friend, when she decides not to go on a date is legitimately sad and the real terror of the film. Stuck with her youth glaring at her outside on a billboard, it uses the lack of subtlety of horror cinema's visual form more effectively, in how youth in culture is used and fetished, turning into a plague for older people to feel trapped within aging bodies.

The film escalates to the absurd levels to contrast this without losing these themes, and this is where I also have to praise the two female leads for their commitment, as The Substance has to juggle these serious moments to the fact both actresses are going to be within extensive prosthetic body suits by the ending. Margaret Qualley was someone I had barely registered in films I had seen before 2024, but argubly 2024 could be her year as an MVP for me, least one of them, in terms of an actor with an incredible range in all four films I have seen in 2024 at the cinema up to The Substance. Including Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things (2023, but January 2024 British theatrical release) and Kind of Kindness (2024), and Ethan Coen's Drive-Away Dolls (2024), within a year I have seen Qualley show a level of elasticity and ability to shift roles within three different directors, from the eccentric accented comedy role with Coen to Lanthimos' idiosyncratic duo, that makes me now want to see her have a successful career with a lot of awards involved. Starting off with a dancer's background and having a link to Hollywood's past, as the daughter of Andie MacDowell, she had started long before 2024, but this is a run of four films that impressed me, more so as with The Substance, you also have to factor in her comfort in being able to do a role as with Sue. Whether in skin-tight Lycra or full nudity, to be able to be hyper-sexualised onscreen would have been a challenge, taking the fake artificiality of her character to its extreme alongside all the primary colours and arch lustiness.

Demi Moore is also taking risks for this too, playing the polar opposite in Elizabeth Sparkle, feeling like an abrupt and amazing inclusion of a huge veteran Hollywood actor in a film with the level of explicitness with full commitment fully felt in her performance, her vulnerability in the Elizabeth character as pointed. There is a shade of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Robert Altman's psychodrama of pitting the real rivalry between an older Betty Davis and Joan Crawford against each other, but unlike the "Hagsploitation" movement which came out of its success, which is dubious in a negative sounding way in how it used older actresses from classic Hollywood cinema, Moore and her character Elizabeth Sparkle are incredibly sympathetic, whilst Margaret Qualley plays the young evil Betty Davis tormenting the older. The one moment where Moore channels a Joan Crawford-like mania, when Sue was already abusing their relationship to harmful effect, is a gleeful moment including its French director-writer mocking her own country's cuisine in a grotesque (and high cholesterol) moment where Moore is almost a cackling witch over pots.

The film, never expecting it with no context before of Fargeat's previous film, goes to a level you normally don't find in Cannes Film Festival competition entries. We have had the controversial films with extreme horror and sexual content, like Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009), but after the end credits, I couldn't help but hope somewhere Frank Henenlotter, the director of notorious genre films like Frankenhooker (1990), learnt of this film clearly indebted to his cinema among others, and has been able to see this. As an official selection film of prestige, with Demi Moore of all people in its centre, I hope he was cackling with glee when, without spoiling too much, what could have ended perfectly as a horror anthology story conclusion in its macabre form decided to instead take it further. As I get older, I am starting to love even indulgent movies which break the two hour mark into two and a half, and a horror film at two and a half hours is a rare chimera almost unheard of for the genre. Ninety minutes is usually the golden number for the genre, so those that are longer are fascinating for me to see exist, as they have more time to extend and flesh out their content. Where this extensive length comes from, with spoilers if not to ruin everything, is the appearance of "Monstro Elisasue", the creation of old school prosthetics which almost evokes the ending of Tetsuo The Iron Man (1989) in two characters being melded into one, if here of flesh. There is also a blood geyser of such length and amount this clearly had been indebted, or at least paid tribute to, Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) for overdoing the fake blood, a film that notoriously left one New Zealand film studio set so stained it lingered in the flooring years after. It is indulgent as hell, and I admit the soundtrack (least in the cinema screening) did become excessively loud to the point of off-putting, but indulgence is acceptable when you bear witness to the final act that ended as it did. The crowd I was with were not really people used to these films - there was shocked laughter, amazement of what they witnessed and likely discussion afterwards in the bar, and even I, already respecting the film, was knocked back that it ended as giddily twisted as it did. The film only won a Best Screenplay award at Cannes in the official competition, but I do see The Substance as being one of the films that will have a lot to be talked onwards. Coralie Fargeat should have had to wait seven years to get the film off the ground, but what the film does when it finally came was an incredible success. It was for the better that the reviews from that initial Cannes festival were way too subdued from the press, and that warning happened just before my cinema viewing from an usher, as they added perverse cherries on this wonderfully gory cake of ideas.

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1) ‘We can be violent to ourselves. Brutal’: Demi Moore on body image, reinvention and her most shocking role yet, by Charlotte Edwardes for The Guardian, published September 14th 2024.

Singapore Sling (1990)

Director: Nikos Nikolaidis

Screenplay: Nikos Nikolaidis

Cast: Panos Thanassoulis as Detective Singapore Sling, Meredyth Herold as the Daughter, Michele Valley as the Mother

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is special to see this film without burnt-in Greek subtitles, a title whose infamy means it finally got a high definition release in 2024 from the American physical media distributor Vinegar Syndrome. It is the one film by Greek filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis to ever get any traction in the wider world, but that is not this film's fault, just a curse the others did not follow Singapore Sling. Thankfully, for whatever reason, Singapore Sling did, and even if it was out of how transgressive it was, it is good to see it happened even if other films from Nikolaidis' career, like See You In Hell My Darling (1999), a film set in a purgatory with genre tropes, showed he was as idiosyncratic after this production. Originally having to import the US Synapse Films release, this is a work of a director who was always provocative, and a production here which despite its innate transgressive between mother and daughter incest, puking, and a close-up of sexually rubbing a kiwi fruit on one's bared crotch, I do not consider this part of the line of very nihilistic and deliberately shocking films which feel grim for the sake of it, where even a director like Gaspar Noé has accidentally fallen into for all the times he has also impressed me. Whilst it may mortify people to even consider this if they have seen Singapore Sling, there is a sense of humour to all this film, even if very grim.

Singapore Sling is also indebted to cinema, a literal perversion of Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), a film noir about the titular Laura, who is seemingly dead and becomes a fixation for the men with only her portrait the visual image representing her. Here, the film noir detective archetype played by Panos Thanassoulis, washed up and drunk, is an unnamed sleuth who finds himself with a bullet in his shoulder and at the manor his own Laura was said to be working at where a mother and daughter live. In searching for her, however, the soon-to-be christened Slingapore Sling, after the cocktail recipe found on him, has also found himself with two women who are sociopaths. An incestuous family, the late father also involved, they are truly sadeian in the Marquis de Sade template in their complete disregard for morals, which we are first introduced by having killed their chauffer before the film started, trying to bury him in the garden on a rainy night when they are introduced. Though the daughter (Meredyth Herold) looks like Laura, she and her mother (Michele Valley) killed Laura when she visited, and decide to keep Sling hostage, as a torture/sex pet under the idea to know how he learnt of Laura being at their home.

The family can also break the fourth wall and talk to the viewer, which presents the immediate sense this film is more than shock value, and oh boy, this has not lost any of the transgression over the years I have been able to see this. It is a film which juxtaposes really shocking imagery against the absurd, which is arguably more uncomfortable but also adds a greater sense of nuisance. Between the re-enacting of Laura's meeting, with daughter taking the role and her mother with a strap-on involved first, and the daughter talking of having sex with her father, as portrayed by a mummy in the attic, this film is not recommended for everyone, but in even these scenes or details like an actual bandaged mummy representing said patriarch, you find already this film is also off-kilter, that it is juxtaposing the horrible with the strange. Juggling sexual perversity and violence, and explicit gruel in details like real animal organs representing Laura's being carefully placed into jars and on the kitchen top at one point, it also adds overt slapstick which might sound a bad decision but emphasises a tone which is more alarming but also means this never feels miserable for the sake of it.

Specifically there is even an influence, as Nikos Nikolaidis was a huge cineaste, from comedian/filmmaker Jerry Lewis, as described in the documentary on the director called Directing Hell (2011), which might be the hugest eyebrow raising to suggest, but has been confirmed in that work as one of his heroes. Burying the chauffer in the rain when we are introduced to them, even if Michele Valley is baring all as an actress in her nudity whilst wearing lace night clothes, as Meredyth Herold as her mother is too, she is especially more obvious as having been guided to make her sociopathic daughter character overtly wacky. She is playing the film between a farce and pratfalls just to bury that corpse like a manic sidekick, and her manners are over-the-top throughout as she bumbles about. Valley as a result becomes the best thing about Singapore Sling, even if the other two actors Herold and Thanassoulis commit to this as much, because the horror of scenes like the women torturing Sling with electroshock therapy, whilst one of them takes advantage to reach the perfect orgasm with him, is undercut by the ridiculous manners she has.

It sets up an upper class family who fell into madness, as the daughter starts to view Sling as a way out of her current place in life, whilst he becomes less a hostage to both but their sexual partner. It is helped too that Singapore Sling even on a DVD let alone restored was always visually gorgeous, becoming one of its weapons in terms of its transgression. Due to the work of cinematographer Aris Stavrou, it is a film shot in monochrome which is evocative and matched by an elaborate production design and costuming, including the work of Nikolaidis' own wife Marie-Louise Bartholomew, as a few of his films including this one, as Directing Hell talks of, were shot at Nikolaidis' own home. As she discussed in a featurette for the 2024 Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray release, he worked on lower budgets, funding a film like this with his work in commercials, and despite the horrors onscreen paints a wholesomeness to the perversions, even the vomit which the daughter throws up on Sling mid sex revealed to have been concocted by Bartholomew from food substances that were actually delicious¹. Considering the film also has one of them urinate on him after sex, we are still talking of a very twisted film, if one where the magic of film makes these scenes legitimately dumbfounding for those unprepared for the film, if also emphasising a sense of deliberate bad taste more in the John Waters territory of cinema than dragging the viewer's face into the worse of humanity.

It means Singapore Sling has to be approached with caution, but alongside the make believe - as there is no explicit real sex, everything implied and fake, and no use of real atrocity imagery as other transgressive films have done over the decades - this feels more wickedly perverse with that sick humour always there. Juxtaposing visual splendour and decadence against the grotesque is also poignant to the film, where one of the more gruesome scenes for myself, despite all the things I have described, is a dinner table scene involving the consuming the contents of a real sheep's head in elegant dress, using fingers, eating brains and eyeballs, and throwing up or playing with the food. Having seen other films by Nikos Nikolaidis as mentioned, which I was lucky to have done, this is more explicitly transgressive than others but still feels on point for him, especially as this is in mind to the explicit pastiching of the film Laura, a film about a man obsessed with woman beyond existence which this plays to, as Michele Valley's daughter character, looking like this film's Laura, starts to use this as mind games between her and her mother, with Sling, symbolically unable to tie his shoe laces for most the film, slowly gaining his composer as he learns the real events. [Huge Spoiler] The ending may turn off some even next to the rest of the content, even potentially coming off as misogynistic, as with the deaths of the women in their betrayal of each other using Sling, this predates David Fincher's Seven (1995) for a knife strap-on, but it is telling for a noir protagonist, a genre known for bleak endings, he neither leaves unscathed, a wounded archetype who finishes the film starting the bury himself in one of the leftover open graves among the others, unable to leave. [Spoilers End]. This film will be divisive, undeniably, but as it focuses on the psychodrama, the shock value alongside Nikolaidis' cinema in general predates the New Greek Wave that Yorgos Lanthimos became the figurehead for, predating the transgression but also the sense of perverse humour that films like this had. It is a film which is striking even next to a Dogtooth (2009), where even its use of fourth wall breaking, not the breaking of taboos, will be too much for some viewers, but it is a far more rewarding film for how brave it is. It does indeed in mind to Dogtooth, and the other Greek films following its lead, feel like the older aunt to them to, making its place much more important by its existence.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Moody

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

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1) The Vinegar Syndrome release includes a 12 minute interview with Marie-Louise Bartholomew, where these details are revealed.

Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004)

 

Director: Andy Humphries

Screenplay: Andy Humphries

Cast: Johnny Vegas as Dave; Mackenzie Crook as Ferris; Mark Gatiss as Jeremy; Annette Bentley as Linda; Julia Davis as Shelley; Lucy Davis as Ruth; Evie Garratt as Joan's Mum; Robert Harrison as Kevin; Nick Holder as Gordon; Dominic Coleman as Tolly

Ephemeral Waves

 

You've upset the Gherkin man!

Ace of Spades by Motorhead is not what I expect opening a British sex comedy, particularly one about two guys in Birmingham delivering potatoes to fish and chip stores, but this is one of the most infamous British films of its time period, forgotten except how it was negatively dog piled upon. Likely greater controversy came from the fact it proudly wares being funded by the UK Film Council, a fund for British cinema production that was contributed to from tickets bought for the National Lottery¹; this means as well family of mine, who bought lottery tickets at this time, may have paid for this among others. The tale of Dave (Johnny Vegas), a slubby guy kicked out the house by his wife for being lazy, and Ferris (Mackenzie Crook), whose allure to the women (even the mother-in-law of his ex he is stuck living) is also his tragedy, alongside a series of other characters at the potato firm in vignettes - it is a bizarre film to return to, and not in a good way for me, just surprising it ever even got made in the first place. Beyond the non-metaphors for sex from the get-go, like "Fishy Fingers" the chippie to unsubtle pickle jar labels, it is gross from the get-go too on purpose, with the fixation of one side character, because of his old girlfriend's fetish for using strawberry jam in the bedroom, of said jam and fish in inappropriate ways. It is also far too niche and peculiar in its humour and tone to have ever appealed to anyone with hindsight, those not on the same wavelength with its gags, but the entire thing for me as a viewer also felt off entirely for other reasons.

It is immediately meant to be confrontation in the gross out humour, but its tone feels like it is missing what British director Jim Hosking got with The Greasy Strangler (2016) a decade on, a notoriously vulgar and twisted film in its gross out, but with the more gleeful edge of wittedness, and a John Waters influence clearly there, to lead it to being a success for a viewer like me. Sex Lives... is just peculiar and actually dour, even when the point is to find humour in the sexual neurosis of its male characters, the intent of its writer-director². The problem is as much because it is not really a sex comedy but plays to the tone of one as, whilst there is enough lewdness to warrant only 18 year olds seeing this back in the day in a British cinema, with the exception of one scene in a sex shop and nude photos on background walls, there is no nudity or explicit sex even as a gag onscreen like in a Confessions... era seventies sex comedy, but it is a lot of gross out comedy rather than playing to the deadpan nature of its series of men struggling with their libidos either. It de-eroticises sex, set in the council estates, reducing it down to shabby men and their existential crisis, replacing the flamboyance of a Carry On sex comedy with just saying "shag" instead, but without necessarily enough wit or just being vindictive in a funny way about the material.

Even in terms of just having as much sexual language as possible to be crass, even Judge Dread, to make an ultra obscure British-only reference, was a lot more elaborate than this, an English ska and reggae musician who, in the seventies especially, gain traction for taking the likes of fairy tales, and making songs around them with sexual innuendo and double entendres alongside just songs about sex. Considering Judge Dread was not subtle either, but more flamboyant on a song like Big Six in his big pun, that pretty much sets up the tone, although considering this film ends on someone wishing to kill a panda to have sex with it, because they would not be able to alive without being attacked, we are in a film which, directed and written by Andy Humphries, is idiosyncratic in a way that I look with a perverse form of admiration in for going to this level, but also never really running with it in anything more perversely clever or so twisted until it goes full circle into inspired. It never tries to go further, and speaking of the John Waters reference earlier, to really got bad taste this should have gone further until it became subversive and gross, rather than gross and merely crass. It is peculiar, in how it really does not follow a plot and falls into a series of vignettes, the closest things to this in tone and shock value being Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012) for American equivalents, non-sequitur films where the humour is mostly bodily humour or weirdness at one tone, in which there is a tangent on everyone wondering how bees make honey (or if wasps do), or a young Mark Gatiss as an incel stalker that has not aged well. From The League of Gentlemen to some, Sherlock for others, and for me a series of horror documentaries on horror cinema and culture, Gatiss is one of the few mostly rewarding aspects, trying him damndest with the performance, and having one joke that lands, the failed attempt to kill his interest's dog by placing him on a chopping board on the kitchen top and threatening him with a knife.

It is a film, and I apologise for having to type this, where "proper fanny flavour" is a phrase used, and especially in mind that term means different things to different countries in slang, I feel embarrassed regardless for using dialogue which feels of an alien logic. For any time it gets the tone right for a crude working class story about horny guys - cutting in Buzzcock's Orgasm Addict, a deeply crude but funny punk song about wanking too much - to surreal non-sequiturs that do work, the nameless but majestic gherkin delivery man who, manly stud to all, is open to being with young women working at chip shops to elderly old women with his body, Sex Lives... can work but those are the narrowest moments where it manages to find itself. Most of the time it is depressing, without bringing even callous humour to the proceedings, merely leaving us to wallow in the lives of Dave and Ferris's characters, discussing wanting to have all the sex they want and wasting their lives in pubs, and not landing at all. It opens up a lot of male neurosis about men who are uncomfortable against sexually aggressive women who are, which is a joke which eventually reveals the female characters are archetypes, including Dave's tired wife, without anything really to them, not even fascinating mirrored distortions of what these men view the opposite sex as, but just two dimensional. The mother-in-law, the women who are just more comfortable in themselves, the woman who has group sex with multiple men, leading to one of the other few good jokes about the guys discussing where they parked their cars outside waiting for the orgies to happen, and the relationship between the chip shop employee and her husband are all there for punch lines which do not work. The later pair especially is kink shaming in parodying a consensual voyeuristic relationship where he likes to hide and she likes to mock-adultery with her boyfriends; strange as it is depicted onscreen, barring the lack of safety on his basement supports to lift him on the ceiling, or getting locked in his own car boot by accident, theirs is at least a healthy if peculiar sex life to theirs worth of a film that would funny weird, icky but funny in a sex positive way.

A film could be gotten a lot from the awkward reality of trying to have the sex life one imagines in porn, where two guys in a potential threesome with a woman find themselves more concerned about getting an allen key to fix the bed frame beforehand, but instead it cuts to Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting in the middle of the act, which makes no sense and does raise that the song probably should stay in another time period if it keeps being brought out for films like this. Instead of being a world of desperate men panicking about their masculinity, it keeps skipping the more interesting concern here in favour of them going down the pub being meant to be celebratory, or a scene of dog poo being fired through a super soaker. It does not even get into the fact this is sexist, in that ultimately one of our leads, Dave, does not really deserve the happy ending he gets, or that Ferris' character never gets anywhere, not even a cynical gag in this repetition brought in to emphasis this non-conclusion. By the time we have a neon sex sign montage set to an American lounge ballad song, I again wonder how this managed to get produced, simply because even the 2000s, the UK Film Council for all the unconventional films they funded should have found this too niche or not sellable as a sex comedy as it was, rather than provide the money to the production they did.

At the time when the film was being panned, Andy Humphries actually wrote a defence of the film he made in the Guardian newspaper², making it a class argument that critics were middle class and hated the film, taken from real life experiences, for being working class including the cast not being "glamorous" in the idea form. Honestly, speaking as a working class person myself, Sex Lives of the Potato Men is a film, now forgotten, which I find fascinating to witness, but is narrow in its sense of humour, and neither sexy nor a dark comedy poking holes in sexual hang-ups to ever have worked, a form of strange humour like the American films I have mentioned earlier which is the one area of weirdness I can rarely get into. Jim Hosking, who I mentioned with The Greasy Strangler, got on my vibes, with non-conventional body types, crude and disgusting humour, and enough penises onscreen (including fake ones) to fill a sex shop, but it was also idiosyncratic and clever in its mix of the banal and the arch, whilst also being well made in its production choices from the music to the location scouting. Even knowing that Humphries made the film as dour on these male characters on purpose, which I have to admire, does not really get past that, for me, it never gets this humour across in a way I was won over at all and was lost as a viewer from early on with.

It is a cruel ending punch line to end this review on what Humphries made next, a documentary named Darts Players' Wives (2005), but his career has stayed in TV documentaries and works about British comedians of the golden eras between the sixties to the nineties, Sex Lives of the Potato Men's lasting effect sadly one unintentionally or intentionally putting him in this era of filmmaking only from then on. The UK Film Council itself, founded in 2000, would last until 2011, with way too many films to name behind their legacy. To just name a few, there is Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), a Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006), Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (2009), Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), Shane Meadow's This Is England (2007), Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), even genre films like Christopher Smith's Severance (2006), with their last film The King's Speech (2010), which proved a last hurrah for an entire decade of British cinema I grew up in, and for the Council, by winning the Best Picture Oscar at the 83rd Academy Awards. If anyone remembers Sex Lives of the Potato Men, we quote the ending of Some Like It Hot (1959) - "Nobody's perfect..." - but this is a type of weird I do not enjoy. I just return to it, once despising it as "completely obnoxious and moronic", and finding its entire existence bizarre to consider instead with less hatred.

====

1) Sex comedy film grant criticised, published by BBC News February 21st 2004.

2) If it's too smutty, you're too snooty, written by the director-writer Andy Humphries for The Guardian, published February 26th 2004.

Swordfish (2001)

 

Director: Dominic Sena

Screenplay: Skip Woods

Cast: John Travolta as Gabriel Shear; Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson; Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles; Don Cheadle as Agent J.T. Roberts; Sam Shepard as Senator James Reisman; Vinnie Jones as Marco; Drea de Matteo as Melissa; Rudolf Martin as Axl Torvalds

Ephemeral Waves

 

Swordfish takes a huge risk from the first scene, one willingly waving a red flag at the film critics of the time of its release, with John Travolta speaking to the camera about how unrealistic crime films are over an espresso. He even speaks about how even Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is unrealistic despite being an acclaimed film in the genre, [Huge Spoiler for that film] all because Sidney Lumet did not let the bank robbers get away with it [Spoilers End]. Swordfish as I will get into is a ridiculous film, so the brass balls of presumption to have this opening is hilarious, probably with full knowledge of the ridiculous gubbins the film gets into. Swordfish is an absurd film, and if I had to put a finger on why I hated this film once, as one of the worst films I ever saw, it is likely that I once held a stigma against "boring" Hollywood films. This was an era, the golden era of DVD rental stores, where I saw too many when my parents used to rent everything from a Global Video here in my English town. With the one or two weird titles that came through the exceptions to many of the big promoted titles of the 2000s, such as the low budget films which were able to slip in between the big budget films and be rented by accident, I saw a glut of the 2000 to 2005, to 2003 at least in terms of Hollywood. These are the titles, the pre-HD versus Blu-Ray war era of 2006, which lead to me having an allergy to big CGI explosions and remotely any sign the score was dictating the emotional cues in a film.

Swordfish is now an old film, and it presents a transitional period in Hollywood cinema, beginning with its co-producer Joel Silver. Silver would work throughout the 2000s and 2010s onwards, but his golden era is that of the golden age of American action films, from producing Lethal Weapon (1987) to Die Hard (1988), someone who expanded the types of films he was producing in the nineties with titles like The Matrix (1999) earning him success. He was however still returning to the bread-and-butter of his earlier career with action films, the changes to how they were presented how he continued from the eighties with films like the one covered in this review. Swordfish also presents us with a director, Dominic Sena, who came from the lineage of music video directors who were especially making their voices known in the nineties, working with the likes of Janet Jackson. Then there is a screenwriter with a tiny writer career altogether, Skip Woods, who was early within his work here but with the likes of The A-Team (2010), attempting to reboot the legendary eighties TV series, to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a divisive spin-off in the X-Men superhero series, I can now see where the cartoonish nature of Swordfish comes from. This is not detraction to this film, as the flaws are a greater problem than the tonal choices, but the later films showing where this one was coming from in terms of its screenwriter’s voice. Swordfish has the mentality to throw anything at the wall, even if nonsensical, and it is to the point this can be held responsible for an urban myth of a man being personally executed by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for treason, which just added a ridiculous cherry on top of this deeply flawed film. In many ways, tame in places but attempting edginess in others, this is a grindhouse exploitation film but on a Hollywood budget, if one with many issues that show blockbusters and exploitation films can share similar issues.

It has a plot, and that I had wrote that with tongue-in-cheek comes from this feeling like a pastiche of crime films, and not a detriment either. Hugh Jackman does find himself in a schism as someone who can played the washed and embittered figure of Stanley Jobson, old enough here to look like an aged renegade who went to prison, and crashed-and-burned after being a cool hot shot, but not as a hacker. It does not capsize his performance, but he feels like the Golden Age of Hollywood star who could never be this person in real life. If he as this character was anyone but a computer hacker, the image and style of performance would work in terms of verisimilitude. As a computer hacker, due to how it is portrayed here, it is up to Jackman's natural charisma to suspend disbelief. He has the virtue of the classical matinee idol, even when his big breakthrough was a 2000s plus phenomenon, the superhero becoming a more respectable casting choices as the films were making money, whose character in any other circumstances would not work if a similar actor like him was cast. Anyone else would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but he can make this matinee take on a hacker work in the same way Cary Grant would have stuck out, as we would have not minded, if dieselpunk was a concept in thirties Hollywood cinema.

The lynchpin that helps with the film to improve it, Jackson's character is a hero willing to commit a major hacking crime to steal millions from the US government, but he does so to earn the money needed to get legal custody of his daughter. In what could be an odd conservative slant, but I think is more a weird quirk of a film that is PG-13 for most of its tone, but prods at the older Joel Silver films which had more R-rated content, the ex-wife has connections in the adult film industry. The ex-wife is a troupe of action cinema anyway from John McClane, here a porn actress with her porn mogul boyfriend with a possible drama in a more complex melodrama even in a blockbuster action film left on the table. One where she is unhappy regardless of her career being porn or not, drinking all the time, in which no matter how she tries to connect to her daughter, her hatred for the husband pushes the adolescent away. Like some Hollywood films, i.e. many, that is not the case and she is an archetype that does cause one to wonder how many screenwriters accidentally showed axes to grind, and in the case of Skip Woods here, may have just taken a troop from films he had seen before. The demonization of porn was an idiosyncratic spin but is so slight it is a weird quirk among many.

More so as, whilst this has moments of adult risqué, factoring the one infamous moment of the film involving the lead actress Halle Berry, playing the femme fatale who brings Jackman into John Travolta's plan, this is a film a world away from a gristly reality. This makes the sudden moments of adult tone more surprising with hindsight, considering Jackman's test for the job is literally attempting to hack the US government's secret website whilst former soccer/football player Vinnie Jones has a gun to his head, and a woman is giving him oral under the work table, flickering of an old R-rated film here and there abrupt when it happens. Most of the film however is a broad over-the-top story; even if there are casualties, including one hostage in the opening at the heist blown up by a contraption she has on, one foot is in the nineties Hollywood mould and one in the new era means that everything is broad, of archetypes and lack of causality. Considering as well hacking is the title premise too, expect none of it to be realistic at all, with actors talking jargon and all meant to look cool in a "cinematic way". It is also less a concern than being a bank heist film, which presents in itself the sense of this film trying to match a new era, where the internet would become more prominent, only to still feel awkward.

The prominence of John Travolta is notable for the tone, and another factor affecting your ability to enjoy this or not is how you gauge his character and performance, the villain Gabriel Shear already idiosyncratic before you have later era Travolta acting interpreting him. I do not mind him here, and actually found him one of the more entertaining aspects, if with a caveat that the performance does expose too much. Travolta, already by this point having played Nicolas Cage, who played him, in John Woo's Face/Off (1997), an example of strange Hollywood cinema when it is done right, can have good scenery chewing. He really was knee capped, even if you do not factor in the controversies of the Church of Scientology, when Battlefield Earth (2000) was released, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel which a) had the controversies of Scientology, from its founder's voice in the text, as an albatross, b) had a drubbing that lasted to the modern day, and c) presented John Travolta as the lead evil alien in dreadlocks, giant platforms and leather costume hamming the performance so much it could turn some vegetarian. The Face/Off reference is appropriate as Travolta could have done a Nicolas Cage, who managed to ride financial debt and mockery to be an unsung hero in terms of committing himself to acting both well and/or so far up to eleven he transcended the mockery. Travolta here, since he is the most prominent aspect of Swordfish, struggles with a sense of self seriousness here, trying to be "cool" in his suits, slicked back hair, taste in expensive coffee and high lofty musings provided by Skip Woods' script. He is meant to be the awesome real anti-hero, but if Nicolas Cage had played this role, it would have worked despite the other problems with the film, whilst there is a sense of artificiality with the performance with Travolta that does undercut this. Despite being one of the memorable aspects for the better with the film, it does accidentally expose something beyond the film to consider with any other performance of his when I encounter it.

The biggest problem with a film like this for all its mad turns, a film about hacking that eventually however leads to a bus of hostages being carried along in the air by a helicopter, entirely in the fantastical more over the top than most fantasy, is one that lead to me being ambivalent to blockbusters from youth. So many, as here, we would dismiss as "mindless" to munch popcorn to, but in truth, for all of us saying we want to have serious profound dramas all the time, most of us just want to have a fun time but with the issue always instead finding something wanting. So many of these films as here you could pluck out cast members and plot points entirely underutilized and see the problem was always that the films skimmed over their most interesting aspects. With the aspects you begin the count being underutilized, the real folly of many blockbusters I dismissed in my youth were where you had weirder, more tantalising premises never fulfilled.

Whatever you think of the acting potential of Vinnie Jones, the notorious Wimbledon F.C. soccer player who was as known for his aggressive on-pitch style as much as for the work he did as a player in a variety of team, he gets little here it is strange he was even cast. Considering the only time you see him stand out, threatening to use rocker launcher ammunition as a suppository on one of the hostages, is just near his end of a role as a generic thug, all the real issues with blockbusters was always the lesser sum of all the parts of their high budgets and casts. The example which stands out is with Halle Berry. It is tasteless to say this, but Swordfish became the film where she as an actress was comfortable going a topless nude scene sunbathing. It only becomes sleazy when reduced to the images of a celebrity as a sexualised object, rather than the actress comfortable committing to the image of eroticism, something you get from the "Mr. Skin" attitude of reducing an actress' entire career to a compilation of her nude scenes out of context, a reference to a real life website that specializes in locating, posting, and rating instances of female nudity in television and film¹. In context, the scene is not tasteless, but plays as a sex comedy bit where Berry, who did the scene to become more confident in her own body onscreen², becomes the figure in control, whilst it is Hugh Jackman who becomes the punch line to the empowered and comfortable woman, even blushing in his character in the moment. Far more insulting with time having past is simply how little Berry actually has to do. It is more egregious your sole female lead has nothing to do, a femme fatale who may be playing both sides but is a blank slate. Even a "dumb" action film could have benefited from what film noir did, the ability to give actresses in these potentially dubious roles meaty performances as compelling figures, something you could see Halle Berry do in what little she has here, but never gets.

Swordfish is okay, where really the issue is of how so many of these films have everything but feel like disparate parts. This is more so the case as, for a film released a few months before the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the start of the second Gulf War, one of the more compelling loose ends is the knowledge that Travolta's character is actually a black ops agent, a thief who is stealing his own country's money to fund protecting the country from terrorist threats. This kind of subversive touch, lost in the ballyhoo, could have been something to let breathe and allow this a knowing air of subversion and weirdness. This is more so now, as mentioned in the review, it is likely due to this film, from one glib comment in this film from Travolta about U.S. President Thomas Jefferson personally seeing to a treasonous person, that people thought this actually happened despite the fact the screenwriter clearly added that into the dialogue as a fictitious flourish^{3a & 3b}. This perverse afterlife to the film is weirder than fiction, making one wonder what this series of fragments, proudly as over-the-top as possible, could have been if playing more to these crime tropes fully committed to a mad edge. Far from the worst film ever made nowadays, Swordfish however from my teen years, like many of those films, could have been lodged fully into the memory if it had the courage to go up to eleven than just come off as silly. Face/Off, brought up earlier in this review, was a silly film I first saw in my teenage years, but it is remembered for good reasons, which is not surprising as director John Woo, able to fully unleash his style from his eighties Hong Kong films, came from a style of filmmaking that never let the stranger or even kitsch aspects undercut taking their dramas seriously nor not making the action scenes as inventive as possible. If this got sillier and Travolta got to pontificate more on movies over espressos, Swordfish could have been something more even if it had become a favourite “so-bad-it’s-good” movie for people to talk of on podcasts, but instead what it is cautious as too many of these films are.

 

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1) The nadir of this, which I am amazed was allowed to go forth, is of course when Seth MacFarlane hosted the 2013 Oscars and performed the song We Saw Your Boobs, which came off as a demeaning when, to be honest, a song called "We Saw Your Butt" about male nude scenes might have avoided this by playing to a jovial glee without the gender bias.

2) Halle Berry bares her soul, written by Bruce Kirkland for Canoe.ca, archived from the original published July 11^th 2012, originally published July 20^th 2009.

3a) Execution on the White House Lawn, taken from Monticell.org.

3b) Jefferson still survives, unlike the other guy, written by Anna Berkes for Jefferson Library.wordpress, published November 5th 2008.