Workbooks Collection (2005)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Canon Fodder

 

Known also as Love-Chaunt in the Chimney, at least in the Zeitgeist DVD release of Cowards Bend the Knees (2003) which have these as an extra, this is among the many of Guy Maddin's career of feature length and short length films, but with the irony that, long before the Seance (2016) project, where he resurrected the lost movies of directors from Mikio Naruse to Ernst Lubitsch, Maddin himself has a lost film these are connected to. Seance, originally set up as a recorded live performance between Paris and Canada, became The Forbidden Room (2015), Maddin's delirious multi-narrative-within-narrative film, whilst the films also called the Workbooks Collection are just shorts from a project which was lost in a fire¹. This is a ghost, fused together and rebuilt from the remnants, including a tie-in to Cowards Bend the Knees.

The films are FuseBoy, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, Chimney Workbook, Audition 01 and Audition 02, blurring the lines between what survives of this project from the late nineties and Audition 02, which connects to Cowards Bend the Knees, a Guy Maddin film which does exist. This lost film started after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a 1997 production that for me was a pleasant experience but is not historically the best period for Guy Maddin. A documentary from the time, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), shows a miserable Guy Maddin, who eventually hated Twilight of the Ice Nymph, which was not seen as a popular work, and a terrible and frustrating experience to the point that the documentary almost has a near-memoriam tone of Maddin imagining his career ending. Made in his garage, some at the Winnipeg Film Group Studio¹, his solution to overcome that experience was a film entirely self produced with improvisation.

How it would have compiled together, an amalgamation of Herman Melville short stories stuck together with assistance from George Toles, is a question for me of interest as, including the two Audition films, the lost film's surviving forms are a curious set of experimental pieces entirely about mood. They precede the fetishishtic nature of Cowards Bend the Knees, the most overtly sexual film of his career, as well as touch a similar nature to old George Kuchar and Jack Smith films as improvised low budget productions literally filmed at points in the director's garage. Rooster Workbook is probably the most explicit, in which a nude woman crawls through homemade crawlspaces, whilst feathers and a rooster populate the visions in rapid fire, repeating scenes in the editing. Fuseboy, starring Guy Maddin regular Louis Negin, is the most implicitly erotic, at least in how Negin, in just tighty whities, plays a man possessed by an erotic memory of three younger men (or one his younger self with two) shirtless erotically mucking about fixing electric fuses.  

With Zookeepers Workbook, Maddin even explicitly references Les Chants de Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont's transgressive novel which, cosnidering its high art status, is also a work where the God-hating transgressive lead has sex with a female shark, surprisingly more transgressive than even Maddin's own work at times but befitting someone, whilst more whimsically transgressive in his films, to reference. Most of the shorts also, shot in standard definition, feel even if from afterwards like prototypes from The Heart of the World (2000), a short film that, when it was commissioned and debuted at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, was a huge turning point positively for Maddin with its Soviet rapid fire editing and aesthetical tributes. These shorts are to be absorbed, his obsessions felt like mood tapes with their repeating images, the Audition shorts, the first for Fuseboy, the later with cast from Cowards Bend the Knees, a curious pair to include but yet befitting, suddenly Maddin turning the viewfinder on his productions themselves. They all, whatever they call them, are a fascinating collection.

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1) As talked of briefly in Offscreen for An Interview with Guy Maddin: Dissecting the Branded Brain by David Church for Volume 10, Issue 1 in January 2006

A Night to Dismember (1983)

 

Director: Doris Wishman

Screenplay: Judy J. Kushner

Cast: Samantha Fox as Vicki Kent; Diane Cummins as Mary Kent; Saul Meth as Adam Kent; Miriam Meth as Blanche Kent; William Szarka as Billy Kent; Chris Smith as Sam Kent; Dee Cummins as Vicki Todd; Larry Hunter as Larry Todd; Mary Lamay as Ann Todd

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) Re-Review / An Abstract Candidate Re-Review

 

The voice seemed to be coming from the hat box.

The narrative with the one horror film from Exploitation Queen Doris Wishman, unless you count her porn horror films, is that the original version of this film was destroyed, either by fire (as documented in Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews by Brian Albright (2012)) or by a disgruntled film lab employee (as Wishman herself documented in a DVD commentary for this movie). This left the original trailer, and a version remade from what survived with additional material. This review exists now in a world where the "Lost" version was found to still exist, preserved on video tape in dire need of being archived itself, but the suggestion whilst scarce the materials are out there and where unaccounted for. This is more so as, whilst the quality is terrible as it has been leaked onto the internet, this version allows a really curious juxtaposition of the source film, and what most people know of, re-contextualising a deeply strange film with a fully fleshed out and weirder context.

And, calling this the Released Version, the re-contextualisation really emphasises how weird this film is. For the uninitiated, Wishman was already idiosyncratic as a filmmaker, one of the few female filmmakers in the golden era of exploitation cinema who specialised more in sexploitation, who here was reaching one of her last productions with a huge gap to the 2000s for her last work. She had a curious filmmaking style if you watch a film like Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), and the Released Version immediately warns of this being unlike a conventional horror film when, with a detective narrator character added in this version, footage surviving from the Lost version is reconceptualised as major character deaths are an abrupt series of non-sequitur events. Events described, I might add, of being important, of a sister killing her younger sister, only to accidentally fall on her own axe, and the history of deaths in the Kent brothers' family, which adds no context to the main narrative.

The actual narrative, built with new footage interspliced between the original, includes a new actress playing Vicki, which will get confusing as one of the actresses now sidelined in old footage as a side character was originally called Vicki too when a protagonist. The Released Version's Vicki is released from a mental institution for killing two young boys, still very unstable as actress Samantha Fox plays her unsubtle, and with her two siblings (one the original film's Vicki renamed played by Diane Cummins) wishing to gaslight her so she goes back in the institution. The use of the Lost Version's surviving footage is weirder now, knowing the other sister was a protagonist, but also because in both versions, this was a surprisingly gory film. The Released Version takes scenes to goofy levels, such as a mannequin head a clear stand-in (i.e. not hidden) for a real one placed in the fireplace, but it comes after a pair of abrupt decapitations of a romantic couple which is merely changed in dialogue and context. This was Wishman trying to catch up with that era of the slasher film and she went for a bloody slasher-like film with aplomb, which adds to the strangeness of intent.

Out of the pair, the version we got is absurd. Even in terms of the new footage, it unintentionally comes off so, which is in mind Wishman's legacy is as much for absurdity in her work, such as her obsession with cutting to feet and the environment away from actors. Vicki in the Released Version is very much out of her mind still in a childlike way, the moment she pulls at her mother's hair in the car when she is just picked up from the institution, and family dinner is here make your own sandwiches, with only the selection of bread, cheese and bologna available, which add ridiculous quirks to the film you cannot take seriously. Some of it is due to trying to create a new narrative from the old footage, which I will get to slightly later, but other aspects of post-production do add to what is already a weird film. This is infamously where voices come out of hat boxes, but this is also in the Released Version where someone had to audibly make the slurping noises to represent a head being squashed by a car wheel, already taking a film which was incredibly bloody and over-the-top to begin with. That scene also included someone having their heart punched out, and the one ran over having their fingers chopped off afterwards with an axe, so the sound effect clearly being made with a mouth adds a cherry on top.

Then there is also the music. Here I will split between both versions, as the Lost Version is actually a grim movie in context, a production in tone helped considerably by the fact its original score is a droning electronic one that is dreary and ominous in mood. The music for the most well known version, more so now able to compare the two, is as much now an influence for how surreal A Night to Dismember is, as it can be compare to an elevator "light music" soundtrack crossed with an old detective show with a dash of a game show theme song. It adds to the delirium of what is a hodgepodge in its existence, already curious as a work with spliced in footage, with the old cast in new scenes and in re-used ones like ghosts haunting the living new actors, by adding even moments it sounds tonally off from its bloodier content.

The Released Version for me is the better of the two, because at only over an hour and a bit, it is like having your ears and eyes spiked with an audio-visual narcotic, with dream sequences about your family murdering you, or the film's narrator only being as omnipresent as he is because everyone in the cast kept highly detailed diaries. In contrast, the Lost Version feels a bleak film, one which at nearly ninety minutes drags in trying to be a narrative story, but still compelling for Wishman making a bleak mood with the film. It offers a spooky fun prologue, with a man in a cape, in the graveyard, as your host who will control the viewer and lead them on a journey, but the narrative he tells is grim. The premise is initially as ridiculous as, following two narrative arches of mother and daughter, the first is opened with the suggestion being hit by lightning in the head as the future mother Mary does causes psychic powers. But beyond this, it feels a more miserably toned work, what with Mary not liked by her family and treated miserably.

Even the gas lighting brother is arguably worse now he blames her for stealing the money from their father, which he himself does for horse race betting, and said father is a mean tyrant. Mary's psychic powers and the voices she hears allow her to kill with an unseen force with a wish however, such as a cheating boyfriend and the other woman in the double decapitation scene in its original context. This Lost Version recontextualizes so much, including the murders, reused in the Released Version, being of Mary's will to have people killed, or that when Mary dies in childbirth, the daughter we follow is Diane Cummins' original version of her character, the original Vicki. Her life is even more miserable as someone who, in her adopted family, is still tormented, even by two random boys or a house part of teasing guests, leading to a body count and an ending which just leaves her a violent maelstrom. It has its quirks, but the Lost Version becomes a mean film juxtaposed by its ominous droning score and the gore. It has silliness, but tonally this is an entirely different film, and together these films present a fascinating chapter of cinema in their existence. Doris Wishman herself would not make many films after this - her unreleased Dildo Heaven (2002), a sex comedy, was one of the last, also recontextualizing old sexploitation footage in a digital no-budget movie. Truly, she was a one-off, but A Night to Dismember, both versions, was unique and to see them together they make this an even stranger experience especially when you watch both of them in a double bill as I did.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Non-Abstract Review: Cry Baby Lane (2000)

From https://hiddenhorrors.files.wordpress.com
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Director: Peter Lauer

Screenplay: Peter Lauer and Bob Mittenthal

Cast: Jase Blankfort as Andrew; Trey Rogers as Carl; Larc Spies as Kenneth; Frank Langella as Bennett; Anne Lange as Ann Weber; Marc John Jefferies as Hall; Allison Siko as Louise; Jessica Brooks Grant as Megan; Sheri Drach as Kathy; Gary Perez as Gary; Steve Mellor as Dick Weber

Synopsis: In a small town, there is a tale of a pair of conjoined twins who, when they died as infants, were severed from each other, one buried in the cemetery and the other buried at a place called Cry Baby Lane. Andrew (Jase Blankfort), and his older brother Carl (Trey Rogers), have a mock séance at a grave to exploit this with a group of girls, only to release an entity that is significantly malicious.

The story goes, like any good spooky tale, that on October 28th 2000, a TV movie was shown on the American channel Nickelodeon that was deemed inappropriate for its young audience, and buried never to be heard of again. Over the decade or so that would follow, this work directed by Peter Lauer and originally meant to be a theatrical release, costing $800,000, was even questioned in terms of whether it actually existed. Some suggested, on the other side of the spectrum in a form of Creepy Pasta (online created urban legends) that it was suppressed for having incredibly disturbing material onscreen. Finally in 2011, a viral Reddit thread lead to a user ugnaught¹, who claimed to on the "lost" film on a VHS copy, uploading it online. Having seen the original broadcast version, which began with an introduction by Melissa Joan Hart, who I grew up with watching Clarissa Explains It All (1991–1994) and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003), I can attest that such a film did exist and, when that leaked VHS copy came about, Nickelodeon played into the hype by showing Cry Baby Lane again, claiming it was a "banned" film and then eventually showing it at Halloweens over the 2010s, particularly in a nod to a 90s nostalgia boom.

The fable of the horrible things said to exist in the film - as Creepy Pasta have included a SpongeBob Squarepants episode that was created by a psychologically disturbed figure which horrified the producers, or a cursed Mickey Mouse animation - is probably more horrifying than the actual TV movie, but it itself in the context of a one-off for a young audience is still weird, gruesome and frankly creepy in implied metaphors even for a crowd (like myself) who grew up on Goosebumps. Beyond the initial story told by the undertaker character Bennett (Frank Langella, who director Peter Lauer originally wanted to be played by Tom Waits) - where two conjoined twins (one good and one evil) die in infancy and are sewn away from each other - there's still a film here where which plays into a dark and fascinating premise. That, once the evil twin is accidentally released as a malevolent spectre, he infects people in the central town and makes them destructive and evil, particularly a group of girl scouts who become sadists, building off as well a central theme of our young male protagonist Andrew (Jase Blankfort) and his fears of puberty and masculinity.

And no, that's not between the lines either in the text, as he's shy and hates how he's scared all the time, at point confessing this and accusing his mother for having caused this by being over protective. His older brother Carl (Trey Rogers), obsessed with being macho and a diehard pro wrestling fan (1999 WCW and WWF merchandise on the walls), constantly picks on him and calls him a wimp, all whilst their father is a fascinating character, laid back and sardonically charming, also with one gag about him implying so much complexity when, watching monster trucks on the TV when his wife's in the room, one scene has him switch to coverage of supermodels on a catwalk when she's out the room.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xaz5GrH_-WI/Vh_YkulS3uI/
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Andrew's life is complex as he has a crush on a girl, who unfortunately is among those scouts possessed and becoming evil, among those tormenting him alongside his eventually possessed older brother and even trying to harm him; it reaches the point mid way through of him being stripped to his underwear, nearly being gored by a bull, and having to flee for his life half naked. Then there's the threat to kiss his beloved, whilst she's possess and threatening this or "chi chi", involving a significantly bigger and gigantic girl looking at him as if she'll easily break his spine in two. That's without his mother not believing him and even the adults, like a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, becoming possessed, where police will try to run you off the road, farmers with trying to run you over with a combine harvester, and guys for shits and giggles with beer will blow up their own boats in madness.

The eccentricity grows as a virtue. Whilst it would've been interesting to see Tom Waits in the role, Frank Langella, the major actor hired, also happens to be a great character actor who in his mere presence raises the material up. More so as, part of the film's sick sense of humour, he's openly a bad undertaker who will even replace coffins of those about to be buried with cheaper ones, as scummy as you can get despite still being a good, moral man at heart. His assistants include a stoner, (well an implied stoner who just acts sleepy), and another who digs the graves who pretends to always be ill but, when no one is looking, dresses up as a cowboy listening to country music in his home and prepares the dining table as if he's about to have a date there, never seen or even hinted at for a weirder twist. The production is as much like this, even if it evoked my childhood of watching shows like Goosebumps, with its moody atmosphere on such a low budget and the instrumental surf rock theme sounding like it's going to break into a song by The Cramps.

The result, appropriate for a more mature young teenage audience, is one I really liked and wished was more easily available. Yes, I admit the mythos is fun and there's something really rewarding in seeing old American commercials - alongside probably one incredibly weird and inspired mock "news report" that, barring one cringe worthy reference to Mexican food, is from a reporter inside a young boy's intestines, interviewing the staff within it just before it's about to blow with potent gestated fart gas. But, again, it'd be something great to see a proper release of just to learn more of its background - just to have witnessed a film which, far from below my expectations, provided its own interesting and blatant subtexts to its horror was enough for me to admire it.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODQ4YjExM
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1. https://archive.is/20130204104051/http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/08/13/081311-tech-news-crybaby-1-2#selection-345.12-345.20