Wild Zero (1999)

Director: Tetsuro Takeuchi

Screenplay: Satoshi Takagi

Cast: Seiji as himself / Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf as himself, Drum Wolf as himself, Masashi Endō as Ace, Kwancharu Shitichai as Tobio, Yōko Asada as the voice of Tobio, Nakajo Haruka as Yamazaki, Kazuko Yanaga as the voice of Yamazaki, Taneko as Hanako, Yoshiyuki Morishita as Toshi, Masao as Masao, Fusamori Tawaki as Mori, Murata Akihiko as Toshio, Shiro Namiki as Kondo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders!

[Update: This review was written before the announcement of Wild Zero 2, which was revealed with a trailer in early 2024 to at least be a film intended to be finished and released.]

Dismissed in my youth, the older self sees how much of an idiot I was back then with my opinion on Wild Zero, though I see the aspect which likely caused such a negative reaction, that this is more of a film enjoy its wacky premise than fully executing it in an elaborate way. In Britain, you would have to have the Beatles make as weird a film like Magical Mystery Tour (1967) or Yellow Submarine (1968) because of their reputation, The Monkees in the United States making the ill-fated decision at the time to make Head (1968) to rise above their reputation as a manufactured band, and in this case, Guitar Wolf as a cult rock band having the advantage instead of the vibrant Japanese genre film industry between V-Cinema and straight-to-video productions to theatrical. That and your director Tetsuro Takeuchi being the man behind your music videos, as a figure you can trust, and shooting this film in Thailand¹.

This particular film, before they in general became a pop culture concept in the mainstream fully, is an early example of taking the legacy of George Romero's zombie films, and the concept of zombies, and returning to them even as here in a playful way of fans of the films. Already in a film like this you have characters bring up Night of the Living Dead (1968) and whether each one in the moment has seen it or wants to in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. There are probably too many characters in general in Wild Zero too, but the personality is there, set around what is actually closer to the premise of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), where aliens only seen in gold UFOS are resurrecting the dead, leaving a motley series of characters to cope with this transpiring. Ace (Masashi Endō) is our proxy, a Guitar Wolf fan who earns the respect of their titular leader Guitar Wolf (Seiji), and can literally whistle them from a town away if in danger. Guitar Wolf the band, starting in 1987, have been continuing over the decades, even after the tragically young passing of Bass Wolf ("Billy") in 2005 at only thirty eight², and here they live the rock n roll music ideal of being outlaw enough to shot people but with a personal morality; Seiji himself is the leader who can appear, figuratively as much as in the flesh ,as the Obi-Wan Kenobi to guide Ace to act as a rock hero should whilst Bass and Drum Wolf offer back up. Tobio (Kwancharu Shitichai, with Yōko Asada as their voice) is the female lead and potential love interest for Ace, and there are also two lovable thieves who botch a convenience store robbery when we met them, male and female, and a female arms dealer whose business with the yakuza was halted by the zombies. The later, standing out as a side character physically, especially shows a moral ambivalence that, even in this silly premise, emphasises figures that can be on the fringes of society, and even in her case more interested in survival and money, but not be the villainess. The villain in this world is a shady club owner, who wears wigs and rocks stylish sets of hot pants, who has a casting car seat for female singers, deals with drugs, and wants revenge on Guitar Wolf and their lead singer in particular for fingers shot off during a standoff.

On the type of urban/country landscape, the luminal space and the wasteland, I find compelling in Japanese pop culture between cult films and anime, even factoring in that this is actually Thailand standing in for its setting, you get a pot pourri of scenes between guitar picks as throwing weapons, matching grenade launchers with said hot pants to go out on a night of the town for revenge, and the equivalent of throwing the kitchen sink in a cult film with abrupt eye lasers. There is also the least expected story of love and overcoming bias to someone you could ever see appear in a cult film, as this has a trans female lead in Tobia. Some of how it is dealt with not aged well and clearly played in the same wackiness as when the digitally added golden UFOs are spliced over famous world landmarks, but in the end, it becomes actually beautiful in how it plays out and progressive with hindsight. Of all the films to deal with this subject, the least expect where someone like Ace has the horrible reaction he initially has, only to feel remorse, realise his true love for her, and have the Guitar Wolf of the band be the one who tells him love exists beyond boundaries and nationalities, is spectacular more now time has passed. It is not something you find in cinema dealt with enough decades after this film was released, let alone dealt with, in an applaudable way, in a film where the military female character has to put on a plaid one piece due to zombies ripping her cloths up out of spite. It is as punk rock in the truest sense as a major subplot just placed within this tale with a happy conclusion.

A lot of this message fits the entire ethos the film has in terms of rock n roll music. Ace's introduction in his room shows the history of music, including Western bands, on posters on his wall, and it goes back to the likes of Burst City (1982) by Gakuryū "Sogo" Ishii in films showing the underdogs in their own world, in these bands or their fans. This ethos is one you can even find in other mediums within Japanese pop culture, such as with Daisuke Ishiwatari, the mind behind the Guilty Gear video game franchise. A creator of a fighting game franchise which references rock and heavy metal even in character names, he has also went out of his way to point out a character he created named Bridget was always meant to be a transgender female character, regardless of fans' attitudes and previous translations of the games in the past³, and depicting characters who straddle moral ambivalences who are still heroic or just badasses.

That Wild Zero itself is merely playing at its premise with humour will be something that will annoy some, as I found when I was younger, but that in itself befits this ethos. Considering you have a soundtrack where inexplicably Bikini Kill's Rebel Girl blasts in out of nowhere, you should see Wild Zero as a film made by fans of this type of music and movie making what they think is cool, and managing to actually make it stand out in many great ways such as its moments of showing this music truly meaning its progressive, anti-authoritarian nature even when being goofy. Even a joke about lovers meeting again as zombies and having their own happy ending, played off as actually sweet as much as funny, fits this tone perfectly. The plot becomes less a priority, the zombies merely cannon fodder and your aliens only depicted as those UFOs, and instead it is the ride that stands out. Sadly its director Tetsuro Takeuchi, barring work with Guitar Wolf and musical groups, has not directed much in terms of cinema, whilst Wild Zero itself feels like it is ready for a proper revival as a cult film, i.e. not on old DVDs being the way to see this, and allowed to be seen in a pristine restoration with the possibility of learning how the film came to be. Even if learnt to be a fun improvisation throwing caution to the wind, it would be a pleasure in itself to learn how this ride came to be.

 

=======

1) Wild Zero review by Ken Eisner, published for Variety on November 5th 2000. [Some of this has aged of the past even if slight.]

2) Guitar Wolf Biography by Mark Deming for All Music.com.

3) Guilty Gear Creator Clarifies Once Again That, Yes, Bridget is Trans by Kenneth Shepard, published for Fanbyte on September 14th 2022.

Human Highway (1982)

 

Director: Neil Young and Dean Stockwell

Screenplay: Neil Young, Jeanne Field, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and James Beshears

Cast: Neil Young as Lionel Switch / Frankie Fontaine; Russ Tamblyn as Fred Kelly; Dean Stockwell as Otto Quartz; Dennis Hopper as Cracker, Charlotte Stewart as Charlotte Goodnight, Sally Kirkland as Kathryn Geraldine Baron as Irene; Gerald Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Mark Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson / Booji Boy; Bob Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Robert Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson (as Bob Mothersbaugh); Alan Myers as Nuclear Garbageperson

An Abstract Candidate

 

Among idiosyncratic trends, one was a small amount of times musicians directed films. A few happened in the seventies – Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara (1978) in its original four plus hour form, outside of fragments, was withdrawn, and Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) is a divisive and weird experiment I need to get to again before given a proper comment on. Even Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit gets into this line up with The Fanatic (2019), a genre film with John Travolta, and he did manage to get into a murder’s row of figures, as in the eighties especially, you get a set of really distinct ones from big figures of music. Prince directed Under the Cherry Moon (1986), and David Byrne of the Talking Heads made True Stories (1986), a film which got lost beyond being a known cult film, only to get a huge critical reevaluation and a Criterion approved re-release for physical media. There is also the subject for today, which has to be one of the weirdest, in that I can now talk today about a film Canadian born musician Neil Young, legendary for the likes of the After the Gold Rush (1970) album, in which he managed to get together with the likes of Dean Stockwell, a bugged out Dennis Hooper, older actor Russ Tamblyn, and the band DEVO just before their mainstream success with the song Whip It, and make a film were Stockwell taking salt in his coffee is the least peculiar thing on the table.

Young, to be blunt, is an incredibly talented figure but, like Lou Reed, his impulses over the decades are entirely his decisions whether his fans agree with them or not. His eighties period, before 1989’s Freedom album and Rockin’ in the Free World, is bizarre in general. Trans (1983) I will look to with sympathy as, with the tragedy that his son was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak, the sudden shift as a rock musician to synthpop was as much dealing with trying to communicate to him as an experiment. It is however after this when David Geffen, the owner of his then-label of choice, demanded a "rock and roll album" from him, only for Young to make a rockabilly album as a response and Geffen to sue him for not making albums uncharacteristic of him. The eighties albums after are not well regarded, and even his return to Cosby, Stills and Nash for American Dream (1988), their last album from 1970 as a quartet, was not held in good regard. Human Highway, which has songs from Trans, predates that album, and was shot over four years with Dean Stockwell as a co-director¹, and likewise this is one of those films that, with Young's name as a selling point, which would divide people as much.

Young himself plays Lionel Switch, an idiot savant of a car mechanic who also dreams of being a rock star, someone who thinks that working on a car radiator is the same as the dangers of radiation poisoning, and openly admits to having drunk water from these radiators in the same dialogue. Stockwell is Otto Jr., who also plays his late father in an old man fake beard who died of said radiation poisoning, Otto the second having inherited the family gas station and diner, which is in close proximity to a nuclear power station, and was running into the red in bills when the son inherited it in the will. Hopper is among the diner staff, the chef with a loose hygiene plan and friend of neighboring raccoons, and Russ Tamblyn is the new employee Fred, a friend of Lionel‘s, taken in to work in the garage. DEVO, glowing bright red due to the radiation, work with the nuclear waste from the plant they casually dispose of, and both provide the most musical numbers and has member Mark Mothersbaugh, in the early era version of the band where he wore a baby mask, taking on the Dadaist Greek chorus by himself. Experiencing Human Highway, it is a vibrant plastic Americana in design to the production team’s credit, with throwbacks to fifties culture set against the new eighties era. Stockwell comes prepared with a pea green shirt and red tie, but for a film which has been difficult to see at times in a proper version, even a muddier version shows Neil Young already had a distinct eye even with help, creating a vibrant place even with minimal production design in idiosyncratic touches, like occasional back projection or the issue of nearby radiation from the plant causing flies to also grow bright red by a onscreen visual effect. Whilst cinematographer David Myers was more known for his history in musical concert films and working with musicians - he was the cinematographer on Renaldo and Clara, and was there to film the legendary Woodstock (1970) concert film - he also was cinematographer on a lesser known George Lucas project, THX 1138 (1971), a very aesthetically distinct film which, whilst different animals in aesthetic and tone, makes the stylization found here in Human Highway not a hard abrupt turn in his career. The look of this film stands out for what does admittedly wander to and fro from what presumably could be a plot, such as Otto considering torching the buildings for an insurance scam.

Sadly this does have one badly aged and problematic joke, of a stereotypical Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabian) figure of wealth that comes to the diner, clearly an actor in brown face and Young’s character using a racial term that is not acceptable. It is a sole sour note to a film where its biggest sin would be that, for Neil Young fans or film viewers, it is so scattershot and a weird flight of fancy it would lose people for not really caring for an actual story. You have to tolerate its peculiar lurches and that Neil Young, whilst capable of composing the likes of Cortex the Killer, or pissing Lynyrd Skynyrd off enough they added additional digs at him in live performances of Sweet Home Alabama, has a very dad humour sense of comedy too. His character Lionel with Russ Tamblyn play to old style slapstick, and the diner staff are over the top, so if you at all find this "lame" or still think this with a dismissive viewpoint, neither is that going to help with Human Highway. David Lynch is an apt comparison, more so as members of this cast would appear in his work – Stockwell and Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986), Russ Tamblyn in the Twin Peaks series - but even his most explicably comedic work, like the one season TV series On the Air (1992), whilst also having cheese ball humour, still possessed his own distinct sense of surrealism.

By the end of the film, Human Highway even rejects pretense of plot, as alongside abrupt nuclear catastrophe, a music number to celebrate it, and end credits evoking the Heaven sequence from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983), a portion of the film is Lionel being knocked out and having an extended fantasy about his rock success. This transpires after he meets his idol, also played by Neil Young, and knocks his head working under the star’s limo, starting a multi-scene dream sequence where, splicing in real concert performances, even the most impatient viewer will be rewarded, as Human Highway would have been worth preserving for the duet between Young and DEVO on My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue). This becomes of note as, whilst this timeline has been questioned¹, it is Mark Mothersbaugh, as he sings in the lyrics, credited to the phrase "rust never sleeps", which became the album this song would appear on with its acoustic counterpart. The heavier version of the song I first learnt of becomes a ten minute version here with added electronic noise instrumentation, and Mothersbaugh in a baby crib on the lead vocals, a sequence which is spectacular if you can appreciate a full blown rock jam session. It is, for a legendary song, an impressive moment for rock film history even if you sit through the whims of Human Highway and do not appreciate its goofball cheesiness.

That entire dream scenario may put off some who can even appreciate the first half, as it has its own aesthetic choices. It oddly evokes another director, Chilean figure Raúl Ruiz, and his eighties work with the obsession with idiosyncratic production design, saturated colour and viewers having to watch his work in VHS rips only, as Young choose to depict this passage of his own film with what feels like Vaseline smeared on the screen throughout.  Shifting between real concert footage, and moments of more slapstick, you have the character of Lionel is touring with the type of woodcarvings of Native Americans you would see in front of cigar stores in American films, seemingly wandering off at some point by themselves, and Young and real Native Americans at a celebration in front of a pyre, all of which becomes a stream of consciousness. The entire experience is unpredictable in a way, legitimately comparable to some experimental films, which can be appreciated but also liable to cause some viewers to pull their hair out for cohesion. Human Highway does show a lot of indulgences in its form, undoubtedly, but at the same time, baring the one joke I references earlier, the obvious issues with the film structurally have thankfully given way to so much that stood out and stayed with me in a positive. The final film altogether is absolutely of a period in Neil Young’s career which was ready to divide people, and even outside of it, this is an eccentric film I could appreciate but could have frustrated me if I was in the wrong mood. Thankfully I was in the right mood and could even at its silliness something to admire.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Stream-of-Consciousness/Wacky

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

 ======

1) The Weird Story of Neil Young’s Human Highway by Jim Knipfel, written for Den of Geek and published June 4th 2018.

Hellbent (1988)

 

Director: Richard Casey

Screenplay: Richard Casey

Cast: Phil Ward as Lemmy; Lyn Levand as Angel; David Marciano as Mr. Tanas; Cheryl Slean as Sally; James Orr as Spike; Phil Therrien as Duke; Stan Wells as Jones; Leigh Dego as Jane

Ephemeral Waves

Hey Lemmy, are you going to eat that burger, or wear it?

Major Spoiler Warnings

With a love song called Van Goh's Ear being one of their few original songs, a punk band performing in a club, grinding by, finds itself with the potential deal with Tanas (David Marciano), a shady figure whose sense of corruption is found, as the band plays, with a shooting he sets up at the same time. Not only a normal shooting, but at Christmas, with a motorcyclist wearing a Santa hat and beard, with a machine gun, hired to assassinate a man and wife leaving their child an orphan. Tanas can inexplicably appear uncalled for offering a mainstream contract to Lemmy (Phil Ward), head of the band, his base a strange strip club with topless women are bound to strange art installations, and wheelchair bound Vietnam vets ranting about Agent Orange in front of the dancers, a den to hide his shady operations with drugs and murder.

Tanas is a Satan figure, dangling a Faustian contract for Lemmy, literally for his immortal soul in Tanas' red lit chamber. The irony is that neither side seem competent, and this comes to the strange tone of Hellbent, a kitsch eighties tone which ultimately helps the film win me over after its initial rocky start, one which eventually it takes risks and gets compelling adds the bow to what succeeds. Lemmy and his band only get particularly good when they sell out, and unfortunately by then, with Tanas' henchmen frankly as incompetent, everyone's on a destructive trip. Tanas wants Lemmy, and his fellow member and love interest Angel (Lyn Levand) to go on a downward spiral, whilst his own men including a philosophical one whose only contributions is to rip off when the legend of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat¹, the other a sex deviate drunk he introduces Lemmy to getting high on cough syrup with hard liquor at the same time.

No one is going to leave this great, when the band was an amateur one who are not great at the beginning, even when they cover the Appalachian folk song Oh Death onstage, but the tragedy they will get into, involving firing firearms in the recording booth, and the kidnapping of a child whose mother will become an angel of vengeance over alongside her slain husband, will make Hellbent the most fascinating of American indie curiosities. Genre is vague here, which is for the better, and yes, I cannot talk of this without the late eighties fashion access and colour choices, from red skeleton earrings, and earrings everywhere even on the men, to red cling film sex dungeons which comes from the same aesthetic tangents of Rinse Dream films and late eighties excess. The film's tone wildly swings directions between goofy to serious, from men inexplicably bringing watermelons to a punk concert to yet having a compelling plot where, yes, Tanas is going for the cruellest if contrived revenges for a grievance he had for Lemmy and his band.

[Major Spoiler Warnings]

Tanas is actually Satan or a devil, the supernatural suddenly kicking in at the finale, adding a final touch that worked for the film and its strange air when the phantasmagoric erupts in the conclusion. That this all resolves around Lemmy's band having mocked him onstage is itself the kind of eccentric touch which works. That this ends with the curious touch, after all the happens, with Lemmy being reincarnated as a folk hippy preaching goodness and salvation adds to the many curious touches of Hellbent.

[Major Spoilers End]

There is a lot to Hellbent which is absurd - Satan's plot, if like this, would be undermined if a punk band bothered to play like Motorhead, or to a lesser extent a more energetic punk band from this era, rather than kill a snake onstage, especially as they had managed to get the riffs quicker and better beforehand. This is however a film where the female coroner, at a crime scene, proudly and blankly informs a newly christened widow of how her husband was precisely shot in the head, so Hellbent is clearly made with a sense of humour. The film is just one of many from the decades of independent genre cinema from the United States, and the amazing thing is that this is another I have found which is just as interesting, managing to have a story which is compelling. Director-writer Richard Casey had previous made a film Horror House on Highway Five (1985), which is held as being just as weird, maybe more so for a slasher film with a fake Richard Nixon masked killer. With no other feature films in his career after, baring a return with Horror House on Highway 6 (2014), sadly we lost an idiosyncratic voice just in Hellbent. It is a shame as Hellbent does exhibit all the personality (and eccentricity you would wish from such a film). Certainly, the tone, once it figures itself out, works in Hellbent's favour; with the soundtrack filled with obscure but good punk/post-punk music, and performance art appearance to everything, this has its own compelling logic that wins you over. We can only presume, since it is entirely of its era, we had enough to enjoy here and any more would spoil it.

=======

1) Or when Alice Cooper, very early in his career for him and his titular band, accidentally got a chicken ripped to shred by a crowd because he failed to realise they do not fly and chucked it into the audience.

The El Duce Tapes (2019)

 

Directors: Rodney Ascher, David Lawrence and Ryan Sexton

Ephemeral Waves

 

Starting with intent, this documentary on the controversial musician El Duce, lead singer of the shock rock group the Mentors, begins with an intertitle from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), appealing for the right of art. This is provocative to begin with, but in itself is a perfect way of starting this subject, the film (if you know of that film and its history) subconsciously drawing one to think carefully about the figure we are going to encounter in various contexts, as a film whose offensiveness was tragically more wider reaching asks for freedom of speech, ironically used to refer to a figure Griffith would have been appalled by. The film by Rodney Ascher and David Lawrence compiles footage from a young actor named Ryan Sexton that, stored over twenty five years and recorded in 1990-1, follows a figure who in the modern day requires a trigger warning for the type of subject he was deliberately provoking. That the Mentors or at least El Duce said their type of music was called "rape rock" is something from a different era, a deliberately crass and misogynistic tone to the lyrics meant from a provocation.

El Duce would have been cancelled today immediately, although the likelihood is that he would have still been able to make music, which is something in itself that, when looking back on a late figure like this, causes one to ask whether the modern world of "cancelling" figures really does work at all. It asks whether it is very slight and ineffectual as a concept in dealing with these sorts of questions of transgressive speech and the freedom to speak one's thoughts, even the offensive ones. This has obviously become more an issue as, whilst Duce is a complicate figure but also a marginal underground musician, more politically loaded use of the notion of "freedom of speech" has rightly made us be wary of anyone who argues for it. To let the writer of this piece put his own politics into the text, with you the reader to think of your own ideas in contrast, the side which speaks of homophobic/misogynistic/racist/etc, rhetoric is obviously morally wrong, with myself only throwing in too that those types of ideas, not the people but the ideas themselves, which support hate are inherently illogical and examples of complete lack of common sense. The problem for me also includes that the guards who wish to speak for progressive ideals have tragically taken on the same unsubtle, crass and sledgehammer graced tones as their enemies. Cancelling something does not really work for me, when the only way to kill the beasts of illogical thinking (hating another person) is to realise they stem from fears, bias and lack of connecting to others in dialogue.

El Duce, to completely deflate my little piece of soapbox standing, also is an example outside of the issues of modern political incorrectness which is more difficult to tackle in a simplistic black and white moralising. Simply because the subject, alongside making music which was only likely to be heard by a few, is also shown here to be a complicated, psychologically damaged figure also as much influenced by alcoholism as he was deliberately being offensive. It is weird, when the documentary says Duce was a predecessors to the modern day issues of political incorrectness, that they include footage of Milo Yiannopoulos, a figure some people may have completely forgotten about by 2019, and for me is an entirely different sort of figure to El Duce even if the filmmakers do link the pair (and South Park) for a reason.

If anyone remembers Yiannopoulos, the irony was that it was only when he shot his own foot off, saying something which even offended people on his wavelength, which blipped him out of pop culture into obscurity. Duce, in comparison, deliberately prodded the bear of controversy to anger people but at a time where he would still have been considered obscure, and never with the added insidious nature, with Yiannopoulos connected to the alt-right movement in the 2010s, of Duce ever being at a time where he could influence people beyond listening to really crass and offensive songs at concerts. Certainly, the concerns we have in the modern day are not new, as the documentary in its various clips posits the Mentors' rise at a time of highly provocative work from various sides of politics. Roseanne Bar was butchering the Star Spangled Banner to a chorus of boos at a baseball game, as George Bush. Sr. wanted the American family to be closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons, and plenty of other shock rock figures were around such as G.G. Allen and GWAR. And there were too Wally George and Jerry Springer, who both had El Duce on their shows and in themselves were deliberately provoking people by having him on their shows, for a larger audience, even if from different political sides and still condemning him.

GWAR in comparison to El Duce are humble, admitting they thought he was insane. Even GWAR were disturbed by the rape comments. Even Duce's own band members were. There is a lot with this figure which is distasteful. The homophobia is offensive, and then white supremists wanted to book the band. However, you also have the image of someone who declined extremists, awkwardly talking of having non-white friends and with knowledge a member of the Mentors on the side who is black, and whose homophobia (including explicitly at glam metal's poodle hair singers) was unfortunately common in a lot of culture too. Ironically referencing Fascism and anti-immigration dangerously veering into real opinion is the one truly scary moment of El Duce (real name Eldon Hoke) as a figure here, rather than anything that comes off as merely distasteful or crass, in one of his many rants where the line between provocation and intent do blur. A lot of what he says in jest or deliberate is going to make many viewers uncomfortable, but one of the most prominent things learnt throughout is that, for someone who I had only known as a cartoonish figure of offensiveness in his black executioner's hood, he was tragically complicated, something else which could easily be lost in merely damning him.

As the first time actually hearing the music, the Mentors are crude, making the suggestion by his fellow band mate Steve Broy almost absurd when El Duce is compared to Van Gogh. It also however says a lot that most of those around him do not really bat an eyelid at many of his provocations. His girlfriend Missy was only offended by the lyrics of 'On the Rag" and downplays him being evil; their erotic dancer on the stage shows downplays him, also referring to the fact that he and the rap group NWA, who were notorious for lyrics about shooting cops, were probably smarter by not actually doing either in real life but merely writing lyrics about them to shock; and there is the fact that, for anyone like myself with a little knowledge of Duce, he was also tragically a figure crippled by alcoholism who eventually died due to being crushed on train lines, whose sister here paints the image of a psychologically damanged man and also downplaying his comments.

Compiled as a documentary based on Sexton's footage, and pop culture material (films, even wrestling) to match the grubby VHS shot material, The El Duce Tapes is a very conventional documentary in terms of showing a snapshot of a troubled figure as much as their downfall. Said downfall was captured by a person named Steve Bray, the later "the Grunge era" of El Duce which gets uncomfortable as he is seen drunk to the state of pure disarray and barely existent onscreen. Even the one bizarre pop cultural thing Duce got involved with, when inexplicably documentarian Nick Broomfield captured him on film saying Courtney Love paid him to kill Kurt Cobain, was stated to have been not long before his untimely death, which really adds to the reality of what could either be a broad parody of a man or the deeply offensive figure few would defend. Even in the internet age, Duce would have likely not become a figure being clambered at to be cancel as, whether his real beliefs, he was also a man who couch surfed homes rather than own his own apartment, and whose alcohol consumption, as his own sister states, eventually even affected his ability to play music. The documentary has to streamline a bit, even if its structure, but the irony is knowing the little notoriety the Mentors got can a) be blamed on the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and Tipper Gore for getting them more sales, and b) blamed on glam metal, which led to so many bands in the underground, both innovative genres like death metal and other metal subgenres, and shock rock bands like the Mentors, being created by people who wished to be less commercial. (Something you could forget when, seeing a little of the Mentors touring, they had slots next to Saint Vitus, innovators of doom metal, and inexplicably Killing Joke, which causes me to wonder what that band would have thought of El Duce).

The one moment the mask seems to slip does also show the horrible influence his father had, one whose strict punishments for his children lead to him considering his dad being a sadist. This is coupled with said father designing the bouncing napalm bomb for the Vietnam War which deliberately could cause more death and agony, Duce seeing his Dad as the insane one of the family. That his father's porn collection, an actual collection carefully acquired, is said to have influenced Duce's lyrics really adds to the complicated psychological framework too.

As a snapshot of the time period too, this is definitely a compelling document too, just for the sight of GWAR unmasked which is startling to see. Seeing Dave "Oderus Urungus" Brockie out of costume, in particular, is a rare yeti sighting for a music fan like me. Knowing too the Duce was a talented child drummer, obsessed with the drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Keith Moon and jazz fusion drumming really does open up the provocative and now-problematic image of this hooded figure in itself too, especially once you learn of an alternative world of the Mentors as a jazz fusion band. If anyone above those already mentioned is to be blamed for the Mentors and songs like "Golden Shower", it is that no one would literally book jazz fusion so these musicians went "fuck it" and came up with the Mentors, "jazz fusion into perversion"'. It also says so much, even if you are on the side that this is just tasteless music that he produced that is not acceptable nowadays, that there is the Womentors - the all female Mentors tribute band who even have a gender reversed dancer on stage too - which emphasises that any art, problematic or otherwise, is subjective to the interpretation and should not be simplified. It is also hilarious knowing that the band KISS inspired The Mentors too, if only because as if anyone has watched Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), another documentary based on pre-existing footage from Dylan's 1975 titular concert titular tour, Dylan took inspiration from the band's makeup for his own white face paint during that tour. The strange connection between musicians of all types in it at least offers a light touch to end the review on.

Punk Rock Holocaust (2004)

Director: Doug Sakmann

Screenplay: Nick Esposito, Doug Sakmann and Christopher Stella

Cast: Kevin Lyman as Himself; Heather Vantress as the Warped Tour Reporter; Lloyd Kaufman as Belial / Satan; Doug Sakmann as William Van Landingham, III / Main Executioner / Explosion Stunt Executioner; Steven Smith as the Fuse Action News Reporter

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #159

 

And that my friends is how the drummer from Def Leppard really lost his arm.

Tongue in cheek, I am glad the type of music in this film, a slasher film built around the Warped Tour and to promote it as a brand, faded away whilst heavy metal, even still off the record charts, got its groove back after the nu metal decades. I say this as someone, growing up as a teen in this era, who immediately recognised Bowling for Soup, all crushed to death by one of their own members, so call me a hypocrite at the same time. 

Having grown up in the early 2000s, and been able to catch up with some of the trend, there was a time when even Metal Hammer magazine had bands like Funeral for a Friend prominent, not a derisive comment but that, reading it in the late 2000s, those bands were not as prominent when the heavier music gained popularity again and were more likely to dominate their free CD compilations over those bands likely to go on the Warped Tour. This period instead was nu metal on its way out, when ska punk was a thing, and we were just off the "New Wave of American Heavy Metal" whilst cult metal bands from Europe and around the world, chugging along, would eventually become the legends but not until after this period, even those like Meshuggah who started in the early nineties.

Here the Warped Tour, whose staff and founder Kevin Lyman play himself, are lightly mocking themselves even, though it does come with a Woody Allen levels of self confidence issues when a joke says they are about as punk as Pee Wee Herman. Punk Rock Holocaust itself is peculiar as a hybrid of concert footage, a promotional film, and a micro budget slasher film which however has a level of production value few have. To my surprise, hearing of this in a negative light over the years, this was a surprise, a mess, but one that would have actually thrown a kitchen sink on stage if considered funny, that production value a huge virtue alongside a sense everyone was having fun.

Contextually director Doug Sakmann has already made a short film called Re-Penetrator (2004), a porn horror story inspired by Re-Animator (1985) which suggests he was already unconventional, a good thing as the worst nature of slashes especially was predictability and telling a conventional story blandly. He has to work around that, honestly, this is a long list of deaths tentatively wrapped around a story involving a Warped Tour. The attempt at said plot is more complicated than you would initially think, all stemming from a band playing "industrial New Wave synth pop" being slighted by Lyman, demonic revenge and Troma figurehead Lloyd Kaufman playing Satan, if the Devil had followed comedian Bill Hicks advice and gotten into the music industry, a huge music mogul pulling the strings on popular bands. To this film's credit, it is openly humorous with this plot, an absurd film desiring to build a high body count but with a silliness, where the masked killer is so evil they will contaminate the vegan food stand with animal fat.

Again, it is a messy film in structure. They also make the blasphemous mistake, when Andrew W.K. comes to save music, to cut away between his set and death by electrocution to another scene at the autograph tents where his songs are muffled in the distance. It does also make too many defensive jokes about Warped not really pushing punk, which is less a criticism but a sense of too much insecurity then they might have realised. It is contrasted by the level of humour which is not in jokes and amateurish but are actually funny, such as a fake French hardcore band named Beret, created by Kaufman's Satan because this was the time when the United States and France, during the second Gulf War, were divided on the conflict, the hostilities something he can make a profit on by having an angry French band all in stereotypical white and black shirts, berets and black trousers being snotty.

In terms of said micro budget, it's ambitious too which is a blessing when, rather than a lack of budget not being a deterrent, having a very dull sense of imagination is a dangerous mindset that can affect anyone. A lot of the bands and musicians - Bowling for Soup, Andrew W.K, "Jeff from Simple Plan" who is impaled on a guitar - were clearly happy to be involved for a lark, but rather than an indulgent and dull experience, it's an indulgent film which still stays creative. Baring one tasteless joke comparing the growing massacre as "Hot Topic meets Altamont", (see The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (1970) for why), it was an absolute blast. A playfully ghoulish film as, whilst the insecurity can be felt, has also the glee to just imagine the Warped Tour staff being unscrupulous, to the point of feeding the increasing numbers of victims' bodies to the staff in economic cannibalism and taking it to an exaggerated extent.

The amount of resources in general are a huge assistance, a whole sense of a culture being displayed, almost documentary-like, which happens to have been invaded by a slasher film. Between skateboard half pipes being used in the midst of performances, and all the various stands and tents you get to see , it has a vibrant colony of people on screen for my initial jokes I look to with fondness seeing them enjoying themselves. The production even shots in the real New York Time Square, with advertisements for The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Prince's comeback album to a major record label, Musicology (2004), all in the goal to recreate a famous scene from Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), where Jason in the same square scares off some punks by showing his face under the mask.

The practical effects are also a high point, the entire crew behind them (or the few depending) the MVP for Punk Rock Holocaust. It gets to the point, with the ambition, that what I first thought was a comically cheap prop, cyanide apparently coming in black and blue pills in an orange medical bottle labels clearly "Cyanide", was actually done deliberately for a joke. Probably the most elaborate scene is helped by a band called The Phenomenauts, one of countless bands inspired by old science fiction pulp and also embracing it in an elaborate stage persona and show, meant as a crew of a spaceship with one of the members a robot. Not only do they bring in firework guns, which can hurt people in this film, but also a tour van even is crushed by a crane and blown up. (That the band snuck into the tour twice the previous two years before, only to be officially invited for the 2004, adds a nice contextual touch to them having a big scene in this film).

The film even shows the kind of resourcefulness that other micro budget films, with less resources, would applauded by recontextualizing real demolition footage. The schism with the Warped Tour itself, whilst compelling, feels like a detriment to all these wonderful little touches as, whilst its funny that founder Kevin Lyman has actually made a pact with Satan, making the joke they are conformist and designed by Old Nick to steal your soul does cross a line in making the likes of Less Than Jake and Pennywise feel compromised by accident. A shame as, with the rest a better balance of goofiness, like trying to synch around actual mosh pit footage with a killer going stab happy, you have something completely charming. Deeply silly, indulgent and with flaws, but a utterly entertaining for me whilst it lasted.

Broken (1993)

Directors: Peter Christopherson (with contributions by Serge Becker, Eric Goode and Jon Reiss)

Screenplay: Trent Reznor

The origin of Broken, a mythic production hidden in the history of the band Nine Inch Nails, originates from Trent Reznor hating his record label. This will not be the last time nor was it the first, his animosity with TVT Records just one of many. Famously or infamously from this era, Prince would being performing in the ninety nineties with "slave" branded on his forehead, calling himself "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" and be very happy when Warner Bros. finally cut their ties to him by realising two three disc epics. Most disgruntled musicians do not get a fake snuff film created as the visuals for a new EP (extended play). That is why the short film is notorious and, alongside how it has been treated by Reznor himself over the years, is why it is being covered.

The Broken album itself, not an LP (long play) but less than thirty minutes, is well respected and certainly is held as significant in the early days of Nine Inch Nails, with many still thinking of songs like Wish and Happiness in Slavery among the band's biggest songs. It is, in hindsight, from all its lyrics and in context a fuck you from Reznor to TVT Records, where the infamous phrase "fist fuck" from Wish is now for me clearly what he imagined they were doing to him continually. Contextually, he had only released one album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), a guy in his twenties who started recording material in his off time working in a recording studio, getting some interest as a result. Only in a few years, however, he felt his back was against the wall and felt the Broken album, recorded in multiple places for secrecy, was a needed act of catharsis. He however decided to go further than this.

That required the director Peter Christopherson, one of the founding members of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle, one of the founding members of Coil, and who was also a member of Hipgnosis, a British design agency whose legacy in album covers is significant. Structured with music videos interspliced in-between from other directors, the Broken film covers all the tracks on the EP barring the track Last and the cover songs that were included at the end of the album. The first images are in stark, gloomy black and white of a man awaiting his execution by hanging. Afterwards, we immediately cut to grimy videotape footage of a man being taken captive in a garage by another man, interspliced with scenes before of the later driving around in a car with the intention of picking up a victim from a working to poverty class area of a community.

The fake snuff film, which will get increasingly more brutal as various forms of torture will transpire, begins with the victim being forced fed gasoline/petrol, and I will elaborate now as a nod to how the film will follow from this that this short, in context of the period of underground and splatter films I have seen from the era, immediately sets itself up as something still unsettling and disturbing decades on before you get to how utterly disturbing the film will get. We will elaborate on that however a little later.

The first film-within-a-film is for the instrumental piece Pinion, and whilst I have reservations about the entire Broken project, almost all the films (shot in rich black-and-white baring Wish) are evocative and of an incredible artistic merit, this one in particular of striking simplicity following a toilet whose pipe is connected to the mouth of a gimp wrapped up like a rubber turkey. That is a really glib joke to suddenly place in what is a review of an incredible dark, still gruesome music art project, but the Pinion segment has to be called as it is in its strangeness, arguably one of Broken's most effective visual sequences and a perfect set up for what is the intro of the album itself.

The next, for Wish, is definitely the most embarrassing and sadly derails the twenty minute short. As an idea, a combination of a post apocalypse if inside one of the gay leather bars from Cruising (1980) and cast members of a circus acrobat show is sound. What you get however is a young Trent Reznor looking awkward in leather chaps for what is a tedious music video of a band playing, the kind I saw in countless videos in the early 2000s on Kerrang TV and developed an aversion of as a result. Help Me I Am in Hell is thankfully another instrumental piece set to an evocative and a needed change of pace, an intentionally surreal sequence of a man trying to enjoy his steak dinner in a room where he and his food is covered in flied. Both this segment and Pinion were directed by Serge Becker and Eric Goode

Next is however arguably one of Nine Inch Nails' most famous videos, notorious in itself for Happiness in Slavery, directed by Jon Reiss. This segment for me is a high point for the Broken project, both for its execution and arguably as much because it involves performance artist Bob Flanagan. Flanagan, a performance artist and writer, was born with cystic fibrosis, the agony of which he wished to overcome in his practice of sadomasochism, the pain he likely experienced in his constant treatment for his condition probably not as painful as hammering a nail into his own penis, something he did as part of his performance work and is witnessed in the documentary on his life and career, SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997).

Flanagan's appearance alone already adds to this striking piece. It is still grotesque, a ritualistic suicide chamber where Flanagan eventually is completely naked and with what appears to be modified tongs in close-up clenching around his testicles at one point, willingly part of a torture machine that will eventually kill him. The images of a man entering this death chamber, lighting a candle and proceeding to his own destruction on a mechanised bed is impactful, down to that he is grounded down into literal worm food. Knowing the Broken EP is Reznor's anger at his label it is a very obvious metaphor for the grinder of the music industry. Helping it considerably though is how distinct and eerie it is, the music complimenting and complimented by the perfect images, including Reznor lighting his own candle and preparing to be the next person to enter. It is with good reason people know of this music video by itself.

The finale, set to the last original track Gave Up, cuts between another striking monochrome sequence, of police finding a house filled with rotting bodies and limbs in refrigerators as a crime scene, and the breaking point where the masked killer in the fake video proceeds to rip the victim to pieces. This includes castration (not explicitly seen), use of a blow torch (managing with pretty decent effects to make this work) and chainsaw dismemberment are among what transpire as the frenzy imbued in the song soundtracks this atrocity. As mentioned earlier, this is a bar higher than most extreme I have seen from this era for video or other formats, the closest thing to this extremity being the German shot-on-video film The Burning Moon (1992), which even then feels over the top and more obviously fake in comparison.

Altogether, I admire Broken in its disgusting glory, but I will admit that it does feel like it would have suffocated the music itself with how extreme it is. If the short film had been released, Trent Reznor would have caused a controversy that could have helped him in reputation but could have hurt him in a precarious period.

It succeeds as an uncomfortable experience, but a poignant detail is that, even when we still have the infamous music video for Closer to still appear, with a crucified monkey among other sequences, Nine Inch Nails changed drastically over only a few years after this. Broken the film is still too uncomfortably close to the likes of Cannibal Corpse's albums covers in terms of visceral extremity, where Pretty Hate Machine was more Goth nihilism, and Nine Inch Nails would change and be sculpted over the years into more interesting directions. The band is Trent Reznor, which fans are aware of, and he has changed. It is significant that, as a fan with a lot of the band still left to discover, the albums I got into Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor's work were Year Zero (2007) and The Slip (2008). This is long after Reznor hit mainstream success with The Downward Spiral (1994), toured with David Bowie, and combated drug addiction. Year Zero was the work of an older veteran, whose health and priority to it lead to a literal transformation to a performer utterly alien to the gaunt and pale twenty or so year old in the Wish video. This was not a time of nihilistic self destruction, but a dystopian novel in an album, one where the additional games played with fans in real life were as important. The Slip, once released for free as Reznor finally got sick of music labels and took his ball home, is not held highly but I feel in love with. This period also led to him eventually collaborating with Atticus Ross, which alongside April Fool's Jokes¹, led to a side of Reznor so different to the man from the Broken era, especially when he eventually co-created a soundtrack with Ross for a Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

The history of Broken the short is one as notorious for its history. Certainly in the early nineties when it was made, circumstances suggest even the creators were uncomfortable with what they had created. Director Christopherson felt uncomfortable with how effective the video was, especially as when you had a bootleg of a bootleg of the video when it was leaked, it would have looked like an actual snuff film. Meanwhile, this was also the time to the recording of The Downward Spiral when Reznor was living at the 10050 Cielo Drive mansion, notoriously the home where Sharon Tate and others were murdered by members of the Manson Family. Testimony from him says he found out about this and did stay at the mansion to record the album with knowledge of this, which in hindsight from a younger musician was a poor choice. It did however probably did not help when it came to Broken as, when he finally saw the final results, a thought occurred to him that how disturbing it was would have crossed a line that would, as I feel, have compromised attention away from the music itself².

Now, you could say it was hypocritical of him to do what he did, secretly leak tapes out, but in an interesting detail, the original hand-dubbed tapes were initially distributed to his friends, even having technological glitches intentionally added in order to let him know who leaked any copies that might surface. (He has even suggested that Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, was probably the person responsible for the most prominent leak³).

Reznor, wisely, whilst never releasing the Broken short has made the project available continually, which I do not consider in the current day hypocritical for him as time has passed and, now that the notoriety is for the fans of Nine Inch Nails who would be interested, he has made a decision that does not suppress it either, be it secretly releasing the short on torrent on Pirate Bay, an attempt to have it streaming on Vimeo, even a secret link on the NIN website like as gruesome Easter Egg. The notoriety and secrecy is now the gimmick, and it is not in bad taste or wrong for him to do so, especially as a man who, alongside transforming considerably as a person over the years since the Broken EP in his own work, has been a vary savvy person who takes account of his audience, even releasing both free albums and also compiling fan remixes into canonical work. He is not a person to bury his past, and whilst I have my reservations about Broken, it is entirely because it feels at odds to the older veteran I came to his music from, this a part of this band's history I accept and I am glad is not ignored.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Grotesque/Oppressive

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

============

1) HERE

2) HERE

3) HERE

All This and World War II (1976)

Director: Susan Winslow

I've become increasingly frustrated with Disney's accusation of 21st Century Fox, as so many titles will likely be sat on as not being part of the House of Mouse's image. They are not good arbiters of preservation as even their digital preservations of films like Cinderella (1950) have been accused as practically altering the original work, so this is significant as particularly in the seventies 20th Century Fox produced some very idiosyncratic titles. They made the likes of The French Connection (1971) and The Omen (1976), but also oddities like Alan Arkin's only directorial feature Little Murders (1971) or Brian De Palma's musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974). Or anything Robert Altman made for them that wasn't M*A*S*H (1970) but also 3 Women (1977), based on a dream he had, and Zardoz (1974), the John Boorman sci-fi lunacy involving floating stone heads vomiting out guns, penis obsession and Sean Connery in kinky bright orange belts and nothing else. All This and World War II is a candidate for something that managed to be even weirder than Zardoz to have been bankrolled by the studio, and if Fox didn't destroy it themselves Disney are not the kind of company to let the public access these oddities freely.

Beatlemania is why it even exists. The Beatles were a cultural juggernaut in the sixties, a band who even when they stopped perfuming live and become more experimental in the late sixties still generated so much goodwill. Films with the band and based off their work in the sixties - A Hard Day's Night (1964) to Yellow Submarine (1968) - eventually bleed into the seventies when they disbanded in 1970, even a documentary about the notoriously antagonistic recording of Let It Be that lead to it in 1970. They had some diminishing returns, an early Robert Zemeckis film I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) more respected than say, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) where Donald Pleasant sang I Want You to the Bee Gees. All This and World War II is much more notorious in a way as, whilst many don't know its existence, it never got a release since its 1976 theatrical release.

The documentary tells the tale of World War II, from the late 1930s as Nazi Germany invaded countries and Britain's attempts at a treaty through Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fell through, to the involvement of the United States in the forties. This material is told through archival footage and films owned by 20th Century Fox itself, such as Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a Japanese-American collaboration telling the tale of the Pearl Harbour attack from both sides. This is not necessarily a bad idea, as you do see a lot of the period in detail. You see just how offensive and ridiculous some of the propaganda in old films were outside the context of the Japanese being the US' enemy, as white actors portraying Asian figures is practically surreal and barely accomplished, and aspects of how life was in the States particularly at the time which add layers to the time period that you don't normally get. It provides real documentary footage of fascination, even those offensive films a curious touchstone when the USA felt it needed to villainize the Japanese the rally against them as enemies in real combat.

The film gets bizarre as this is scored to Beatles songs. There were plans to use the actual songs, but with the prospect of being able to release a soundtrack album, which did happen and lasted longer in public consciousness, the production got a who's who of mainstream seventies music. Even Status Quo, the English personifications of Dad Rock, cover Getting Better alongside songs by Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Bryan Ferry etc. Even Elton John covers Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a song recorded before and ironically with John Lennon playing on it under a pseudonym.

The issue, and where All This and World War II falls off the rails, is that most of the song choices are utterly inappropriate. Sun King arguably makes sense as a double pun on the Japanese army, with their first ever emperor Jimmu said to be a direct descendant of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, and the Rising Sun on their country's flag, whilst Keith Moon singing When I'm Sixty Four is fun in the knowledge Paul McCartney wrote that song in mind to the type of music from an early era like this, but most aren't like this and fail. That I Want You is never used for a recruitment segment is a missed opportunity, nor Back in the U.S.S.R. when Soviet Russia enters the war, is just the tip of the iceberg.

From http://www.midnightonly.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/allthis2.jpg

Instead having I Am The Walrus covered by Leo Sayer over the Pearl Harbour attack or the Americans in the Pacific War in combat is absolutely perplexing, as you now have to consider "the Eggman" (written by Lennon as pure nonsense to trick listeners) are now armed. Only a few times do the combinations work. Rod Stewart barking Get Back to Hitler in the Nazis' losing finale, with footage manipulated to make him and the goose-stepping soldiers dance, is one of the only successful moments¹. Most don't work because the lyrics are tonally inappropriate, the film making a misguided error to presume the chorus is all that matters, not that you still have to hear everything also. So Come Together is used for the involvement of the Japanese, whilst She's Leaving Home is used for the women working out in jobs or for the war effort.

The point of the documentary is a real question mark. It mainly comes off as nostalgic on the surface but streaks of subversion are found which undercut the entire work. It has a passage, significantly, which deals with the internment of Japanese Americans by their government which is a black eye historically for the States, a really bleak sequence of people being forced into camps, really racist language in newspaper extracts, and even signs of Japanese kanji or phrases from stores and cafes being removed and replaced. It's the best sequence but tonally alien to the film's whole.

That this production changed hands, director Susan Winslow not the original figure in that seat, probably explains a lot. Even some of the footage is jarring too. The aftermath of the Pearl Harbour bombings, and the initial footage showing the USA joining the conflict, inexplicably has a ventriloquist dummy enlisting in the army in a surreal publicity segment. Most of the film visuals tell a succinct tale under ninety minutes, but the juxtaposition with the music is at odds. Even if the documentary was meant to be very subversive, some of the tonal choices throughout do jar from everyone which does, with the former usually more frequent than the successes.

The result was, as mentioned, a film pulled after two weeks of a theatrical run. The soundtrack was much more successful, whilst All This and World War II fits the strange catalogue of films made in the seventies which were nostalgic for the times between the 1920s and 1940s, where Mae West's last film in her eighties was the car crash Sextette (1978), and old stars were repacked into TV and variety shows. This is a film, even with flashes of subversion, which is undeniably about the nostalgia of the era even if its accidental. The film also reminds you of how different a time the forties was, as stars like Jimmy Stewart are shown enlisting in the war effort, and even dealing with the racist propaganda films a peculiar nature is found of there once being a saneness to dressing a white man up and trying to pass him off as Asian as Charlie Chan's cameo attests to.

And the time capsule footage can be compelling, enough that this should've been made available.; even a minor tangent like the art painted onto airplanes, including some that would be too saucy to show outside colour footage that looks like home film recordings, has something of immense reward for me in terms of new details of the era. Seeing the ordinary world of the era, in among the celebrities and fictional war films, including a much appreciated James Mason cameo as a Nazi, is a virtue even if the film is structurally mishandled and the project misguided.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Haphazard/Nostalgic

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

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nx_Wa-hpbjI/hqdefault.jpg

=========

1) Done later but done better, in its opening credits set to disco funk, of the wonderfully titled and awesome Czech sci-fi gem Tomorrow I Will Scald Myself with Tea (1977), a film deserving of a much wider fanbase and actual availability in the English language territories.