Wild Palms (1993)

 

Directors: Peter Hewitt, Keith Gordon, Kathryn Bigelow and Phil Joanou

Screenplay: Bruce Wagner

Based on the comic strip by Bruce Wagner

Cast: James Belushi as Harry Wyckoff, Dana Delany as Grace Wyckoff, Ben Savage as Coty Wyckoff, Robert Loggia as Senator Tony Kreutzer, Angie Dickinson as Josie Ito, David Warner as Eli Levitt, Kim Cattrall as Paige Katz, Ernie Hudson as Tommy Laszlo, Nick Mancuso as Tully Woiwode, Bebe Neuwirth as Tabba Schwartzkopf, Aaron Michael Metchik as Peter Katz, Brad Dourif as Chickie Levitt

Re-Review

From the first scene - in which the older brother of Jim Belushi, James Belushi, enters his suburban kitchen at night only to find a rhino there  by the refrigerator- you are immediately primed for a very weird and idiosyncratic television mini-series to ever be produced. Since I have learnt of said series, I was immensely fascinated by its existence and found it fit my sensibilities completely. Riding the zeitgeist wave Twin Peaks (1990-1991) created, broadcast on the same station ABC and co-produced by Oliver Stone, the result is a peculiar beast. One where Stone's cameo as himself, being interviewed about secret JFK conspiracy documents proving his theories, is the thing that barely bats an eyelid about what is going on throughout the narrative. That a phone line was set up to explain plot points per episode is a sign of where Wild Palms goes, a melodrama with a pulpy sci-fi bent and a lot on its mind.

Belushi is Harry Wyckoff, who finds a new career path under senator Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), founder of the religion Synthiotics and founder of the Wild Palms group, who are developing both virtual reality television and mimizine, a synthetic drug with allows one to interact with the holograms. It is not long into the first episode, a feature length beginning, that Wyckoff's life becomes a complex spiral - caught between the war between The Fathers and The Friends, two opposing political sides; discovering that his son Coty (Ben Savage) may not be his own; that Kreutzer is a corrupt wannabe demigod, that and his wife Grace (Dana Delany) is suffering from her connections to the Wild Palms group, not least because her mother Josie Ito (Angie Dickinson) is a vindictive, violent person and Kreutzer's sister; that the story starts rolling, like a noir plot, with an old flame Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall), connected to Kreutzer, who has re-entered his life and stoked a flame that is eating away at both of them.

It is an alternative reality - set in 2007 when Japan did not have the economic bubble burst and influenced US culture - but so much of the five episode mini-series is incredibly fresh and meaningful still. The danger of religious cults; a populist politician played by Robert Loggia whose ability to charm by his charisma; that a murder shown live on TV will be forgotten a week later; and the fact that Wild Palms is about virtual reality technology in peoples' homes that, with a drug that can allow you to touch and interact with holograms, can be used to control people. So much stands out, even if the look and lore is of their times, the best of these sci-fi/dystopian/cyberpunk stories still interesting in their themes. The plot of Wild Palms is in fact not that difficult to set out, merely that there is so much on its mind, that it can be a lot to take in, especially as the show embraces more eccentric details. Its ideas are stil salient even in terms of virtual reality; back then, it was still disconnected from the reality of basic effects and having to wear one of Daft Punk's helmets, but the themes of reality and our growing addictions to artificial simulacra exist even into the modern day.

Whilst there are four directors involved - Peter Hewitt, former actor-director Keith Gordon, Three O'Clock High (1987) director Phil Joanou, and Kathryn Bigelow - this is the brainchild of Bruce Wagner. A novelist and screenwriter, his career in cinema is small but with David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars (2014) among his filmography, an underrated and weird Cronenberg work, his idiosyncrasies are felt between the surrealism to constant references to spirituality including Buddhism. The other factor is Oliver Stone, who produced the mini-series and in the midst of his nineties period clearly saw many of his sensibilities here. He is probably the reason why this is a lot more cinematic than a lot of mini-series, a sense of scale found in its style, where the camera will actually glide across scenes, and musical choices even include the Rolling Stones.

The cast certainly helps, certain performances an acquired taste and yet appropriate for what turned into a melodrama in sci-fi dystopia costume. For James Belushi, it is the least expected role he could have as he is known for comedies and family films until, in a nice piece of synchronicity, being cast in the 2017 series of Twin Peaks. That Belushi apparently had no idea what the plot was about almost feels fitting for the film. As our cipher into this world, an everyman who realise his life is more entrenched in conspiracy than believes, he is the actor playing the most muted role which means he is easy to dismiss, but someone appreciated by me nonetheless. Especially as he is the sane cog in the midst of everyone else, with only the sadness of Dana Delany as his wife, in her tragic plot trajectory, a grounded emotional current.

Robert Loggia, who described his role as Tony Kreutzer in the context of ancient Greek plays when interviewed about the miniseries, chews scenery appropriate for a character that has had people killed and also starts randomly bursting into song in the final episodes. Not a man unknown for weird films, an acid flashback to his Al Johnson impersonation in The Ninth Configuration (1980) and that he would work with David Lynch in Lost Highway (1997), he fits a role of the ultimate tyrant, obsessed with a McGuffin known as the Go Chip which will give him digital immortality. Angie Dickinson, from the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980), manages to outdo even Loggia as his sister Josie, channelling both Bettie Davis and Joan Crawford from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with her pronounced makeup and heightened performance; appropriate for a character with an obsession with kidnapping her former husband and Friends leader Eli Levitt (David Warner), and gouging peoples' eyes out. Among these figures also includes Coty Wyckoff (Ben Savage), Harry's son who is both a new TV star for a cheesy show "Church Windows", naturally the first stage for controlling the masses, and a child sociopath; Ernie Hudson from the Ghostbusters films as a Friends member who becomes addicted to mimizine and can hear church bells as a result, and even Brad Dourif in a small role. Another smaller role is by one of the mini-series' directors themselves in Kathryn Bigelow, which has additional pertinence as this feels like a dry run for Strange Days (1995), her dystopian sci-fi epic which also deals with the dangers of technology through artificial memories.

The tapestry, which can be boiled down to the evil  "Fathers" and good "Friends" who are at war, is pleased to cram in as many references as it can, from the mythology of the hungry ghost to cinema references. Villains have their own fears and compulsions, and side characters on the Friends are even clearly meant to be gay lovers, with far more progressiveness to that point by it never being explicitly evoked yet part of a tragedy in the midst of this underground war. The plot twists and events fly thick and fast - secret tunnels in swimming pools, child kidnapping and psychotic child stars, drugs which induce hallucinations of church bells and microchips that create digital immortality - but there is always a sense of scale and gravitas which makes everything feel appropriate. It gets to the point where you have a glib reference here in calling a cafe in the background "Eros plus Massacre", a tip to the hat to a three and a half hour Japanese experimental film by Yoshishige Yoshida, which shows we are completely different territory to most television at the time. This is even before you get to Wagner's own quirks like his obsession, spoken by the characters, of rhinos being fallen unicorns. For television, it is like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) at points.

If Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2006) is like MTV scatterbrained version of this type of high-minded sci-fi, Wild Palms in tone is far more stylish and an moody, like the classy event it was originally clearly meant to be and from the director of Natural Born Killers (1994). Palms' class is felt just in Ryuichi Sakamoto scoring the mini-series, the former Yellow Magic Orchestra member and legendary film composer creating an underrated score in his career, or how for all its dated CGI animation, the premise is thought-out and still poignant, the dangers of one's dreams and alternative realities being controlled and manipulated. Like a high budget soap opera, the over-the-top drama and twists feel on point, and appropriate for a world that has yuppies beating people up in the street that everyone walks past.

It never comes off as tacky, and even the aesthetic, where Japanese clothing has influenced these characters' costumes and everything is high on early nineties style, everything is matter-of-fact, a grounded world that does evoke Wagner's constant obsession with Los Angeles and Hollywood if his bibliography is to attest to. That it is set in Los Angeles of another world makes the world's mishmash of content befitting, and the absurdity is also clearly on purpose - rhinos in the kitchen, dreams of taking a katana as one's briefcase, even the casting of Bob Gunton as the obviously suspicious psychologist - with a sense of humour occasionally and proudly appearing. I mean, one episode includes in its first scenes a hologram sixties girl group and the final episode is named after a song from a Marx Brothers' film. Author William Gibson has a cameo as himself, admitting he has been called the inventor of "cyberpunk", only to walk off and never be seen again.

The general madness on display was the original reason I feel in love with this title and is weaves gladly with the ambition and quality, characters spitting out elaborate and memorable dialogue in each scene with the content being as memorable and idiosyncratic. In spite of its limitations, still for a higher budgeted television production having to tell some of its content off-screen, Wild Palms is deliciously weird. Where swimming pools have secret doors at the bottoms, lairs to the Friends' hideouts, and that, as in all dystopian sci-fi of the time, there is a slum district which law enforcement stays out of, a Casablanca of rebels and bootleg holograms. The dichotomy between advanced tech, like virtual reality, against issues like the complete lack of internet, living in a subconscious realm outside of our past or future off the television screen, is matched by both moments of real emotional weight but also the weirdness of a religious cult whose motto "Everything must go" is literally taking an advertising motto as biblical text, the accidental comparisons to a real and controversial religious group not likely to be missed either whatever your opinion on them. Wild Palms is something deliriously weird that, even if it came after Twin Peaks' popularity, somehow was bankrolled and exists despite the sense it was never going to succeed even as a miniseries. An instant cult work, not contrived but too weird to live. Merely a slither of Wild Palms creates many questions which, even when answered, open up so many new questions of where they came from. Now that I have come to admire it even in context of its TV presentation, which once before was a flaw, Wild Palms gets by as a bizarre TV melodrama, a product of its time which thankfully exists, only to have turned into something I absolutely adore.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Scum of the Earth (1963)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: William Kerwin as Harmon Johnson; Louise Downe as Kim Sherwood; Lawrence J. Aberwood as Lang; Sandra Sinclair as Sandy; Mal Arnold as Larry; Craig Maudslay Jr. as Ajax; Christy Foushee as Marie; Doug Brennan as Carl; Christina Castel as Shirley; Edward Mann as Mr. Sherwood

Canon Fodder

 

Cannon Fodder is for titles from figures, like directors, I hold in good regard which would not qualify for the Abstract List. Here, we plunder through the career of the Godfather of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis, but not a horror film and in one of his tangents from his reputation...

Released the same year as Blood Feast, I am going to be controversial and say I prefer this to that his most well film. Most of this stems from the fact, when I talk of Blood Feast separately one day, it suffers from the position of being a creator's most iconic work despite not having the best of their idiosyncrasies and details that let me to become a fan of them. His last monochrome movie here, for example, is has a lot more of note for me. It is still to be viewed in the context his exploitation cinema, always subjective in quality due to their technical skill, but from a director who held no pretentions of this and always had a personality.

The tale of an underground pornography photo ring who tempt an innocent young woman into their fold by blackmail, officially this was one of the first "roughies" made, an example of how sixties exploitation could still be transgressive even it was naive, emphasising the roughing up of female characters for the titillation of the audience. This is problematic in the modern day, although it comes with the strange knowledge that the only two prominent women directors of this type of cinema, Doris Wishman and Roberta Findley, made a lot of them themselves alongside male directors. Scum of the Earth thankfully does not flesh out this sub-genre's problematic ideas, so there is very little concern for me with viewing the film either.

Instead, it brings in the entire paradox of these films depicting sordid plot tropes to exploitation whilst feeling quaint in the modern day, in mind that this illicit pornography photo ring, due to the time, can only imply details that are more lurid but can only show quaint nude pin-ups. These are stranger when the women are dressed topless in baseball caps with bats, or if you see the "clean" version of scenes (available for the Arrow Video release in the late 2010s) which just have the actresses in their underwear. There is an unsavoury underbelly, mainly that the muscle bound goon of the villains Ajax (Craig Maudslay Jr.) is a potential rapist, but the film only once plays to the roughies' tropes, a scene of a model being whipped with a belt in a hotel room, whilst this content just to vilify the likes of Ajax rightly as scumbags instead.

The film also has the tone of a fifties anti-drug film which softens the blow, emphasised by the voiceover in the end warning of the dangers for schoolgirls getting involved with these sorts of people. A film like this from its production, likely made as product, puts it on a knife edge in terms of hypocrisy, the hustle of old exploitation being both the sizzle, as we see a young woman about to go to college being blackmailed to pose naked, but with moral guilt emphasised to make sure the makers were not in trouble for being too sordid without punishing the viewers, instead continually emphasising how scuzzy and wrong this is. It avoids hypocrisy, just, because this contradiction is actually more honest than if it was a message film. This actually makes Lewis' way of filmmaking more honest.

It also shows the appeal of these films. This has grit. Its acting is not perfect, it is not close to the best of the medium in the slightest, a low-fi crime drama with sexploitation content, but the actors always give their all. Shot in only a few locations, said locations are also actual environments, adding some verisimilitude to them. These exploitation films are their own island in cinema, the work of independents trying their hardest, even if the films were just for tickets. That I can get on with especially as Scum of the Earth is a tasting but unique tonic soaked in Florida of the early sixties, sexploitation and pulp tropes with none of the drag and padding which sadly plagues other films from this era and type.

In terms of pure exploitation entertainment, this is one of the more interesting of Lewis' work at least. A distillation of old poverty row crime pictures on an even smaller shoestring budget and filtered through the nudie-cutie genre, it neither has the stiffness of Blood Feast which, honestly, Lewis would improve upon in his later splatter films. Mal Arnold, whose performance in Blood Feast is legendarily wooden, manages to have the charisma that would have been great in an old Monogram Pictures film; he is excessively old to play a teenager he is supposed to be here, but as a creepy slime ball, he is memorable. His boss, played by Lawrence J. Aberwood, is the same in his disarming politeness, only to explode in one of the most memorable scenes, one that was immortalised in the Something Weird Video trailer and, with the film cutting closer to his mouth in his evil tirade, shows that Lewis could be inventive. He scoffed at the idea of his films being art, but between this and having one shot of red onscreen, painted in as a frame, to represent someone shooting himself, he did have a lot of creativity too. Even William Kerwin, who was one of the more memorable figures in Blood Feast, gets to act a bit differently as a bit of a slime ball, as the photographer, who still has a morality.

This is bearing in mind a film with the loosest of plots and rough around the edges, but unlike a Blood Feast which feels like an artefact of its era, full of exposition which does undercut its camp fun, this has the decency to be economic. And actually, surprisingly, have a bit of a dynamic worthy of an A-list picture in how the hero is actually an anti-hero, a photographer who openly works for the villains to corrupt an innocent schoolgirl into taking nude photos, blackmailing her with the potential shame if her father found out, only to find his moral compass eventually. It is better if the exploitation film made purely for sizzle rather than art at least has some meat to it, a nature of being gripping in spite of its origins. Knowing that my growing appreciation of Herschell Gordon Lewis comes from the truth that he made fun films without pretensions, there was still the spark of fun in his work. Here it is apparent he could even pull out even some fun old school b-movie drama by way of a c-level film budget, something has been unfairly not presumed from the man more infamous for splatter.

Popcorn (1991)

 

Director: Mark Herrier (with Alan Ormsby)

Screenplay: Mitchell Smith and Alan Ormsby

Cast: Jill Schoelen as Maggie; Tom Villard as Toby; Dee Wallace as Suzanne; Derek Rydall as Mark; Malcolm Danare as Bud; Kelly Jo Minter as Cheryl; Ivette Soler as Joanie; Elliott Hurst as Leon; Freddie Marie Simpson as Tina; Tony Roberts as Mr. Davis; Ray Walston as Dr. Mnesyne; Barry Jenner as Lt. Bradley; Cindy Breakspeare as Gloria Gates

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #206

 

Is there an inherent gene for obnoxiousness?

I first encountered Popcorn as part of a series of "b-movies" my mother enjoyed and collected, usually disaster films and the scale of a "d-movie" in quality, the sillier the better. This was part of a double sided DVD, a gift from my uncle, with Leprechaun 5: Leprechaun in Da Hood (2000), a film we will quietly brush under the carpet again unless I decide to hurt myself by watching it again. Popcorn thankfully transcended into a personal favourite. A large part of this is that, very late into the eighties slasher boom, actually appearing into the nineties here, this entry in the horror sub-genre is set around a special one night horror movie marathon at a cinema about to close, reflective of cinema in itself just in the sense of having fun with its past. Namely, this horror all-nighter set up by a film class reviving old b-movies with their elaborate gimmicks, only for an ominous slant to be involved with a mysterious figure known as Lanyard Gats. A crazed experimental filmmaker in the sixties, his response to negative reviews was a public performance of one called Possessor whose finale, a live stage performance, was killing his wife and trying to kill his daughter, only for him to be stopped a cinema to be burnt down. Inherently as a cineaste and someone with a taste for film culture, this stands out even for someone with a divided relationship with slasher films, this unlike many trying to rip off Friday the 13th with a premise that is very distinct. In knowledge of its background, that the original director Alan Ormsby was replaced with Mark Herrier midway through, it only shows a couple of signs of being messy in its creation. It also has the curious touch that, meant to be set in the United States, the production ended up being shot in Jamaica, which is never referred to baring a version of Saturday Night At The Movies by a reggae band, and an actual reggae band in the film.

You could have excised the slasher narrative and just had the horror all-nighter as a narrative, with patrons in over the top costumes (giant heads, wigs, second heads etc) and particularly a celebration of cinema in all forms. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of this type of cinema going, even if exaggerated here, was sadly something I had rarely experienced, and even without packed crows, this idea of the ideal dream palace of cinema has been undermined by how much of a conveyor belt cinema production and distribution is within my neck of the woods. Even as someone who finds multiplexes fascinating buildings, like dreamscapes going through their corridors between cinema screens, the comments against multiplexes here bite more decades later as the product shown on the screens with exceptions did not hold as much fascination of the environments they were shown in themselves and the idea of cinema going as a ritual.

There is also something nice in a slasher film, from its own horror sub-genre boom, making affectionate parodies of the older horror movie sub-genres that existed before it, the films-within-the-film as much why Popcorn always stood out for me, referencing the films from the fifties and sixties including the legendary figure of William Castle, a director and producer as famous as a showman behind gimmicks to sell his films as he was the films. Mosquito! is a low budget monster film from the nuclear fifties era of giant bug films, where the giant prop mosquito that is pulled above the audience likely refers to William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) where a plastic skeleton was pulled by wires in theatres. It is probably too gruesome for its time period, with a man's head sucked empty by a radioactive mosquito, but finding the right balance between earnestness and showing a corniness of the era, it sets up these parodies very well. Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man offers a parody of many films made in the late fifties and the early sixties of men changed by science, like Indestructible Man (1956) with Lou Chaney Jr., in which a death row inmate (played by Bruce Glover) is a test subject of an experimental blood form before he eats the electric chair, referring to William Castle's The Tingler (1959) where the seats are wired to shock punters. If there is a disappointment to Popcorn, only one for me, it is that we barely see The Stench, a parody of a sixties Japanese genre film, less Toho but a smaller company cashing in on a Toho film, with Japanese actors obviously dubbed into English and the added gimmick of taking Odorama further, not scratch and sniff cards but odour pellets blown through into the theatre.

The film is a lovely tribute to the older era of films, with posters of the likes of The Deadly Mantis (1957) and even The Tingler itself¹ among the rich production design of the main cinema location, even referencing in the film a lot about cinema, be it an early argument in the film of how the Police Academy films have more philosophical weight over Ingmar Bergman's work, or how another of William Castle's gimmicks is references, when he had have patrons sign a waiver in case they died of fright during a film. It helps as much that the slasher film narrative is also interest and very peculiar, set up around a cursed experimental film from the sixties known as Possessor, meant as a parody of sixties avant-garde cinema with the first shot a close of an eye ("must be a private eye flick"), but is connected to the kind of occult stories of that era too including Euro-horror movies. The peculiar nature is as much writing confusion, where it does bring in supernatural content which could not be explained with science, like the cinema's marquee spitting its letters at a person, only to be entirely around a grounded but also memorable figure, but that is something I can thankfully get past. Particularly as the film has, in its centre, a tragic killer scarred physically to the point of insanity, one who can create fake faces and disguise themselves which adds an even odder and inventive nature to the film alongside all the kill scenes being based around death-by-movie-gimmick.

No character in the cast is a dull, bland figure either, everyone like lead Maggie (Jill Schoelen) interesting, or in the case of her potential love interest Mark (Derek Rydall), playing up the clichés in an amusing way, in his case making him the most put upon figure in such a role, who is among all the things he suffers through punched, hit with a door, locked out of the cinema, attacked by a dog off-screen and ending up with split trousers, among other agonies whilst still being sympathetic. Then there is Toby, who is at a certain point completely memorable because of his actor Tom Villard's performance. [Major Spoiler] At some point he is revealed to be the killer, psychologically broken and having to rebuild his face every morning, trying to restage the original Possessor screening, to which Villard takes the performance up in terms of exaggeration but also pathos [Spoilers End]. Tragically, it would not be long, in 1994 after this when Villard would pass, a tragedy as here you see someone who could have made a great name for himself in genre films through the nineties.

As much of this review is admitting Popcorn is a film as a youth I feel in love with, those films we see as a kid or a young teen we get fixated upon. Thankfully, to show a bit of ego and being a bit of a hipster, mine is a bit more obscure and idiosyncratic, but Popcorn has grown so much regardless of this. As much of this was from being a fun tribute to the horror genre which, when given the slasher storytelling tropes, excised all the dull ones or renovated them with better ideas, becoming something significantly more memorable than many I have see. It is a film, having frequently watched over the years, which won my heart.

 

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1) Also Frankenstein 1970 (1958) and The Incredible Melting Man (1977).

There is No Sexual Rapport (2011)

 

Director: Raphaël Siboni

Cast: Hervé Pierre-Gustave

Ephemeral Waves

 

We'll do a fake blow-job.

If pornography is a day job, then There is No Sexual Rapport definitely emphasises this, following a figure named Hervé Pierre-Gustave in his day-to-day work filming low budget adult films. Unlike other documentaries though, this project by Raphaël Siboni is entirely told by behind-the-scenes footage, from thousands of hours worth, all recorded on secret cameras. The first shot of this film even has a camera being used in a scene, shooting a threesome between a man and two women, tip down and end up staring at the tiled floor. I will also warn you the reader now that, if you are not fond of lengthy discussion of sex in words and details, or the more morally contentious aspects on the subject, it is not recommended to continue reading on as describing There is No Sexual Rapport will have to be blunt and matter-of-fact as the content.

Actresses and actors show their IDs (blurred) to introduce themselves. Then we cut to the nitty gritty, of sitting around nude and having to stage scenes, even if they involve real sex between the participants or scenes involving having to fake this. Even in the modern day, this documentary has a lot still which is surprising, mostly the lacksidasical way shooting porn really is and how it drags out. The interesting thing is that, however explicit the film is, is also shows the banality of the work to the point it completely de-eroticises everything, with even moments of the productions being openly faked, such as a male co-star merely slapping an actress' thigh and rocking the deck chair she is on, just off camera, to play act a sex, undercutting titillation for titillation's sake.

Far from a turn-off, it is humanising. These are beautiful people of all shapes and sizes willing to sit around nude, with the men calmly sitting around with erections and the women naked or in costume shop nurse outfits all day looking bored or cold. The human body is beautiful and erotic, but porn is as much a boring day job as anyone else's desk job here. Whilst there are moments around its central figure, filmmaker Hervé Pierre-Gustave, which are an issue later in the film, this instead raises the issue that pornography nowadays, with a lot shot in peoples' homes rather than with ambition of the more elaborate films of the seventies and eighties, does seem stuck in a schism. That the clichés feel even more out-of-place, and a concern ethically, as a lot of the film here is as much an encouragement to gander with interest at peoples' furniture and environments like a furniture catalogue, especially as many of the scenes are on tiled floors and in bathrooms.

It does cause you to imagine, alongside a greater verisimilitude for the regular viewer, what it would be like to be naked even in a fake leather couch, which is not as trivialising a comment to make, especially as, unless one wished to go for the cinematic idea of eroticism, celebrating the reality of desire would be equally be worthy. (Some locations, like purple walls leading to a turquoise bathroom, do have their own grounded aesthetic and aesthetically pleased me in their own low-aesthetic way.) If anything, the dangers this presents are the same tropes and clichés being played out, as even Hervé Pierre-Gustave has to figure out some narrative, as at one point, to justify a scene, forcing him into such clichés. The body with its moles, fleshiness and tattoos is more beautiful than we mostly are honest with, and not the problem. Its flaws and our fear of our mortality is likely why we have over-heightened, objectifying views of beauty, men and women alike, and likely why sex is a taboo subject for many. Porn, whilst losing its aesthetic of yore, has at least found reality with actors with piercings and tattoos whilst yet being totally fabricated, the later farcical in what we see and the concern.

The fact sex is depicted and usually padded out does not help adult films, and this also shows the absurdity of the acts and how difficult they are to actually film, which adds a perverse comedy when, under Suspiria green and red lighting for an ejaculation scene, they do not even know if any semen has been caught on film. One male actor, in the midst of a gangbang, even reveals the reality that, if you do multiple sex scenes in a day and have a regular sex life, you can be completely dry and have to rely on condensed milk to fake scenes, an emphasis in one line on dialogue on the expectations being too high in the fantasy. This is even without Hervé Pierre-Gustave fantasising about a budget of 10,000 Euros for special effects, as there is no real difference filming this or a regular film baring that a few people, especially the actresses, are brave to have real sex (in its choreographed way) on camera.

The costumes on the actresses especially, despite being aesthetically interesting even in their tackiness, show the strangeness of these filmed fantasies. I can see how cumbersome they are, like a pink and blue chequered skirt with a tie holder, a tie on a bare sternum, and with the makeup, I can see why, whilst fashion for women for me is frankly more aesthetically creative and interesting, why this is objectifying in just being stuck in awkward clothing. It is enough to imagine the pleasure of just sitting at home in pyjamas having just more meaning. That these are real women behind the costumes is a factor the film emphasises. When one actress in one line reveals herself to actually be a mother of a five year old daughter, you should not demonise her for this career choice, it is just work for her in a gangbang scene with three guys, as much as one of those men admits to having a girlfriend. It is contrived like a Hollywood production, as they even laugh about the target male audience buying this thinking its real. You still have to be directed in the best way to do a blow job. Pierre-Gustave still has to direct actors' motivation, so plot is still important even if it is ridiculous, being duped with a USB of porn videos then the promise of sex with an older woman, rather than just having a three person scene where people just fancy having sex. Soft porn, where everything is faked, is more contrived and awkward to film

This is also existential and two questions. 1) Why is sex such a taboo despite 2) why is it such a huge part of human nature universally beyond even procreation in the first place, creating this paradox? In terms of what you see, the banality of the work completely undermines the taboo, with only the costumes and the names of the performers being heightened, where I could list all the over the top names. William "Storm" - Pierre-Gustave's key main male actor and a lynchpin he has to rely on - of the many actresses named like Dolce Elecktra, Super Sex or Nymphy. One stage name which is in poor taste is Sexy Black. We could have had the one black actress have a name which was more tasteful, especially as in the middle of the countryside in the daytime, naked having sex with one leg raised by her male co-star and trying to balance against the bonnet of a Mercedes-Benz, she has a tiring day's work most do not. Little details like this do emphasis that, yes, there are many issues within pornography as a medium, but surprisingly it is not the real sex but subjects we have huge issues of, such as representation, that are the issue and can be found in other media considered more wholesome.

Amateur actors, not professionals, are also involved which raises their own questions, even if the two we see, "Pom-Pom Girl" and a larger woman named Sophie, are two young women wanting to participate in fantasies of theirs. There is an unexpected moment of sweetness, when to the concern of the two men in the scene with her, Pom-Pom Girl after a scene is in tears only for it to be tears of joy from the first explosive orgasm she ever had. With the figure of Sophie, including her and Pierre-Gustave getting very intimate afterwards by the computer he works and edits his film from, the issue of whether a line is crossed, and what is real and fake in this documentary, does come to mind. I wished there were more of the actresses talking about themselves, even in the structure of this documentary, as this is the kind of production, in content, does find into in a place where, especially after the MeToo movement, one's concerns whether this type of work is coordinated without sexual exploitation is a huge issue to consider.

This is to keep in mind when we are introduced to Puceau, a male black actor, only nineteen, who is involved as Hervé Pierre-Gustave also films gay porn. We see Pierre-Gustave tell Puceau of how, if he does the film, it will inevitably be on the net as people will copy it and be out of their hands first. It is here both Pierre-Gustave strays close to the line precariously, but also that this industry is in a weird place, as here you awkwardly have someone who is trying to film this work even though he himself is not clearly gay or bisexual, especially as for here and a scene with Puceau with three other male amateurs they have to put on heterosexual porn to get everyone in the mood. The only real exception to this at all is a BDSM scene with two men helped by the fact, with so many chains and cables to lift one of them up it looks perversely comfortable too, that they actually like each other physically. You also have the moment where Pierre-Gustave tries to big up Puceau to feel confident, falling back onto the cliché of being man enough to impress girls against weedy rich males from the schools he goes to, Pierre-Gustave himself still having to wheel-and-deal, which in itself is a problematic thing.

The film is not subjective or taking a side, which adds another layer which will discomfort some, as it does not take sides on whether this is good or not. Puceau, when informed that being a male porn star is not an easy world of money women, a dog eat dog world requiring confidence and a willingness to put up with the hard work, does feel the one scene where you do think of this, especially as Puceau looks like a deer in the headlights as Pierre-Gustave talks of the popular people being idiots whilst they are "warriors" does show they are flawed human beings. Nothing truly awful, jut obsessed with success and dated ideas of impressing women. One thing Pierre-Gustave that dangerously puts him in the fire line, with a nineteen female performer Anna Polina, is when he talks that the brain only fully develops at twenty one, whilst the military hires at nineteen because people will still take risks at that age, which in itself, depending on how it is interpreted, is a very misguided thing to have said aloud, whilst taking erotic pictures of her. Even if she visibly is rolling her eyes at her, that in itself just a bit later in the decade this film was released would get him far more scrutiny even if he did not entirely think of how creepy the words sounded.

He is a curious figure in himself - alongside stepping into non-adult cinema as a director, he has also been involved with some films like the controversial Baise-Moi (2001) - so he has had flirtations with other forms of cinema. To lighten the review a little, he is also nude all the time, or just in black boxers, which is bizarre even if the reason was to make his cast feel comfortable being naked. Emphasised by also being bald and having no body hair, it would be more elicit if he wore trousers in a scene. For the most part, he just feels a person who works, having to just scrape by with these productions, using his own bravado and confidence to even if that in itself has become, rightly, something to be wary of as too many people have exploited this gift to exploit others. The irony, as mentioned paragraphs earlier, is that these problems are not just in pornography though, so it can no longer be demonised in itself.  And whilst others may find the film dull, lacking context or with aspects where it feels uncomfortable how these films are put together, I found it compelling for these reasons as much as it's completely non-judgemental attitude, viewing this all from all the thousands of hours of footage and forcing you to have to think about how you feel. The finale shot are exhausted men contemplating in the BDSM scene room, one Hervé Pierre-Gustave, both spent and emotionally drained is a powerful shot in itself. These figures, even in this career, have to grind themselves through the metaphorical meat grinder of life to get anything done, regardless of what you think of them. It is obvious, but as an eighty minute film, few probably consider the adult industry with this light upon it.

Balnearios (2002)

 

Director: Mariano Llinás

An Abstract List Candidate

They are places made to be near water.

Starting off with old home movies of Argentineans splashing in the sea, so blue it is unreal and set to jazz, the film immediately tells you what the point of it is, a documentary of the idealised past of balnearios ("beach resorts"), the "country's childhood". This is just a prologue, to a film which from the director of Extraordinary Stories (2008) which soon reveals itself not to be a conventional documentary, but with a gently voiced female narrator, and even black and white footage going further back in time, this sets up various chapters based in various sides of the balnearios, real or fantasised.

A male voiceover set over driving footage introduces us to the section on "Mar Del Sur", an abandoned town and specifically "the arrogant and mysterious mountain" that is the old and unused hotel, an enormous building that just from the windows is a place of ghosts falling to pieces. Like a prelude to Extraordinary Stories, three separate stories in four hours (with tangents) that feels like a cinematic epistolary, this segment follows the tale of its owner "Mr. G", once a young G who became part of defrauding the businessmen who worked with him to run the hotel, accidentally giving G and his wife (a French singer) ownership. This blurs the line between what is real or pure fabrication from old footage and imagination. One which escalates to a lawyer getting ownership of the hotel and letting crime take over, leading to a baker being murdered for trying to uncover this and a painter from Uruguay committing the murder as a partner.

The Beach Episode is not as dynamic, but as an essay film in itself, set to recorded footage, it struck a cord for me as we see the life of the Argentinean beach. At first their environments are dead cities when out of season, seeing shots of the town as fading entities until life returns, with the odd realisation, yes, in the Southern hemisphere when the patrons come, December is a warm period, and not cold and wet. Talking of the millions, even priests, rolled off in stats, there is so much I can write from the narration and I have barely recorded most of it in this review for description. That parasols have a masculine attitude to them due to men obsessing where to position them, or the long and vain walks which cause perpetual traffic. We see footage of young boys moulding a racetrack for toy cars in the sand, even getting down to the ground with an improvised tool to smooth and level it, whilst the mysterious and foreign scenario these beaches are for dogs is shown in the shots of our canine friends.

Starting with the moral criteria of flags warning where the tides are dangerous or not, this was where Balnearios kindled a love for English beaches as an Englishman, where there are surprisingly not that many differences culturally between them then you would think, a place equally of the sea for all people even if fraught with jellyfish and the wind blowing objects away, as witnessed with a red and white striped parasol being blown along the beach. All of this involves footage of regular people in a seaside town, such as the night-time scenes of the amusements and cotton candy machines. The narrator is whimsical, openly playful, and sometimes mean in its anthropologic tone where here he talks of singers of yesteryear and second rate television actors being the night-time entertainment. In the segment about arcades for video games, now a rare entity sadly, the words are actually affectionate and respectful even if intentionally making it absurd and sounding like an anthropology documentary David Attenborough could narrate, the jungle of scoreboards where the champions take domination over cabinets for hours, destroying "laughable enemies" with elegant playing, hunting opponents and challenges whilst in this digital ecosystem the onlookers watch over their shoulders like an alternative species of animal.

This entire segment by itself would have been a great gem by director Mariano Llinás itself, as much as between the "thousands of sand buckets and shovels", because everything at a seaside has to be sold in the thousands, or the shots of a gift shop full of shell art and a corkscrew with the screw positioned in the crudest area on a nude figure, there is not that much difference between Argentinean and Britain in their seaside, itself an entity of its own nature between both continents with its own culture and symbolism. The only thing that stands out is the churrero seller who carries wafers in a metal cylinder on his back on the beach, which I have never seen in a place like Skegness, or that the English usually built cafes or stands to sell hot dogs from.

The story of Miramar adds a real piece of weird real storytelling, an anecdote of a peaceful and calm town where the original happens to be submerged under water, cutting immediately to a lamppost sticking out of the sea. With images above and below the waters you could image Werner Herzog voicing this segment, as we learn of the likes of Hotel Venecia being under the water along two others, images of posts and slides and houses in shots barely above the surface visibly real images from a freak incident, whilst the underwater imagery, in orange lit ocean darkness, turn an undersea petrol station into a surreal abstract image. That the narrator cannot give the reason why this actually happened - a storm or a nearby dam development two theories - adds to the mystery, the point instead the surrealism of regular life witnessed, emphasising in it what Llinás would explore in a fictionalised context with Extraordinary Stories.

The last part of Balnearios, closing it out, is its own distinct piece, in mind Llinás would continue with documentary and short film work in his career. Heading to the provinces, we meet Zucco, setting up the location first win an old fifties documentary about the promise of dams and irrigation channels which would be evoked later in Extraordinary Stories, where one of its stories is set up with a similar looking public information film. Set now in the world of resorts of concrete and swimming pools, of civil engineering and hydropower than natural tides, Zucco is a regular older man on the street and our central lynchpin here, an artist whose work varies between painting and metal art of marine gods, Lord Neptune and fish beings, a segment which in itself does also emphasis Llinás as an admirer of ordinary people, as interested in shots of Zucco cooking shown in detail as he is the process of the metal craft in his workshop.

Note by here, I have come to adore the work of Llinás in both style and his writing, whose work has sadly not been easy to see, a shame as with the things I have seen, he is distinct. Especially as with La Flor (2016) being thirteen plus hours long, his interest in sprawling epistolary films, managing it here in just eighty minutes, led him to push against traditional rules of film length, which will present an issue in distributing these productions. All the segments in Balnearios interconnect in a beautiful and fun ode to a piece of Argentinean culture that could be ignored. Befitting it ends with a man whose "disturbing worship of water" intertwines with a love of alcohol, drinking where the music is live and from the soul. By this point he even shatters the documentary tag fully by having a snapshot of one of Zucco's dreams, about a Hell where everyone is however cheerful, a Hell of pods to swim in and stone manmade waterfalls, even a mermaid presiding over everything. These distinct images, even in the final shot in black-and-white of a young woman swimming by herself in the sea, could be easily ignored within the constantly quotable narration, but cements the virtues of the film.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Epistolary/Playful

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

Extraordinary Stories (2008)

 

Director: Mariano Llinás

Screenplay: Mariano Llinás

Cast: Mariano Llinás as X; Walter Jakob as Z; Agustín Mendilaharzu as H; Raúl Agüero as Vecino en ventana; Alberto Ajaka as Prisionero de las islas; Diego Alarcón as Padre de César; Rodolfo Andreani as Siri; Matías Arce as Vecino en ventana; Lola Arias as Alicia; Enrique Boess as Mazzuchelli; Héctor Bordoni as Carlos Armas; Fernando Brizuela as Sobrino del árabe; Federico Buso as Colombo; Soledad Cagnoni as Contadora; Elisa Carricajo as Hija de Palomeque

An Abstract List Candidate

 

3 Mona Lisas. Careful! No Napoleans.

For this unique Argentinean gem, you follow three completely separate narratives. In the first, a man named "X" (director-screenwriter Mariano Llinás himself) arrives at the boondocks. He stumbles, by accident, into being a witness of a meeting between a tractor driver and two men by hay bales which goes sour, when one shots the tractor driver (all in long take) dead with a shotgun. Well, he was not quite dead as X learns, inspecting the scene and taking a briefcase left behind as he leaves. For the second story, a man named "Z" (Walter Jakob) arrives in a town as the new manager of an agricultural office, only to learn his predecessor Cuevas, who lived in the storeroom, had a secret life buried in the possessions he left behind after his death. And the third story is of a man named "H" (Agustín Mendilaharzu), who has to cross a river searching for manmade monoliths. His is more complicated, as a debate at a society devoted to agricultural ideas ends up in an argument where one man argued that dredging a river could create a transport route; this is dashed by one veteran Bagnasco, who argued against it, leading to another Factorovich, stewing in his seat, to accidentally make a bet it was possible. With the advantage of knowing it was possible and had happened, with a company decades ago having tried this,  and the narrative cutting to an odd promotion film for emphasis, he hires H to look for the remnants.

These three stories by Llinás, over four plus hours long, will never cross but are allowed to breath and get odder, celebrating similar things and finding a wonder in adventure in the least likely of places. Z's one pleasure for his new job will be that he can drive around once a month to inspect their network, but with a system and secrets of a ghost named Cuevas that will draw him in the moment, trying to find his registration for the company car, Cuevas' red notebook is discovered in the care. X hides in the hotel room 301 in fear of pursuers, becoming almost a ghost in himself, and hunting old monoliths, actually markers of the old company construction, H's journey turns when the first he finds has been blown up and sabotaged.

There is too much to document sadly, but Extraordinary Stories, told like a novel with a male narrator a constant prescience to guide us, is idiosyncratic. With elaborate codes in a red notebook, with old pieces of paper between the pages that have aged brown with weird arrow symbols on them. Old letters stored at a grocery store for a "Kurgger", Cuevas under another passport. Or that X's briefcase contains the history of a massacre where, even in prison, a criminal was able to sneak out, to steal another briefcase full of gold from a grain mill business sealing a deal with a Saudi Arabian company, only for it to go south and everyone to die. This is Thomas Pynchon, the author of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), but very subdued, still weaving extravagant events but also embracing the joys of banal life, where H encountering the saboteur, an older grey haired man, is emphases by a sudden spaghetti western theme from composer Gabriel Chwojnik. If it has to be compared to a Pynchon novel, it is The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), which was not as drastic, world expanding or extreme, but a mystery surrounding a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies. Here, a boss of an agricultural company, Cuevas, becomes a man within a labyrinth of his own design involving wild animals, which is just the kind of narrative Pynchon could have had, but is one of three such stories you get for the price of one.

Seeing Balnearios (2002), Llinás' debut which was an essay hybrid about Argentinean beach resorts, Llinás is also fascinated in the epistolary format, something witnessed here when the narrator of Z's story even takes a tangent into the life of an architect whose work, before his brief flourish of a career faded into obscurity, was considered evil and ominous in the small town he worked in, suddenly turning almost into a documentary. His stories consist of articles, maps, letters, documents etc. all within the narratives, but even the structure changes tone to feel appropriate for what tangent it now is on. That is not to say there is not a compelling trio of narratives here, and even on an emotional level, Llinás hits a tone with complete success, his style subdued to contrast the eclectic nature of the narratives with a diverse music score by Chwojnik that can incorporate a didgeridoo and match the diversions that happen onscreen too.    

Llinás can sustain an entire narrative plot thread being about X pinned in his hotel watching a woman from another room outside his window, or lead to X concocting a theory that the narrator afterwards says is entirely false after spending a long time letting it be drawn onscreen. The chapter devoted to "the Colonel", [Major Spoiler] revealed to be a sick lion and using a real animal with clear care for its well being [Spoiler Ends], turns into a legitimately heartbreaking sequence of pathos about the end of its life. Then there is the tale Lola Gallo, a mystery woman who X tries to connect to the case he is involved with when introduced in a newspaper article he finds. Instead, the film switches to her, with a female narrator and subchapters within a chapter about her, a tale of an old man fixated with her and a young tractor seller she marries that, when it leads to them coming together in a diner, is bittersweet and a standout. It is not even connected at all to X's plot or anyone else's, but is in itself a striking moment which justifies the film's length and structure completely.

The film's length, with two intervals, even manages to include a tangent set within World War II, with a real tank used on the film as it tells of "Big" Ben Ferguson and the Jolly Goodfellows, is a masterpiece which goes against the usual rules of film making and, like a Thomas Pynchon novel, breathes with so much content which never feels indulgent. One which, for a film sadly not as available as it should be, manages to feel like an incredible journey for four hours, telling the story of the pleasures of storytelling and intrigue, absolutely the case here as the journey proves to be more important than the destination for all three narratives¹. It is a film that, in its own distinct way, shows all the possibilities of filmmaking, and it is in the knowledge, possibly not satisfied even after even this gem, Mariano Llinás' next major production La Flor (2018) had to go thirteen hours long to follow from this.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Epistolary/Playful

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

 

===========

1) [Major Spoilers] H and the man sabotaging the landmarks, named Caesar with an unnatural knack to catch fish and rabbits with his bare hands, are arrested for accidentally trespassing onto a military base illegally, with explosives and weaponry, after deciding to work together. Z ends up on a farm where, after solace, he concludes the journey with Cuevas' secrets even to Africa with little learned. X just leaves the hotel with no resolution, even after killing a man, beyond getting the document in the briefcase to the right people, if by accident, to save a man from prison. [Spoilers End]

Taiwan Black Movies Part 3

 

Taiwan Black Movies (2005)

Director: Hou Chi-jan

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

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

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

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

*****

On the Society File of Shanghai (1981)

Director: Chu-Chin Wang

Screenplay: Yung-Hsiang Chang and Ching Wang

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Taiwan Black Movies Part 2

 

The Lady Avenger (1981)

Director: Chia-Yun Yang

Screenplay: Yun Chu and Kang-Nien Li

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Lun Hua, Nien-Kuo Kao, Hsiao-Ling Hsu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Hsuan Lung

 

Can't forget that strange image, won't let me...

Barely surviving oblivion, viewing The Lady Avenger was a reminder why film preservation is important, and in this case, you sadly see the handicaps of films having to be "perfect" when one like this had to be preserved from a very battered and scratched print, which will be a hindrance in giving The Lady Avenger a wider availability. This is sadder as this is a Taiwanese entry in the contentious "rape and revenge" genre however directed by a woman, Chia-Yun Yang, adding a different context alongside turning into one of the strongest films I saw from a collection of Taiwanese genre films.

Chia-Yun Yang, who is interviewed in the documentary Taiwan Black Movies (2005), was a script supervisor amongst many roles before she became a director of films like this, which was a production where the script was being worked on whilst being shot as she described in the documentary. It is however compelling from the get-go as a lurid pulp film still pointedly relevant in its subject, the soundtrack already strange and intense, befitting a bizarre opening where a sexist commercial is being shot where, even when shot in the back with a gun, a woman would still crawl and reach out for a cosmetics product.

Said actress named Chu storms off the set, only to be raped by the male driver she hitchhikes with, all within a sequence where you find, even in its lurid tone, the sympathy is on the female cast as, running from him in the muddy countryside, all the violence is ugly when happening to the female cast. Attempting to get a trial set up against him, the bias against this woman, including the actress likely to lose her reputation even if she was to win, is uncomfortably potent still decades later, especially as with the point made that the perpetrator also happens to be from a rich family, this film not feeling alien to a post-MeToo movement that transpired in the late 2010s at all. Even after that movement lead to woman speaking up of previous real molestation and sexual violence against them from powerful figures, this Taiwanese b-movie still possesses salient comments or moments which sadly are still relevant today.

Step in the real lead, a female reporter named Hsu, tackling the case only for Chu to not be held up as a highly moral and loose woman, even by Hsu's male fiancée, and the trial to go against her. Even when Chu tried to get revenge by knife, her body is found days later washed up and the shore and, as Hsu digs and openly taunts the male perpetrator, she is becoming more of a target. Even in this pulpy narrative that comes after though, this is taking the material seriously even in its heightened tone, uncomfortable and eventually nightmarish when Hsu unfortunately encounters four drunken men. It is a long sequence what transpires as, the film requiring a trigger warning for anyone interested in the film, she attempts to escape them through a grungy urban environment and fights back, long but to the point that, when it is not possible, the film tastefully cuts away and you get the impact of what has happened. That this was a set up by the rich man of before sets up the genre plot but does not demean how the film tells the story.

Even the song that plays afterwards is used fully to represent the lingering agony, the same words repeating in the shower for Hsu. It is an exaggerated film but the content is still strong, when she gets drunk and, despite the over-the-top drunken acting from lead Lu Hsiao-Fen, you get in the space of a few minutes someone being unable to tell her fiancée she has been raped without pain, and becoming traumatised to the point she would rather be drunk. That the fiancée himself is more concerned about saving face, twisting a metaphorical knife in, makes it worse; it is to the point that, destroyed and a woman devoured by revenge by the end, Hsu and he have long split up and a haunting image of them passing each other on an escalator in opposite directions takes place much later in the film, he already with another woman in a separate life again.

You can argue that, getting to the action tropes as she picks off the assailants, and the villain is trying to get rid of her, it undermines the point, but in context, you accept this as a heightened reality appropriate to tackle the subject. Those revenge scenes are fantastical - a poor stunt man is hung upside down by a leg off a crane on top of a building, whilst there is a repeating shot of a giant gory splash of fake gore, deep red, hitting on white which fits the film's mood. Even its music, between a sad solo saxophone, to electronic droning synth and guitar, is a bar higher than many genre films in turning uncomfortable and real subject matter into a primal scream, where every detail keeps you on your toes.

Even with the first images being a montage of all the revenge scenes out of context, gut stabbings to recreating the Most Dangerous Game in the woods, The Lady Avenger despite its sadly battered and mangled presentation befits the hyper-potent tone of a film whose luridness actually makes such uncomfortable subject matter more meaningful. This, even with some strong films I saw, was the one above them all I was blown away with from this batch of movies.

*****

Never Too Late to Repent (1979)

a.k.a. The First Error Step

Director: Yang-Ming Tsai

Screenplay: Yen-Ping Chu

Based on the memoirs of Sha Ma

Cast: Sha Ma, Hui-Shan Yang, Hsiu-Shen Liang, Hsiao-Fei Li, Min-Lang Li, Chi Wang, Mo-Chou Wang, Hsiu Chuan Yang

For a completely different tone, we get to the film argued in Taiwan Black Movies as the catalyst for this movement of Taiwanese genre cinema. Lead Sha Ma, introducing the film in narration, says he is not an actor as the scene presents him in a prison being lead along in chains by guards. In truth, whilst he would eventually become a prolific actor (including in Woman Revenger (1981)) Sha Ma was a reformed criminal turned author who in this fictionalised take on his life tells a cautionary tale of a man, within genre tropes, ending up incarcerated and the hard climb back up to salvation. In this film's case, whilst working at a brothel, when upon being stabbed multiple times by a surly gangster with their gang, even losing a finger to the blade in the process, he went beyond self defence to stabbing the man to death with a giant sharpened pole-like object. The film is fictionalised - Taiwan Black Movies, with one of its interviews, reveals that Sha Ma was charged for "obscenity" - but that does not stop the film as an interpretation of this real man's life from being compelling.  

Tragically as well, this is another film only surviving from very damaged materials, with the version I saw battered and with a lot of the sound track lost, only with the relief that it is not the whole film, just snatches, and that this proves that the visuals of a film can still tell a story even muted, like Sha Ma being bullied the moment he is put in a group cell. Early on, the film plays out as a prison escape film, including tools being hidden in food for the cellmates, including a comedic rotund figure named Chicken who bumbles through the escape plan. It even has a much more creative ways of drawing straws, writing numbers on torn up pieces of paper, to order who goes first to last to get through the window they spend days removing the bars from, with money for everyone to use if they manage to all flee.

However, despite escaping briefly and even meeting his real father, a man abandoned and left to be looked after by his grandmother in his back story, Sha Ma is eventually back in jail and even shipped off to Orchid Island, a literally island compound for re-education. It is a place closer to military training, but the film is not about anti-authority or crime pulp, whilst the later is occasionally seen, but a tale of a man now on the path to redemption, starting with the island being ran by a former classmate who wishes to help him. The film is instead a drama more than a genre film, but that is not a bad thing. Never Too Late to Repent was held in high regard, against quoting Taiwan Black Cinema, because it tackled subjects that were never seen before in Taiwanese films considered taboo, such as the narrative drifting into locations like brothels and especially tackling the Taiwanese prison system, particularly as the real narrative is that Ma Sha's fictionalised life eventually tackles the stigma of being a criminal even when you have reformed.

Be it being picked on by police when a crime is committed by someone else, or being fired when people see Ma Sha's tattoos, the real man's full body ones striking and likely to have stigmatised him in real life, the final quarter which deals with the hardness of ordinary life outside of prison is the most rewarding passage. With happiness marriage but even a simple job of selling magazines on the street needing a license, it offers a distinct change of pace to a drama about a criminal seeing one try his hardest to redeem himself but the society around him completely unfair in its structure. This is all melodramatic, but in melodrama, you still reach a meaningful conclusion which is a triumphant ending here. The genre tropes, as in Western melodrama, allows for intensity, here as he goes alongside his way to reforming and becoming an author, literally bleeding onto his art and actually bleeding his own manuscript as a result of a fight when defending a woman. As a non-actor, Sha Ma is charismatic, and in mind these genre films were meant to be "social realist", Never Too Late to Repent definitely shows the template for what this genre was originally meant to be, showing real Taiwan by way of genre plotting. I can see how, even if sadly underappreciated to the point it only survives in a damaged form, why people in its home land praise it in Taiwan Black Movies, and how it kicked off a movement of similar films.

To Be Continued...