Lucy (2014)

From http://www.dragonblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/lucy2.jpg

Dir. Luc Besson

No matter how one responds to Lucy, it's better to meet her knowing she's eccentric and quite ridiculous. Yet it cannot be ignored for me how refreshing it is to see her try for something different in a multiplex. I went into my nearest for the first time in a long while hearing she was very peculiar but had takes on certain ideas no one else was having in that building, turning a present day action film, which Luc Besson has been as much responsible for in his production studio and legion of directors, and turn it into Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011). Dinosaurs and gun fights exist in her words. Violent action scenes with science fiction straight from anime and archival footage from documentaries she's seen. Ideas of how the mind doesn't use its full capacity, which she knows is a myth but springs from it ideas of the expansion of human consciousness while still bringing in a car chase and policemen against Asian gangsters. There's even an archival image of warthogs fucking brought into the ideas, which I never would presume to see on an Odeon cinema screen, and altogether the film made from all this, the tangents in the thoughts, with plot and logic gaps, is compelling despite of them. Usually you're forced to listen to someone whose monotonous and predictable when you go to a multiplex, going through the same tedious good guys/superheroes shooting/fighting bad guys scenario with no eccentricity or clever concepts behind them. With Lucy, moments in her speech are legitimately inspired.

From http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_image/reviews/lucy-2014/hero_Lucy-2014-1.JPG

Inadvertently caught up with a criminal organisation in Asia, American party girl Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) has a bag of an experimental narcotic sewn into her stomach area as a forced upon drug mule for the criminal head Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi). When the bag is broken open accidentally inside her, the drug causes Lucy's mind to awaken, able to use far more of her brain's potential than the ten percent explained, in Paris on the other side of the world, by Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) that human beings usually use. As she slowly gets to using a full hundred percent of her mind, transforming her into a demigod like figure of unknown power, she gets into contact with the professor and a French police detective Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked), while trying to acquire the remaining bags of drugs sewn up in three other drug mules from Jang and his henchmen. With Lucy able to manipulate her body, access vast intelligence and transform her environment and other people in abstract ways, the result is a mad melding of profundity, of the meaning of life and the concept of mind expansion in a sci-fi action film where the female titular protagonist can just pin goons to the ceiling or knock a whole corridor of people unconscious with her mind. The film discards the plot holes it will have or a logical set of rules around what the protagonist can and cannot do. There is no clear threat to Lucy when she becomes superhuman at all, as her powers progress, more of what she can do and what happens when she reaches a full hundred percent mental capacity when just a small boost higher turns her in a gun welding killing machine. The scenario is allowed to play out, past rational plotting, literally to prehistoric history. A lot of the film is ridiculous, but it's clear the film knew this, as Lucy becomes a cold, logical being able to connect to others through any machine, reaching a stage of feeling every sensation and every conscious force possible as she ploughs through people in her way. It's loud, juggling musings of life in the same breath as people being shot in the head, and it's trying to have its cake and eat it in being philosophical and violently dumb. A person in my screening, at the start of the final credits, called it the worst film they ever saw, and compared to other mainstream films in the multiplex, someone will pick it to pieces in comparison to them....

From http://www.humortimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/article-2595619-1CC58B9C00000578-637_634x378.jpg

....but people are not willingly to take such a risk in directing and writing a film like this as Besson did. In any other circumstance, Lucy could've been merely a fascinating failure, one of the peculiarities that I obsess over, but the director does so much right. The film reminds me less of a blockbuster than the gene pool of genre films from decades ago, in the seventies and eighties, from countries like Japan, an ungodly breeding of unconnected ideas and types of cinema created from trying to make films different from each other, less interested in a conventional, cohesive plot but in a plot that acted as a skeleton just to house the content and the effect the content causes on the viewer. Besson's willingness to experiment is seen in the beginning, as Lucy is coerced into meeting Jang in the first place by her boyfriend, the film cutting to a mouse, against a black screen out of narrative time, tentatively getting closer to a mousetrap. Never intended to be a subtle technique to begin with, the Montage of Attractions theory of Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, is brought into an action film, something you rarely see know even in art films. It immediately won me over, and showed that for all the silly content that would take place onscreen, the film was going to be spectacular in playing with the form and content just by going back to a concept of film's past and using it in an inspired way that had dramatic effect.

From http://www.ozartsetc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ozartsetc-lucy-luc-besson-trailer-09-e1396573809492.jpg

It's for the most part of typical action film around the acquisition of the experimental drug, the police and the criminals around the title character, but its well made as a case to house the more bizarre content. Every action scene is exhilarating and well made, something that has to be emphasised because it's not a rule followed enough. It's brutal, it's nasty, but it's also put together properly for effect. Yet the action content only works fully in that it's the skeleton for the peculiar story around it. The bizarre sci-fi, solidly depicted too with Industrial Light & Magic behind the microscopic and cosmic images brought into the film, gives the work a uniqueness even if it's for the most part another action film in its ilk. The risk taken is what makes it good, and how it's done well. In plotting, despite the holes, and the bold risks. Acting for example. Min-sik Choi is the stereotypical villain, but he's great and allowed to speak in his own language rather than be hindered in trying to speak a second one while acting at the same time, an act of respect from Besson for his abilities even when, interestingly, non-English dialogue is only translated when needed for the story's basics. Morgan Freeman is being Morgan Freeman, but who else would you want to talk about the evolution of life on Earth and its ability to think, profound when it's over images of mankind's construction and even over those images of animals having sex that cause people to chuckle, the actor able to make everything sound as meaningful as it should be regardless of the images onscreen. The there's Johansson. Since Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008), I've found hwe to be one of the most attractive actresses in current American cinema, but it's been wonderful that she is also talented and picks very unconventional films too, seeing two very different faces of her on a cinema screen in this and Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin (2013). I'm not impressed with her being in The Avengers (2012) or any of the Marvel comic book films because she was turned into a lifeless fetish doll for comic book nerds, who didn't get to bare actual teeth within the all-boys club of superheroes. Here thankfully, she can be the action heroine but be in something unconventional for commercial cinema. For the most part, she is a growingly emotionless machine, but there is a charisma to her where nothing she says or is involved in, including a majestic take on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that is yet so unexpected in a multiplex film involving an ancestor, without it coming off as silly. That's not to mention an abrupt scene of real drama, a phone conversation with Lucy's mother where she discusses her memories unlocked of her childhood and sadness in her predicament, which comes out of nowhere and shows how good an actress she is.

From http://sleeplessthought.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/lucy-2014-movie-screenshot-red-eye.jpg

That scene as well, on Besson's part as director and writer, is exceptional, the placement and flawless execution of such moments, from this to the strange, going against the sillier moments and bringing the film to a higher quality, taking real risks and succeeding with them. It's a high octane action-for-action's sake movie which yet takes its ideas of the mind's expansion, in a template of a mindless action film, into areas that are actually thoughtful, including those for the sake of the mindless action scenes. It comes off as intriguing as a take on the evolutionary potential of the human species in context of using it for carnage onscreen. What is the exact message being said is vague to be honest, but as a take on the concepts it takes a real shot of trying to explain them. Lucy eventually becomes fully esoteric - if the archival footage  from documentaries and Freeman talking about life hadn't already - in the finale alongside a large scale gun battle between groups, throwing in ideas of time, the meaning of existence, and mind bending distortions of reality and form that you'd only get usually, in juxtapositions, in anime and manga. Without any hesitance, bravely, what starts out as an entertaining action film with a likable heroine in a terrible situation and clever visual tricks gets more and more bolder as it goes along, rejecting Christopher Nolan plot logic for more inspired ideas. Mind reading as depicted in a curving, rooming camera viewing around pockets and reflections of sunglasses that may make no sense in a plot continuity but is more rewarding in being exaggerated and playful. An entire timeline passes through onscreen, and the universe as a whole, in a few minutes just for the sake of it. Sincerity that veers close to naivety but worthy for the desire to be so. A finale transformation that definitely evokes anime like Akira (1988) while more aesthetically elegant, rather than disturbing, and obsessed with black and white, ending with a odd, finite ending with no chance of a sequel, no epilogue for any characters, but a clear end, cutting to the chase without padding.

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

Lucy is mainly an action sci-fi film, connected to its action narrative, as Johansson's Lucy fights off suited henchman, greatly. It ends up in an odd placement here that its reliance on this structure in tone, unlike other films, is too conventional for it to get to Medium ranking, yet makes the content even more stranger in a rationalised, normal setting. It's a film that left a lot of baffled viewers at the end of the screening I attended regardless of its conventional aspects, encountering a work that deals with the universe and beyond in a ninety or so minute action movie when people went to see another action film like any other at that multiplex. The originality and risks, the smallest to the biggest, are pronounced, making it madder than a box of frogs and exhilarating at the same time.

Personal Opinion:

If more films this bold and unconventional were being made for the multiplex, I would be a better person. Everyone would be a better person, although I want to avoid making that phrase a dead horse I beat repeatedly here. The plot flaws may grow on rewatches, but the first time viewing, seeing Lucy vibrate with a boldness different from other films that was worth viewing on the cinema screen, makes her someone I'll have joyful feelings for in being different.

Détective (1985)

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Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Even with a more commercial effort, as this was made to help fund his personal project Hail Mary (1985), with known stars and a pulp crime script, the films of Jean-Luc Godard are as multi-textual and layered as you could see. The reason why I once hated Godard films, only to keep viewing them until he became one of my favourite directors, is that you don't get films like Détective. Few people are this experimental, which makes encountering them exhilarating or alienating compared to films with more common cinematic tropes. Détective is a fully formed narrative of various characters set within the Hotel Concorde at Saint Lazare in Paris. A disgraced hotel detective William Prospero (Laurent Terzieff), his nephew Inspector Neveu (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Neveu's girlfriend Arielle (Aurelle Doazan) attempt to answer the mysterious murder of two years earlier of a man called the Prince, while still being entangled with the relationships between them and those of individuals around the hotel. A couple, Emile Chenal (Claude Brasseur) and Françoise Chenal (Nathalie Baye), in a fraught relationship and his business failing, attempt to get money back from boxing promoter and trainer Jim Fox Warner (Johnny Hallyday). Fox Warner has a dept to pay to an elder mafia leader also called the Prince, his boxer Tiger Jones (Stéphane Ferrara) and his relationship with his love, known as the Princess of the Bahamas (Emmanuelle Seigner), causing further issue. And Fox Warner and Françoise Chenal have a relationship from the past that conflicts their interests. Almost completely set in the Hotel Concorde, Godard's take on the familiar tropes of crime cinema guts out all the extraneous exposition, making a series of fragments that interlock into one full story, and also continue his experiments with what cinema is alongside tangents on media, society and life.

From http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/GodardnewAdd4.png

The digressions and narrative co-exist in a film methodically put together. The first quarter of the film has the opening credits split across introductory scenes introducing the characters and situations. Narrative wise, it's tremendous, and despite the circumstances of its green lighting, it's treated as a full story with great performances and a novel take on the stories, willing to mix crime narrative, drama, even slapstick intercut into other scenes within its various plot strands. What differentiate it from the sixties films of Godard's its evoking is that it also shows the transition from Godard's final cinematic period of the 80s to staying within experimental filmmaking fully to the present day, with Historie(s) du Cinema (1988-1998), Film socialisme (2010) and various short films after, the seeds of them clearly visible in this pulp detective work. Sound and the use of it is the first thing you notice, the first film of Godard's which was in stereo. Dialogue continues while the image onscreen cuts to something or someone else, an almost-cut-and-paste collage of speech and music, all classical, taking place when exposition and character building conversations are fragmented, making one conscious of the structure of audio in cinema. It works to add to the narrative, while other moments have music intentionally jarring to the content of the scene on purpose. The film is as much about communication and disruption of it as it is a crime story. The multi-plotted story itself is as much about miscommunication, where barring a final series of shootings, most of the conflicts are through words. It's surprising how this film reminds one of American indie films, especially Jim Jarmusch, a genre narrative broken of its conventional plotting structure with additional allusions to philosophy and especially cultural items. Characters are pulp figures but still have time to be built up, fleshed out, through Godard's musings on life, able to use such thoughts, like the reason pornography is called 'x-rated', as part of the metaphors and thoughts of the characters as much as his outpouring of his thoughts outside of cinema.

From http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/253/218/56061/format_web/detective.jpg

Books populate a lot of the film, piled on mass on Prospero's makeshift desk in his hotel, his and Neveu and Arielle's names directly referencing The Tempest. Characters read a lot generally. Quotations are countless, spoken and in narration, and is even part of Fox Warner's character, a copy of Lord Jim he keeps with him, opened randomly to any page in a time of crisis, giving him advice in whatever passage he reads. It's impossible not to think, as communication is part of the narrative, how Godard is also directly commentating of how the way to communicate has changed in the period the film was made in. Cutaways to a media store, the neon of Cassette Audio and Video Cassette, in the colours of the French flag, tangential to the narrative, but in a film that plays with audio and visuals, a comment of how film and culture in general has changed from the Sixties crime films of his and cinema in general. Discussions on pornography in an era of video tape and porn theatres, to classical films on televisions, the black-and-white celluloid images fuzzy on the screens, evoking tropes repeated here in the story or, as characters watch Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) in each other's arms, how its part of their lives as pulp characters as they are for the viewers. Arielle, with Prospero's interest, films directly out of their hotel room window with a film camera prominently, the grainy images from it the first of the entire film around it; it cannot be ignored, as Godard's shows, that the images are distorted even in these narratives as they will be for cinema as the technology did indeed change over the next few decades or so.

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/e/e0/Detective_Godard.jpg

Détective has a very unconventional, tangential style to it compared to other Godard films in general. Still a Godard crime film, in what one would expect, but aspects stand out differently with this one to the others. Prospero is trying to figure out a crime, the random murder of a man known as the Prince, that is far too simple to be explained, confounded further by the Mafia boss also being known as the Prince existing at the same time, Godard's habit of dissecting genre and cinema taking a metaphysical tone here alongside with a meta one. Mostly within the main hotel location, barring one or two scenes outside, the setting is an unmapped series of corridors, stairs and rooms, beautifully filmed in static shots, but out-of-reach from reality. Where characters are hidden away in blackened billiard rooms, or squashed up together in hotel rooms, and each other's hotel rooms for that matter. In an almost sci-fi touch, with Fox Warner's extended circus of entourage, including a young girl unexplained in her prescience playing an instrument at times, he has access to a computer, part of the issue of technology being addressed by the director, but one, when asked questions in outputs, able to keep answers from the users on its own digression. It tips into legitimately freakish horror in one moment with a dead mouse and blood coming from the least expected place, asking what Godard would've brought to the horror genre if he tried it.  Characters populate and intrude on each other's spaces, to comedic effect at points especially with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a sleuth keeping his eye on the situations around him or running through those he has no connection to. Entangled romance takes place, adultery and cheating one's lover, the follies of the heart, alongside misguided views and the deluded belief money is easy to come by, all spoken through Godard's quotations, experiments and reflections of the period. The result is sewn and weaved together without issue, a delicately balanced mix that works more so on a second viewing and shows its masterful constuction.

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

Altogether, Détective works both as a Godard experiment and as a genre film, but it is definitely an unconventional work as crime narratives go. It works as a great take on the tropes of a b-movie thrillers, in that it gets to the point in its fragmented tone, while still fleshed out, and letting the experiments work for the story and for the director's intellectual concerns. The experiments themselves do not detract from the full narrative, but they would be disarming to anyone encountering Godard for the first time, and take these well worn tropes into unexpected areas. On a second viewing, it still causes one to sit back and take in the level of experimentation you do not get in most cinema, marvelling at them, fascinating in its moments where it steps into separate observations. The advantage that makes the film more abstract is that is still works as a film, and it is immensely entertaining in that area. Gripping as a very talkative, cool toned crime story, each character subplot of interest when one puts together the pieces of each, and taking on a very different take on them for original results. It is a funny movie at times and despite the events of the end - beautifully set up with a use of a clip from an older film for one of the meta references - it finishes with high spirits which contrasts fully from the cerebral content and the seriousness of points. The hybrid of completely bold, uncompromising experimentation and genre actually manages to work and it's never conventional because of the melding.

Personal Opinion 

It is to the director's credit, while very much transitioning to his winter period of filmic essays already signposted by films before like Slow Motion (1980), that he still made a film that cares for its narrative as much as the musings. From a script from a producer who was willing to fund his controversial take on the immaculate conception in Hail Mary, Godard uses it as a suit, an aesthetic, for his own ideas while still making it as was desired under his own terms. It turns back on the films from his first Breathless (1960) in the sixties, but with the matinee looks of a Johnny Hallyday against moments of the director disrupting his work further than the jump cuts of decades before. The two sides, of the past Godard and the one he would become after this, cooperate fully and the transition is felt here immensely with great results. This is also a film where a character pretends to do boxing sparring against his girlfriend's bared breasts, following her directions of which to box, the largest Toblerone I have ever witnessed in the flesh or in image, a clumsy waiter joke, self conscious computers with digital paint portraits of an actress in the film on them, and a monologue of how one washes their hands shows who they are that'll make Quentin Tarantino look like he's a twelve year old trying to write cool dialogue in comparison. With Godard, then or today, you get the intellectual meat but plenty of material and images you'd never see in most people's work, or together in one film like this, and it adds together to more than a plodding art film but something artistic with great character to it.

Videotape Swapshop Review: The Pumaman (1980)

From http://ayay.co.uk/backgrounds/b_movie
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Dir. Alberto De Martino

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

There's no lick of a chance this would get on the list. It's a very silly superhero rip-off film from Italy that only gets near to the abstract, passing outside the metaphorical library of unconventional films so far kept and breathing on the glass, in its perfunctory effects and how amusing they are.

Personal Opinion

Entertaining in its incompetence mixed with trying hard and Donald Pleasance chewing the scenery. A full review can be found here - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/21830/the-worse-of-the-worse-the-pumaman-1980-director-alberto-de-martino/

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/
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Medea (1969)

From http://www.parchiletterari.com/files/image/pasolini_vita14.jpg

Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

These sense of who Pasolini was is far more complicated when his filmography is build up. The Marxist who yet has a considerable chunk of his filmography based on mythological and literary historical pieces. The politics can still be seen in the Trilogy of Life (1971-74), Oedipus Rex (1967), and what was left of the uncompleted adaptation of Orestes, but the willingness, even in a social realistic form, to depict the fantastical, is eye opening when all that one knows of him is a Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), or The Gospel of St. Matthew (1964). The words of a centaur to a grown up Jason, who is seen raising the Greek mythological individual up from infancy, include that reality is fantastical, and that the fantastical is reality. The abstract supernatural tone of Teorema (1968), the absurdity of The Hawks and Sparrows (1966) and such films leads to an immense centre of dreamlike material which the politically minded director managed to sew to the bare reality to stress his point. The reality is depicted through them - the failed yet beautiful faces and bodies, the elaborate yet handmade and theatrical costumes, and real locations substituting fantasy ones. Even the most fantastical moments in his films - the bronze man in Arabian Nights (1974), the centaur here with his fake horse legs etc. - are depicted as obviously practical effects, theatre tricks, but given a reality for them. You can still see the fantasy, the myth, but its appropriated for a clear meaning of his own.

From http://marfapublicradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/CallasMedea.jpg

Appropriating the play by Euripides, the film after the prolong follows the titular protagonist, played by opera singer Maria Callas, a sorceress in her land who sacrifices her position to go with Jason, played by Olympic triple jumper Giuseppe Gentile, and his Argonauts, on the search for her land's golden fleece which she steals for him. The next and final half depicts the years later when, married, Jason betrays her by planning to marry the daughter of a king he was originally opposing, leading to tragedy and revenge. Medea is the old world, Jason the new world, Medea losing her abilities in a spiritual crisis for her betrayal. The film succeeds in that it is just a step ahead of fully being understood, scenes playing out that seemingly have no connection to what has transpired, leading to the uncanny. There is an abstract tone to the film in its pure fantasy, an ancient world interpreted in a theatrical way. Yet it is realistically made. Locations in Turkey and Syria make up the world shown amongst others, buildings carved from the sand as empires. Wooden masks, capes, gowns, metal chain jewellery, a coarse aesthetic beauty to the content. Pasolini went further and handpicked a score based on various types of traditional music. African. Music I recognise, in the squealing high horns, of Tibetian Buddhist monks or the same instrumentation and chanting. Even what I felt, how my ears interpreted them, as a East Asian string instrument with matching vocals nearly synched onto post synched actors. The world shown is of no clear time, timeless, a mass of cultures made into a cohesive world in terms of look and presentation. A sacrifice shown where a virile young man's blood and organs are painted onto a harvest to grow, a key and memorable sequence, using real natives of the local environment shot in as extras, feels as if one is in the same place as the characters. Pasolini made a fake world into a reality in how it is shown, connectable to even if also completely alien in culture.

From http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Medea.2jpg.jpg

Maria Callas, close to middle aged grace, commands the screen even if the film is viewed without her original voice in Italian dubbing. While never singing once, it's clear the prescience required for opera is shown in the performance. As well as sympathy for the old world, the apparently barbaric one, the director also created a feminist film, the plight of Medea that she is seen as a barbarian to her husband Jason even after rearing children from him. Killing her own brother early on, she is still sympathetic, the role of mythology to step back and see the complexities of gods and mortals, their worst and best sides, as well as the relation to normality to the fantastical. Pasolini doesn't over explain what is going on, confusing at first but ultimately more rewarding because the images and few words said speak much more than exposition. This shows the lack of boundary between the mythological and the contemporary which rears itself in existence in films like Teorema, the atheist still able to evoke more powerfully the unknown to rational human logic then a Christian or spiritual filmmaker. This paradox is at its most distinct that it was Pasolini, not a Christian like Mel Gibson, who made the greater portrait of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According To St. Matthew, not just for his down-to-earth, rational portrait of the Son of God but also the mystery he still leaves in. Had his take on Orestes been made, remaining in the filmed draft Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970), then he would, in filming the Greek play in current day Africa, have melded two sides, his real environments and the old world he felt nostalgia for, that were far closer bed fellows than presumed..

From http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9040/e783.jpg

The film is subtle, yet is full of pronounced, powerful moments. The sight of the two sides of the centaur, how they represent the mind of Jason to express and evoke, the old world and the old world desecrated represented by both sides. The potential flash forward in the future of the princess being struck down by accident, or purpose, by the curse of Medea, panic felt when scenes and dialogue almost repeat again suggesting it will actually happen in narrative time. The eloquence of the dialogue even in subtitles, how every character is not just an archetype, but gives a depth. How sumptuous the film is. Colourful but earthly, the blazing sun enough to symbolise the old God of the Sun reappearing to Medea to regain her power, one of the many subtle editing or short composition practices Pasolini used. It's surprising as well how gory and considerably nasty the film is too, the effective of severed prosthetic limbs not overbearing, not over elaborate, making an effect but linking the ancient plays and myth to today's horror films in comparison, how the physical, exaggerated violence is as much representative of the emotions behind them as they are probably more accurate to what happened in real history. Pasolini was able to evoke these tales, beautifully in films like Arabian Nights, without losing sight of a clear interpretation of his own thoughts, usually condemnation of modern life. Even as he rejected his own work, and made Salo in rampant disgust of the world he lived in, he still made the horror of that film with the same theatrics seen here or in a Oedipal Rex. Medea itself ends with this despair. We sympathise with the titular character in her abandonment. She takes a violent extreme, but in context of mythology, and the potential feminist reading, her despair is rational, despite its brutality. She shouts down Jason that nothing is possible anymore, the last line. 'Fin' is shown then, the film ends. Stark, cuts to the point. The old world dies screaming under her own terms. Pertinent now as it was in the Sixties when the film was first show. Usually the past is misappropriated, distorted or manipulated, so to encounter it in its true form is potent, shocking for the modern eye and liberating, which Pasolini was able to translate to the modern day.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XutalbIgm4s/UjOrZ-vYNlI/
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Abstract Scale (High/Medium/Low/None) - Low

Pasolini managed to make a clear, unique style of his own that shifts closely to a series of images that connect and have effect rather than a clear cut narrative. A film like Porcile (1969) or Teorema is this taken to its furthest, but Medea still has the same energy. That Pasolini deliberately used a highly well known opera singer, a celebrity, and an Olympic champion as his main protagonists here adds a specific detail unique to this film. Like Terence Stamp in Teorema, deliberate in using actors as well as non-actors, the director is able to take a recognisable face and give it new meaning in context of his work. This as much applies for the adaptations of the ancient and classical literary sources and the materials he uses too, creating new and alien contexts for recognisable material. Using other nations' environment and other cultures' music and making them gel perfectly with others. The clear moral battle for Pasolini, the existential fight, between the modernity he hated and the past he desired, is littered and shown through all his work I've seen, and in deciding to depict this through the mixing of the recognisable, the universal, with the abstract creates a peculiar but effective mix. Certainly enough for the scale.

Personal Opinion:

It's amazing that a director I first approached as a mere intellectual art director has a significant chunk of his filmography devoted to films like Medea or the Trilogy of Life. Myths, fantasies, the erotic, comedic, even films that are legitimately great entertainment. Even his most abstract films has bursts of humour. Even Salo has a sick sense of one despite the abomination and shit eating. The films, alongside gems like Porcile, have been a revelation, more so when the same attitude and presentation is given to the depiction of the modern day as the ancient worlds. His works are an open dialogue to his issues with the present and the past, depicting the unreal faithfully and adding oddness to its nature alongside his own pertinent political ideas, startling as a result. On first glance Medea might be seen as a lesser work, but then one compares it to other films based on Greek myths and would see how significantly superior it is to most films.

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Final Stab (2001)

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/70kxjh8SvZc/mqdefault.jpg

Dir. David DeCoteau

In the beginning, knowing completely this is not a great film, the opening credits of visual distortions of the killer's mask is quite memorable, if just to remind me of the contents of a lava lamp, and that's more than enough to be very interested in a film. It may sound ridiculous, but any interest is better than no interest at all. You're set up with a young romantic couple Charlie (Jamie Gannon) and Angelia (Melissa Reneé Martin); Charlie is suffering from reoccurring nightmares, and Angelia's older sister Kristin (Erinn Hayes) knows of the reason, setting up a faux serial killing spree at an infamous home of a real one with her ivy league cronies to send him to the hospital in a strait jacket. However someone else is also there and it's no longer fake corn syrup but actual blood that's being split. I admit to having viewed slasher films as one of my least favourite genres for a long time, and it wasn't helped when I was younger that I grew up during the post Scream (1996) era where films like Final Stab were made, films that I just thought were dreck. Final Stab is not great, yet its strangely compelling. Significantly, my old criticism that all slasher films were the same is lost when it's obvious, while the plotting and archetypes (the jock, the goody two shoes etc.) are shared between this and other films, that even a movie like Final Stab that never gets mentioned in lists of praised films in the sub-genre has its own idiosyncrasies of interest.

From http://horrorhothousereview.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/final-stab-1.jpg

DeCoteau is a conventional director here - very tight, close-to-the-actors framing of scenes with very little sense of space, emphasis more the exposition dialogue and the deaths rather than anything else. What's interesting about him, having become a little obsessed with his name when I kept seeing work of his at a young age during the early 2000s DVD boom, is how his career has spanned the history of straight-to-video cinema, from its beginnings with VHS in the eighties to DVD now. He has worked with a mummy, Linnea Quigley, a mockbuster of Hansel and Gretel, and Eric Roberts as a talking cat. One area I've yet to go into, DeCoteau a gay man, is his various horror films from a homoerotic slant, which would be worth looking into, and actually would deserve praise before even seeing them for staking a mark in the horror genre from a very little done viewpoint. Final Stab itself, where a killer picks off the one-by-one as is expected in the slasher subgenre, is perfunctory at best as a great film or not, perfunctory as a slasher film in terms of quality too. Its average for me in that scale and it's not going to be a film slasher fans immediately go to. As a lurid genre films it lacks what's desired for most people either. There's no nudity baring one bare chested guy in just his boxers, some blood but nothing shocking, no unique kills or craptacular fashion and music tastes shown from the early 2000s to wince about. There is instead a very over eager score which, unless I'm going insane and losing my ability to judge musical sounds to each other, had bongos as part of the percussion. It is close to the current era of horror cinema where most of the characters are insulting each other even as friends, twats to use the English vernacular to be around, although here at least there are characters, even if one dimensional, who are sympathetic despite some still being vain egotists. Most of the film is full of catty remarks between people as they insult each other, either because the screenplay was an attempt at Joss Whedon one-liners or, God help us, the American were this obnoxious at times.

From http://horrorhothousereview.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/final-stab-2.jpg

Knowing this is far from great, I decided to rewatch this film, after many years, with only the desire to be entertained. It's fascinating, and does actually become entertaining, to see such a film trying to be dramatic. Sisterly antagonism, skeletons in the closet, revenge for being rejected and unspoken desires as a person in a boiler suit and mask carves people up. The decision to have it set up as a prank, a fake serial killer running around the single setting, only for real murders to take place is quite amusing and interesting for what it is - an upfront, somewhat crass reference to Friday The 13th (1980) aside, its more watchable to see the difference between pretending to be dead and being dead. It's junk but its charming, seeing stereotypical looking young actors playing stereotypical archetypes. For example the, for a lack of a better word, bimbo character is the stereotype only without a lurid nude scene like more explicit slashers show, and the actress playing her, with pronounced curves, probably dyed blonde hair and California tan, is as much as a b- and c-movie archetype of an actress too, adding a perplexing joy to viewing the film. The male actors are the same - light thin wool jumpers, rippling muscles, platinum blonde hair, a little vapid and too square jawed to stand out from each other. Obviously this is dangerously close to character assassination of the real people, not just critiquing characters in a straight-to-video slasher film they play, but it's from affection, that suddenly came about, viewing this film of how the type of actors after Scream (1996) cast for these roles were as much of the late nineties and early 2000s as the content was.

From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is120/finalstab2fj3.2135.jpg

Now accepting slasher films for what they are, there is fun in this despite being far from said greatness. A sudden plot twist involving two men having had a relationship is abrupt, never took further, but the most inspired thing in the film. It's wrong in a lot of ways to enjoy such bitchy, insulting dialogue being thrown around by the characters at each other, but there's a suitable level of smarminess to it that's amusing, especially from Erinn Hayes as the Queen of snide comments. A pointlessly large cast is there for killer fodder, but it's too innocuous to be dubious, just to spill fake blood for the sake of it in a silly way. Slasher films have an inherent campiness to them in hindsight, especially those around teens, ivy leaguers and youth trends, that is ripe for me to devour with joy now, and this has it despite being a quickie slasher, let's be honest, made for the commercial market of video first. It's been great to jettison my snobbery over these films, especially with having the darkly humorous joy of some of the content in this unintentionally hysterical. A truly Oscar worthy performance of a knife victim is seen, the actor able to create this realistic performance by actually dying with a knife plunged in his back, looking like he's fallen asleep on the job while no one realises the blood on the floor has haemoglobin in it rather than corn syrup. At least one dead person is ignobly stepped over and ignored in one scene too. The disposability of characters in slashers, far from nasty and nihilistic, has a ridiculous side to it that can be finally appreciated by an Englishman like me who has a corpse like sense of humour. The one legitimate virtue of this film, while I mainly enjoyed it for its rudimentary straight-to-video tone, is that it does have a clear ghoulish sense of humour to the material that goes against the ordinariness of what's onscreen. It may have been churned out, but moments have too much of a winking sense of humour; not ironic, taking itself seriously, but with a silliness to its tone. This especially comes about with the twist ending, which is completely ridiculous and may be accused as being really bad scriptwriting. But slasher films have always had baffling twist endings since their beginning; I can point to Happy Birthday To Me (1981) as a key example of this, and even the first Friday The 13th has an ending there just for a cheap jolt regardless of it being great to watch. Viewing Final Stab, its recommended, like I did, to not care about grand artistic merit as you watch it, not turn your brain off, but just admit what it is, and find any sliver of merit you can find from it. It's not Halloween (1978), but that was obvious seeing the cover, so its redundant to compare the two.

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/BQJ-EizbRNQ/0.jpg

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

There was no way this would get onto the abstract list - a standard, generic looking straight-to-video slasher as a killer prowling around an abandoned house. What you see is all it has, entertaining for me, but not odd, atmospheric in an oneiric way or ending up with a random pie fight taking place like a Boardinghouse (1982).

Personal Opinion

I'm having an epiphany with slashers. Once my least favourite film genre with biopics; now I just despise biopics the most. Most of it was an apparent sense of creative stuntedness with the subgenre, a lack of imagination. Now, its still not a creative subgenre at times, but I can find fun in a Final Stab because they still have individual quirks between them of their own. With the help of a podcast called The Hysteria Continues, I can see how idiosyncratic and peculiar to each other these films can be, like one punk song to another, and just have to watch more of them. Some might raise an eyebrow with me beginning with a Final Stab, but to find entertainment in it, and not feel like I wasted a night's viewing, means more in that it proves I can now like the maligned subgenre in its less-than-well regarded places as well as its highs, and far from dismissing Final Stab, I repeat myself again and say that this is still above many other films in quality and entertainment, worth praising in itself.

Rubber's Lover (1996)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4e/Rubber's_Lover_FilmPoster.jpeg/220px-Rubber's_Lover_FilmPoster.jpeg

Dir. Shozin Fukui

With the sense of having to blink, slumped back at the end credits, trying to get my senses back together, a secondary viewing doesn't detract from the sensitory barrage of Rubber's Lover, only add to it. Is it all brute sound and violent content only? Probably, but you can become very complacent if one merely goes about believing any art that is lurid and outright hostile is unacceptable. Sometimes you need to shoot up the experimental drug rectally, get the rubber gimp suit on and let your mind be expanded by the pulsating, audible noise being played through the speakers, as crafted as the sound torture a character in the film creates on magnetic tape for a project to expand human consciousness. To actually have an effect on a viewer, it's better to go to the extent Shozin Fukui does in audio assault then be sedate. And what a film, cyberpunk cinema, based on stories around dehumanising industry, slum based fiction whose name evokes punk rock and its D.I.Y ethics. Here, Fukui wanted to depict a theme of his of catharsis through physical pain, and it appears here in the submerged underground laboratory the film is mostly set in, depicted in stark ink black and burnt-out white monochrome photography.

From http://horrorhappyhour.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/1538997732_d2a1ac3e96.jpg

This is a prequel of sorts to his previous film 964 Pinocchio (1991), his debut, not in the same subject, but of the same vibe of psychic power and transgressions with bodily and sexual undercurrents. I would like to imagine too, if one attempted to make a giant narrative encompassing both, that film started some time before its narrative when someone found out about the aftermath of this film and cut their losses by going into the living sex cyborg business that makes part of 964 Pinocchio's story. Better to try and salvage the remnants of the scientific experiment that failed messily here and try a different area with more chance of financial reward. Here, two scientists, and a comely nurse (Mika Kunihiro) in Lolita Goth costume who molests the human guinea pigs, are attempting to bring mankind to psychic abilities like many films before it, but with two potential options for doing so of their own design, the Digital Direct Drive, a piece of technology for monitor and enhance one's mind, and a drug called Ether. The two scientists, Motomiya (Sosuke Saito) and Hitosubashi (Norimizu Ameya),  are butting heads about which is the superior method for doing so. One thing they can agree upon is that, in the final stages, their test subjects are wrapped up in an all-rubber body suit, and not just because everyone is exceptionally kinky, but for a practical reason. The rubber suffocates the skin, preventing it from breathing, causing an insulating affect that, with noise blasting your mind away and the Ether drug in your system, will make your everyday senses mindless allowing psychic powers to come to the surface. Thus the title is explained and the S&M aspect of the film is shown. And its based on real research by Fukui before preparing this film, including contacting S&M practitioners, that is explained in a filmed interview that was included with the film's US DVD release. I don't recommend the reader try any of this in an attempt at expanding the mind. The amount of finance and underground space required is steep, and as this film suggests, it would lead to someone being a mess of organs on the floor by the end.

From http://www.honekoubou.jp/en/filmo/rubbers_2.gif

The psychic project is a failure. They're wasting money and killing human test subjects, and not producing the results their benefactors want. And they're clearly going insane, Motomiya, spearheading it, is a "muscle monster", as their nurse calls him, with the muscles of a body builder, who mostly wears only a thong and a see-through raincoat, so on edge and psychopathic I'm not surprised any one would like to close his projects. That or his tendency to rape people which rightly would prevent anyone wanting to assist him in continue said project. Members have gotten addicted to the Ether drug, and the last test subject unfortunately disintegrates on the operating table in splatter fashion when their nurse puts too much Ether into their veins. A female employee of the higher ups Kiku (Nao) is sent to tell them the project is to be closed within a week, but the three remaining members of the staff refuse to finish. The fourth Shimika (Yôta Kawase), an addict to Ether, is planned to be the next test subject in a last ditch attempt to prove to themselves they can succeed, and if Kiku tries to intervene, or accidentally cause the power to go off briefly trying to use an elevator during their experiment, Motomiya has no issues with sticking her between two speakers as a test subject too and blasting her ears with mind shredding noises.

From http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y121/
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Rubber's Lover is a claustrophobic film. You are grateful it eventually gets out into the real world, to see some neon signs of Japanese streets of the time, or inside a supermarket briefly, trapped in the stark and choked world of the test labs for the most part. The actors were told not to talk to each other during takes, which would've added to the tension onscreen. Unlike the expansive, delirious tone of 964 Pinocchio, with its Andrzej Zulawski inspired moving cameras and hyper active acting, this is a complete 180 degree turn. A refined, subtler form of the hyper violent, assaulting content as Shimika ,during the experiment, does develop psychic powers but still has the will to take his revenge on his former co-workers. Not through the conventions though, blowing someone's head off Scanners-like, but with Kiku the catalyst he is linked to now, through destroying someone's brain, disintegrating their body, or flat-out cannibalism whilst in an entire different body. Add to this a moment of blistering strobe effect that distorts your retinas, and it's an intense experience, but the quietness of most of the film baring the electronic trance score that occasionally is heard creates an interesting mix. Its oppressive even before the fake gore effects are seen, or the sexual aspects seep into front of your eyes, already unnerving in its rundown, industrial locations.

Don't worry, nothing bad happens to the bunny.
(From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JIUmad51doo/UoGNg-lekVI/AAAAAAAAdcg/
Jy2I6Om1kJ4/s1600/Rubbers+Lover_001.jpg)

The director's theme in both films is that transition and transformation is possible through agony, the film structured around effecting the viewer where you feel like you've gone through the same procedures until a waking sensation by the ending. The monochrome images. The sound design and disturbing content, including prolonged repetition of dialogue samples in scenes of pronounced psychokinetic events taking place. It's not surprising Fukui worked on Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the most significant film in the Japanese cyberpunk subgenre. In fact, of immense interest, you can see three trajectories' come out from that film. That of its director Shinja Tsukamoto, who would continue with the theme of the body and then develop more and more emotion to his work. Co-cinematographer and main actress Kei Fujiwara would unfortunately only make two features as a director herself, the most well known one Organ (1996) I've also reviewed online before [Viewable here], but developed her own unique spin on body horror that would baffle and alarm anyone who went into them expecting a Sushi Typhoon fest of cheesy gore. Fukui decided to concentrate on the mind and the transformation of it. Of course the three of them would have themes that would blur into each other's work, but they took their own inspirations alongside what happened in Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/quietus_production/images
/articles/13017/rubbers_lover_2_1375805104_crop_550x412.jpg

In contrast to the first film, Rubber's Lover has a darker conclusion as the dependency on the Ether drug and lost memories leads to an end. The climax involving a discovery of a dark past continually referenced to including a film, on celluloid, in Motomiya's collection. It also involves the sudden appearance of snow falling inside a room, a moment of elegant grace before the closest moment to a Scanners scene taking place. The end is tragic but continues with someone sat against a pillar inside a subway. They have been through torture, until becoming more then they were, leaving them drastically changed. Fukui would not make another feature film for over ten years after Rubber's Lover, returning back with films and shorts that look impossible to see. If it was the last time he made a film, it certainly ends with the right statement, leaving this viewer fried mentally gripping with the content again. The beginning of something new, back to the idea of catharsis through physical violence.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5KMMfm12ybQ/UoGNlplyXyI/
AAAAAAAAdek/8bBtf2QVawI/s1600/Rubbers+Lover_019.jpg

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

There's an entire wing of this site that's going to be devoted to Japanese cinema let alone their cyberpunk movies, such imaginative but also stark work. The borderline between alternative, underground art - theatre, punk and experimental music etc. - matched by giant drill penises, pig people and in this film's case leather frog man suit fetish and a prolonged scene of the two actresses writhing in a white lit elevator being pleasured by a pocket machine that blatantly stimulates your orgamically. A person's torso being ripped open while they're still awake and a very muscled man, able to make sound with them just through flexing, wearing only a transparent raincoat, repeated again in this review by how bizarre that particular image is to me. In fact you can add the almost nude muscle men in Tsukamoto's Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) and paint this image of large biceped men in underground lairs involved in evolving mankind that's impossible to shake out of your head. But Rubber's Lover isn't pointlessly lurid. Disturbing, yes, and definitely a film that has divided people, but one that at least contains a distinct and provocative point of view. Rubber's Lover is merciless in its abrasive content but for the means for what is felt rather than direct ideas. It is worth mentioning Fukui's background in noise rock about now, the sense of the embracing of the messiness and oppressiveness of noise fitting the style of the content in this film. The result, like a Tetsuo: The Iron Man is completely unique and unrelenting.

Personal Opinion:

It's difficult to choose between this and 964 Pinocchio in which is the best film. Fukui's other work, barring two shorts that came with each film on US DVD, are to my knowledge unavailable to see. Here you get a very idiosyncratic style of filmmaking that feels like putting your head in a vice, not necessarily a horrible situation to be in when the calm final shot is shown and the whole viewing was worth it. They are part of a filmmaking style, like Tsukamoto's work or Organ, which is unconventional even for the extremes of all the violent Japanese cinema I've viewed, and not just because their created worked together, but also in an area of underground filmmaking which is willing to step outside of good taste but also have a clear idea for something a lot deeper. Maybe represented in brutality and fake gore being splattered about, but still an idea or mood. Like a pressure cooker, Rubber's Lover keeps going from one extreme to the next one, tightening and becoming more disturbing as it goes along. The result is impossible not to feel a reaction to.

Sexy Killer (2008)

From http://lytherus.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/35097.jpg

Dir. Miguel Martí

Meet Bárbara (Macarena Gómez). She's sexy as the title suggest, glamorous, likes both the cute and pink alongside the dark and macabre, desires to be famous as a celebrity, likes fashion, and just happens to be the mysterious Campus Killer at her university, bumping off anyone she despises or irritates her in gruesome ways. Directly talking to us the viewer, or an invisible camera to be the bafflement of one of her lecturers in one of her anatomy classes, she is perfectly content to enjoy the hottest trends while keeping a man's severed head she's claimed in the fridge. With the police investigators on the Campus Killer's trail, she also falls madly in love with morgue coroner/student Álex (Alejo Sauras), who she mistakes as a serial killer like her and is the one whose performing autopsies on her victims. Add his work in his spare time, a machine that can see into one's mind and can show the last images before a person died, and it's going to be hectic for her. Sexy Killer is definitely a film of the 2000s or so. You can see - when it uses flashy editing, bright candy colours, a parody of an infomercial demonstrating the tools required to suffocate someone with graphics onscreen - that this is a type of film that was birthed to in the late nineties onwards and is frequent now in genre cinema. It runs into sub-genres like grindhouse throwbacks and parodies, and can be said to be the zeitgeist of most cinema now baring the art house branch. It can be seen in blockbusters too. The influences can vary - music videos, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), (although its Taxi Driver (1976) that is referenced in this film), Quentin Tarantino and many more. It's a peculiar concoction of self referential, movie geek zaniness. We follow Bárbara in her days, starting at the end of the film with her telling her tale to a man stupid enough to run over her dog, with his fingers broken and a knife in his hand already as she does. It's an oversaturated, hyperactive film. It starts off referencing slasher films, with naked female co-eds in the locker room, than immediately goes to Scream (1996), one of the first films to be a box office hit for its self-referential narcissism, then goes on to quote anything from the 'You're talkin' to me?' speech of Taxi Driver to the Teletubbies. It's bouncing off the walls from the beginning with its lurid and intentionally ridiculous gore that can yet be brutal, constant dropping of plot points and broad humour.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQGI5vqIRSSGYIAEoI7GXxjDcZW4PMetVUCzbrlPDB0GAInlbAmU9YOJgsTZHKObeKm0MdxWxEmwMx8cAOo6V5Yr1oJwwA7oUvcgfBJetLP7_VhEhTWBy3jo-D93KnS60skP1Ugl4Npo/s1600/Sexy.Killer.2008.DVDRip.XviD.AC3-ViSiON.avi_snapshot_00.05.15_%5B2013.11.13_22.05.39%5D.jpg

Like the other films of this ilk, the problems immediately raise their heads, more so when I immediately thought of three films I've seen over the years like this one - in chronological order, Gen Sekiguchi's Survive Style +5 (2004), Greg Arak's Kaboom (2010) and Joseph Kahn's Detention (2011). They may reference other works but they sustain themselves on their own energies and weird plots, as candy coloured, hyperactive and zany as a Sexy Killer or a Manborg (2011) but superior. With the exception of Araki, the other directors worked in commercials and/or music videos previously, another trend with these films. All are gaudy, at times glib and as manic as a film like Sexy Killer. But Kaboom has a heart and a controlled, knowing sense of humour in its pastiche. The humour in Sexy Killer is merely broad, and really has no emotions for its characters baring generic drama and romance between Bárbara and Álex. Detention intentionally pushes the use of onscreen graphics, pop culture references and genre mash up pastiches to an extreme, which Sexy Killer is too timid to do, willing to have someone crucified on a cave ceiling, a Christian worship shrine, in blasphemous fashion at one point but never letting such twisted images sink in. Survive Style 5+ has the background that surrealism and pop art was embraced fully in Japanese popular culture, its tendrils even reaching their pop music and adverts. Sexy Killer, a Spanish entry to these sorts of films, could've been interesting. A female killer as the protagonist, who at one point bemoans the sexism of presuming all film killers are male, a goofball horror comedy made in a pan-gender era, post meta-horror and after the existence of Pedro Almodovar's brand of camp black comedies like Kika (1993). The problems becomes obvious when the only real laugh is realising a cover of Aqua's Barbie Dolls is played over one of Bárbara fantasies, of a fake 50s Technicolor gloss of idyllic life, raised to want to be always pretty by her vain mother, not because it adds a point to the scene even out of amusement, but just because a song I was young enough to hear on the radio when it was first released is being covered.

From http://www.cultreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/sexy-killer-bathcr.jpg

Most of these films are vacuous. Horror cinema now is atrocious in a smugness especially that is transparent. Happy to merely be gory and make an Evil Dead reference, little else after that. Constant film references, but always the same type of films, and with a Taxi Driver, referencing it without any real reason too or learning the craft of such a film, content with the apparent coolness of Robert De Niro talking to himself in front of the mirror but not interested why his character is doing that. Far from being a miserable sourpuss, I find myself with films that cannot string together a barest of narrative threads let alone a charm and charisma, discombobulating quickly into self-fellatio of fandom that's a detriment to the creativity and inspiration you find in fandom too. The virtue of a Greg Araki's Kaboom is that, even if that film ends on an intentional anti-climax, is a consistency to be able to wrap any random, strange ideas into a distinct form that can make them work together, an inventiveness with a real humanity even if it's weird. A Detention was a mess of plot strands but it went so far that it becomes a parody that cannot be loved by the crowd its mocking, like most parodies now, smug with themselves, its extreme hyperactivity divisive to many who see it. Sexy Killer, strung together by random kills, vapid glossy scenes, and plot strands that don't go anywhere and are not random on purpose, is just dull. Moments do stand out with some good things - Álex convincing a person to borrow his suit by having a bonding moment of how they were nerds in college who were virgins, Star Trek fans and awkward with the opposite sex - but most of it fails.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdni7TKW-mqF5T19gCiFHbtyFOAqtzp_wy6OB9C1wJK8LXq4A6XCnoieOBdNcF6VqjGc3SCcVu-UtmYrCFF7JKUlGadqQ2thDUMI4lXAZmJwZ5ajDOe-1OcChcFlt8khncOiCMBvwSfSN6/s400/SexyKiller_02.jpg

It becomes obnoxious. A potential subplot of someone else who is killing people quickly mentioned and quickly after dropped, and the film devolves into the most conventional of stories. Inexplicably it turns into a zombie film by the end. Yes, it turns into a zombie film. I'm not kidding, suddenly the undead are introduced for the climax. Why? Probably because the director likes George A. Romero films but with no consistent reason to make the switch work at all, or to be so out-there, like Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris (2004) that it flummoxes you in its tonal shift. It's vapid in its tributes to films it likes and never becomes its own distinct creation with a real depth of black humour or dares to truly piss off the viewer. The promise for a film here to take an interesting spin on the tropes, a fun one, is lost as soon as it starts. It's not really going to be subversive in its celebration of this female killer, slowly becoming trite as it introduces the Scorpion and the Frog story and suddenly becomes serious in the final moment. Neither is it camp enough or really feminist. The latter is complicated - Bárbara is charismatic, and the actress Gómez is absolutely game for her role, but the character is vapid and only obsessed with shopping and fashion magazines; not inherently a negative, as it's clear in real life glamour and goth/alternative culture are bedfellows for both genders, but her character development is miniscule.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/
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The zombies break out and randomly attack the party Bárbara is at in a poor script contrivance. Her lover Álex and her are ready to have the cliché dramatic scene about her real self that kills the film further, as a home invasion takes place that reminds me why I'd rather be watching Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (1992) again then it. This is worse when, baring a few film references, that film is not close to this smug horror comedy cinema of now, more concerned with the horror being horror, the comedy being real jokes, characters being actually likable, and ripping into fifties New Zealand culture to give itself its own unique personality separate from other horror films like it, things all these genres really need and many lack as if it's a badge of honour.  When a blatant CGI explosion burns down the house, the film is completely dead for me. Nothing is really good and it's part of a long line of these films, from Casa di mi Padre (2012) to Die You Zombie Bastards! (2005), the mainstream to the obscure, from the 2000s onward to now, that are as empty as each other. Films thatmerely pat themselves on the back as they believe that they are affectionate tributes to the love of movies and things that are fun. And it's more of an issue since their influences are rarely to blame because they've avoided making the same mistakes. Some - like George Lucas and Troma films - need to be viewed before I can make a judgement, but the others aren't guilty. Steven Spielberg and the movie brat generation vary between the serious and Indiana Jones films. Music videos, and music in general, is varied, and commercials perish quickly. Videogames, before now when they all look the same, are more idiosyncratic to each other then people credit them for. Video and video rental stores could lead to the discovery of truly unique films as well as your per usual schlock.  Scorsese varies his work beyond Goodfellas, and Tarantino has actually grown up, won't you believe it, making very peculiar and bold experiments even if he's still obsessed with grindhouse films. So why do films like Sexy Killer exist that fail this badly from their influence? Simply a horrible tendency that surface coolness is enough, which is why most of these similar films of now are as bad.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

This is one of those 'zany' films I mentioned in the guidelines for this blog - shown here - those that throw everything they  think is weird onscreen but aren't actually weird, not abstract and just tiring. It's a conventional, if shambolic, narrative and isn't brave enough to do something actually strange or daring.

Personal Opinion:

Most cinema that I grew up with, from the early 2000s to now, is rubbish to be honest, because films like this delude themselves into thinking that a fan attitude can make aesthetically sound judgements on art. That's dangerous ground for me, he who only writes amateur reviews, to pose, but with my little inexperienced soapbox out, there is a pronounced difference between someone, regardless if they're a movie fan or started filming music videos etc., who can make fleshed out, engaging art even if its wacky and silly. See Greg Araki. Michel Gondry. Look at what place Quentin Tarantino has gone to now from before, and see why people are getting very tired of the grindhouse revival very quickly. No matter how many pop culture references they have, glib violence and farcical attitudes to meaning, the good artists have more on their mind and have read at least read one book in their lives. They do, for the risk of failure, try to be serious and earnest, or at least give their fan base a kick in the nuts when required. Something like Sexy Killer is middling, a retroactive work that makes the notion of being film fan very uninspired and easy to distract, excess without meaning to it. The result, willing to watch as many films like it as I can even though I should've learnt by now, is painfully drab.