Cinema of the Abstract: A Möbius Strip Back to the Beginning Again

Abstract (ab+stract) adj.

1. having no reference to material objects or specific examples; not concrete

2. not applied or practical; theoretical

3. hard to understand; recondite; abstruse

Abstruse (ad+struse) adj.

not easy to understand; recondite; esoteric

Taken from the Collins English Dictionary, 1979 Edition

In the middle of October 2017, in the midst of the Halloween 31 for 31 season of film reviews I completed annually, a sudden emotional shock was felt. I had become unemployed at the start of October but it only sunk in two or so weeks after was quite a horrible effect. A depression which took advantage of sadly my worst tendencies, imagined cataclysms and pessimism, and grew deeper. It fed on aspects which were idiotic to worry about, fearing my mortality despite only being twenty eight. But it also fed on aspects which were a small existential crisis. A spiritual one but also of greater important trying to reconnect back to simple pleasures that actual meant something to me. Before this becomes a morose, oh-woe-is-me scenario from someone far more well off than many, there was instead a realisation that I hadn't lived up to my own personal expectations of what I should accomplish. Placing myself into my community and helping those around me is one such factor. The other to get back to cinema is that for a blog called Cinema of the Abstract, it's drifted from the original plan to be both entertaining and actually cover abstract films too much. I had already realised this and planned to take this blog back not only to its roots but improve on it, to take the blog's point of existence more seriously. The emotional shock and depression, now October's past and I'm dusting myself off, have pushed this plan forward. To tidy up and focus this blog. To spend more time on it and on the quality of what I write. With this in mind, I am going to go through some drastic changes...

1) Of greatest importance is to improve my writing. I had rushed some reviews and need to work on them. To stop writing in a generic style of review fed from Total Film magazine articles I read as a kid and actually create my own voice. Which means spoilers will no longer be a concern for reviews, as that actually regressed and undercut some reviews in the past. Taking the time to write these reviews, but to not take too long, is of importance. To take the time to cover films whether they are high art or unintentional surrealism and, rather than use clichéd phrases, to prod why say a Doris Wishman film causes a reaction in a viewer as much as a David Lynch film.

2) To do so I need to drastic improve the Abstract Spectrum aspect of the reviews. The entire page on the subject, The Colour Spectrum of Abstract Films, has been an embarrassment for a couple of years, never looking at the section again when I completed it and never daring take it down. Likely from an emotional fondness for how absurd the process was, which involved even drawing around a plate in a cafe and using Microsoft Paint to create a diagram. When this post is put up, it will be deleted, the "Abstract Section" in the reviews now to be terms to describe the experiences felt from the films using existing artistic movements or terminology you can look up as a reader easily. Eventually a new page will be built up once I relearn a college worth of Films Studies and significantly more to the point I can rewrite it with some greater knowledge.

3) The Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) will stay as it is untouched, only with the Abstract List page updated more.

4) As of now, this will be the last of the Halloween 31 for 31 series I'll do unless anything changes for next year. The issue is that, whilst I've loved doing them over five years over two blogs, even a month's worth of preparation eventually led to rushed reviews.

4b) In general the A Night of a Thousand (Horror) --- reviews will be curtailed down to a small number being published at a time, having ended up writing more of them than about reviews about the actual subject of the blog. Thankfully horror in many places is inherently surreal or weird, so the number (currently at #148) will increase still. It will mean that films I have no interest in writing about will just be ignored¹.

5) TV Series will still be covered. The longer amount of time needed for them however does bring up an important question in terms of covering them or not, whether it's worth investing the time if they are important to cover or not. I was meant to cover Gantz, the 2004 adaptation by Studio Gonzo and Ichiro Itano but I couldn't finish it off after two months going through it, at episode twenty with only six episodes left abandoning it. A realisation, after having had patience with the series with its tonal shifts and decision to stretch plot points over multiple episodes, that my investment was broken by a terrible storytelling decision² which lost me completely.

6) This blog is still meant to be fun. Thankfully in the time that's passed as this has been typed together has allowed me to cheer up. I wish though to be better in terms of emotional state than before, to completely avoid depression in the slightest unless unavoidable, and the only way forward with that is to bring my spirits up.  The blog is meant to tackle the "Abstract" in cinema, that which is less than easy to define. That separates this from a website like 366 Weird Movies in that the pool I draw from is significantly more larger in what "abstract" could mean. It also means that the type of films covered will not just be cerebral serious art films. In fact a significant factor to this type of cinema (and why I prefer so much to Hollywood and narrative led mainstream filmmaking) is that even that stereotype is undermined continually. The serious dramas with minimalist realism can suddenly burst into music numbers with people dressed up as giant penises, as Tsai Ming-liang fans can attest to, amongst such other unpredictable examples. I got into cinema after 2008, with the 2000s became an era of unconventional films made by the likes of Ming-liang, Claire Denis, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas etc., fed upon by predessors from the classic era of art cinema of the fifties and sixties, and pushing what a film was in terms of genre, in terms of content, in terms of style to extremes. Not just extremes in content but structure. That type of cinema is the one I embrace the most and everything that deviates outside of it does however link even by accident to them in content. Weird exploitation films from the dustbin of genre filmmaking which are regional productions, showing their environments, or deviate from what it expected from cinema. Ephemeral films and home movies preserved by archives. Material which deviates from expectations and depicts human life and beyond in its vastness. This is why, barring horror, I find that genres like high fantasy bore me completely and even then I prefer horror which isn't conventional. You have to tackle these sub basements of moving pictures,  the art films to the strange smelling residue of ephemeral filmmaking and grotty exploitation dustbins, with humour because intentional or unintentional it's impossible to avoid humour within talking about them.

7) Finally, I have ambitions for this blog as things pick up. To cover non-Abstract films as well, those that don't qualify for the main point of the blog but are worth covering as they are on a subject that interests me in lieu of point 7. To  span a map of Abstract cinema. At least have a Hall of Fame. To cover films which generate countless emotions - shock, confusion, melancholy, bafflement, lack of comprehension, the sensation of time compacted or expanded, disgust, distress, gibbering incoherently at illogic - and so forth.

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1) For anyone curious why the reviews of the Phantasm series have stopped at part 3 abruptly, I felt it was impossible to write anything really rewarding and to the point of the blog. I really liked Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) as an example of low budget film making, overcoming its severe restrictions to be as introspective and fascinating as the original 1979 film, but Phantasm V: Oblivion (2016) was such a flat climax, likely the last of the franchise due to Angus Scrimm's passing, that it was not only a bad choice to end those Halloween reviews on but not worth posting reviews about Phantasm further.

2) Major spoiler warning for Gantz - how badly episode twenty, alongside its tonal rollercoaster throughout it, depicts killing off the major female character in presentation. Imagine a human shield scenario which, due to how the scene is depicted, could've been prevented with both people surviving if she actually pushed the other person out of the way. The series does, reading spoilers out of curiosity after a few weeks away from the show, have an actual ending unlike what I previously thought but, as much as it temps me to finish the series, especially as someone fascinated by this type of Japanese genre storytelling which blends genres, there's as much to push me away from investing in those final six episodes to complete everything. 

Computer Chess (2013)

From https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/uploads
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Director: Andrew Bujalski

Screenplay: Andrew Bujalski

Cast: Patrick Riester as Peter Bishton; Wiley Wiggins as Martin Beuscher; Myles Paige as Michael Papageorge; Robin Schwartz as Shelly Flintic; Gerald Peary as Pat Henderson; Gordon Kindlmann as Tom Schoesser

Synopsis: 1980. A computer chess tournament is taking place where computer programs are pitted by their creators against each other over chess games. As the games take place in a hotel, sharing space with a New Age therapy group, a series of increasingly bizarre details start to be noticed by the people there. The cats found everywhere. The strange woman in the foyer outside. That the computers, particularly one Bishton (Patrick Riester) is maintaining with his colleagues, are developing bizarre ticks and possibly even self consciousness.

Bujalski is known as one of the founders of the "mumblecore" subgenre. One that's divisive even in whether that name is even official, a nebulous title for a series of low budget dramas which emphasis improvisation and dialogue, whose processors include underground cinema and John Cassavetes¹. With a film like Computer Chess, its best to imagine it closer to those predecessors in existing in an undefined genre, that it's a series of scenarios based around one event where professional and non-professional actors work from a scenario onwards. A scenario that Bujalski was obsessed with and was finally convinced to bring to screen as an intentionally "unmarketable" project. It's one with its eyes firmly in the past of American experimental cinema as far as their own uses of now dated filming technology like video and 16mm. Computer Chess was shot, and deeply influenced, by Bujalski wanting to shot the film with vacuum-tube-based video cameras which, even if they proved to be a greater pain in the arse for the production to use as interviews suggest then to be, drastically added a necessary aesthetic dynamic to the film's lo-fi aesthetic.

From https://www.sundance.org/images/filmguide/2013/13102-1.jpg

What could be seen as for the sake of nostalgia with its captions of text having to be added in post production, usually slanted by nature of the obsolete computer tech clearly being used, is one of the first virtues of the film. Where the deliberate artistic choice has a pronounced effect for the film dramatically and for mood. Meant to replicate the early eighties where the primordial versions of computer geeks are crammed in a hotel, it adds a frank harshness to the material, particularly as part of the shots are meant to be footage being filmed from the tournament's grandmaster Henderson (Gerald Peary), a chess champion who wishes not only to document the tournament but intends to challenge the winner himself in a proto-Deep Blue scenario. The camera rarely moves, not an issue as in lieu of older American films like from Paul Morrissey the dialogue is heavy, constant and compelling to follow, the small character interactions are fascinating like a microcosm of personalities and eccentrics. Where Papageorge (Myles Paige), one of the more unconventional and openly rebellious competitors, spends most of the movie sleeping in corridors due to not having a booked room. Where there's even two drug dealers/conspiracy nuts who are there believing they will be witnesses to the beginning of the apocalypse, one believing that this is all a secret Pentagon related test for military programs, a conspiracy which for some other characters may actually turn out to be real and lurking in the background of a harmless chess tournament.

The camera used gives a archaic look, exactly that of old filmed documents on other obsolete formats like Betamax or 8mm. Materials I myself  once handled as part of a volunteer position at a media archive and as a result can attest to their strange, ethereal qualities - time capsules of a period one cannot reach in materials that drastically effect them as much. Materials which add their own fascinating hazes to lost in clear modern digital. Whilst Bujalski's work here is minimalist drama, the format choice gives the sense of the viewer having come across personal home footage, willing to take risks even with a colour segment that within a mainly black and white films comes as a sudden shock to one's perceptions. Then the camera used starts to glitch out at impromptu moments, none of which were actually deliberate on purpose but the issues arising from using the camera. Accidental moments which take place at the right times, when cracks start to appear in Computer Chess' initial tone and things get weird. Subtle oddness, meaning this is remote from the most abstract films ever made, but following on from the best of this type of low budget American cinema where Bujalski never lets himself become shackled to tropes of his genre, stepping out of them to conjure up a series of peculiar details the characters start to be as concerned about as things go along.

From http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/computer-chess-3.jpg

The subject of computers at their infancy is a major subtext here, fears less of computers turning into Skynet from the Terminator series but their self awareness being more strange and perplexing. This is especially the case as the computer programmers here, including the sole woman Shelly (Robin Schwartz), who gets tokenised as the sole  female tech at the tournament by the men, are not the glamorised ideal of modern pop culture but a subterranean minority developing these computer systems at the dead of night. A minority working on machines which may even be throwing games in rebellious boredom, wanting to play human players instead, or asking questions back at the programmers asking them questions. Their behaviour in the tournament can already be described as weird due to programming hiccups, the introductory forum before the matches covering an infamous glitch from the tournament before that evokes less embarrassment but how the misfires of these computers can be seen as idiosyncratic quirks human beings can have.

And then there's the cats. Not just two running around the hotel corridors, not just three, but an entire hotel room full of them never explained. The new age therapy group the chess tournament have to share space in eventually break into the other's lives due to this awkward space issue, who participate in mock rebirths they include Papageorge in when they find him sleeping in the conference room. An older couple from the group even attempt to get Bishton to join them for a threesome, suggesting the limits of a chessboard as a metaphor for his closed nature only for him to inform them the numerous moments one could play on a board could take longer than most human lives to document the scope of, the two sides bleeding into each other as esoteric outsiders away from conventional normalcy. All of this feels like real incidents Bujalski could've taken from his everyday life, thus proving reality could be even weirder than an active imagination.

From http://www.stefanopaganini.com/wp-content/
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He eventually add slithers of material feint of full blown sci-fi that go even further from this. The system Bishton works on becomes a character in itself, a cranky machine who loses games on purpose and even gets into supernatural horror in a flashback sequence when someone makes the unwise decision to ask it existential questions. And the final shot involving the mysterious woman in the foyer continues a trend in 2000s and 2010s American independent cinema of strange pop surrealism, the tastes of genre cinema and non-sequiturs that flash up in films with body horror stubs and flushes. Stylistically the tone is maintained throughout all this. Bujalski steers the lengthy conversations into areas that even if the subjects are strange always are interesting or funny. Bujalski's subject itself, despite being seen by himself as un-commercial, is inherently of interest, as there has always been something fascinating about the least likely of topics findings themselves the centre of films. Communities in their own worlds with their own languages which are mundane to the outside world but when allowed to breath in a feature length have a life to them. Something that Bujalski takes seriously with respect, just happening to also notice the weird what-ifs in such a world. 

Personal Opinion:

An immense surprise. With virtually no context for Andrew Bujalski in the slighted until Computer Chess, what has been viewed as his peak so far in his career is a rewarding, deliberately odd piece of cinema for me. Something entirely new for me, coming from the influences of Bujalski's other films and the area of cinema he came to be from, and utterly rewarding for the differences he brings to such material. The best kind that fluctuates genres to the point of being legitimately unclassifiable, at least in terms of detailed categorisation, but stays focused over ninety minutes to become low budget filmmaking that never becomes predictable or cookie cutter. A film instead that's funny, sincerely quirky and imaginative.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

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1) I also admit lack of knowledge of Mumblecore, having only seen Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) as an official film in this "genre". A film that was utterly ponderous and dreadful even as someone like me who likes meandering non plots in cinema, something that felt proud of itself without much of interest and the worst in pretentious white middle class twenty year olds, it didn't exactly convince me to find other films like it. Something not to be proud of when I like Paul Morrissey's Trash (1970)  and the type of cinema Mumblecore evokes in my mind in premise.

Death Spa (1989)

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Director: Michael Fischa

Screenplay: James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise

Cast: William Bumiller as Michael Evans; Brenda Bakke as Laura Danvers; Merritt Butrick as David Avery; Robert Lipton as Tom; Alexa Hamilton as Priscilla Wayne; Ken Foree as Marvin; Rosalind Cash as Sgt. Stone; Francis X. McCarthy as Lt. Fletcher

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #148

Synopsis: Starbody Health Spa is the best in health spas. Fully automated by an advanced, innovative computer system. The best equipment. The most beautiful and charismatic people, not at least co-owner Michael Evans (William Bumiller). But Michael's late wife only a died a year before when, wheelchair bond, she dosed herself in gasoline and lit herself alight. And the new woman in his life Laura (Brenda Bakke) is blinded one night in the spa when chlorine gas is inexplicably poured into a steam room, immediately leading to the police investigating. When diving boards fall down when said police are there to investigate the previous incident things progressive get worse from there. Is Michael himself responsible? Michael brother-in-law David (Merrit Butrick), creator and operator of the spa's computer? A ghost? Why's the tiles flying off the walls in the women's shower room?

A shot over an urban skyline. Full, multi-spectrum colour in the dark. Neon sign of the Starbody Health Spa. Lighting hits the roof. With a title like Death Spa, or the alternative Witch Bitch, you don't expect it to immediately have an atmosphere that envelops you into it. But that's the case with Death Spa. Utterly ridiculous as a film but made which such a compelling mood in its style it's still effecting. It's a film which progressively gets stranger as it goes along, entering a groove that deepens as it continues. Obviously one questions whether the film's legitimately good, but this is one of those cases that, in the right frame of mind, its compellingly strange. It's an eighties flashback, a last hurrah as it was released in the last year of this decade cramming as much as possible into itself. Aerobics with its skimpy, multicoloured spandex. Health food crazes and exercise, all through a cornucopia of fashion from leg warmers to a Flintstones t-shirt of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble exercising at their own prehistoric gym. Yes, it's all beautiful people, an exaggeration of what a real gym would be with its vast and diverse shapes, one where the visage is emphasised by the gratuitous group shower scene in the female bathroom which used women from a porn casting agency as extras. It's an exaggeration, one from an era where films attempted to capitalise on this trend, but having found myself drawn to the virtues of exercise, the exhilaration of merely a home placed bench press and how it could almost be Zen in its removal of negatives thoughts, I can still appreciate this idealised version still having a jest of fun and energy even if it comes off as a music video. The absurdity of these symbols of American excess is more in how over-the-top glamorous it is in spite of a film like this being visibly an excuse for an exploitative movie.

What you don't expect from this film, which has a factor in my response to it, is how distinct and well done the look and production style of the film is. Imagine a schlocky b-movie with the aesthetic of a Rinse Dream production having ingested mad Italian horror logic for dinner. Particularly when you compare it to the other spa related horror film from around the same time, David A. Prior's Killer Workout (1986), which is serviceable to say the least, it's a surprise that a film that basically boils down into a possessed gym manages to have the level of style it has. It's not even a scary film as horror, which should immediately undermine it, but you get something weighed by the level of quality thrust upon it this issue doesn't come up. Dolly shots of the camera prowling across corridors. The colour matched against the artificiality of the environment, gothic architecture if redeveloped as mall culture public building. The music by Peter D. Kaye that, whilst occasionally slipping into some corny scary cues, which adds to a hazy mood. I confess, whilst these words may sound cruel, that I don't know any of the other work the production crew of this movie has made including the director but they managed for Death Spa of all things to give it a fantastic tone, doing their damndest to shot this film the best they could technically in spite of how silly it is.

This helps to connect together a plot which gets more and more elaborate, convoluted to be perfectly honest, as it continues. The two police officers trying to make sense of the strange spate of injuries and accidents taking place, a pair straight from a buddy cop movie from the era. That Michael's wife could be haunting the premises, typing computer messages to him trying to convince him to join her, something that spooks him enough to hire a paranormal investigator. That there might be a conspiracy to drive him insane from his own staff when a bird's nest is found in his office onwards. Or that his ex-brother-in-law is acting weirdly, a twin who might be hearing his late sister talk to him. A whole torrent of plot points that get crushed together into a mass you have to accept and let pass over you. If the film was more conventional and less slick in style, it would be a tedious slog. With its current tone it's something much weirder, where the reoccurring flashbacks Michael has of his wife's death are with her shot against a dusk sun with the vibrancy of a Kenneth Anger film.

It's a film with no hesitation in being lurid either which emphasises this weirdness. The nudity which could be seen as crass to some, strangely emphasising the sweltering mood for others in how explicit it is even for horror from the period. Something gruesome which takes the influence of Italian genre cinema fully. Where a woman is half melted by acid, heart exposed beating and still alive. Someone's head blowing up in pieces shot in a slow motion haze and possessed food processors. Material that straddles the line between the rewarding and utterly stupid and being both. It can present to you a beautiful coloured aesthetic, even if it's of the time, than presents a romantic scene between Michael and Laura where a piece of asparagus is comically phallic in how its eaten. It's difficult to ask whether the film altogether is actually well made or if it's just the production style that saves it, but it helps immensely how wild the film is, culminating to an extreme at a Mardi Gras costume party at the gym which escalates things further. It's a final act that doesn't drop in quality but escalates the strangeness further, between gender confusion and ghostly influence to the idea of burning someone to death in a tanning bed and a flesh eating, frozen fish. Effectively taking the strangest of American genre cinema, upping the quality of the film technically, upping the level of luridness, and adding Ken Foree. Something unique at least even if you scratch your head afterwards.

Personal Opinion:

For the curious. Those who can appreciate how silly it gets will come for its premise, stays for the style and madness.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

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

From http://whysoblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Death-Spa-1.jpg

Two Dollops of Killer Tomatoes

I grew up with knowledge of the Killer Tomatoes since a young age, created after co-screenwriter Costa Dillon saw Ishirō Honda's Matango (1963), and continued over multiple sequels by the same director, and Dillon's high school friend, John De Bello into the early nineties. An intentionally absurd, self reflective farce taking old sci-fi b-movies tropes, it takes the fruit most often mistaken as a vegetable and images if it developed sentience and decided to rebel against mankind. I remember seeing a piece of the 1990-1991 animated series, where my fixation on these rebellious tomatoes first came from. Alongside that series, there were four films, the first two the most well known. With a proto-primordial Zucker brothers structure of absurd comedy, the tone the first Killer Tomatoes film has is rough around the edges. As intentionally goofy sci-fi, ironically these films have to be watched in terms of the rise of genetically modified crops and the fear of them, inexplicably bringing so seriousness to films that were meant to be a joke¹.

From https://i.imgur.com/HPxoG9U.jpg

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)

Director: John De Bello

Screenplay: John De Bello, Costa Dillon and Stephen Peace

Cast: David Miller as Mason Dixon; George Wilson as Jim Richardson; Sharon Taylor as Lois Fairchild; Stephen Peace as Wilbur Finletter; Ernie Meyers as The President; Eric Christmas as Senator Polk; Al Sklar as Ted Swan; Jerry Anderson as Major Mills; Jack Riley as Von Schauer; Gary Smith as Sam Smith

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #146

The fascinating thing about the first film - created between De Bello, Dillon and fellow high school friend Stephen Peace - is that whilst ultimately a mess, it perfectly slides into that era's rich history of American independent genre cinema. Shot in San Diego, California you have a film with the same rough edge of the other independent films, only with the desire to elicit laughter at itself deliberately. The opening credits make you aware of this farcical nature from the beginning as the text is full of jokes, none too lame to not be included. The humour's scattershot, some jokes funny, others not which is ultimately the issue that surrounds Attack.... Also be aware, sadly, that some of the humour is also un-PC. To those who will perceive me as being "soft" for including this warning, what qualifies as politically incorrect is usually not funny anyway, jokes that merely present race or sexuality (for example) as they are in exaggeration, usually for the sake of laughing at them rather than anything remotely further. Sadly this does crop up in Attack... a couple of times, alongside a lot of sex humour, which makes a film that would be suitable for families actually difficult to shown to children.

There was a great energy at the start. The first scene brings up a lot of hope, a tomato appearing out a kitchen sink plughole to terrorise a stereotypical housewife. It doesn't have a prologue and immediately gets to the red invasion, which helps the film a lot, where the police are already fighting them and things are getting worse. It's the perfect set up both for this absurd humour and even a cheap, but funny political joke or two as the president (Ernie Meyers) is in damage control by contacting an ad company to suggest the tomato menace is not as bad as it sounds, in his office permanently signing documents for their own sake and having bartered the Statue of Liberty to the Middle East for a loan. A sense of mayhem is found alongside the ridiculous humour where actors have to pretend to shot tomatoes and scream that they're not being pushed back. This also includes a helicopter crash captured on film that was not meant to happen. This is the one moment that stands out in the film because its sudden on screen and was an actual accident, no one thankfully hurt or killed, the actors hesitating but improvising that a rouge tomato jump at it in the sky, an ad lib on screen that for any major flaws with the film around the sequence is stuck in my mind still.

When the film is directly about the tomatoes it succeeds. There is something ridiculous, despite the existence of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), in tomatoes devouring people. The rudimentary effects behind them, whilst not being bad for the sake of it, emphasises this. Actual tomatoes. Prop tomatoes. Giant red inflatables larger than cars waddling across the camera. Many speaking gibberish growling noises. There's even a tribute to the aforementioned Toho films with a battle in an urban city using extensive model shots, all explosions and prop buildings and tomato juice on everything. Considering tomatoes are remotely the least sinister of all fruit and vegetables - consider the pineapple with its hard shell and spikes, or the pumpkin which has become part of horror symbolism culture - these red fruit are funny to imagine in this role. To be lobbed at people in stocks. A good base sauce for paste. For Red Nose Day charity. Not for a monster stand in. The joke works when the film accepts the absurdity of this situation, but important, plays the attack of the tomatoes as matter of fact, finding humour elsewhere in the scenario.

The film's problems are in this elsewhere. The human characters themselves is where you realise this film has a shaky structure, one which is merely built to suppose any strange jokes the creators could come up with but with the danger that the humour is hit-and-miss to an extreme. You have a crack team of specialists to fight the tomatoes, the only one of importance being Wilbur Finletter (Stephen Peace), a former Vietnam War veteran who wanders around in full parachute and uniform even if the parachute itself is constantly in the way of his movement. Peace is not bad as a comedy figure especially paired to David Miller as the government agent Mason Dixon meant to coordinate this task. This team of specialists however is pretty useless in terms of humour and story. A female athlete who eats steroids literally for breakfast but little else. A scuba diver in full wet suit, back in the era where that was inherently surreal. A master of disguise Sam Smith (Gary Smith), who could've been more useful as a funny character, especially when he attempts with some succeed to disguise himself as a tomato and infiltrate the enemy, but also has risible humour attached to him such as, as an African American actor, dressing up as Hitler just because. The female reporter Lois Fairchild (Sharon Taylor) who also plays a large role in the film is also not that interesting, contributing not a lot and really there for dated sex humour that's somewhat demeaning.

This humour, despite being the main point of Attack..., is inconsistent to an extreme. Attempts to be wacky are as liable to fail as they are to succeed, with reoccurring jokes taking huge chunks of the running time that could either be awful to sit through as much as be a pleasure to follow on with. When it works, it's the jokes about the ad company being hired to disguise the tomato invasion in propaganda, the presidential press secretary Jim Richardson (George Wilson) meeting an ad company manager obsessed with pure commercialism. Ads appearing on screen to the viewer, as well as his latest projects (never seen onscreen but heard) which allows us to witness Wilson's horrified reactions to material like Jesus Christ shilling a tech company. Or the unexpected fact this turns into a musical at multiple points, such as with the ad executive bursting into song about his work or soldiers performing a choreographed dance before they fight the enemy. Its heavy handed but, outside the homicidal tomatoes themselves, its where the film gets the most interesting. However there is so much undeveloped slapstick, crass sex jokes, and jokes in general that fall short that I have to concede that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is the sum of its individual parts judged separate rather than a success. Aspects I am happy to have seen, and laughed at, but it's also a failure.

From https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5e/2d/f3/5e2df3555c8412991
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From http://www.scifi-movies.com/images/
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Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988)

Director: John De Bello

Screenplay: John De Bello, Costa Dillon and Stephen Peace

Cast: Anthony Starke as Chad Finletter; George Clooney as Matt Stevens; Karen Mistal as Tara Boumdeay; Steve Lundquist as Igor; John Astin as Professor Mortimer Gangreen; J. Stephen Peace as Wilbur Finletter; Michael Villani as Bob Downs; Frank Davis as Sam Smith

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #147

Return of the Killer Tomatoes is in many ways the superior film even if the original, despite being a failure, had the more intentional risks to praise. It also has to be kept in mind this isn't really a film about giant killer tomatoes, but where a mad scientist Professor Mortimer Gangreen (John Astin) can turn tomatoes into human beings with toxic waste and certain choices of music. As bizarre as you could get as a premise still, slap bang in the late eighties after teen sex comedies populated the era. Surprisingly it does continue on from the last film, ten years later in a world where tomatoes are outlawed, a subplot never really tackled fully but amusing that they've become prized contraband and the owner of any grocery store could be the equivalent of a moonshine dealer in Prohibition America hiding the goods in the back. Wilbur Finletter (Steve Peace returning back to the film) is now running a pizza parlour after his military service, where weird (and likely disgusting) pizza toppings have to be used like candy to replace tomato sauce², and our two leads, nephew Chad Finletter (Anthony Starke) and Matt Stevens (George Clooney) work behind the counter.

Clooney, and young and bouffanted here, is part of the reason the sequel is known, his early pre ER television days a curiosity where, before his television success let alone when people called his the Clark Gable of his era, he feels here like he's merely in primordial form here. His comic timing especially isn't as defined here as when you get to his work for the Coen Brothers, the only really interesting joke (that just happens to also be crass) being how he's conning beautiful women with a fake competition in hope of getting laid himself. Starke as his friend, the straight man to his joker and the main lead, is also just adequate. The plot's absurd fluff where Chad meets Tara (Karen Mistal), the perfect woman who just happens to have once been a tomato, Gangreen's ideal woman he wants back. It's a cocktail of meta humour, sex jokes and farce which is as erratic as the first film even if the look and style of the film is considerably slicker than before.

The more overt meta humour works, the film actually stopping half way through as the cast and crew deal with the fact they're run out of money, the film afterwards suddenly full of product placement in the background and blatantly in dialogue. It's moments like this where Return..., even as a fun romp first, gets the funniest and more rewarding. Going for the strangeness of its material is as successful. Where the scuba diver returns from the first film for a cameo, living in a water submerged lounge where even the pet dog has a scuba mask on. How it runs with Gangreen's machine being able to create an army of Rambo knockoffs, big beefy musclemen, or even the Pope just from tomatoes and certain music. And Igor (Steve Lundquist), one such creation who despite being the henchman really wants to be a news reporter more, a joke the actor does pull off with real fun. Even the fluffy tomato creature named FT turns out to be funny as a creature which makes noises, waddles around unconvincingly, and is willing even to sacrifice itself by jumping on a live hand grenade.

It's a shame, considering these virtues, that the ending does lean more of the scattershot tone of the first movie, a mess of jokes and plot which vary in whether they work. It's this which does undermine Return..., arguable that if the creators focused more on giving a more serious plot to these two films, they would have been more well structured and actually funnier as a result. Also strange with Return... is that, whilst its more overt about the sex comedy, its surprisingly chaste, not a criticism or a compliment, just a very strange detail with the sequel that stands out.

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1) And Matango, despite its absurd premise of mushroom men, is actually a bizarre and compelling psychodrama, one in which shipwrecked people forced to survive on an island may be hallucinating their own turning into mushroom people from eating the local fungus, or that the mushroom people are real but the desperation and madness being formed in the survivors is as dangerous as the local population. It's a film in dire need of availability as its underrated from the director of Godzilla (1954) and very alien from the traditional "fun" sci-fi Toho studios were also doing.  

2) Though considering you can have caramelised onions, hummus, cheese, even pumpkin as options instead of tomato sauce for pizza or otherwise, we're clearly dealing with the deliberately absurd. Only a mad person would consider eating any of the pizzas made during this film.

The Gruesome Twosome (1967)

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Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Allison Louise Downe

Cast: Elizabeth Davis as Mrs. Pringle; Gretchen Wells as Kathy Baker; Chris Martell as Rodney Pringle; Rodney Bedell as Dave Hall; Ronnie Cass as Nancy Harris; Karl Stoeber as Mr. Spinsen; Dianne Wilhite as Janet; Andrea Barr as Susan     

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Films) #145

Synopsis: Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis), with her mentally disabled son Rodney (Chris Martell) and a stuffed cat named Napoleon, run a lucrative wig shop where their products are made from real human hair. Freshly scalped from young women who take interest of the rented room sign they also have up in the window.

Before we get on with this, let's not forget Herschell Gordon Lewis thought himself a businessman first, not a filmmaker with artistic inspirations. He had a personality, which is why in spite of this fact and the technical flaws of his film he could have only made these films as they were. The businessman in him however must've been aware that, if not careful, his success with gore films would've gone the way of all the nudie-cuties he made before, slowly losing their financial worth due to repetition if he didn't get bored first. Having switched to splatter films, he made a trilogy of gore films - Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) - which have a cult legacy. After that, he did make A Taste of Blood (1967), but also two children's' films, other exploitation movies, and the paranormal weirdness that is Something Weird (1967), so perfectly titled a legendary cult movie preservation and distribution company took their name from it to aspire to collect films as weird as it. Within this is The Gruesome Twosome, where he'd have to be nastier in the gore but it becomes apparent that his personality, his eccentric sense of humour and willingness to be absurd, would have to take over to keep it afresh. Ironically this is his claim to auteurism even if he'd have found that an absurd sentence and laughed his arse off at the notion.

Kitsch is self aware here. There's no denying he made the films with deliberate humour as well as being repulsive in the gore. The man who made the first splatter movie also pastiche the subgenre not long afterwards before others did. The Gruesome Twosome's infamous moment is at the beginning and immediately alerts you to how Lewis isn't taking the material seriously without losing the sense of ghoulish fun, without becoming smug but instead retaining its unpredictability. A prologue with two wigged polystyrene heads talking. Meant to pad out time to make the film feature length, nonetheless playful and bizarre. No one expects inanimate objects to speak even in cinema. Objects having life is immediately surreal because it undermines the binaries between what is alive and what shouldn't, especially as mannequin heads are vaguely human looking. The cartoonish facial features added, big paper eyes and lips like Miss Potato Heads, is on the joke and the fact they talk as casually as they do is even absurder. They set up the premise and put the tone perfectly in place.

Story wise, it's as minimal as you can get, minimalism in exploitation an extreme its practically a Michael Snow work. The "off" nature surrounding its threadbare plot, is where things become interesting and what a young John Waters would've gotten off from in terms of inspiration. If Elizabeth Davis as Miss Pringle didn't act so broadly, as flamboyantly, as she does than her role would become tedious, a nonentity which gains life because she's as over-the-top as she is and clearly enjoying herself. That her relationship with her son, despite being killers, is so perversely wholesome in the few scenes they have, reading him bedtime stories and giving him a new electric carving knife as a gift. Talking to Napoleon, a stuffed animal, as a living creature with thought, not a stuffed taxidermy, enough that the final shot of the film for impact is the cat itself and its wide eyed frozen expression.

Helping on the opposite side of the law is that our plucky heroine Kathy Baker (Gretchen Wells) is as unconventional. Imagine a young female sleuth from a children's series mixed with the cast of Scooby Doo and you get Kathy, so infectiously obsessed with the world around her in a wholesome way it's strange for me to write that, for a character in a splatter film, I'd want to hug her and stay within her energy cloud of personality. Energetic and sweet, obsessed with trying to solve the spate of killings of women, even jumping to conclusions that her college's caretaker is the culprit (with a Swedish accent so broad even the Swedish Chef from the Muppets is subdued). She's a lot more rewarding and positive than most heroines in serious horror films still to this day, a terrible thing to realise, but Lewis' sixties films always have these chirpy, twee figures who emigrated from the older type of horror films to these nastier, animal organ filled orgies of gore. The contrast is inherently startling but it also means you actually care about the characters; not because they're well written or acted, but that they actually stand out, something that anyone whose suffered through straight-to-video/DVD horror nowadays will be very aware of.

Repetitions of women being scalped take place, gore shots meant to be distasteful but in a playful way. All done with a gristliness that still gross you out to this day particularly in the bright sixties colours and for how blunt they are. Over and over until our heroine is on the right track to investigate the murders. Lewis leaves the seventy minute film to go on lengthy tangents rather than a plot that stretches from the first minutes. Filler in any other film, personality here and he manages somehow to get away with it if you are in -tuned to the pleasure of the non-plot moments in cinema in extremes. Viewing these scenes, you react realising time has stopped but for those in the right frame of mind they can start to pick up a camp to the material as it continues. Her decision to follow the Swedish caretaker back to his home feels like it takes ten minutes for an obvious red herring, hypnotic in how long it felt for me. And for another weird moment that takes the cake, intercut between Kathy hanging out with her blockhead boyfriend and her friends at a drive-in, you constantly go to an unknown heterosexual couple. Faces never seen, extreme close up of the hands only as a table takes up the shots. Huge bowl of crisps (potato chips). Huge bowl of fruit which the hairy male hands usually molests and squashes in as lurid detail as the gore shots. Beer opened and poured in glasses. The female wanting to be romantic, the male thinking with his stomach. It would be avant-garde in another film, here a silly "men are from Mars, women from Venus" gender farce that takes up considerable length and Lewis included on purpose.

Those who not appreciate these tangents find them irritating, expecting films to progress or to not be this intentionally silly. Fans of psychotronic films can detach themselves from continuity in plots, there for these off moments of strange drama and character interaction. The worst moments in genre cinema are when they are merely perfunctory. Nothing that stands out is actually worse than bad acting, as there is no emotional effect. Weird character moments for faceless figures never seen again will always get a reaction out of people even if it could be negative. Not merely a kitsch but humour in these snapshots of weird events. Adding to this is the aesthetic. Does it sound bad that modern genre cinema can have no sense of taste, even bad taste? No, because as history informs people, even bad taste has an aesthetic, still carried symbolic weight of the times. Eventually the 2010s will have an aesthetic defined I'll look back on with pleasure once the artificial dullness is removed. And actually, with sixties cinema, low or high art, you do see a lot of great taste too even if the fashion is so alien to now. The surprise viewing these schlocky films is that a lot of their aesthetic is based on things now critically evaluated as good art. The lounge jazz in particular is something you never get now in even splatter, usually orchestral or retro synth for horror nowadays, but this stock jazz music was common in American exploitation. It's cool jazz, a nice contrast alongside the sudden stop mid-film, as sixties college girls in negligee munch on KFC chicken, for a surf rock/pop rock song dance-along. The colour and vibrancy of sixties cinema, even in the grottiest of preserved prints, is amazing even in terms of what is middle road Americana. Kitsch maybe, but it still possesses human emotion to it, given emotional connection when given human life and especially with the awful fake realism of modern horror that's artificially grey and brown we suffer through in modern times, not even the real 2010s culture but subdued in extremis.

Personal Opinion:

Not as iconic as Blood Feast, but those initiated in Herschell Gordon Lewis will be aware of the quirks of his cinema and appreciated this film. For myself, I realise how technically rudimentary his cinema is, how broad the performances are, and that he slapped these movies together for business, but he stands out from so many tedious gore films made within these same standards because he was clearly enjoying himself. A showman aware to bring his odd humour, knowledge that it was deliberate that succeeds.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic

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

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Phantasm II & III (1988-1994)

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Phantasm II (1988)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; James LeGros as Mike Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Paula Irvine as Liz Reynolds; Samantha Phillips as Alchemy; Kenneth Tigar as Father Meyers; Rubin Kushner as Grandpa Alex Murphy; Ruth C. Engel as Grandma Murphy; Stacey Travis as Jeri Reynolds

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #143

Phantasm (1979) is a horror film as its meant to be, a campfire tale of human emotion that also happens to be an oddball crowd pleaser. With its exceptional success because of this, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the sequel in the height of the eighties horror film boom for their own use. It's the big budget sequel but between part II and III is where the most contentious aspects of the series for me will stand out. The first, upon reflection, is an immensely rewarding rediscovery. One whose ending manages to take a cliché and deliberately turn it into both a metaphorical emotional impact for the viewer and emphasising how odd the first Phantasm was, neither in reality or dreams and entirely in a confounding nether realm. Obviously for Phantasm II to exist you need to re-do this ending, beginning a series of film serial-like cliff-hangers, where the end footage is played again but with new scenes interwoven. The problem with this is that, with no true ending to these sequels, they need either to contribute something of interest or become time killing and ultimately worthless, the goal originally to close out on Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) and now Phantasm: Ravager (2016). To get to the ending, it would help to have sequels that bring something of worth to them.

I will also remark, just from Phantasm II having the biggest budget, how really marked in the theme of death this series is even over other horror franchises. It's a film which plays on the fear of death even when being more entertaining and bombastic. These films more than any other franchise meant to be as entertaining tackle this subject with a lot more inante power to them due to their tone, more affecting than any other whether you are spiritually inclined, agnostic or atheist. It's a theme Don Coscarelli has gone over in his career, his obsession, which he does tackle even just in the tone and look of his films. I admit, going through a depression because of unemployment, one which has become existential, has made viewing these films regardless of my critical opinion of them all immensely affecting, a tone I have been unable to shake off. Probably the worse films to have watched in this low mood but at the same time a testament to the material's qualities This fear paints the entire aesthetic, from the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) having suited morgue attendants as minions to the production design. The sequel also presents an interesting new arch for the series, where the scale of the first film's portrait of the Tall Man as an adolescent's fears now grows to be a menace that inflicts entire towns. Scenes of Mike (now played by James LeGros) and Reggie (played by Reggie Bannister) entering a town entirely desolate is effective and creepy. A scale for a film which yet is set around only a few characters and an existential fear disguised as sci-fi weird horror.

It's the most violent certainly of this series, paradoxically to the modern day the Universal Pictures backed sequel film increasing the gore to make it a more populist sequel. An emphasis on comedy where Reggie is now Bruce Campbell, his character lovable but by way of a wannabe middle aged lothario, doing his damndest to be a hero, but also flawed, out of his depth and really obsessed with lusting after women. The later could come off as creepy considering he's considerably older than any of the women he's with throughout parts II to IV, only succeeding because Reggie Bannister is a charming, charismatic actor whose able to make dialogue that would sound so wrong from other actors work.

However with this there's also the cost of mainstreaming the original film, an independent movie whose awkward, rough edges were its charm, a prom queen or king with acne who were prettier than the ones with too much makeup and gel in their hair. Why recasting A. Michael Baldwin with James LeGros as Mike doesn't work. Considering how good he was as a child, replacing Baldwin was absurd in the first place, for a tangent with an actor in LeGros who is okay but ultimately a bland figure now here. The less said about Liz (Paula Irvine) and an un-used telekinesis subplot the better, a psychic link to Mike and a potential romance which never goes anywhere and is ultimately made worthless with what happens to her in Phantasm III. The issue of films having write out plot points from previous sequels is the biggest flaw of the middle of Phantasm's franchise, this sense these films are in a cycle of the protagonists continually chasing the Tall Man and neither being a symbolic repetition or leading to an actual end of interest. I admit to liking Phantasm II as a spectacle - the morbid aesthetic, the chainsaw battle etc., a killer title theme by Fred Myrow and Christopher Stone the series wisely returned to - but I also admit that it's pretty empty compared to the first film. That sense of losing the quieter, more creepy personality of the first film which spent an entire scene of Mike doing a MacGyver to escape his locked bedroom. Which dealt with the bond between brothers and friends for large passages of its length. Idiosyncratic personality being scrubbed off here.

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Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; A. Michael Baldwin as Mike Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson; Kevin Connors as Tim; Gloria Lynne Henry as Rocky; Cindy Ambuehl as Edna; Brooks Gardner as Rufus; John Davis Chandler as Henry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #144

Idiosyncratic personality fully scrubbed off here. Sadly here it feels like there's little to appreciate for me only until you get to the final scenes, the most rewarding aspect of the entirety of Phantasm III as it allows Phantasm IV: Oblivion to exist, a far more rewarding sequel. For most of Phantasm III however it feels like a rehash of Phantasm II with less to offer. It repeats almost the exact same plot as before. Thankfully A. Michael Baldwin is playing Mike again, and his entire plot line for this film is the most rewarding aspect of the film, leading to a progression where the Tall Man has greater intentions for him than to be turned into a hooded dwarf. That Bill Thornbury returns as his older brother Jody, dead and now a sphere with its sense of consciousness still there, should bring an entire new weight to the film's main plotline.

Baldwin though is not in a lot of the movie at all.  Instead most of the film has Reggie (Reggie Bannister) with Tim (Kevin Connors), effectively Macaulay Culkin from the Home Alone films if the traps killed people, and Roxy (Gloria Lynne Henry), an African-American woman who attempts to use nunchaku on the silver spheres and is tough. They present an interesting duo to have but unfortunately they don't possess any really interesting aspects about them. Their dialogue between them is very clichéd. Tim is just depicted as a precocious kid in spite of the back-story of losing his family having the potential to bring a greater emphasis on familial bonding, with Reggie and Tim easily developing a symbolic father-son/uncle-nephew interaction if the script developed it more. Roxy is more disappointing, a strong black female character who completely goes against stereotypes of female characters in a lot of horror regardless of race, more androgynous and tough, someone with short hair and wears combats like Sarah Connor, the perfect foil to contrast the danger of Reggie's obsession with women becoming creepy by making her someone who finds it ridiculous. Unfortunately she never gets any real drama of interest and disappears at the end of the film with no conclusion to her story. Thankfully Phantasm: Ravager has Gloria Lynne Henry return to the role, but I wish that her initial introduction meant more than it did.

Where Phantasm III is of interest is just the ending. When Mike is "infected" by an operation by the Tall Man, leading to the plot of Phantasm IV which becomes more introspective, an odder film like the original. Phantasm II and III for me don't really interest as much as they should, which do possess a lot to admire between them in terms of style and mood, but sadly in the case of Phantasm III feels pointless.

From http://www.joblo.com/images_arrownews/phantasmiii-a.jpg

Evil Ed (1995)

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Director: Anders Jacobsson

Screenplay: Anders Jacobsson; Göran Lundström; Christer Ohlsson

Cast: Johan Rudebeck as Edward "Eddie" Tor Swenson; Per Löfberg as Nick; Olof Rhodin as Sam Campbell; Camela Leierth as Mel; Gert Fylking as SWAT team lieutenant; Cecilia Ljung as Barbara; Dan Malmer as Zip; Kim Sulocki as Dix; Göran Lundström as Bondage Face; Robert Dröse as Fridge Fritz

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #142

I had never heard of Evil Ed until 2017. Immediately my interest was piqued when details of it were disclosed by Arrow Video for their physical release. A Swedish splatter film post-Peter Jackson from the nineties. Swedish horror tends to be a rare thing. Any horror film from a place that never had a large industry surrounding them(the US, Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain etc.) is immediately of interest, allowing me to witness how a country's culture seeps into a template. Them and more unconventional genre and art films are far more rewarding for this than critically awarded films in my opinion, particularly now when the auteurs of the old guard like Ingmar Bergman were replaced by "World Cinema" as a marketing concept.

There is also the fact this is a splatter comedy from Sweden. The stereotype of Scandinavian cinema is serious filmmaking. Horror films from Sweden, the few that are well known outside of the country, are in my mind Ingmar Bergman's more fantastical works and Let the Right One In (2008). Something which evokes Peter Jackson's early "splatstick" work like Brain Dead (aka. Dead Alive) (1992) is an anomaly against this stereotype. That it's from the mid-nineties as well is of interest. Horror cinema a year later from Evil Ed's debut, at least in the English speaking world, would go from years of odd, unconventional films that would only get critical status decades and terrible sequels to Scream (1996) that would become a cultural zeitgeist. Films from Asia, which became a prime influence alongside horror from non-English speaking countries, existed throughout the decade but it would be in 1998 that you get Hideo Nakata's Ringu and, from South Korea, Whispering Corridors which had an effect and attract interest. In the midst of an obscure period, this lone production clearly being made off the creators' own time and investment immediately stands out.

Immediately you come to an odd paradox with Evil Ed. Edward (Johan Rudebeck) works as a film editor. Usually he's working on black-and-white art films until he's asked to hastily replace the late editor from the horror department, whose office is decorated in arcade machines and beautiful women, led by a scuzzball manager who makes his living off a franchise of packaged horror sequels called the Loose Limbs series that he needs Edward to edit. Can a comedy horror that reveals in the gore have its tongue in its cheek when editing these splatter atrocities causes Edward to first hallucinate and then lose his mind? Admittedly David Cronenberg made Videodrome (1984) asking himself what would happen if violent television could actually corrupt people like the conservatives said, but Cronenberg even with his grottiest, early horror films always came to them with cerebral ideas. Evil Ed, made with humour could easily be called a hypocrite.

Whilst likely unintentional, there was however a period before this where extreme genre cinema existed which could even make hardened fans of splatter have existential questions. The Guinea Pig films from Japan, whilst fake, gained infamy when Charlie Sheen thought the second of them Flower of Flesh & Blood (1985) was an actual snuff movie and called in the FBI to investigate it. Far more problematic, the progression from Italian mondo movies and the Faces of Death series turned to Traces of Death (1993), which rather than a mix of pre-existing footage and faked death scenes became a series of real death compilations for the sake of a thrill, crossing a line in its point morally. A tipping point where even the creators of this film, including campy film-within-film scenes of pointless and random splatter, would distance themselves from. It could also just be a film parodying all this in the most exaggerated manner possible just for a laugh. The film was meant to be a satire of the Swedish Statens biografbyrå, the oldest censorship board in the world until it was disbanded in 2011, making Evil Ed effectively a piss take of everything their institution was meant to represent.

The initial issue you as an audience member have to deal with is the dubbing. English dubs from decades before, like the Italian films of the sixties to the eighties, have a distinction to them and there are fans of them as there are detractors. For every ill advised decision - like Bob in House by the Cemetery (1981), reoccurring child actor Giovanni Frezza clearly voiced by a woman doomed to infamy trying to do a childish voice - there's a pretty consistent, even charming, aspect to these dubs of yore. Dubbing changes in tone from the nineties on. They are more broader. A frankly artificial tone where even the American accents feel like they're faked, be it here in the nineties Gamera movies. That the film never denies that its set in Sweden, even parodying Ingmar Bergman with another film-within-a-film that's subtitled, does make the entire production decision to do this pointless and actually a detriment. The only person whose able to recover from this is Johan Rudebeck in the lead, as he's able to emote with body language and a natural charisma that shows through even if his voice isn't his own. The rest is peculiar to the ear to say the least even as someone who loves even the broadest of dubs of old Eurocult oddities.

Evil Ed can be split into two halves. The first is much more amusing, continuing on the idea that Peter Jackson's earliest films showed of ingenuity with the unpredictable. Even if some of the ideas are random, and connect to nothing else, an unpredictability came that shows the fun and imagination taken to bring the material onscreen. Edward's hallucinations bring in a whole sleuth of material which doesn't necessarily make sense in tone but work in the heightened absurdity. A large amount of this is bizarre practical effects and even puppetry, when a foul mouthed gremlin inexplicably appears in his refrigerator. Material that is never explained, but shows the creators stepping outside of convention for something more original and idiosyncratic. A sense of inventiveness that can even succeed in being sombre and menacing, as Edward finds himself in a nightmarish mental asylum room with a demonic figure, real or in his mind who convinces Edward to purge the sinful from the Earth and begins his homicidal streak.

Once the homicidal stream appears however the film falls down into the predictable. What should continue to escalate in invention, why Peter Jackson's earliest films are still beloved, is lost in favour of pretty generic and unremarkable material. Chasing his stock wife and daughter figures around, even someone as interesting as Edward reduced to a generic killer, worse when especially with the divisive English dubbing when he starts to quote other films like Full Metal Jacket (1987), utterly groan inducing especially as a far more appropriate and rewarding way to depict the creators' love for cinema could be found in keeping an eye on all the film posters on the walls in countless scenes. Dialogue, which was already in a precarious position of being merely rudimentary is less interesting, and the material becomes deliberately "wacky", not funny in a natural way as that term should mean, but artificial. Also deciding the final scenes in the hospital should be an extensive action scene with armed policemen was the straw which broke the camel's back for me, as unless an action scene is properly coordinated and/or inventive like the best of John Woo, gun battles are innately lazy even if I accept how much hard work is clearly behind them. Not disrespecting the hard work but that onscreen gun fights are not cinematic for me as the anticipation and denouement of them are. Once the film reaches this half where all these issues arise, my excitement for a discovery in Swedish ebbed away to disappointment.

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