Silent Hill (2006)

 

Director: Christophe Gans

Screenplay: Roger Avary

Based on the videogame franchise

Cast: Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva; Sean Bean as Christopher Da Silva; Laurie Holden as Bennett; Deborah Kara Unger as Dahlia Gillespie; Kim Coates as Officer Thomas Gucci; Tanya Allen as Anna; Alice Krige as Christabella; Jodelle Ferland as Sharon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #226

 

Truthfully, this is going to be a very negative review. I will preface this in saying that, coming to the film with no experience of the horror videogame franchise, this is not a slight on that property, but entirely about the film adaptation. Historical context, what I know, is worth however bringing up. Meant directly as a title to rival Resident Evil (1996), a Capcom produced "survival horror" game which spawned an ongoing franchise including a long running film franchise, Silent Hill (1999) on the original PlayStation was a creation which became a success, on a games console which innovated as a CD based machine with three dimensional graphics, and with a lot of companies throwing the kitchen sink in for curious experimentation. Interestingly, and the curious detail I am however fully aware of, this film and its 2012 sequel are directly based on the narrative thread of that original game and Silent Hill 3 (2003), both following an elaborate narrative about a cult and demon summoning, surrounding the titular location, which will be elaborated on later when discussion the film. Ironically, the game in the franchise which became its magnum opus was Silent Hill 2 (2001), which on the following console the Playstation 2 has a legacy of a work that, whether technical and artistic has aged well or not, took video gamers by surprise through a very adult and surprising narrative seperate the original plot, without demon summoning cults, and followed a psycho dramatic drama of a man dealing with the past of a wife who died of a terminal illness. Among other characters tormented by horrifying entities which channelled his sins and even repressed sexual and moral shades, it is talked with high regards for a work still.

That is to note as, whilst not coming to this with any context of the original videogames, I am fully aware Silent Hill 2 was arguably the game which cemented the franchise and still does. The series has had a complex history. Produced by the company Komani, the original four games were developed in Japan through a team within them called Team Silent. The games after those first four would be developed by Western companies after the 2006 film, starting with Silent Hill: Origins (2007) up to Silent Hill: Downpour (2012), the game which came out the same year as the film's sequel, for that timeline and all not gaining as strong a reputation¹. Infamously, after a playable demo called P.T. (2014) became a thing of incredible lasting memory for gamers, to the point it itself became the other watershed moment for the franchise, Konami cancelled that game as part of a falling out with one of their key members Hideo Kojima, a highly regarded video game auteur who was in the director's seat for that project.  Alongside collaboration from director Guillermo del Toro, actor Norman Reedus and horror manga author Junji Ito, this project that was to become "Silent Hills" never came to be, ending up in a very dramatic breakup which painted Konami as villains and would be a compelling story for a video game related blog to tell. Rumours in late 2020 talked of Konami patching things up², to create the unmade "Silent Hills", but contextually if one was to talk of Silent Hill in one movement, the franchise which existed until its violent end at that Silent Hills cancellation in its first arch, this was a franchise whose later Western made sequels were not as well regarded at all, with arguably the 2006 Silent Hill film hitting the time when it was at its highest in recognition.

And the fact my review is going to be so negative is miserable as I am open to its creator, French filmmaker Christophe Gans. Gans is fascinating, as a man who cut his teeth with producer/filmmaker Brian Yuzna for the H.P. Lovecraft anthology Necronomicon: Book of Dead (1993), as a man who attaches himself to distinct ideas, exiting titles or his one unique film Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), and completely commits to their concepts. Crying Freeman (1995) for example, adapting manga author Kazuo Koike's breakthrough work, is a very faithful adaptation of the first few chapters. Gans however has not as large as a filmography as you would think. After Silent Hill, Gans would not direct again until 2014, with an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Silent Hill the film is sadly a very dull film. After the set-up - a mother (Radha Mitchell), learning of Silent Hill through her adoptive daughter through her moments of split personality and sleep walking, travelling to the location only to be involved in a car crash and then have to look for her daughter in a strange nightmarish world - the problem is entirely that a very predictable and not very interesting narrative takes place. This is one of the problems, but it is one of the biggest, as for a film based on a franchise highly regarded for its premise, you are having a game franchise flaws and virtues being pared down to the least interest tone.

The one thing that succeeds in stepping into the titular Silent Hill is some of its atmosphere. Based on the real abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania - a near ghost town in the United States where the populous had to flee due to underground coal fires in 1983 that were said to have started in 1962³ - the version of Silent Hill as initially depicted in this film is exceptional. A barren abandoned town raining in white and grey ash. An air raid siren, from the games, blares at the moment the world will turn into its alternative form, a place of hellish creatures, but even in the world as is, monsters are occasionally found and you are stuck within an atmospheric place where a breathing mask is still needed in the real world outside due to the fume from down below the ground. Helped considerably is that, whilst composer Jeff Danna is involved, the film uses choice musical cues from the games by Akira Yamaoka. These pieces of soundtrack are frankly, out of context, better than a lot of horror film soundtracks I have heard, be it between the industrial noises to the more ethereal pieces, Yamaoka's music out of context is immersive and unique.

The problem immediately is shown in how, to depict the nightmarish hell world of Silent Hill once the siren goes off, we are treated to a large cavalcade of CGI which has dated significantly. Without context of the videogames, it is difficult to make complete judgements, but one thing to state is that the flexibility and type of work you can make in a videogame, with polygons/sprites/etc., is difficult to cinema where, unless animated, you have to work around the physical reality, of how CGI has never really worked for me as a viewer unless in certain circumstances. As much of this is contrasting real actors, rather than digital characters, to prominently digital effects to depict the growing decay of the nightmare world when witnessed, the human faced giant bugs or blood coming from the walls. Honestly, using more real (if still artificial) practical effects would have helped considerably.

It does not help with the fact of how perfunctory the adaptation is. Whilst it feels as if following the progression of a videogame in pace - some exposition, some exploration, even acquiring tools like a knife to cut through a painting as if a game puzzle - eventually for a narrative which does not really capitalise on a franchise, reading of it, capable of strange and completely nightmarish content. The whole narrative involves a cult as well, but a very hackneyed Christian fanatical cult, which causes me to roll my eyes, particularly as Silent Hill's greatest issue is one that plagues so many films and sticks out more for someone increasingly disconnecting from conventions of cinema. Namely that whenever a film is entirely focused on a narrative and telling it, if said narrative is a conventional one it is now becoming torture, more so as truthfully in art, it is not the narrative which is of concern, as it repeats tropes even in new ways from the dawn of human storytelling, but how. Silent Hill intrigues me as a video game franchise both for what it gets right, what is morbid and dark and surreal (like a giant head in a hospital room starting at you), what is accidental, and what is even irrelevant or intentionally silly like the UFO endings or the one with the town being controlled by a small dog.

Silent Hill the film has references to the games, and whilst I cannot tell the legitimacy of the adaptation, it feels wary to take a risk. Even I as well can spot, within in this context, the problems with the film can be shown in metaphor with how the figure of Pyramid Head is used. The franchise's mascot, a horrifying human-like figure with a giant blade and a painful metal pyramid helmet which it drags along, I am aware too of is how this character was originally created for Silent Hill 2, with a significance to every part of its iconography symbolically. This also means the character can unfortunately be pulled out for any follow up as the most iconic figure but losing his (their?) point outside that game. Even without that, you have a creature, a hulking form, with a giant blade and a strange atypical headgear designed to be as much to cause self harm, a potential horror film icon, and what you get is effectively fan cameos even if they strip the flesh from a person at one point. A lot of the iconography and content feels the same way, even that original to the film, or that which is adapted with an inspired idea, such as the figures of ghoulish yet eroticised female nurses, again from Silent Hill 2 with loaded symbolism, being portrayed by dancers in how they move or even stand still like statues for one scene.

Everything is without bite, even in a film fixated on dirty locations, dirty razor wire (including going into one area of the human body that is pretty grotesque even for a film deemed suitable for fifteen year olds in the United Kingdom), but feeling sanitised. I have not really described the plot because, alongside Sean Bean attempting an American accent as the husband trying to find his missing wife and adoptive daughter, a lot of clichés are here and, in mind to what I said earlier, they are not told in an interesting way, meaning there is not a lot of difference to Silent Hill from other run-of-the-mill horror films I saw from this period. Everything from witch burnings to a ghostly curse feel trite, and this is in mind that Silent Hill originated from Japanese video game developers wanting to recreate American horror films, only to touch something idiosyncratic to itself that compelled people in the West to adore this franchise. The production design and some of its other aesthetics are worthy of praise, the proof of the quality of any film if you have creative figures on staff, but this was definitely a disappointment to witness.

 

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1) One exception, on the list of entries in the franchise worth investigating, is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009), which brought in a complex psychological and emotional narrative entirely as much based on giving the player a psychological profile depending on their choices and answers.

2) One reference to this rumour can be read HERE.

3) HERE

Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008)

 

Director: Edwin

Screenplay: Edwin

Cast: Joko Anwar as Yahya; Clarine Baharrizki as Young Linda; Ladya Cheryl as Linda; Andhara Early as Salma; Carlo Genta as Cahyono; Pong Harjatmo as Halim; Wicaksono as Helmi

An Abstract List Candidate

 

No New Year's Day to celebrate

No chocolate covered candy hearts to give away

No first of spring, no song to sing

In fact, here's just another ordinary day

- "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder

 

Edwin is a figure I have been aware of if, tragically another figure really undermined by the difficulty to see his films. The one word named Indonesian director makes idiosyncratic short and feature length work, which look very different from each other. A snapshot of a family in A Very Slow Breakfast (2003) contrasts Dajang Soembi, the Woman Who Was Married to a Dog (2005), shot in a silent movie structure with intertitles. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is, by itself as his first theatrical length production, a puzzle in itself, where I will have to structure the film in points to properly explain and show admiration for it.

Blind Pig is mostly structured around one family. Verawheti, the mother and a former badminton player, is not seen as much but we do see her in her prime in a game, during Indonesia versus China, which sours and ends the game when a child in the audiences make the awkward comment asking which one of the female players in Indonesian. She eventually converts to Christianity in the later stages of her life, where we meet her watching a Christian show constantly on the television with a faith speaker as the host. Her husband, Gian Tik, is a dentist fixated with one specific song, which will be devoted to in its own paragraph. The daughter Linda, "the girl who eats fire crackers", is self explanatory, introduced on an online show which has previously has a girl who sleeps with scorpions. Our central character, she begins with one firecracker, in the most iconic image of the film, stuffed in a bun like a hot dog in her mouth and lighting the fuse. Her friend and potential love interest is Cahyono, who is part of the film's theme of the persecution of Chinese-Indonesians, who was so bullied for his ethnicity he now wants to be Japanese, always usually found in a baseball jersey with his mouth and nose bloodied from fighting.

For all the strange content and tangents, separated into titled chapters, Edwin's film is dealing with a very serious subject. It explicitly references, with Cahyono reworking news footage from the events, to the 1998 May riots that took place in Indonesia, protests over economic problems which tragically lead to violence against Chinese-Indonesians, a persecuted minority in the country. Arson, murder, vandalism of business and sexual violence took place, making this an uncomfortable subject to tackle let alone in a tone which is openly more peculiar on purpose with a lot of dark humour. Tackling this ten years afterwards as well, Edwin decided to have an openly whimsical and odd humour the film juxtapose against the serious issues that intercut between, not forgetting the severity of the subject.

We see Linda and Cahyono as children, bullied and called pigs by boys for their Chinese heritage. His parents separate him from her after this incident, feeding his disconnect, whilst her obsession with firecrackers both comes from the bullying incident, were we see where she tries to help him with them, and from a belief they ward away bad spirits. We have the reoccurring image of a pig tied outside in the countryside to a post, left trapped in this position until the animal can eventually escape into the underbrush. Or that Cahyono has turned the 1998 May Riot footage into karaoke with Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You.

That is the most curious touch to the film. Wonder's 1984 hit and one his most successful songs was also an Oscar winner, because it originated as part of actor Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red (1984), a film he also directed as well as started in, which adds such a curious cinematic connection in hindsight.  Resoundingly alien to Wonder's iconic image, sat by a piano, as it is with him using synthesizers and various electronic instruments, Blind Pig plays this song off as a running joke as the dentist is obsessed with singing the song whilst working with patients, leading to musical sing-along's with everyone baring the one with gloved fingers in their mouth. Eventually however this song, frankly awkward in the original version let along sung by the cast, has a surprising melancholy or at least a sense of thematically working, in a perverse way, once spliced over footage of people rioting and destroying property, footage we learn of being from the May 1998 riots and, if you read up on the subject even a little, became a tragedy. As the film also includes in narration over a retrospective news item, amongst what horrible things transpired also included people being burned to death trapped in buildings on fire. The song, which Edwin somehow managed to get the rights too, suddenly takes on a greater weight and becomes a perfect choice.

Beyond this, the film is a series of vignettes following these characters. The childhood friends are reunited. The dentist, who wishes to divorce his wife and convert to Islam, also has plans to be in a relationship with his female dental assistant. She herself wishes to be on a reality singing show Planet Idol before she will do this, and will require the help of a gay male couple, in a fractious moment of their relationship and requiring a male third in a moment to spice up their sex life, to help him with this request. Chronology occasionally fragments, as we intercut between Linda and Cahyono's childhood to the modern day, and throughout Edwin is contemplating the ten years which have past from the May riots.  Like other work I have seen of his, Edwin's short and theatrical films tend to not really follow a strict narrative through line, and likewise this film is a mood piece which evokes its themes. Baring one striking scene, how frank a threesome scene between the doctor and the two men is, in its quiet matter-of-factness in his dental office and how, not seeing anything, you still get semen on sunglasses, Blind Pig never openly directs itself to the main subject or become angry. This will be off-putting to some wishing it had taken a more strident viewpoint, that in itself became one of its more rewarding aspects for me. Like the Wonder song, the longer this film (only over seventy minutes) lingers in my mind and suddenly it acquires more detail.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Eccentric

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

Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Tobe Hooper and Howard Goldberg

Cast: Brad Dourif as Sam; Cynthia Bain as Lisa Wilcox; Jon Cypher as Dr. Marsh; William Prince as Lew Orlander; Melinda Dillon as Nina; Dey Young as Rachel; Tegan West as Springer; Michael Keys Hall as Dr. Cagney

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #225

 

I am a Tobe Hooper apologist. For many, Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and then everything after baring Poltergeist (1982) is ignored. For me, not only did he start earlier with an experimental hippie comedy named Eggshells (1969), thus undermining the notion he came from nowhere, but that alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre there is a string of great and fascinating films onwards. About the end of his three picture deal with Cannon Films was when things wander into questionable paths. I like The Mangler (1995), but as a strange film born from a tale of a demonically possessed industrial clothing press, and by Crocodile (2000) you get a film there which feels like something is lost least for that production.

Even Crocodile has emotional attachment for me, simply as the last film I saw with my older brother before he moved to Australia, but it is still a proto-Asylum Picture production with a lack of spark, feeling the sense any could have helmed it. Other films in the period beforehand however are far more interesting. The Mangler is a misfire, but a gloriously weird one. Spontaneous Combustion, the subject of today's review, has always stood out but it has the stranger aspect that one of its most vocal fans is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the acclaimed Japanese filmmaker who has worked in a variety of genres in cinema and is critically acclaimed. Amongst that acclaim is that he has also left a lasting mark in horror cinema between Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001). Kurosawa has described his interest in this later Hooper film alongside Lifeforce (1985), one of the more infamous films in Hooper's career as a highly ambition science fiction horror tale from Cannon Films which is divisive¹. To think that the alien mood Spontaneous Combustion has influenced Cure is something to be amazed by.

Why I love Hooper is that, whilst his work can vary in content, he still belongs in a group of directors with a clear author's flourish on his movies, that everyone creeps with the sense of the deranged. Most of his films are mad and crazed, heightened to the point that barring a few quiet moments they feel like his creations. Even Poltergeist has this maniacal air when trees and clowns terrorise a suburbia family, which is why I waver on the notion of Steven Spielberg being its secret director. Hooper's career is full of heightened figures and moments to emphasis this - the late Gunnar Hansen running around in slapped on makeup and a chainsaw, a coked up Dennis Hooper welding two, carnival freak shows of two-headed sheep, Bill Mosley as a steel head plated Vietnam vet shouting about "Narmland" - that it even infects a sombre film in his filmography like Salem's Lot (1978) with James Mason, films like the later gaining a fascinating contrast as well for their tonal differences.

Spontaneous Combustion starts off very different, a cold and very sombre piece, catching a viewer off-guard with its atmospheric dark synth music contrasted to jets of real flame being projected over a black screen between nuke green opening credits. In the fifties, a man and a woman are test subjects for surviving a nuke being dropped within a bomb shelter, through a test anti-radiation vaccine, only for the officials behind it to be mystified when they have conceived a child whilst there. The parents in a freak incident burn to death due to spontaneous human combustion, a curious real life phenomenon of people randomly being set on fire from the inside of their bodies, leaving their newborn son as an orphan who grows up as Brad Dourif. Dourif is the best thing in the film, bringing a level of gravitas to the point it is sad that he started in films like One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest (1975) only to become marginalised. He takes this film so seriously that when the film does slowly morph into the frenzy of Hooper's other work, he reins it in.

Dourif to his horror continually finds out people he has rage or arguments with suddenly die of spontaneous combustion, not a long time after seeing a hole burst out of his forearm spitting fire and his girlfriend hiding knowledge behind his back becoming aware that something is amiss.  The coolness of the tone makes the film atmospherically at ill ease at first, coldness just about the entire the terrain of David Cronenberg and a touch of a conspiracy thriller. The fact the film is looking back to fifties anxieties of nuclear power, by way of just leaving the eighties when that fear resurfaced, cannot be ignored. Born on August 6th, the day the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, his conception is in the middle of 1955 in Nevada and a bomb testing sight. The ultimate nuclear family, the film has enough budget to credibly parody old fifties newsreels, with his parents Brian and Peggy the ultimate fifties icons of the American pie family without becoming too tongue-in-check and missing the satrical point. Set during a time in the then-modern day where there is a modern nuclear power plant being built in the setting, the Trinidad Beach nuclear power plant, and people like Dourif's lead wearing anti-nuclear black armbands, the film is not profound in its message, but evoking the period's concerns is still strongly felt throughout.

Halfway through Hooper's film follows a suspension of disbelief that is similar to Italian genre movie logic, taking fifties atomic man film and updating for the excess of the late eighties. Due to the aspects of nuclear energy and an anti-radiation vaccine given to his parents, Dourif can set people on fire from the inside with his mind and spurts miniature volcanoes of flame which destroy his body. All around him a conspiracy plays out with people wanting to dispose of him and neon green fluid in needles like reanimating fluid being welded around, slowly becoming more pulpy and energised with an intensity the more physically damaged Dourif is, his acting making sure a film which dissipates in its seriousness still works the further it goes along. The film's drift to being more absurd is not a bad thing in hindsight, especially as Hooper by this point mad far more openly humorous films and was not above intentional silliness. You do not have a cameo with legendary cult director John Landis, name recognition in horror circles where he plays a character who is set alight as a bonfire, without knowing the tonal shift that results.

Everything is excessive as was the case of Hooper's career in his best films. Not only do you have dark synth music, but a Latin singing choir straight out of The Omen (1976) blasting away, which may be ridiculous in context but for myself actually adding a sobering sense of seriousness even to a film which eventually becomes more of a b-movie in its tone. (Whilst not a recognisable name, the composer Graeme Revell is a journeyman who, if you saw mainstream films and television between the nineties to the modern day, you the reader have likely encountered at some point without realising it). Huge portions are lit in bright neon or artificial lighting to the point even a phone is built to radiate neon pink from a transparent case, all disarming and, even if closer to ­Hooper's visual excesses of the era, still presents an alarming tone which raises the film's qualities. More so as in high sight, the film if it has any problems is entirely with the swiftness, and resulting messy nature, to how quickly it tidies up its conclusion. It feels rushed, and suffering from its low budget when it needed more time to breathe. The mood and the attitude Hooper brings to the table is Spontaneous Combustion's greatest success alongside key collaborators within the film. Seeing the film, and scenes such as Dourif  in the middle of a checker board tiled corridor, stark neon blue lighting and permanently with smoke coming from wounds in his body, this film whilst note a key work to immediately see from the director is still striking enough to be worthy of his filmography. The Kiyoshi Kurosawa connection also emphasises now the film as worthy for historical recognition as, alongside being an entertaining if flawed b-movie, I can now see the same attitudes in look and mood Kurosawa took as influence to make even greater films, as meaningful badge of honour to any film to have.

 

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1) Perfectly summing his interest, which I will link to HERE, is an article of Kurosawa creating double bills around his own filmography.

Michael Jackson's Ghosts (1996)

 

Director: Stan Winston

Screenplay: Stephen King, Stan Winston, Mick Garris and Michael Jackson

Cast: Michael Jackson as the Maestro / the Mayor; Pat Dade as Pat; Amy Smallman as Amy; Edwina Moore as Edwina; Yasiin Bey as Dante; Seth Smith as Seth; Kendall Cunningham as Kendall; Loren Randolph as Loren; Heather Ehlers as Heather

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #224

 

You're weird. You're strange. I don't like you.

I will start this review by saying, since this is covering a Michael Jackson related project, if any reader wishes to skip the piece, go ahead. Jackson is a complicated figure, frankly a paradox. His allegations of sexual misconduct with minors has made him a much more difficult figure to think of in the public eye, but for myself that aspect of Jackson is not the focus of today. It has to be kept in the back of the mind, it cannot be ignored, but it is still not the focus of this obscure entity in his career, a short extended music video which does admittedly have some unfortunate turn of phrases that evoke the reality. The last thing you want through the power of hindsight, in which the parents of a couple of boys and the mayor of a small town enter the gothic home of the Maestro (Michael Jackson), demanding him to leave as an unwanted outsider, is some of the dialogue having unfortunate innuendo, including his secrets with the boys. For what is in fact an attempt to outdo Thriller, the legendary 1983 music video shot by John Landis which became one of the most iconic things of Jackson's career, the last probably wanted is obscurity and unfortunate mirroring to real life.

Jackson was not only one of the most successful musicians of his time, but also a cultural phenomenon, which means that we are stuck in a scenario where his music still plays on the radio but the real man has been challenged by the likes of the documentary Leaving Neverland (2019). It says a lot about Jackson as well that, if one was to step back from the uncomfortable subject of whether you think he is guilty or not, his superstar success beyond just music is a strange thing in itself. Starring in Disney theme park attractions helmed by Francis Ford Coppola, videogame tie-ins, collaborating with Sega, even getting Jarvis Cocker to storm your performance, Jackson's career like many big mainstream figures when considered has a lot of strange tie-ins and work to capitalise on his success. Some of it is entirely his, like Ghosts, where he attempted to push his passions or ambitions in such a project with direct involvement. Others like Moonwalker (1988), a strange mainstream theatrical, a drama mixed with music videos and live footage which eventually involves Jackson even having to transform into a car to rescue children from evil Joe Pesci. Even before you get to fan culture, or work and documentaries made after his death, even the ones condemning him in honestly still riding on his star status whether their moral purpose, Michael Jackson just like an Elvis Presley or a non-musical star like Bruce Lee exists in a place where crossover success or legendary status means stuff can appear for television or the cinema in your name which is peculiar in the future to look at¹.

Ghosts is the same, though it has never been re-released on DVD, as elusive as Captain EO (the Coppola theme park film) but without an obvious factor to its absence from available, nothing as obvious as a Disney Theme Park ride project being a roadblock to licensing. Ghosts, in its background, is marked by being around the time some of the first accusations of indecency with children began in the early nineties, an uncomfortable parallel with a plot where he plays an isolated count beloved by children but about to be chased out of town by the locals, one of which who is the Major played by Michael Jackson himself. His doppelganger in elaborate makeup who calls himself a freak and loathes him is probably the strangest aspect, as much because of the makeup effects, and for the unintentional psychodrama with the real Michael Jackson you cannot ignore even if the viewer places it on themselves. The psychology behind this casting choice is strange even without the context, either way a bit too real for what was meant as a sequel to Thriller. Even without this darker real life history too, this was around the time Jackson's plastic surgery and its physical results became an issue, and infamously the time Jarvis Cocker invaded the stage during his live performances of the Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards and literally waved his arse in protest to him, a sense of the King of Pop becoming a far more easier target of derision.

Against this, an elaborate music video with large scale dance choreography and special effects, also had to follow from Thriller, the song a legendary piece of his career but the video as iconic as you could get. Ghosts, stemming further from Jackson's love of horror cinema, is amazingly obscure considering that, to top what came before, legendary special effects creator Stan Winston is helming the film, with the narrative and screenplay gestating from Jackson himself, Winston, Mick Garris, famously a go-to director for Stephen King adaptations at this period, and the legendary author Stephen King himself. Said final result however, barring being released in front of theatrical screenings of Thinner (1996), a very weird and misanthropic adaptation of one of King's novels from his "Richard Bachman" days, is likely to be unknown by many who even know about Moonwalker.

Ghosts in itself, whilst never going to top the Thriller music video and is shackled to the innovative digital technology that has dated, is nonetheless a spooky and fun experience. Between Stan Winston and Stephen King of all people being collaborators on the project, it would have been difficult to fail miserably at the project, and between Jackson turning into a dancing CGI skeleton and the elaborateness of the dance sequences, it adds to the fever dream mentality that has arguably been found in all his work. He never lost the power, despite everything, to make the most expensive music video in Scream at one point in this era, never lost the power to even have Ghosts made, or fill such work with strange idiosyncratic detail. With history, many of which were could be summed up from a musician who always stayed a child by all accounts, the same mentality of just including various things because he thought it would be awesome for fans as it was for him. Even that idea of him as the child-man is however one which should be questioned

Despite having had a theme park called Neverland built and a Peter Pan persona put on him, other accounts also suggest Jackson as a very adult man, one who was also a ladies' man too, one who especially when it came to the content of his music vastly contrasted the persona placed onto him in how adult the lyrics were. Ghosts also shows the schism between the innocent persona, including all the problematic baggage, and the very adult themes his pop music had. The album this mostly promotes, Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix (1997), is a great album, if bearing in mind (as with HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I (1995)) he inexplicably included remixes and greater hit compilations as part of the albums alongside original material, Blood on the Dance Floor a case where the first five songs, the original works, are the real concern for anyone to listen to the LP. They are used in this film for its jaunty haunted house spectacle, and the New Jack Swing trend that influenced them is of the era, but actually hearing the lyrics of Ghosts and Is It Scary make them very dark songs. Even in mind to the later being originally for Addams Family Values (1993), Is It Scary's refrain of "And if you wanna see eccentrialities / I'll be grotesque before your eyes" is very ominous in terms of the derision Jackson was getting at the time, and the controversies with accusations. Ghosts, which plays horror metaphors to someone tormenting Jackson and terrorising him, is for me arguably one of the best songs in his output but also a really twisted exposure of his psyche, provocative and likely so on purpose at a vulnerable point of being dogged in his real life.

It really contrasts a film of a heightened spooky play, where all the horror tropes, like Jackson stripping his skin off to dance as a skeleton to the ghoul backing dancers climbing on the ceiling, is for fun. That and having himself mirrored by the Mayor, and all the times both call each other freaks throughout the short film, really expose too much by accident of a psychological profile. Within a film where an uncredited Dave Chappelle with his over-the-top scared villager acting should be of attention for how absurd it is, instead most people with some context of the musician's history, unless you watch the film as a fan for fun, are going to be unpicking some much psychodrama intentionally there and accidentally exaggerated.

The added factor to bear in mind is that Jackson was always incredible as a dancer and as a musician, making the controversies and debate around him more difficult, but also making sure even Ghosts is even more striking. Whilst they have got horror allusions, the songs here are all effectively fuck-youds to all the accusations and criticisms he got which, contrasting a man with a childlike wonder who built a literal Neverland with almost a split personality, a grown man who spits out stinging lyrics whilst dancing better like anyone could. Like Prince, who was going through his the Artist Formerly Known as Prince era at this time, they were both very eccentric individuals who however backed up these decisive personalities by having music few were good enough to produce and stage magnetism few ever possessed. Jackson's story is difficult to deal with, even in mind to the fact his childhood was also terrible, but it is fascinating to watch a man whose psychological makeup and his output, but in quality of the work and the psychological underbelly, were equals in their density.

Whether its defendable in Jackson's case is entirely up to you, but hoping one day Ghosts can be watched in a better quality, it itself was a fascinating piece of the man's career and worth the experience. It is also, with an example like Moonwalker, just one of many of these titles of his in existence. Ghosts, in spite of its obscurity, was meant to be a mainstream release, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival² even, a rare case of a mainstream production entirely fed by a voice's singular obsessions and the curiosities as a result. Whether the truth of the man behind this film,  digging into this stuff even for amateur armchair psychology will be compelling.

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1) Moonwalker, which was unavailable in the US but was released on DVD in Britain, is a completely indulgent project at the height of his fame. Where Jackson inexplicably demanded he turned into a car at one point to fight Joe Pesci, worth mentioning twice because that dramatic segment also has the incredible Smooth Criminal dance sequence, perfectly summing up an example of weird celebrity ephemera at its best and peculiar at the same time.

2) Linked to HERE.

8 ½ Women (1999)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: John Standing as Philip Emmenthal; Matthew Delamere as Storey Emmenthal; Vivian Wu as Kito; Annie Shizuka Inoh as Simato; Barbara Sarafian as Clothilde; Kirina Mano as Mio; Toni Collette as Griselda; Amanda Plummer as Beryl; Natacha Amal as Giaconda; Manna Fujiwara as Giulietta the Half Woman; Polly Walker as Palmira; Elizabeth Berrington as Celeste, Emmenthal Maid; Myriam Muller as Marianne, Emmenthal Maid; Don Warrington as Simon; Claire Johnston as Amelia, Philip's Wife

Canon Fodder

 

That's an unrecognisable blasphemy in Japan!

A word to describe Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway? Esoteric. The former employee of the Central Office of Information (COI), Greenaway made short work on architecture and current trends in the seventies alongside progressing to experimental short films. His debut The Falls (1980), a three hour plus fake documentary set within a Britain hit by a bizarre disease that turned people half bird, pretty started off with his intentions he would carry throughout his career. An obsessive compulsive interest in lists; an insanely encyclopaedic view of art, literature and other mediums; a profane and at times controversial attitude to the body, be it equal opportunity nudity to violence which came in films that came after The Falls, and a pitch black sense of humour.

What changed over the decades is that he wrote narratives with actors soon after The Falls. This did not stop him from pushing the experimentation, to an extreme by the nineties as he would eventually fragment and multi-layer the screen (in Prospero's Books (1991)), or to discovering computer editing for The Pillow Book (1996). He also found talented individuals for behind the camera; this is after composer Michael Nyman has moved on in the early part of the decade, but 8 ½ Women is important as the last collaboration with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, famously the cinematographer of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and who Greenaway first worked with from A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) to this film. (The film is co-shot with Reinier van Brummelen, and Vierny would pass in 2001 not long after).

8 ½ Women, even as a fan, was the one Greenaway film I was hesitant to revisit as its the film, in a career of someone who pushed buttons and upset people, which has two men (banking mogul grieving over his wife's death, and his son) build a harem of eight and a half women catering to their fetished images of women. Paying for them, or even using blackmail, to have them in the elder's home, they varied between Toni Collette as a former nun to Kirina Mano from Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) playing a woman obsessed with kabuki theatre and wishing to be more "feminine", becoming a member of the harem as a stereotypical geisha. Thankfully, even if it involves throwing Federico Fellini under the bus, the film is skewering this premise from the get-go, mocking their fetishes when this idea stems from the elder's lack of sexual experience, having watched Fellini's legendary film 8 ½ (1963) in a theatre to grieve the loss of the mother/wife figure, referring to a sequence of Marcello Mastroianni's lead having a fantasy sequence, one where the women of his life are in a harem including those who eventually become ignored and rebel back.

The question of where Greenaway is going is to prod and skewer this fantasy of his film's two leads, beginning with the question if cinema is a way for a director to create his sexual fantasies, and the stereotypes of feminine identity in male fantasy, including a debate on whether a Jane Austin heroine would be more sexually exciting then one from a Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy work. 8 ½ Women plays to the double sided coin of the harem fantasy, that a) a man even if he had one might not be able to keep up physically and mentally to the fantasy, and b) that these women are strong and independent figures who buckle the image and argue back, especially because of Palmira (Polly Walker), the only harem member who is not bribed or blackmailed into this scenario, but willingly did so for a lark. The film has aged, but not necessarily of the premise, where the women eventually turn the tables on their male dominants with ease, whether secretly planning to poison them or with Giaconda (Natacha Amal), a woman who loves having children and being pregnant, who is so fertile that it forces the men to have to contemplate children. As Palmira has become the object of obsession for the father, distract entirely by her, the sense of the film aging is more that Greenaway's caustic and corpse black sense of humour here has a couple of moments which will raise eyebrows, such as a character believing he can keep a concubine by blacking himself up like Othello or that a large part of the humour is two very privileged men, one entirely closed in, making crass remarks about the outside world.

The knife-edge Greenaway manages to walk on is that we see the humanity of our lead males in spite of some tasteless witticisms, that the harem is an inherently misguided decision but only because it stems from two men grieving the loss of a loved one, the establishing first half a lengthy part of bonding between father and son. Once the harem is created, it is entirely clear their fantasy will crumble, due to real women not being like the fantasy, some taking umbrage to their position, and even a supernatural amount of earthquakes, also involved as the son (Storey Emmenthal) evoked one is speech and has seemingly caused them to follow him around.

The female cast, far from marginalised and in various states of undress, are not props just from the fact that Greenaway was always open to having his male cast do full front nudity, both in his obsession to replicate and evoke classic art, and as a scholar of what we call the human flesh and all inside it in gristly detail. That and that he casts a surprising batch of distinct figures for the titular women. Vivian Wu, lead of The Pillow Book, returns as the accountant; it is still strange casting her as a Japanese character again, despite being Chinese, but she is good in a smaller role. Kirina Mano, who I did not realise was here, is probably most known for Bullet Ballet, standing out there, but is distinct as a character here too whose mostly speaking in the state of kabuki half sung voice. The rest of the cast is an eclectic mix, from European actresses like Barbara Sarafian, the prolific Canadian-American actress Amanda Plummer, playing a woman who liberates horses from owners and has an openly sexual relationship with a pig named Hortace, to Polly Walker, another prolific and hard working actress for cinema and television who carries a huge bulk of the film in terms of the lead female character. She is also the one who has the most scenes as an eroticised state as, whilst frank in talk, this film is more restrained in spite of its premise in terms of sexual content and even nudity for Peter Greenaway, which has an effect of the film avoiding becoming potentially crass.

It helps Greenaway, despite his claims over the years of cinema being dead and arguments that it is an inadequate medium, has always both been a distinct visual director who explored the medium, and also a distinct and good writer. He can be crude and erudite at the same time, wisely always taking a structured plot with a reliance on actors, building up on his ideas through listed or ordered themes to progress, and a lot of corpse black humour. A lot of the film, despite having aged in ways, is still funny in the modern day like contemplating the human prick as a piece of architectural brilliance, meant to be as absurd and thoughtful as that sentence sounds. In terms of his cinema, this is one of his most straightforward narratively. By this point, he had pushed the medium in some very experimental films, and would so past this through his career, but 8 ½ Women does not necessarily challenge structurally as others do. It has taken from his previous use of digital editing and layering the images from The Pillow Book, but baring touches like having images within images, showing pachinko players in scenes in the first half set in Japan, or superimposing parts of the screenplay itself over the images, he is more restrained after the radical nature of his nineties films.

From then on, this plays as a rebuttal to all the initial set up, where not long after the harem is set up it is clearly doomed to fail. The moment the two male leads acquire their goal, the soon after it starts to crumble, and we follow on with both tragedy (and even final happiness) for the characters even if through a very questionable choice of life decisions, Greenaway taking no sides even if some of the material will come off as profane or questionable for some viewers. It is in a position, unfortunate to also disappearing in time, of being a Greenaway film not talked about, which is surprising knowing films from this period and throughout his career (especially Prospero's Book) which are more divisive and more talked of which have not even gotten the basic decency of a sole DVD as 8 ½ Women at least got in the director-writer's homeland. As with all his films, this does add a great deal to find and see.

Cashmere (1999)

 

Director: Michael Ninn

Screenplay: Michael Ninn

Cast: Kylie Ireland as Penny Lane & The Lanettes / the Co-ed / the Lover's Lane Babe / the Pin-up / the Prom Queen; Vicca as a Go-Go Doll; Nikita as a Go-Go Doll; Shayla LaVeaux as Mrs. Kennedy / the Pin-up / the Cheerleader; Jill Kelly as Crooner's Lover / the Pin-up; Jeanna Fine as Sister Mary Francis; Anna Malle as Sister Francis Mary; RayVeness as the Pin-up; Brick Majors as the Drive-In Lover; Colt Steele as the Diner Guy

Ephemeral Waves

 

Bed time snacks make a girl crackle.

[Note: Cashmere is a pornographic film, but the version watched for this review is the softcore Redemption release. A British company who release titles in the United States and the United Kingdom, they have varied between the likes of Euro horror (Jean Rollin for example) to Japanese pinku softcore. They have also had a habit of releasing softcore cuts of hardcore cinema, this with some "strategic" close-ups among edits to alter the release for the more "easily offended" British public.]

Interpreting early sixties culture through late nineties shot-on-video aesthetics, I had high hopes with Cashmere as another delve into adult cinema's idiosyncratic tangents. It introduces me to Michael Ninn, a figure who starting in 1992 would become a significant name within the pornography genre for idiosyncratic titles like Latex (1995), a figure whose work embrace and work around low budgets (and video toaster and green screen effects) for fetishistic and ambitious looking productions. He is someone I am open to, regardless of my final opinion of Cashmere, as certainly going in he has an idiosyncratic premise even for a film for the sake of real sex to latch onto, embracing the aesthetic of early sixties and late fifties Americana, the touch of the titular Cashmere. Certainly having your lead actress Kylie Ireland duplicated as a whole girl group, Penny Lane & The Lanettes, for a 1961 set musical number is memorable for an opening for a porn film. Shots of a cinema, Ireland in a white ball gown as all the members, Lucio Fulci approved fog, and actual music, all very alien especially to a lot of modern day porn found online.

It is more eighties in aesthetic, by way of replicating the past, but when does an adult film in the modern day have actual musical numbers, one of many with different songs, with the music actually of some merit even if Casio backing music is used? Ninn to his credit, alongside an obsession with aesthetic (the latex costumes of Latex and Shock (1996)), has tried his hand at new directions, whether adapting those older films into Full Motion Video adult games, to Playboy's Dark Justice (2000-1), a softcore adult animated sci-fi show for Playboy TV. Cashmere's music is to its credit the best thing of the film, where even if some of the music reminiscent of a guitar magazine bonus CDs, the instrumental tracks to help teach guitarists new styles, the music in context is a solid quality with good vocal work. Even if it comes closer to nineties music (and Whitney Houston) the more they appear, they are unexpected in their existence within the film.

It does evoke Rinse Dream, real name Stephen Sayadian, the director of idiosyncratic films in the medium like Cafe Flesh (1982), especially when you learn the strange dialogue that has been repeated over scenes throughout verbatim - "Wrap me in a micro-mini" or "They're still stuck in the sixties" - were borrowed from Sayadian's Party Doll A Go- Go! 1 and Part 2 (both from 1991). Ninn's own production style, as stated low budgeted films which use video effects, and a lot of hazy aesthetic, is distinct especially as, contrary to my introduction to the film being set in the fifties, it is explicitly set in 1961 and the early sixties, right down to the eyebrow raising references to Jackie Kennedy. Played by Shayla LaVeaux in the famous (infamous) Pink Chanel suit suit, there is no sex scene with her, but she is evoked in the narration by the un-credited Michael Ninn, recounting nostalgic memories of that era against its iconography. It is very neon and tawdry, with blonde or pink bouffant wigs on the female cast, American diners and even a Cadillac used to have actors have sex on, but it is distinct to choose. Never was there a film, in tone with its bright bubblegum pinks and cheerleader costumes, where an Angora sweater or two would have been perfect and suitably erotic.

The immediate problem is that, rather than trying its hand at a series of vignettes or a narrative, Cashmere is a series of scenes of sex which whether seen uncut or in a censored form is repetitive and with not a lot else. The narration from Ninn himself really does not work, and you have the immediate issue with pornography that its length in scenes is endurance in terms of viewing, depending on a guttural arousal or lack of, and that this is a medium whose tropes about sensuality for many can be a bad cliché. (Or at least exaggerated to the point of its own logic which can be alien to a viewer's own eroticism or parodied). The paradox of pornography is also visible in how women are objectified, but they are figures who are lavished with diversity, the stars and with access to costumes and personas, whilst most male cast members in the case of a film like this are faceless figures. None of them are allowed to be more than stock figures - be they generic beefy men, scuzzballs or in a fake Clark Kent pair of glasses and wig - whilst another paradox exists in the variety of costumes and looks a female star can have. The moment in humanity's prehistory where women were to traditionally wear makeup and costumes is as much been one of our many failures as an intelligent species, but it has on the other side of the coin the advantage that, for all the fashion and aesthetic men can have, even traditional "feminine" fashion and cosmetics are so diverse there is the ability to use their variety to develop a person's individuality and even rebellion against norms, even in terms of not wearing makeup and dressing down as a more radical option.

Even in this film, where the audience is likely to be mostly male, the women in this film can play act, be figures of heightened (even absurd) femininity which can be dominant. Even if you have to bear in mind the film as a piece of pornography of the then-modern day which undercuts the illusion a lot, like the amount of tan lines, this does command a lot more visual power regardless of the explicit sex especially against the male actors, many of which do not even get IMDB profile pictures in the modern day and emphasis their status. No male actor, like LaVeaux playing Jackie Kennedy or heightening the cheerleader outfit, gets to riff on iconography either. One male is dominated by two leather clad dominatrix for his lusts for a schoolgirl, but no one is allowed to neither play in this world of dress up, nor become an eroticised figure that is in him as appealling and erotic even to a heterosexual male viewer. Even from a bias position as a cis-gendered heterosexual man myself, many erotica targeting male audiences tend to not portray men as physically pleasing in the slightest which Cashmere falls into the trap of.  There is no James Dean type - not the porn actor who, once a figure who drew female viewers to his work, sadly was revelled to be an utterly repellent figure, but the legendary Hollywood star of few films before his tragic end whose aesthetic style would have been perfect in this film's illusion, alongside many a greaser or rock 'n' roll figure. Even an Elvis impersonator would have been apt, in these early "wholesome" sixties, as there is a male sung musical number of a crooner, but this never goes anywhere.

Neither is the film, like Rinse Dream, going to challenge the viewer's sexual desires nor be inventive. The most diverse moment is what is described as "girl-homo", which is definitely a line of dialogue from a Rinse Dream film we never got, but is just a scene with only women which is not that illicit nor likely to win favour over for gay or bisexual female viewers even if, all wearing pink wigs, you could have had pure erotic camp. Honestly the disappointment with Cashmere is that, for a film about sixties iconography, one wishes it was not bothered with the initial goal of making a porn film and dared to sell itself as a pure wave of weirdo, nineties interpretation of early sixties chic.  Especially as this is pre-hippy psychedelic as well, which is a very distinct and niche aesthetic to sell, this could have been brilliant, even if still a string of sex scenes, if it had been a parody of a film or pop culture from the time.

The set up, with the opening music video even if all the members are Kylie Ireland, suggests a peculiar documentary of an old girl group, by way of dreamlike sequences of old childhood nostalgia, which if shoved further in detail would have been more. Even a "ghee whiz" parody of an old film or sitcom, like has become bread and butter in the later decades with porn parodies, would have been more rewarding especially as Ninn's aesthetic and production value is a leap above in terms of distinction. I would have preferred a narrative film, or an outright oddity, which just embraced trying to recreate an old film from the era with real sex, full of iconography like jukeboxes and quiffs on the studs. What you get are just surface level aesthetic on sex scenes which, even if you have the aesthetic strangeness of chessboard tile floors, or translucent yellow and red plastic pillars against fern trees, is still set dressing to sex scenes which have a lack of additional flair. Said scenes, if seen in a softcore form, do not even have what the film was meant to always sell, which is not appealing to another viewer either.

It does show Michael Ninn's virtues, but the final product could have been a much more different and more appealing production. As much of this I admit is merely the expectation of more to the film - i.e. more than a string than sex scenes. Certainly seeing screenshots of the film, and its heightened plastic sixties interpretation, even the stereotypical porn figures of the cast, does have a strange energy to it that is compelling, one that can be devoured and stretched. The issue is that, actually watching Cashmere, one wished there was more to work with than that energy. 

Hardly Working (1980)

 

Director: Jerry Lewis

Screenplay: Jerry Lewis and Michael Janover

Cast: Jerry Lewis as Bo Hooper; Susan Oliver as Claire Trent; Roger C. Carmel as Robert Trent; Deanna Lund as Millie; Harold J. Stone as Frank Loucazi; Steve Franken as Steve Torres; Buddy Lester as Claude Reed; Leonard Stone as Ted Mitchell

Ephemeral Waves

 

Don't call me a clown. I'm not a clown. Not anymore.

For full context, this film was first seen with very little knowledge of Jerry Lewis. Lewis, an American comic who first began in popularity as a duo with actor/singer Dean Martin, developed a career as a filmmaker as well as onscreen in his own films, eventually developing the clichéd reputation that the French were the ones who liked his films. That is not that exaggerated, as even Jean-Luc Godard (and the legendary French film magazine Cahier du Cinema he wrote for) liked his films and took inspiration. Lewis was also an actual innovator in that, to be able to look at his own work to direct, he helped pioneer the video assist technology.  The context for the following film, excluding seeing The Nutty Professor (1963), could be lost for me, but a lot can be immediately gathered however if you know the historical context.

Namely - Hardly Working is the first film Lewis directed after a seven year absence from behind the film camera. The last film he helmed beforehand is the one, ironically, which has become one of his most well known alongside The Nutty Professor (likely due to the 1996 remake) and The King of Comedy (1982) (a Martin Scorsese film he has a prominent role in), being The Day The Clown Cried (1972). Clown was never released, which adds a perverse irony to it being one of his most well known films as said movie is one few have ever seen. It became a source of speculation of a drama-comedy about a clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp, where his attempt to tackle the Holocaust would have been a challenge, alongside additional issues like the funding disappearing and forcing him to use his own money. It was never seen, and has had up to June 2024 (7 years after Lewis' passing in 2017) a rule stating that the film could never been seen in public form in whatever form actually exists, even in mind to that only being accessible through the Library of Congress¹. With only second hand testimony from comedian/actor Harry Shearer who saw the film as what most think of the film, namely a complete and utterly tasteless disaster², it has become an albatross that many of us (myself also a guilty member) are morbidly curious of even if we were all to go over to the Library of Congress to see. I admit to at least wanting to learn of Jerry Lewis as more than that film, as a filmmaker and actor, even his stint with Dean Martin or his reputation in humanitarian work, as a result of seeing something like Hardly Working. Many however will probably think of him only for The Day The Clown Cried if not The King of Comedy, someone else's work after the clown film.

Whatever the truth behind this infamous crypto-cinematic entity, whose existence and mystery have likely subsumed Lewis' long career in many eyes rather than his own successes, Hardly Working is Jerry Lewis trying to pick himself up after that incident to make a new comedy. It is also a film of a man entirely alien to the new world around him, even if Hardly Working was more financially successful than Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), another film of an acclaimed older comedian lost out of time back the late sixties. Fraught with its own financial issues, Hardly Working's aspirations to even have a sequel called Hardly Working Attacks Star Wars announced in 1979 were kicked in the teeth by budget problems and a protracted completion³, only to get a release in Europe in 1980 and only in Lewis' homeland in 1981 through 20th Century Fox³. This was neither the last Lewis made, but taking a year or two to be gestating, it feels like an alien entity despite Lewis having done so well as an auteur to direct a string of films through the sixties beforehand. It feels funereal, or at least to throw back to his own past as a real man behind the character, with an opening montage of hits and gags from older films as set up for this new story of Lewis himself as the icon and his new character. It then introduces Lewis faintly veiled as said new character, as Bo Hooper, a professional clown whose circus has had to shut down leaving him jobless.

Bo is cursed to be a comedy character, a natural klutz in a world where everything will fall off a shelf, petrol pump cables are too short and mailboxes will fall over to spite him. He himself is a miscreant, given the chance to live with his sister (much to her disapproving husband) until he can get on his feet again. The film, in truth, is not quite funny enough to be good but is strangely compelling to the point it is still a good film in spite of itself. This is a rare case of a film that I come to pity, and said pity comes (with moments of a great craftsman's skill) to appreciate as with virtue. The first act, where he blunders through a series of jobs, is a mixed bag entirely. On one hand, you see the complete skill of a man who will even with a low budget here use it for perfection, unlike comedies I grew with during the 2000s and 2010s where the visual form was rudimentary as a concern in Hollywood films. One gag about Bo's ill fated work at a glass factory does not even show the disaster of these two meeting, only the aftermath, the noise and him being told to leave with the smash cut in editing to the joke perfect. As someone who also struggled through countless job interviews in my twenties, let alone actual jobs, this segment does ring true in its bitter sense of humour.

This however also has Lewis, taking a job in a Japanese restaurant, do yellowface, which even in the late seventies is a tasteless thing to have, worse as this is returned to in the end credits and the original American poster. Yet it is telling, if indefensible even in this context, Bo's character having decided to act like this in his new work, with fake buck teeth and even producing a fan for Asiatic mist effects, ends up offending his white clientele so much they proceed to beat the shit out of him off camera. Again, the scene should not be here, a nadir, yet apt for Hardly Working's curious and disquieting themes, even the film itself is self critical of a joke from a decade or so before, when Mickey Rooney could get away from a Japanese stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and punishes the lead for playing this as a joke as part of the final punch line for the sequence.

Even once you get to the core of the narrative, Bo's attempts to succeed in the postal service, the film is funny at points but undercuts itself. Part of it is obvious, a film with the tone of humour in this era wilting, but as much of it is that it is far more compelling as a melancholic tale of a man who simply cannot adjust to the world around him than if it was a comedy gem. Not only is Bo struggles to be someone within this world, but for all the moments of colour, the world's starkness (by accident of a low budget and the production being shot in Florida) alienates even Jerry Lewis, the man behind the character of his past now as a middle aged man, further. Even if the issue of Hardly Working being difficult to see has posed a barrier, likely to be seen by many through a VHS rip haze, the world of palm trees and stark suburbia makes Bo even more of a miscreant. The narrative trajectory, a mild pleasant one about him trying to win over his post office boss, to keep the job, and having accidentally developed a romance with said boss' daughter, which is felt the same from her side, is subdued and antiquated, feeling of a sixties film but now trapped in a time period and production aesthetic a long way from that idealised past.

Adding to this is that, in this world, strange and surreal things happen for punch lines which gain power from the starkness, a world which is utterly at odds with Lewis' act let alone his character, like giant menus being handed out in a restaurant or that answering machine voices can not only talk back but can be strangled if you twirl the phone cord at your end. Even when he predates Adam Sandler by acting as a female character interacting with himself, a heavy set caricature with a curious European accent, it is disquieting rather than a cheap joke, an abrupt tangent that disquiets. Even Lewis' own physical comedy, such as a famous trick of sticking a glass of water between his lips and suspending it in his mouth, feels not childish but a goonish innocence at odds to the subdued world the film is set in and made in real life within.

Truthfully, not in terms of a wider Lewis canon but by itself, Hardly Working's title is tragically apt for itself, but it also as a result becomes a fascinating piece to stab at as most comedies do not suddenly force one to feel melancholia this way. Most comedy for me, especially in the "modern day" (i.e. not from 1980, when I was not even born), was never interest personally as a genre, whilst a film like this many would not like if far more compelling. Made originally in the late seventies, having Bo imagine himself as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977), shimming on a dance floor, was a topical joke back when that film was a success and disco was still alive. In context, when the illusion of Bo as the white suited lothario and centre of attention is deflated, and the reality is a middle aged putz shimmying by himself, told to quietly leave, the joke has a greater sense of sad sack humour.

So much is this tone there, radiating the picture of someone out of step for all the moments which are legitimately funny, that it means that I do not feel it requires a spoiler warning to tell how the film ends. Eventually, in a quiet presentation rather than a climatic happy conclusion built up to, Bo becomes good at his job. Barring annoying his boss by being obsessed with his Dunkin Doughnuts, and the tension of dating his divorced daughter, Bo succeeds but it was almost abrupt for myself, baffled by the creative decision by Lewis, when Bo decides to burn his bridges and reject his success by becoming the clown again, mass of rabbits coming out of the post van to a confused helicopter reporter and police. In hindsight, the point is obvious, above spoiler warnings, that suddenly the clown realises after gaining normalcy and acceptance it means not being himself, rejecting it, and driving off into the sunset a better man. Hardly Working is an awkward film, difficult at times of dated jokes, one really offensive one that was never funny, and at times too much uncomfortably real melancholia, where Bo's comments like “There is no place for clowns in this world[...]” really feel too close to Lewis himself being an odd man out in a time. Post New Hollywood and into the blockbuster era of the eighties, even if this film did well in the day it feels a relic from an alternative era of that time, a resulting mess that is still a compelling result, far worthier to exist than a generic slapstick comedy in the flawed humanity that exists within it.

 

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1) As talked of HERE.

2) The original Spy magazine article which deals with the film and includes his testimony can be found HERE.

3) As referred to in the film's history HERE.