The Howl (1970)

 

Director: Tinto Brass

Screenplay: Tinto Brass, Gian Carlo Fusco, Franco Longo and Gigi Proietti

Cast: Tina Aumont as Anita Annigoni, Gigi Proietti as Carlo detto 'Coso', Nino Segurini as Berto Bertuccioli

An Abstract Candidate

I questioned a corpse.

At first The Howl may suggest the tonal inconsistencies of Attraction (1969), another film from when Tinto Brass, an Italian director who eventually would focus on softcore erotica, had an experimental late sixties period. A man's future wife, our lead Anita (Tina Aumont), is bailed out of jail by his influence, only to be told her tale upon being arrested of being raped with a policeman's truncheon by a gang of them. When she flees her wedding however, The Howl intends to be a more morbid, bleaker view of the world which just happens to have moments of farce and levity. It was also wise for her to fled him, a man of power in all its flatness, especially when he does not bat an eye to that tale, even if she tells it with almost humour, deciding instead to flee into this surreal dreamscape capturing the era.

Pale faced, from having fled her wedding, she ends up on an incredibly surreal farce which at times cannot be viewed as anything else as truly dreamlike, even if unintentionally when it was trying to be politically relevant. Early on, this is stated as intent when immediately into this, the film has a horde of English policemen running down a hill and, in one of the many eye-catching moments, a double decker bus burning on fire at night.

The Howl does have its shock value and time stamped content, a film which precariously plays to a profoundness but also nastiness for the sake of it, such as juxtaposing eroticism that is meant to be positive with an off-screen rape scene by soldiers meant to be taken seriously. It throws a giant gauntlet down when its first scenario is a hotel Anita enters which caters to all kinds of sexual perversions and kinks - a mass of imagery, as throughout too much to absorb, including a reference to Leda and the swan, necrophilia, bottomless female teachers and much more. It evokes Jean-Luc Godard's political farce Weekend (1967), a bizarre road trip, whilst in mind that this particular journey exists out of space and even time, further than Godard's did sticking to the French country motorways. But it still has cannibalism like Godard's, in this case a philosopher in a loin cloth and 18th century wig whose family captures and eats people.

With a character at one point, in clown face paint having murdered someone in a train passenger seat, says "I awoke from the dream..." repeatedly, this film shows its hand as intentionally illogical in form, but probably to its advantage is that, whilst full of surreal and intentionally slapstick material, this feels a darker film. Even when Anita befriend and is tagged along by a slapstick male comedy figure Coso (Gigi Proietti), this for all the moments which still have aged badly feels a more powerful work, a memoriam of the state of the world. This is especially the case as it explicitly evokes World War II and its destructive influence on the world from an Italian filmmaker. Explicitly as a stand-in for Benito Mussolini and Hitler, a raving clown of a dictator, is machine gunned down by Anita and Coco.

The film presents moments which are delightfully strange, such as a ducking peeking through a post box slot on a door talking, but most of the film exists from a bleaker worldview, or at least a more sombre reflection of the world. It stops to follow the male sidekick interacting with a ghost of a young woman who has spent her eternity weeping at train tracks, feeling of more appropriate tone here with what it wants to evoke than, as I have seen, Tinto Brass trying to capture the times and, for all the incredible skill still involved, also showing his hand badly. When this film, using the same footage, uses real life mass grave and war footage as Attraction did, it is still questionable to have even brought it in onscreen, but feels more appropriate as the characters end up in a village that clearly encapsulates World War II.

That sequence, an extended one alone, makes this film more profound than even its surreal tone may initially suggest even if just evoking emotions for more real from its creators than they may have realised. Of soldiers, terrorising the town and shooting the populous lined up against the wall, heads on spikes and skeletons everywhere. Even when the film returns back to slapstick, including an entire stint within a mental asylum built in ancient Roman architecture, the title is apt as a deranged howl, as the protagonist herself is going on a downward spiral as the world is. It does feel its length, a journey even in ninety minutes which leaves one exhausted, but you are taken for a ride through such a surreal landscape that is completely admirable in form. [Major Spoilers] It feels more apt, than trying pretence of being about free love as Attraction was, when here instead the narrative conclusion is death by car crash in reality, the delirium collapsing in on it's being [Spoilers End]. Here when a cry of rebellion is broadcast in a sound recording stage, Tina Aumont throwing herself into this role, and in that scene shouting with magical intensity this speech, to rebel against the soldiers in the WWII town, it feels powerful as it is spoken less with latching on just the times, but an ageless form of rebellion stemming with influence of the horror of that war that is magnificent.

The Howl's dreamlike, deeply strange nature will still put people off, a languid work at times which yet can be explicit, nasty or just plain weird. For me, waiting to see this film for a long time, it thankfully has less of the pretentions of the other Brass production from this era, something that is difficult and really feels more a string of consciousness than cohesive, but apt in terms of what it wants to get over. There are better, even more difficult to grasp and more illogical films in this same vein, in just that The Howl does have the issue of what the politics and use of gendered takes on sex involved, when others have nudity and violence but feel more provocative to an advantage, but this is the kind of film that is an acquired taste I open admit an admiration too. When this is focused, this surrealism even if in the end it never had a point gains one with feeling like the creators' and casts' emotions spilling out onscreen, being stuck in the journey swimming in this fully.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Grotesque/Surreal/Weird

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

‎Attraction (1969)

 

Director: Tinto Brass

Screenplay: Tinto Brass, Gian Carlo Fusco and Franco Longo

Cast: Anita Sanders as Barbara; Terry Carter as the American; Nino Segurini as Paolo

An Abstract List Candidate

 

He's putting on contraceptive fingers....

Attraction is going to be a dense production to deal with, but it is amazing to think, for the initial thoughts, that Italian director Tinto Brass is most known throughout his career, after his disastrous and miserable experience on Caligula (1979)¹, he devoted himself to softcore erotica with a fixation of the female derriere (for the lack of graceful words) for most of his career. Brass having an experimental late sixties period does seem a huge curveball, but at the same time it befits any artist (or person for that matter) that they evolve and change over the decades. Attraction however, for all the admiration I have for it, is absolutely too the worst definition of experimental post-hippie psychedelic cinema, something you are dumbfounded by upon experiencing.

A strange voiceover talks of peace and love, of Mao, and Attraction is definitely a historical item to examine from the era worthy to examine in how it tries to talk of the time altogether, if however at the same time the equivalent of being stuck in the mental recesses of the era. The voice over, following what is effectively a feature length proto-music video, in which a woman Barbara (Anita Sanders) is considering a sexual fling with a handsome African-American man only dubbed the American (prolific actor Terry Carter) in the streets of English metropolis, is on the nose immediately and is part of the worst aspects of the film, in terms of being as subtle as a sledgehammer and pretentious. From the get-go however, just from the editing alone, this film however comes as a shock to the system for a director who, Caligula to the softcore films, made very traditional (and sometimes cheesy) erotic stories and also expresses how much is also exceptional here too. Attraction is a true paradox of great cinema but also so much unintentionally ridiculous and in one case completely ill-advised, and trying to deal with this is going to naturally cause the review to possibly be confused as a result.

Trying to explain what will happen in this film too in it's entirely is impossible, even at just eighty minutes Attraction managing to feel its length. It is an odyssey of eye catching and completely bizarre moments, some incredible technical work, but also making some misguided choices alongside never really becoming as profound as it thinks. When the film randomly cuts to Un Chien Andalou (1929), and its famous eyeball cutting scene, contrasted to a all nude male band with body paint murals on their chests, we are dealing with something truly weird even in my experience of this type of cinema. And for emphasis, as the film is designed to have Anita Sanders walk through various scenes and topics, this baring the voice over and some plotting feels like a prototype of a music video over a feature's length, as the film is as much carried by songs by Freedom, founded by members of Procol Harum. This does not prepare you however, early in the film, alongside Freedom being a Greek chorus performing onscreen, for the film being strange and unpredictable as it is. The introduction, where Tinto Brass in his late sixties films was quite inventive in how to have opening and ending credits, here playing under the footage, has Barbara wander through a park full of eroticised hippies and nude people cavorting around, and soon into this film you already have the hairdressers sequences. At first it seems merely playful, with fast-forward footage, until when the customers turn into cows, done with fake cow heads and, set to the song lyrics "A cow in your bed/Always well fed" with intercut sequences of a man trying to get an actual cow out of his bed.

This would suggest Attraction is going to be a playful erotic farce, where Brass predating his most reoccurring work will have a l-o-t of female nudity throughout, but we will have to address one of Attraction's biggest divisive issues, how it clearly wants to be profound in its state-of-the-world address, and the drastic and inappropriate tonal shifts as a result. Against what does feel like both a great technical experiment contrasted by pretence clearly from a male gaze view of sixties free love and a lot of sex, you do have a lot here which does not work, and especially does not qualify as a black comedy despite how the film is advertised as. If more of a pop art experimental farce, we would have less of these issues even if the voice over stayed.

Tinto even here is still obsessed with nude women as he would be later in his career, and at first, this does feel playful if weird in a compelling strange way. It is, as mentioned, a prototype of a music video in theatrical length, such as a scene with Barbara looking from a boat to the various apartment homes. Shown through a first person circular image against a black screen, like a periscope or a peephole, you see a variety of people including a woman with a giant fake flower trying to shot herself, which is dark but still in keeping in terms of the tone so far. It may seem dated, but this far you are still seeing a director, with legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis early in his career funding this, even if bumbling through the culture of the time still cutting his teeth with his production team (especially cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti) to make something this impressive. Knowing Brass was his own editor here especially is incredible as, regardless of what I think of Attraction as a whole, there are moments are true surreal joy here and Brass's editing is a thing to admire for how ferocious and mind-bending it can get.

Whether this all is actually profound is the issue however. I like many of this idiosyncratic late sixties cinema, even ones most would view as utterly pretentious, but definitely the term indulgence and pretention has to be thrown around. Even one of the more famous ones I grew to admire, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), comes from the knowledge I hated that film for the first six viewings until admiration and an obsession to watch it still came to win me over, and that is still a film with stuff of its era and stuff even back then you would have scratched your head at. It is apt as a film to evoke as, with Tinto Brass' The Howl (1970) evoking Godard's in tone, this is such an alien time in the modern of a specific Western and European cinema, not excluding American and British entries², of films that would never be funded two decades later existing with carte blanche to experiment and try whatever came to mind. You are dealing with so much cultural baggage, however, now of what many were getting at, and if this was plain alien weirdness, this would be less an issue. The sexual and gender politics have to be pondered and frankly questioned at times, even when there are still (unintentionally?) funny lines like chin-ups causing orgasms, or how much the voice over does obsess over sex to the point you see Tinto Brass of his later softcore years secretly within this, but the additional state-of-the-world address the film has also raises issues.

Moments, like Terry Carter's character swapping a young Chinese man's copy of Mao's Red Book with the autobiography of Malcolm X does also cause one to wonder with European and Western filmmakers what exactly they truly thought about when they threw their gauntlet into topics like China's Red Revolution and the racism. Godard, at this point into his infamously dense and messy Dziga-Vertov Group era, succumbed to really never making cognisant points and bad ideas alongside good productive concepts, so someone like Tinto Brass throwing himself into this alongside a pop-music set tone is tripping through so much baggage that even highly admired European filmmakers of art cinema succumbed to.

This comes to ahead, when Attraction failed completely for me as it is still a compelling artefact to witness, when an Italian Catholic priest appears to inform the viewers the sexual content, inappropriate, will be replaced with "suitable" violent and war based ones. It shows, entirely in voice over, that this is an Italian production just masquerading in the real streets of England, but it is one of the cleverest moments. It does however lead to the sequence, with footage re-used more appropriatly in The Howl, that is probably one of the most tonally inappropriate I have seen in a film in a long whole. As is, it involves real footage and images of war, execution footage, footage of a mass grave with real bodies being thrown in, and slaughterhouse images, all contrasted to lots of nude imagery. If Brass still wanted, for a film about sexual liberation and escaping a bland married life, to signpost that this is made during the Vietnam War and juxtaposed with the history of World War II, which he explicitly does in the later film The Howl, it makes sense to if done right. (Deadly Sweet (1967), a giallo he made, has a scene in a cinema where news footage of the Vietnam War plays on the theatrical screen his characters are watching, and that works perfectly in context). When the tone before has been light with dark humour, with very pretentious dialogue and scenes in aesthetically bold sequences of humdrum married life, this is such a misfire.

Likewise, when then wishing to deal with the civil rights moment and racism, the film dances a dangerous line about this being a potential romance or romantic fling between a white married woman and a very charismatic black man. They cross paths with him constantly flirting with her, and she struggling with pronounced sexual fantasies, with nothing at first to never feel an issue, but you get a tone-deaf song from an all-white band about racism, with very obvious lyrics, contrasted to real images and footage of a lynching and KKK cross burnings. The Howl, off-mentioned, has drastic tonal whiplash, but that feels a much darker morbid film with moments of playful farce sprinkled through for levity or to reveal in a corporeal nature. Attraction, alternatively named the eyebrow raising The Artful Penetration of Barbara, has moments which are artistically inspired, deeply weird and was a compellingly bizarre film worthy to return to, but it is also the worst excesses and artistic ideals of this era of experimental and cult cinema on full display. This is not going to defend sixties experimental cinema, and it feels like Tinto Brass punching far higher than he was capable of. If you focus on the technical achievements, as his own editor and the artistic ambition on display, with its cutting of multiple shots at once or peephole camera shots of only a circle of an image onscreen, it is incredible even today. But the violent juxtapositions to real grotesque atrocity of human kind, when Brass is mostly exposing a very heteronormative take on free love and indulging in sex of the late sixties hippy movement, is the one moment even over very pretentious and mockable voiceover dialogue where most viewers will hate Attraction if they have not beforehand.

Attraction, when it is just charmingly strange and gibbering, is what I would gladly rewatch and revisit. A love tunnel with painted face hippies is something only of the sixties, including the fact a real grotty love tunnel you would find in my country at this time is preserved on celluloid, causing one to wish that Brass had not had a decision to be profound. He even snubs what is not a tasteless plot of two people of different ethnicities have a romantic tug-and-pull over their various encounters at first, but even later on the film flunks this however when one voiceover, and I apologies for having to quote the term, has Barbara dubbing Terry Carter's American as a "negro" without thinking more of who he is as a person. That he never gets a name, and is another, particularly as the film ends reverse to what it begins, with her returning to her husband as if a sexual fantasy he is happy with, negates what does a lot which stood out. When even the sexual fantasy shown before repeatedly of both of them nude in a jungle/woodland does not actually play to offensive stereotypes, just the pair of them, beautiful in the nude, frolicking in dense woodland naked, this could have been a much more compassionate film than it turned out to be. Terry Carter, without any dialogue, manages to radiate personality to the point you never even had to bring race into the narrative, just that Barbara is stuck in a marriage of dullness, meeting this charismatic well dressed man completely understandable for a beautiful woman to fall in love with even if with a conflict. Knee deep in psychedelic late sixties weirdness, we could have had fun with this, and it is not a surprise, and a happy epilogue, knowing Carter was a very busy actor in cinema and television.

The result is a mess. This will be a confusing conclusion for many when, having said so much of why this film is a failure, I still find Attraction a compelling experience. When Attraction is weird, like a scene taking place in a museum instillation of what is effectively people sculptures made from trash bags fornicating, than it is memorable, truly a one-off of pure strangeness that I would gladly revisit. But it unfortunately has the price attached to it of how much is antiquated and even back in this era really not profound. This is definitely a case of warning viewers of this being only for a few people. For those few, this will be a special experience even if a difficult one a lot of time.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Surreal/Weird

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

 

=====

1) The tale of Caligula is long and infamous, one probably told by many professional writers, and testimony from its cast, for very good reason. It is worthy of its own review another day even if I could never write as sufficiently as those testimonies and stories on the production history on how insane its existence is.

2) And yes dear readers, let us not forget the Japanese films of this era, or other countries such as Cinema Novo and the likes of Glauber Rocha in Brazil, so please do not think this is Anglo-European bias. They will not be ignored, and goes to show why I love sixties and seventies cinema and can trip up even over a low budget genre film that can be inventive or just bizarre at any time.

Vertical Features Remake (1978)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Colin Cantlie as the Narrator

An Abstract List Candidate

 

For me, one of the most rewarding films in the career of Peter Greenaway is Vertical Features Remake, an early short film which I will argue is one of the most perfectly executed in his career, hidden away at a period before making feature films which leaves it easy to malign next to many great titles more know. Presented as a public information documentary, in which a fictional group known as the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration attempt to recreate a lost film by the figure Tulse Luper, it also has importance to Greenaway's career. Tulse Luper, a character created as a journeyman and polymath, would have one of his most ambitious projects based around him, The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003-4), one which despite being a trilogy including meta-narrative additions is among one of Greenaway's obscurest productions to see. Even among those you can find with greater ease, even little details like a specific water tower film archive used in image will be returned to for Drowning by Numbers (1988).

Set to library music synth, composed by Brian Eno, in its opening credits, Vertical Features Remake looks like an actual documentary from this era were it not for the production having to correct itself constantly. It is the driest of dry humours you will need to appreciate this, effectively a structuralist avant-garde film which however has a meta textual sense of the self-referential, but if you can get past the main content of the film, it is compelling. The main content is "Vertical Features", a project by Tulse Luper which, reinterpreted over multiple tries as new theories and archival documents are found, consists of 121 shots of vertical objects in English countryside towns being shown in order in a varying time per shot and sometimes set to music. This is the aspect which is still a dense and obtuse avant-garde film to experience. Viewed in the right light, as the later adaptations get said music and vary in shot length in more varying ways, it is actually peaceful to sit through the segments like one could an installation work, but it is the one thing you have to bear in mind as they are experienced as whole short films within one forty plus minute experimental production.

The humour is entirely how many jostling voices come into this project, predating Greenaway's The Falls (1980) and his experience at the Central Office of Information (COI) suggesting to him the farce of trying to create comprehensive archives. Told entirely with narrator Colin Cantlie, and still images representing everyone outside the Vertical Feature remakes, the arguments for and against the project, and having to remake this project over-and-over, does have an intellectual concept of how one struggles with attempting to recreate the past based on merely preserved notes and artefacts. It also gets to the point one figure will even question if Tulse Luper even exists, an excuse for the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration to get funding for this self indulgent technical editing exercise, which is where the dry farcical air comes in. Combined with Michael Nyman crafting most of the score, at the beginning of his work with the filmmaker, and this is as esoteric as you can get, crossing Greenaway parodying a documentary from the time but also sincerely, in many ways, creating an experimental structuralist film, its creation of a fake history as unconventional as you can get in terms of filmmaking.

And it predates The Falls' entire structure among other shorts he was make beforehand, his debut a three plus hour film parodying attempting to catalogue the world in a more elaborate and bizarre structure with this same template. The Falls is less avant-garde film reconstruction but more science fiction narrative of a world after an unknown incident turn people into bird people, with all the use of pre-existing photos and just more actual actors to push this further. It definitely shows, right from the get-go, Peter Greenaway would have easily continued into this experimental world but found himself moving towards dramatic narratives with the experimentation in their structures and themes, finding a way to go forwards. Here, subversively, even if still difficult he may have also figured out a way to make explicitly avant-garde material much easier to digest.

The beauty of the English countryside against very rigid experimental art is a fascinating juxtaposition to have, unlike other real experimental films which have pure coloured shapes and sound only, and the set-up as effectively a piss-take on the subject also makes the content have a greater depth. An argument is made by the end Tulse Luper's project, for a group known as Session Three to develop a "dynamic landscape", was actually a condemnation of his own group's plans by showing the potency of the landscape already, alongside hints at colleagues being likely to have destroyed or altered his work through their own goals. It is still, by parody and making an avant-garde film within a film, Peter Greenaway tackling subjects that will appear in his narrative works, where a lot of protagonists struggle in terms of making pure art or life goals fighting against individuals who wish for purely political, financial or emotional victories. It is, know to me for a long time, a secret masterpiece in Greenaway's career even for the simple fact that, effectively a short film, it is the right length, has no chaff even with four "remakes", and is artistically perfect as it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Meditative/Playful

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

Blog Update September 2021

 The following post will be brief, but a necessary one. Simply put, a significant change in my personal life, involving moving home, will transpire within the remaining year into 2022. This is significant because, whilst it may not affect the blog's existence, it will affect content currently and may affect it in the future.

Currently, there is a significant amount to clear out, including old notes with one of the goals to have content ready even a month plus ahead if need be for the likely effect of the move. In mind to this, recently, there has been less focus on "abstract" cinema, but hopefully this will change alongside a very odd and esoteric mix. This move encourages a need to go through planned ideas that never came to be, for this blog, for the side content Games of the Abstract, my other blog 1000 Anime and possibly some Archive material too so that everything is dealt with.

I intend to plan ahead for October 2021 and Halloween by trying to have as much content in most of these topics ready, maybe covering horror films beyond the month, for a very eclectic choice. I intend it to be celebratory, in mind to the move's likely effect on me, so it is going to be a curious mix of many types of posts. Clearing out old notes, which I admit are handwritten, I am not just going to dump odds and sods as they are, but wishing to flesh them out, they are a going to be a weird mix even for my standards of topics, which in itself may lead to some entertainment for your dear readers is just finding the least expected juxtapositions every time you long onto the blog. This will last into the next year as I want them all cleared out, alongside topics which come of interest as always happens when you plan ahead but find things you want to write about as time passes.

In terms of the future, even if it means a change in content, if it leads to fewer posts to focus on other concerns and/or bearing in mind a change in what is covered, that will simply because this will clear through indulgences, including streaming subscriptions, and a change of personal life in a positive way. I do not see this as a concern in truth baring concerns of how it will go, and the wait to see how it goes, but that does not mean this blog, which was a hobby to do to unwind, will be left to gather dust or have less passion place upon it.

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009)

 

Director: Rob Zombie

Screenplay: Tom Papa and Rob Zombie

Based on a comic by Rob Zombie

Cast: Tom Papa as El Superbeasto; Sheri Moon Zombie as Suzi-X; Paul Giamatti as Dr. Satan; Rosario Dawson as Velvet Von Black; Tom Kenny as Otto / Rover/ Old Man / Herbie; Brian Posehn as Murray the Robot; Dee Wallace as Trixie; Ken Foree as Luke St. Luke; Geoffrey Lewis as Lenny Crumpski / Roy Sullivan

Lew Temple as Adam Banjo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #234

 

There's no cable in the jungle.

Opening with a thirties cartoon aesthetic, with black and white animation, and even orchestral music, I came to one of the more curious titles within Rob Zombie's career with no idea what to expect. El Superbeasto is an animated film, one which was originally started in 2006, a production which really cuts against the image even I had of him, as he lets his hair down and is effectively goofing off here. Even when our titular lead runs over Michael Myers of the Halloween films in his low-rider for a one scene joke, it is not a extreme as what he did in Halloween 2 (2009).

El Superbeasto, a farcical tale set in a horror world metropolis, follows an egotistical luchador-slash-actor in a very tentative narrative, one with a large cast including his far more likable eye patch wearing stepsister and spy Suzi-X (Sherri Moon Zombie), and a plot of a figure named Dr. Satan (Paul Giamatti) wishing to marry a woman with a 666 birthmark to gain great power. This in context of his film making career, Rob Zombie doing comedy is really strange especially when he was a divisive director of very violent horror films of an acquired taste, one I openly admit barring The Lords of Salem (2012) and Halloween 2 I have not caught the same wavelength with. This adds the weird touch, for what is a film I find a lot of problems because it was trying too hard, is how the figure of such work like The Devil's Rejects (2005) is proudly a pop culture geek of material some of his fan base probably did not know of and, unlike including Urotsukidôji sound clip in a White Zombie song, is probably very uncool to them. For example, it is a hardcore reference, of something no one who may have been the target audience of his films at the time would have known, to have a visual cameo of Korla Pandit, an African-American musician who posed as an Indian composer of exotica music, making a cameo as the piano player at the marriage from Hell.

It is also of its era, as with carte blanche, El Superbeasto asks the question whether you can be ironic with having so many animated bare breasts onscreen, even to the point the song composers Hard 'n Phirm, who come from the Black Dynamite (2009) school of explaining what's onscreen, have a song telling viewers it is okay to masturbate to cartoons and feel like true Americans, even if the film was produced with a South Korean studio. And credit where it is due, for a film whose production was a case of a frolic for its creator which expanded in scope and production, this does look good. It does admittedly evoke The Ren & Stimpy Show, a show I grew up with which is a cursed thing nowadays to make comparisons to, not even because of its creator John Kricfalusi being accused of sexual misconduct and grooming of teenagers, but that he infamously rebooted the series as an adult show with Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" (2003), a cursed item for many that even a voice actor for the original (Billy West) refused to work on the project¹. That reference, bearing in mind childhood memories are useless to work with, also brings up the issue that El Superbeasto is far more interested in shock value and being silly than actually taking advantage of its tone and world for better jokes.

El Superbeasto is a very crude work, when our lead, a completely unlikable figure prat, is introduced working on a film-within-a-film where, parodying porn, he turns a woman into a living pizza or, really evoking Ren & Stimpy, has another woman erotically sucking one of his rotten, horrible looking toes. At times, the film comes from a time where many people were trying to get away with stereotypes or deliberately shocking comments which, long before "Social Justice Warrior" was considered an insult, was always just low hanging fruit in terms of humour. Rosario Dawson, as Velvet Von Black, a stripper able to inflate her body on command and even mould a breast into a balloon animal, skirts a line of just having Dawson playing all the vulgar and cuss filled stereotypes of a poverty class figure that speaks and farts her mind as much as imagine an unrepentant figure inexplicably finding herself in the plans of marrying Dr. Satan, he himself literally a nerd bullied at school who even without that context was an annoying sex pest. It is also a film which is knowingly being ridiculous and throwing the kitchen sink in with a couple of zombie Nazis, and that too raises the issue that, even without some of the more questionable jokes, this sinks under just wanting to be over-the-top without taking a breath or really embracing the virtues, sunk within itself, which would have been funnier, still incredibly lurid but also even deeply weird in the best ways.

The result is an acquired taste, one which even for Rob Zombie fans would be a great indulgence. This indulgence is what put me off. Moments in this are funny, legitimately so, and some aspects are fascinating to have seen if it was not trying so hard, which makes this more of a strange thing to have to unpick through. Beneath the music by Hard 'n Phirm, whose over explaining for a joke is overbearing, and the over-the-top nature of crude humour and drawn nudity, there is something compelling of being in Rob Zombie's brain, being in a world where the strip club has legendary horror character cameos and monster women dancers, where the most obscure characters he has referenced in lyrics live, not surprising for a man who, whilst reaching trendiness when the likes of Dragula was a track in The Matrix (1999), was referencing The Munsters, an old sitcom from the past even in the nineties when Zombie had Dragula as a popular song.

One of the huge virtues is just Dr. Satan and his assistant Otto, an intelligent ape with a British accent who hates crude things, living in the corpse of King Kong underground with a creator he hates but is stuck with due to Satan being able to twist the screw on his head to turn him into a beast again. Casting Paul Giamatti as Dr. Satan is eyebrow rising but also a beautiful surprise, as Giamatti also happens to steals the film alongside Tom Kenny as Otto, who is a veteran of voice acting famous for playing Spongebob Squarepants. The pair of them and how the characters are written, Satan a dweeb and Otto the figure who has to put up with him, alongside the running gag of Otto's friendship with their elderly elevator operator in very slow conversations, is the sort of thing where you get the perfect mix of humour that is funny in the children's show for grownups tone, and also to funny crude humour when Otto catches Satan wanking and the viewer realises those are dog squeaky toy sounds on the soundtrack to represent it².

Also having clearly gotten the tone right is Sherri Moon Zombie as Suzi X, with Brian Posehn as Murray the Robot. Yes, her character is a hyper-sexualised cheerleader, ahard-as-nails stereotype of all the sexy action women of nineties pop culture who you can have naked all the time, but alongside the delight in Sherri Moon putting on that high pitched voice for the role, there is the knowledge, regardless of what you think of Zombie having all the nudity and sex humour in the film, which is sweet of always having his wife in his films, always presenting her with admiration, even here in this insanely sexualised figure still feeling it was given to someone who would have been game for the role and knew exactly was going to be animated. More so as, since mocking Nazis is a crude joke that is completely defendable, she even gets to steal Hitler's brain (or his head) and mow down an entire mass of incompetent zombie soldiers with her sexually frustrated robot friend, whose relationship shared is a very kinky and passionate one which shows how you could have had your cake and eat it throughout in having the adult humour.

This does ultimately, sadly, become a barrage of jokes with a knowing wink, an irony that does become more a concern than being consistent or actually be engaging rather than too much to digest. As much of this is not appreciating this type of tone at all in truth - that it would have been better to instead be sincere and try to create a world where everything is weird - and that eventually you are also with a film which is just improvising in the end. When it, alongside cameos by regular collaborators with Zombie like the late Sid Haig, it will end on a parody on old southern music television for the last scenes, it feels crow barred in like a lot of the gags do. It is fascinating to be inside Zombie's head, and see how cheesy it is, and that in itself a worthwhile advantage of witnessing films like this, but as I have found in some of his straight faced horror films, there is here too, for all my interest and like in him, or someone who if he focused or embraced the more esoterically weird touches of his work would have won me over more easily.  

 

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1) Referred to in the following interview, though bear in mind of the more "curious" comments within the brief section on that title, including the context that the new version of Ren & Stimpy played up the characters being bisexual for humour. I think we can all agree even the 2000s was a different time even if I do not immediately jump on titles like other amateur reviewers may, with stuff that in hindsight was questionable back then let alone now. Strange as it is too, whilst it would have to come with a warning of John Kricfalusi's problematic accusations for good reason, looking back at the original series and even suffering through Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" would be fascinating, even if the latter especially sounds like stapling your testicles repeatedly.

2) And for less crude jokes, casting Ken Foree as a talking cat, if you are in on the joke by knowing who he is, is the kind of winking joke that does win you over.

Battle Heater (1989)

 

Director: Jôji 'George' Iida

Screenplay: Gorô Nakajima and Jôji 'George' Iida

Cast: Akira Emoto, Hisako Hara, Masao Imafuku, Kenichi Ishii, Pappara Kawai, Gorô Kishitani, Takayasu Komiya and Shigeru Muroi

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #233

 

In cinema, we tend to lionise the director, hence the auteur theory; even when people have argued against the theory, directors hold an important place as the helmsperson, the captain, of a production. Think of those directors who have not developed cults, for all those maligned or leaving the director's seat after a short career, and wonder what they contributed. Jôji 'George' Iida is an example, whose filmography is fascinating to look at, of an obscure director with a very eclectic career just in genre cinema.

Starting among the boom of low budget, straight-to-video horror which developed in the late eighties, only to continue on with the likes of Another Heaven (2000), a flawed and convoluted horror murder mystery which nonetheless had a lot to admire, he worked into the modern day as a screenwriter in television, or an original creator. Spiral (1998), the once-forgotten sequel to Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998) released theatrically at the same day in Japan and taking a huge step in a different territory¹, is likely his most famous work as that has become of more note in the modern day. Iida makes interesting films, even Another Heaven now having a fonder air to it for me now.

We will begin with the obvious - this is entirely about a demonically possessed onsen, a type of heater-table hybrid, meant to keep one's legs warm and that is entire unique to Japanese culture. They are an object you learn about when their pop culture imported globally, and you have the absurd fact that, yes, this is as ridiculous on the surface as an American horror film called The Refrigerator (1991), a real film about a flesh-eating refrigerator. Also idiosyncratic to Japanese culture however, and referenced in voiceover at first, is that their folklore talks of how an object that lasts for over a hundred years develops a consciousness, hence why even a film like this which is intentionally comedic is still not as ridiculous as it would have been if a Western film. When your folklore has horror tales about possessed umbrellas, it is not something that breaks credibility even if meant with humour, which Battle Heater proudly wears on its sleeve. When the title is literally depicted as a giant foam object of rock in the beginning, and a Buddhist monk is eventually crushed by the "End" title of the final shot, Battle Heater is deliberately silly, without irony but playing up to a gleefully morbid sense of humour.

The evil onsen happens to be acquired by two equipment salvagers, the youngest accidentally removing the seal that keeps the malicious table dormant. He happens to live in an apartment complex full of eccentrics: the punk band who bully him and whose singer wants to steal his love interest from; a woman and her lover who have killed her husband, and are secretly (and slowly) disposing of the body; and an elderly couple revealed, in the darkest of humour, to have built a contraption to kill themselves with alarm clock timed electrical current. Immediately Battle Heater stands out as, rather than dragged out and a dull tale of an evil heater table, all the subplots are interesting up to the point the onsen acquires enough energy to become a giant monster, occasionally killing someone by tricking them to sleep by it like a Venus Flytrap. The dark domestic humour is really interesting - particularly the lover and murderous wife as, casting an actor as the torso of the dead husband who does an exceptional job of acting with his mouth open in rigor mortis, their bickering relationship of a soured adulterous couple is (even of a different culture) comparable in the best ways to similar characters in British comedy.

All of Battle Heater, as a result, is incredibly broad but an advantage in that there is a style to the material, straddled between modern Japanese life and its own world. One minute you are in a scrap yard wasteland in a Lucio Fulci approved phantom zone, covered in fog to match his own history of using fog machines, the next minute the school the female love interest goes to where, in machinations, the mass crying student populous awaiting the final concert of a beloved music teacher will provide the mass screaming populating fleeing a demonic table as it eats a drummer. Probably the best aspect of this is that, in actuality, it is still a small production that relies on some silly production design with care. The murdered husband is an actor clearly propped up in a hole pretending to be half a corpse, but it works; the onsen itself is wobbled, rattled and shaken about; there is even a scene of its plug, moved about likely on a string (and even having first person shots hunting for a socket) that adds a sense of play.

In Iida's career, this marks a different direction from the more serious films he would make in the horror genre, which makes it a distinct production. He is good at comedy, broad and with a lot of slapstick, but the visible dark humour stands out too. The surprise of seeing this film, which I hated the first time I ever encountered it as an immature viewer, to the point of being on the lowest 1/10 tier for an inexplicable reason, comes with a greater admiration now of this obscurer genre director. It is an impressive little gem, and to think once ago I hated the film that much feels embarrassing in hindsight.  

 

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1) Especially helped, when they re-released the original Ring trilogy of the 1998 to 2000 films, that physical media distributor Arrow Video included Spiral as an extra film restored in their 2019 (late 2010s) box set. Spiral is fascinating as its own curiosity, especially in mind that the re-canonised sequel, Hideo Nakata's own Ring II (1999), is a perplexing creation in itself that would divide people. Not surprising when Nakata would admit he was influenced by the infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the strangeness of his own sequel against the bleakness of Spiral make them a fascinating duo to exist.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief            

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief      

Cast: Udo Kier as Adolf Hitler; Alfred Edel as Hermann Goering; Margit Carstensen as Martha Goebbels; Volker Spengler as Fegelein; Andreas Kunze as Martin Bormann; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Joseph Goebbels; Marie-Lou Sellem as Tochter Goebbels; Asia Verdi as Nurse Morell; Brigitte Kausch as Eva Braun

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Enjoy them, the nuts of the Germans.

[Major Plot Thread Spoilers]

From the year of my birth, enfant terrible Christoph Schlingensief shot this film improvised in an actual World War II bunker, documenting the last days or so of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle before their world collapsed. You could say it is tasteless, not comparable to a serious take like Downfall (2004) with the late Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Yet, with the added irony of the Wim Wenders connection this film has which we will get into, and how most now know Downfall for turning the scene of Ganz's Hitler getting angry into an internet meme, whether about video games and films, how one deals with the legacy of the Nazis especially as a German is salient to the project's point and a fixation Schlingensief has been pointed on.

In a 2005 documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, effectively an extended sit-down interview with Schlingensief by director Frieder Schlaich over his career at that point, one of the points Schlingensief made, and is contrasted by the broadness (and for me misfiring) nature of Terror 2000 (1992), is really profound to consider. That of how he talks of Germany having been ultra-tentative about Nazi history, saying that if they had left it open and let it corrode in public, there may have been less concern of its fetishisation and a rise in Neo-Nazism. German law, even to the point videogames had to be censored, understandably had a strong reaction to trying to deal with this history even if you are against censorship. One of the bleakest moments in their history is a difficult one to deal with, and yet 100 Years of Adolf Hitler cannot be said to be trivialising it either, even this perverse farce having a profoundness when, because of the evil he committed in real life, Hitler is reduced to Udo Kier as a drug addict, Eva Braun clearly being more attracted to Martha Goebbels, and Goebbels himself carrying on incest with his daughter. In fact, no one in the group of male party members still alive really likes Goebbels, more fixated on getting the Reich Councillor position and hoping to oust him even in a bunker they are all stuck in.

Terror 2000, which was made in the post-Soviet Union fall and tackling the question of migrants in German culture eventually did become merely uncomfortable, as for a subject which has been a discussion for the country even decades later, it never really was a film about the migrants themselves and does eventually, particularly with its attempt to mix corpse humour with content like rape, end up missing its target. Here the mix is right, even when it does cross into taboos like sexuality that dances a dangerous line in that territory too in one scene. It would almost being tragic seeing these people lost and broken until you remember that the real figures led to World War II and the Holocaust, the follies of people who acted worse than beasts yet tragically still human. These tragic figures a small cast of actors play in 100 Years... bicker, feel cornered, argue about who gets a higher rank when all this blows over, even Hitler's origins when he originally wanted to be a painter evoked even if reduced now to Udo Kier making arse prints in paint on canvases. Theirs is also one of the bleakest depictions of Christmas celebration you could get only screen to, with scrawny trees in the darkened corner. At fifty five minutes too, this never skips over into dragging on, and the last days of Hitler are not told the same as real life.

Case in point, Hitler does die, and yet you can become the Fuhrer, and can only take that name and that of "Hitler", if you have the moustache, which Eva Braun eventually does. It would almost be subversive in another way, were it not for the specific figures involved, that Eva and Martha Goebbels are romantically attracted to each other from their introduction, and are married at one point, even if it leads to Martha dying and her birthing a (cloth doll) child at the same time that will be put in a river like Moses in a wicker basket.

Though a film made in little time, it is a striking production, actually shot in a bunker, with the film also shot in stark monochrome and using only the lighting available from the production as the only lighting source. It neither hides its artifice either, based on a play, as you will see the clapboard multiple time and calls for "Action!" in many scenes, a film openly admitting its improvisation. So much so as I leave the most curious aspect which bookmarks the film at the end of this review, as it is the most open to interpretation. Wim Wender's 1984 Palme D'Or win at that year's Cannes Film Festival, for Paris, Texas, which could be seen as the most profane aspect of this entire film even in lieu to its trivialisation of the evil of Nazis, with the footage of the German auteur's award speech, about the potential of art, contrasted to the film it has the footage within which is about the worst of their culture being turned into a profane farce. With Kier speaking directly to camera the names of highly regards high art filmmakers and actors in his first scene onscreen, like Wenders to Margaret von Trotta, there is a sense however that, next to the emotionally tender Paris, Texas, this as Schlingensief's 'career would continue is a pit stop into the grotesque on his end. Certainly he is not pulling his punches, with malice, when he cuts to a figure by the end of the film talking of how, if you do not talk of politics at the time, the German people should have been proud of their achievements and resilience during and after World War II. In the modern day even if a misinterpretation that really skates the dangerous line of forgetting Germany's guilt and why it exists in the first place, more so footage used in a film from the nineteen eighties. Even this film bastardising and trivialising the Nazis never forgets their sins, merely mocks them.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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