Black Scorpion (2001) Part 2

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

[The following is a continuation from the first half which you can read HERE. And yes, they were written separately over time, the first devoted to the first half of the one season of television and the later covered here to the final. You can tell a lot of additional emotion in the words what the final review and progression was.]

Halfway through viewing the Black Scorpion television series, you have a villain with dwarfism, more of a trickster who rides about on a hover board in the air (part of the show's then low budget CGI). He is dressed as Cupid firing arrows at bystanders that cause them to fall in love with the first person they see. He never returns after that one episode, and certainly is the most baffling moment of the whole season. He is not even the main villain of the episode, but there to cause mayhem in a scenario where the leads are paired with villains they had romances with, adding to the weirdness.

Black Scorpion, to be blunt, could have done with more of this as by the second half the sense of decline and numbness started to kick in trying to watch the show. It was doomed by the inherent structure of having to pad out forty plus minute episodes for its original station the Sci-Fi Channel, which would have been an hour with the advertisement breaks.  This is a huge crippling flaw, as you can feel the show having not enough to come up with in terms of good material, more so for a twenty two episode show, eventually draining for myself to see. It eventually has to rely on the same specific villains being brought up over and over even in cameos, as the show has established early in the season it can have even dead ones cloned back to life.

It is a programme where not a lot is sustained or memorable, and whilst the episodic nature could have been worked around, there is a sense too of the budget being way too small to really push into anything more than its template. It has to rely on a lot of dialogue and including all those poorly put together fight scenes with actors who (with sympathy for them) are clearly not trained even to do choreography. One episode is about virtual reality, which is strange as surely by 2001 the first wave of VR as a craze had died out in the late 1990s and would have waited to the 2010s for the tech to improve. It is mostly just to add production value in a fantasy medieval set or two for the deadly VR game, which allows Roger Corman to recycle his Deathstalker films for footage. Even then, the episode squanders cult actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as a fantasy grunt than a villain which could have boosted the show for a moment considerably. Set in a scenario where someone wants to use VR to help the homeless, by putting them in a virtual utopia, only for the mayor to use it for the prisoners in jail, Black Scorpion's political satire is still a mangled but fascinating mess even if less pronounced. Even a late running plot, of police chief Henry Strickland wanting to run for mayor, is quickly written off in two of the last episodes when it could have been rewarding to see where that went for the series finale.

A large part of the show, always and still the most compelling running joke, is that Mayor Worth is to blame for most villains due to his corruption. He even hires a band of female rockers, whose music is not as bad as everyone says but is grungy alt-rock with horror punk lyrics, to subliminally cause riots through their music for a mock morality campaign. That is satire the show had right in the palm of its hands and could have toyed with. That the show's humour instead is mostly bad puns, based on the villains' gimmicks, sadly becomes more and more the case in the last half of the season when before there was more playfully fun comedy. Even the villains themselves eventually become interchangeable baring one or two exceptions, like a hockey player that Mayor Worth accidentally has paralysed by his own team mates to rig a game, getting a robot suit from a mad scientist so brazen he enters a hospital room randomly and even has a glossy catalogue of his deadly tech.

Most of the time though the show is relying on buxom actresses in fetished costumes, neither helped by the fact the heroine's willingness to kill them is still there, even despite defending herself from accusations of this at one point. There are too many villains and too many killed off, preventing any from gaining traction through the series. Those that do sustain a bit of time are not really interesting either, baring their sidekicks of the opposite sex and common trademark of novelty themed bombs to throw out the back of the van like explosive ice cream scoops, as was the case in the first half of the series. Adam West, who was a stand-out in the early episodes as the Breathtaker, is reduced to a goon to eventually escape prison and is merely voiced acted, which is a miserable waste. The one figure who gets someone interesting is Stoney Jackson, as the Gangster Prankster, with an odd but memorable second episode where Jackson gets to stand out. That and the premise at least shake things up. That Argyle is forced against his will onto the side of the villains, actor BT one of the most charismatic of the leads, and where the plot eventually leads to. That, when Gangster Prankster is sick of a comedian mocking him on television, it leads to the creation of a device that causes people to expand like balloons and even explode when they laugh. It is bizarre, with a death-trap involving being tickled on the feet and Gangster Prankster wanting to cause mass explosions by dropping feathers on Angel City on a plane, but it is at least idiosyncratic for a series which is repetitive most of the time. If the show had kept to this warped, low budget pulp, it may have gotten more mileage for me.

Instead, I struggled eventually to even get through the series for writing a review, let alone to complete, all in spite of any episode by itself being innocuous. This is a show which, if shorter, would have been tolerable in spite of being very conventional, but as an episodic narrative where the characters will not progress it becomes harder to sit through for each episode's length and the amount of episodes. Michelle Lintel's lead has moments of conflict but really has no wiggle room to drastically evolve her character, whilst Scott Valentine, in-between directing one episode where we get an ice skating Black Scorpion for a memorable moment, plays a character who is pulverised all the time by villains. That also includes Black Scorpion herself, who usually kissing him afterwards, means that in-between their romantic chemistry, his character is also eventually going to be a masochistic if he was not before.

One of the few episodes to really take a challenge, and hence one of the only good ones, drastically upturns the show even in a scenario which eventually retcons this, bringing back normalcy by the end credits in a bizarre sci-fi twist. That Black Scorpion's identity is revealed and leading to everything getting darker - friends are forced to sleep in their cars due to their connections to Darcy, the police are after her, and Valentine's detective changes in his conflict of emotion. That this has to be amended by the lead getting a clone of herself, who is rapidly degenerating the moment she left the cloning tub due to an ever increasing brain, is weird yet gets into something compelling, including the continuous aspect of the lead having to fight against her alter ego, literalising it here.

It is one of the few compelling episode, and still in mind of having the bad puns and being around a villain from the first half of the series who is an evil photographer, the episode having to be forced out of all the series' bad creative decisions to be good. Even the two episode finale, which should be a major climax, feels brittle. Soupy Sales, famous among other aspect for his daily children's television show Lunch with Soupy Sales, plays a useless TV psychic who gets villains, abruptly just new clones than already in jail as they were, to cause crimes for him to predict. The resulting narrative has a lot of padding and does not feel like a jump in drama in the slightest. It becomes twisted in a way which is not dramatically compelling but just morally wrong too from one character, when Argyle has Darcy's dead father cloned to help her through a crisis of faith as a superhero. This would be the end of this version of the character, followed up by two compilation movies from episodes of the show, and frankly any semblance of this show working was clearly visible halfway through as not being there. Roger Corman whilst a man of huge talent is imperfect, and there is really a sense here, ironically, whilst he could make films cheaply and quickly in his golden era, that a television schedule is its own structure which could not be easily deal with. Black Scorpion had moments there were entertaining, but so much for a show I had to sit through for a long time I can gladly live without now.

Black Scorpion (2001) Part 1

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

I've grown tentacles in funny places

[As television series, even one season wonders that were cancelled, can have a lot of episodes, it would be better to cover them in parts, starting here with a curious tangent in Roger Corman's history...]

If we were to look at Roger Corman, the legendary producer and filmmaker, he has worked for so long you can forget that, alongside a legacy of people who brought into cinema and key films, that his career has many properties and even arcs to them. His sixties Edgar Allen Poe films for example are very different to his eighties films he produced. The period after the eighties is an obscure era in itself not as talked about, in which after his last directorial production Frankenstein Unbound (1990), he spent the time just as a producer including readapting films of his from the past as television movies like Humanoid from the Deep (1996). This television show is a curious tangent for him, when he mostly stayed to films, a spin-off of two films made beforehand. Black Scorpion (1995), originally with Joan Severance as the lead, is sexy Batman without subtlety in the comparison, a film with a figure in tight black spandex like the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher films, with the gadget leaden car, only with a very attractive woman as the hero with a nude sex scene at least in the first film. This was followed by Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1996). Both were screened on the Horror Channel, a British channel devoted to horror movies which however screened other genres occasionally and where I saw these films. The TV series, when learning of it, felt like an obscure thing out of reach, but thankfully a lot has changed in that time.

Michelle Lintel replaces Severance, a female police officer named Darcy Walker who, inspired by her late father, dons the mask of the Black Scorpion as a rouge figure, even hunted by the cops, to stop super villains who terrorise Angel City. Helped by Argyle (BT), a former gang member as her genius tech man, she can take on the villains. One of the immediate issues is that Black Scorpion the series is very repetitious. Each episode a villain of the week, many having two henchmen (or usually henchwomen). Many of them, due to car chases being more easier for the show to produce, usually have a van to drop explosives out the back of at Walker's car when she pursues them, be it exploding clocks to exploding sports balls. Usually the villain is a buxom model or genre actress in an elaborate costume. The villainess Aerobicide for example, a feminist exercise guru with testosterone stealing beer and robot limbs, is Renee Allman, defying how lack of testosterone works in men in the episode but having a small filmography including Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (1993) in her career. Her henchwomen are Ava Fabian, former Playboy's Playmate of the Month and actress, and Faith Salie, contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and journalist among other career roles, just to give you an example of the eclectic nature of these cases. There are exceptions, one a villainous male gardener with a giant green thumb, who even gets a tragic romance with the major's secretary and leading to a tangent, from Corman, where you get practical effect made monster plants which make weird noises for an episode.

On the police side, you have regular characters to prop up Walker's story. Scott Valentine plays Det. Steve Rafferty, the police officer who is trying to catch Black Scorpion. He has a complicated chemistry with Walker, including with Black Scorpion as a separate person, which comes to play when one villain uses hallucinatory gas and she is literally fighting herself. There is also a slovenly yet lovable police chief Capt. Henry Strickland (Guy Boyd), and two goofballs Slugger (Steven Kravitz) and Specs (Shane Powers), who I will admit will annoy some in the earliest episodes but do eventually stick with you. There is Enya Flack as "Tender Lovin", Argyle's girlfriend, who he has a loving if argumentative relationship with. When you have a work with a limited budget, you have to rely on the cast you have. This is something that I have especially seen in cancelled television shows I have watched where, especially with the episodic productions, it is always a virtue to have people with charisma to keep the show afloat. To the production's credit, Scott Valentine and Michelle Lintel do have a great chemistry with each other, though it is sad to know that Lintel's filmography is very tiny, with this show (and its own follow up film) one of the only prominent things within it.

Telling the narratives of each episode is pointless, as this is a wash and rinse show in the repetition of the same narrative, something which can work but is unfortunately worse here as the episodes are forty minutes long without advertising breaks, which feels too long in how they are usually structure. A reoccurring aspect, for most of the villains, is that most of them only exist because the mayor, Artie Worth (Robert Pine), is so corrupt it is comical and actually a funny piece of satire in itself. Cheating on his unseen wife with his buxom secretary Babette (Shae Marks), he can be involved with funding for toxic waste to be dumped into the sea, defunding the fire service and even paying a pyromaniac to burn things off the side, making it not a surprise many either try to kill him, kidnap him to the underground homeless person territory or break into his office almost every episode. Even his secretary has a plot for one episode, with the gardening villain who decides to create monstrous (practical effect created) muttering plants to exploit her attraction to power away from Artie. His character, to the credit of the show being deliberately broad, was a highlight in the first half of the series.

There are attempts at satire, where Angel City is built on many incompetent figures, but the show's various attempts at politics beyond their mayor do blunder along sadly the more it tries to be serious. It can be funny, such as the Black Scorpion mobile having some of its gadgets removed like the oil slick for being environmentally harmful, but many do radiate ill advised or confused tones. When tackling the homelessness issue, with cops taking them off street, they join the villainess in the episode even when Black Scorpion tries to convince them this is the wrong way to go. Any time this program deals with feminism, the show becomes awkward. That Walker has a tendency to kill her villains flippantly is common, especially with the knowledge that, with all the reused car chase footage of police cars crashing spectacularly, chasing Black Scorpion, there are likely a few officers who have at least retired from duty afterwards. The one running plotline throughout all the series is Dr. Phoenix (Raye Birk), a figure who can resurrect the dead villains to try to reform them, despite it clearly a misguided folly, even clone a character named Gangster Prankster from cremated ashes, a Joker stand-in he tries to turn into an upstanding citizen with a microchip implanted in his brain to induce electric shocks.

It is that episode, Episode 10, where the worse decisions involving the show trying to be serious are found. It starts off well, with a cop carnival to improve public relations with the police, so bad they have to dress up as clowns, but even the leads arrest Gangster Prankster based on presumption of him being a former criminal. This is not helped by the character is being played by an African American actor who, when he becomes a villain again, even says jokingly "Let my people go" whilst breaking out his henchmen. It is an episode difficult to love in the modern era in the worst vibes it portrays, which is worse as Stoney Jackson, an actor you may recognise from Walter Hill films or even being a prominent dancer in the Michael Jackson Beat It music video, is actually one of the best guest stars in the show, getting a Joker rip-off but making it his. He was already in the second Black Scorpion film before, and in terms of getting the most out of a character, including when he is a good guy and working for the police, in a comical cop outfit subduing armed suspects with pies, he is great.

For the first twelve episodes, this show has a cheese to it, knowing its own absurdity when one episode has an exercise bicycle that will electrocute the rider if they get under 25 miles per hour. Snippets of its co-producer, barring a Chopping Mall (1986) poster in alleyway fight, can be found if having to be toned down for television. The sensuality obviously had to be toned down, with a lot of cleavage if anything else the most titillating it can be. The fight scenes, regardless of what could be shown on television, are bad which makes the extended amount of them more of a chore as a result. When Black Scorpion relies on its comedy, you still have to put up with too many awful puns, but it helps bolster the show up considerably, even if this feels out-of-place at a time when superhero films where soon to be the juggernaut into the next two decade's worth of cinema. Lintel is okay, but it says a great deal that she stands out more when she gets to play Walker out-of-character when not showing a clear chemistry with Scott Valentine's character. Be it in hair curlers, dress and surly in a nightmare sequence as an annoyed trailer park wife for Valentine; as a ditzy gold digger undercover; or fighting herself as an evil Black Scorpion. Likewise characters like Argyle, with his argument heavy but loving relationship with Tender Lovin, or the police chief who is always close to retirement, are broad stereotypes but that is a pleasure to have. It argues that with a lot of television, the more I look at, they are the home for actors to really have to stretch themselves to keep their shows afloat if those programs were doomed from the start.

For this series especially, the surprise guests really add a bit to the production depending on the casting¹. In lieu to the comparison to Batman, cast from the 1960s Batman do make an appearance in the first twelve episodes, with Frank Gorshin playing the Clockwise, wishing to steal people's time by aging them artificially. He is great here, which was not a surprise as, among the other pleasures in the 1966 Batman film spun off that show, his performance as the Riddler was one of the best things in said movie. Adam West, as the Breathtaker, a former doctor whose accident losing both lungs led to a mental breakdown and psychopathic tendencies, is in two episodes so far, and if there was ever one good thing to take from this usually average series, it is the hope that Adam West got to play more villains in his career or should have. His humour is still there, stuck behind an oxygen tent/jail cell as he informs a newly created villainess that she should always warm the public on the news of her plans to destroy the city as a standard custom, but there is quite a bit of this where he is legitimately creepy or menacing, something which is unexpectedly exceptional to witness.

There are some bizarre cameos too, and the two that particularly stand-out are worthy to end this part on, just to give an idea of what the time period was like for them to happen. Alongside the fact that Michael J. Anderson, a regular David Lynch collaborator, shares the screen with Frank Gorshin, throwing exploding alarm clocks at the pursuing Black Scorpion car behind, you also have Laura Harring play an assistant to Dr. Phoenix in the episode where Adam West first appears. This same year, the original footage an unused television pilot from 1999, Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) would be released to acclaim with her in a main role, making Harring's tiny role in a sexy nurse's costume bizarre. More so as this means that there is a scene of her helping a newly resurrected Adam West regain his ability to develop words by exposing her cleavage to him. That she played Babette in Black Scorpion II: Aftershock adds to the curiosity of this. Even more strange? That Dave Mustaine of the thrash metal band Megadeth, and its founder, inexplicably appears in Episode 5 as a pyromaniac called Torchy Thompson. This is emphasised as an instrumental bridge of Hanger 18, one of their most recognisable songs, appears in a fight scene between him and Black Scorpion. Not even the main villain for that episode, as that belongs to a fireman who Walker falls for, it is one of the least likely things to happen. If anything, a series like this will intrigue for these unexpected pop culture tangents to be crossed.

 

[To Be Continued]

 

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1) Again, as earlier in the review, even an ultra obscure figure is fascinating especially if they were someone who stars in so much work their appearance was not a surprise. One personal highlight for one scene is Irwin Keyes, who I first learnt of as the monster in Frankenstein General Hospital (1988), an ultra obscure Frankenstein parody. He is easily recognisable even if he never has more than a cameo most of the time, and through his career he worked a lot so many have encountered him onscreen. Here he plays a man who is sick of the world and wishes to blow people up with a vest of cartoon dynamite, only for learning to juggle to bring meaning to his life even if he still has to be arrested.

Crumbs (2015)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó (with translation by Daniel Worku)

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Candy; Selam Tesfayie as Sayat; Mengistu Berhanu as the Shop Owner; Shitaye Abraha as the Witch; Tsegaye Abegaz as Santa Claus; Girma Gebrehiwot as The Man Who Listens

An Abstract Candidate

 

Miguel Llansó returns, although in this case the older title far from being advanced from actually proves to be a Rosetta stone for getting more out of the later (better known) Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019). I still like the later immensely, but Crumbs became the favourite of the two immediately.

It is effectively an Ethiopian set sci-fi film, but the obvious thing to notice is how much Western pop culture is deliberately included. This could have easily been trite, like many post-post-modern illustrative artists I have seen on sites like Juxtapoz magazine that, whilst still are great illustrations, are beholden to knowing what the symbolism is. I have always worried, maybe irrationally, that especially in the modern day where "content" and "stuff" is more of a concern for companies to pump out to audiences, not dissimilar at all to the goods produced cheaply in pound stores or more expensive boutiques, whether any of this material will be left for scholars in a thousand of years or not, even that which is loved and became art to its fans. I am also someone who actually, on the opposite side to that opinion, as an admirer of Surrealism's ethos including admiring low culture, someone who would wish for even the content itself to celebrated even if just manufactured, that as long as there is a way to turn something into art, it is worth saving even if to be deliberately camp or perverse. A lot of the illustrations or art I have seen however, from the likes of Juxtapoz, whilst still good sadly still are beholden to their symbolism needing to be known with not much else between the lines, which would be a nightmare for scholars a hundred years down the line to appreciate even with context, and just an excuse for perverting brand names in surreal psychedelic imagery. Here with Crumbs however, there is something more profound in the end.

The absurdity is there. Actor Daniel Tadesse returns, and this time he has to locate Santa Claus to get tickets for the spaceship to return to his home, whilst his love interest Selam Tesfayie prays to the holy shrine of basketball legend Michael Jordan and lives in a bowling alley where it has seemingly come to life on its own will. This is film where, in terms of one-off imagery, an Ethiopian Santa Claus (played by Tsegaye Abegaz) smashing a children's bicycle in the head of someone wearing a Superman costume is something I actually witnessed and can write about. However, glacial and a road movie in its own way, there is something much more profound about Crumbs which means more.

It is felt fully when, far later in the short feature length film's narrative, we enter a cinema which has been playing a Turkish rip-off of Superman continuously. In a world where no one really remembers the past, believing a toy children's sword or a Donatello ninja turtle figurine are all artefacts of ancient warriors, this offers as much as its narrative the subtext that the artefacts we churned out on mass in our pass, whether of worth or cheap pound store junk, lasts a hundred years down the line (especially if made of plastic) and now is found by the survivors in this world. Here Michael Jackson is not the figure we have him as, controversial yet a huge mega star, but a legendary singer presumed to have been a farmer at the same time he made the Dangerous (1991). If anything, Llansó offers the perfect attitude to how to deal with pop culture in art. Name drop the material, which if you get adds new layers, but force them in a strange scenario where name or brand recognition are not the point but how these objects are reinterpreted in the environment. It is perfect in dealing with a problem, especially with this era now we have to add post to post-modernism, which is going to befall media which attempts to deal with all the culture around it that has been made and still will be.

More so as, in the other virtue of Crumbs, Llansó found enough surreality and scale in the real world. I liked Jesus Shows... immensely, but Crumbs wins out between the two for managing to find real life locations straight from a dream reality. Staying entirely in the country of Ethiopia, it is subversive and profound in itself to have this story in this country, where the cast of local actors of the territory and they get to play out a scenario with this much imagination. The manmade environment around them itself, as someone who admits to having had dreams of strange buildings made from the most banal of places like supermarkets, are just as evocative as the strange content the director-writer added himself. Railway tracks nearly to sink in the sea, the bowling alley itself is an atmospheric place where a bowling ball randomly rolls down a corridor by its own will, and there is the stunning if lived-in zoo where Santa is found. That last location, a masterstroke for the production to have found, is a vast extravagantly decorated environment found in the country of Ethiopia which offers far more production value than if made from CGI. As much as the film is deeply silly on purpose, like this being a world of a "Justin Bieber IV" existing, it both has a greater weight of imagination due to the production values the filmmaker found (or found in a discount store) but also a salient political commentary that is inherently within this material.

In this world in particularly, the apocalypse which we learn of that transpires did not really effect a lot. The metropolises and environments are abandoned, but the habitants have survived, with none of the gravity of a film set in a Western first world country like the United States saying everything would be a disaster. No one cares what has happened, and so much plastic or pot materials left after the end's wake is now more valuable than it was back when civilisation existed. The greater concern here now is being attacked by someone whilst you acquire a Christmas tree for your love one's collection of dwarf trees. Even Nazi imagery, one character wearing a Nazi uniform with Mickey Mouse ears and a gas mask, is no longer threatening in the end of the world, not even able to convince the store owner who sells artefacts the pay more by threatening him with a toy gun, and the traditional folklore and culture is still able to survive. A witch exists, and still thrives, only now she has the benefit to having a ceramic cup to drink from and little trinkets to be paid with. Even a figure like Michael Jordan now is a deity here to light incense to, rather than just the legendary basketball and Space Jam (1996) forgotten about.

It is also of note that, in a country like Ethiopia or non-Western countries, the complete saturation of our pop culture bleeding into theirs is inherently political for how it is matter of fact and has no power, merely objects in the background or trade. It evokes the film ‎Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016), from the Philippines director Khavn De La Cruz, in that for all its tragedy and surrealism another aspect I still remember is how, in its great production value, there was so much noticeable American pop culture (branded clothes from the likes of Pixar's Cars) among the trash and debris of its mostly impoverished or homeless cast. It disconcerts how much of the consumer goods floods of ours flood other countries, but it is thankfully not as powerful as we fear, as they will eventually become meaningless or at least not merely something to have to buy, merely symbols having to fight with others based on an individual's priority rather than what it sold to them. It is befitting, returning back to the Superman imagery here, Superman becomes a symbol of hope and virtue in this world, which would make the DC characters' original creators still proud, but that the Turkish knock-off is shown, still liable in itself to have inspired a young child in Turkey as much as the American Christopher Reeves films of bigger budgets.

Crumbs in itself, whilst also hilarious and a thing of beauty, gains a lot from this, and it now makes the more accessibly weird Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway more meaningful as it was in this exact tone of using pop culture, taking Soviet cold war era paranoia and its pop culture and smashing it together. Knowing as well that Miguel Llansó can slow down, let you breathe in a fully fleshed out world seen in less than seventy minutes as much as throw you through the lunacy of the later film, itself is fantastic as it means he is capable of being unpredictable and entice with what he can do with this distinct aesthetic attitude.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Post-Modern/Weird

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

Gumnaam (1965)

 

Director: Raja Nawathe

Screenplay: Dhruva Chatterjee

Based on And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Cast: Nanda as Asha; Manoj Kumar as Anand ; Pran as Barrister Rakesh; Helen as Kitty Kelly; Mehmood as the Butler; Dhumal as Dharamdas; Madan Puri as Dr. Acharya; Tarun Bose as Madhusudan Sharma; Manmohan as Kishan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #222

 

Here, life is gorier than death.

With its opening Gumnanm starts off well bolting out of the gates - a man orders another man to be run over, with a will being immediately passed on, only to be shot by a mysterious man dead and the film to kick into the opening credits of a city road at night with a mix of proto garage rock guitar against orchestral strings for emphasis. Even the fact it is not really a horror film, instead adapting the Agatha Christie story And Then There Were None, is compensated by the fact that you get a lot of gothic moments and even sets straight out of a horror story. The one tragic aspect is that, unfortunately, Gumanaam does have a bad ending. Following ten people and an airplane staff member who are taken to a mansion on an island where the ten chosen individuals will be murdered one by one in a revenge plot, I feel this has to come up front in the narrative, as this is a pitch perfect example of when tying up the loose ends and concluding the results to leave everyone happy can ruin all the good.

Particularly when everything beforehand is very good, in its own idiosyncratic logic as a Bollywood film made in the sixties with its own distinct structure, giving this a huge distinction separate from other films of this type of plot. Ten people are selected for a trip to a luxurious mansion. Even this prologue, to set that detail up, has its own literal song and dance. Many will know this film because its main theme played here, the rock n roll/surf guitar hybrid Jaan Pehechan Ho, was later used in the 2001 adaptation of Ghost World, but in context you have a nightclub of Western iconography and sixties colour (with purple and pink prominent throughout), with white suits on men, elegant Western night dresses for women, and Lone Ranger black masks for everyone. This immediately establishes that, as a pulp/psychotronic or just merely distinct piece of pop culture from India, this will be idiosyncratic.

One logic step you need to adapt to is that, of course, a lot of Bollywood including this one will have musical numbers even in the least expected genres. Bollywood's reinterpretation of A Nightmare on Elm Street (Mahakaal (1994)) had one, so will this. It has an odd touch in that, even when the cast learn that they will be killed off one-by-one, and even after this happens, they will still have comedy scenes, a romance between two of the cast members which includes a musical sequence in the rain, a trope in Bollywood which gets around their censorship with a very explicitly symbolism and in the lyrics, and musical numbers every least expected place in general. And yet, if you let yourself go with this, it does not prove an issue at all. In fact, whilst not three hours long like many Bollywood films, the two and a half hour length actually proves a virtue in that you get to live with these characters even if they are archetypes. The songs themselves for the cast even here add a lot more to their personalities by allowing them to stand out.

Archetypes definitely have to be on mind as there are aspects here which are not acceptable today or are part of cultural customs which would not be held high on. This film does have the duality between the chaste, good female character in Asha (Nanda), the niece of the deceased man, and Kitty Kelly (played by Helen), the later a Westernised figure who represents decadence played Helen with all the fashion iconography of the West, including the odd decision to go swimming in her normal clothes at one point, and the prolific and legendary Nanda wearing traditional dress. However, thankfully even this film undercuts this at points despite being embroiled in this stereotyping - you do actually like Kitty Kelly, even if she is complicit in the original murder, even having her own musical number despite all the deaths that have happened of just enjoying life, and there is a sequence where the two women get drunk and have a drunken musical number which is almost triumphant, all in spite of the male lead acting in a chauvinist brutal way to undercut it afterwards. There is also the butler, played by legendary comedic role veteran Mehmood, who is a character you eventually realise is played by an actor in blackface, or explicitly more faked tanned, his darker skin at one point used as detraction by Kitty Kelly in one moment her character is undercut in a terrible way.

It has not aged well, but with the actor Mehmood even at his most buffoonish, the butler also happens to be the best character of the film. Making his entrance on the levitating onto his feet on the dining table in a body bag, the Butler, despite being a nameless figure, stands out even as a broad cartoonish character for fun, a figure I immediately was won over with as the one person in the island who will not be killed, having to make sure everyone is fed and the mansion is kept running, and can act like his own Greek chorus to everyone as a result. In response to one of the most evocative touches of the film, a female voice singing through the island the cast is one a song of "someone is anonymous " that everyone and the viewer hears frequently, he has heard that cursing song so much, a "hit in the jungle", that it annoys him, and even the prop of his lilac tea set, stuck to the serving tray, becomes memorable for Mehmood waving it about. Even in mind to the problematic nature of the character being in blackface, and a ridiculous bowl cut hair style and Chaplin moustache that suggests just a cheap comedy figure, he becomes a sincerely lovable figure. He even gets a musical number, just after the one scene of racism, where he proclaims regardless of the colour of his skin he is still a great lover, which does not deal with the tastelessness of before, but offers a soothing pill as he gets to be a lothario in a nearly surreal dance number in his dreams of ancient psychotronic temple architecture, with dancing women, psychedelic colours and statues with flashing lights built into them.

It does become a chimera of emotions due to the tonal and genre shifts, justifying the gothic horror tag for its brief moments in the holy temple in the environment, and it works as much due to director Raja Nawathe making this a stylish film to match the content. The colours, the canted camera angles etc. but also completely inspired moments such as a female character playing a grand piano intertwining with the non-diagetic score at the same time, all of which makes sure this never becomes a dull or conventional piece, something which sadly one could have done with this premise. It is entirely with a shame the film has to have a conclusion, and that the one chosen was what we end up with. [Major Plot Spoilers] Between the fact that it involves a character never seen, baring in disguise, as the culprit, and a generic crime related explanation, it absolutely feels out of place even if it might have been impossible for Gumnaam to fully be satisfying, between the premise's contrivances to how to even explain the ghostly female voice we here throughout. Even how abruptly the film ends, resolving itself with an airplane acting as a deus ex machina with police on board, falters the film. [Spoilers]. It is undeniably, though, something pure in terms of a snapshot of a non-Western culture's take on cinema, and all the wild playfulness and distinction that can entail, in how genre tropes cliché in the West even at this time are turned on their head and what appealed to its nation's audience.. It has obvious issues, including problematic content, but this indefinable film in terms of genre is compelling for never, until that unfortunate ending, being predictable.

A Holy Place (1990)

 

Director: Djordje Kadijevic

Screenplay: Djordje Kadijevic

Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol

Cast: Dragan Jovanovic as Pop Toma; Branka Pujic as Katarina; Aleksandar Bercek as Zupanski; Mira Banjac as Gospodarica Zupanski; Danilo Lazovic as Doros; Maja Sabljic as Lenka; Predrag Miletic as Nikita; Rados Bajic as Spira

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #221

 

Made in the former Yugoslavia, Djordje Kadijevic's trajectory as a filmmaker before this film is fascinating. Originally making films set in World War II, his tackling of the subject matter was incredibly controversial, forcing him into television production. Far from more restrictive, Kadijevic thrived, claiming under his belt a cult hit when he transitioned to horror and folklore narrative. The She-Butterfly (1973), adapting a story by Milovan Glišić, would develop a reputation over the decades as an one long horror tale for his homeland the same way horror tales, shot for the likes of the BBC, would gain a cult reputation for people who caught them off television in the United Kingdom in the seventies. With A Holy Place, he turns his attention to the legendary author Nikolai Gogol.

Gogol is someone I have complete admiration for as an author, initially for his dark humoured satire Dead Souls (1842), where a man learns he can step up the ranks of society by collecting the deceased of lord's records, which have not been officially decreed as dead, and pass them off as his own villagers. Gogol, alongside a sudden strike of creative block which tragically fell on him at the end of his career, leading a second part of Dead Souls dealing with the redemption of the novel's lead to be left an unfinished fragment, is ironically someone who is acclaimed as a realist author yet has two adaptations to cinema based on a horror tale. This is not surprising in some ways as, in his work to depict reality juggling between a satire in play form of bureaucracy to humorous documents of peasant life, adapting his land's folklore is as much an act of recreating his home land on paper. It is only with the irony that the tale in question has been adapted twice, as both one of the only Russian horror films in existence, Viy (1967), and this Serbian (former Yugoslavian) adaptation in 1990.

In both, a young priest in training has an unfortunate encounter with an elderly woman who lets him and his friends sleep at her home in the middle of nowhere, in Viy being ridden on like a horse, in A Holy Place a much more violent case equivalent to a mugging as in both the old woman is clearly a witch. Both lead to the priest struggling back only to find a young woman in their place once he is able to escape the witch's clutches. This is immediately where Kadijevic's adaptation with his own screenplay takes a new direction, as whilst most would still be shocked, the priest is already embraced with the woman on the ground, in lust with her white garter and stocking covered legs each side of him, only for her to die.

A Holy Place openly deviates from the source, in that the priest is abruptly selected to says prayers for the young daughter of a rich man who chose him, revealed to be the woman he encountered on the previous night, forced to read prayers on three nights whilst she is far removed from life and death as a supernatural threat to his life. The original Viy whilst macabre has a very quick pace, at only less than eighty minutes, and a greater sense of farce, both in its priest character both eventually being left constantly drunk and shoved around over the three nights, and that the film, both adaptation the source material fully and with the involvement of veteran stop motion animation and fantasy film maker Aleksandr Ptushko, has more practical effects and monsters appearing as the nights continue. A Holy Place is more sombre, far darker and especially more sexual.

Surprisingly more sexual as, in one part of the review that is time stamped to a specific time, the British would finally be able to see A Holy Place legally in a limited edition bonus alongside the Russian Viy, from a distributor called Eureka under their Masters of Cinema label, which is strange as Djordje Kadijevic's film has been decreed suitable for twelve year olds to see despite being an incredible explicit film in the little it has. Namely, that, once the priest appears to the home of the young woman, it is increasingly obvious there are many sinister things going on. Originally held as a figure of grace, she is significantly more cruel and sinister as the priest hears stories from others, even witnessing her work first hand when the dog trainer on the premises is now a dumb individual barely coherent as he wanders the premises. The mother gone, the relationship with her father is even darker, including once the priest learns of the erotic painting said father commissioned of his beloved daughter only he can see.

Naturalistic, as was the case of The She-Butterfly, A Holy Place is grounded in a reality but the supernatural invades. It is ironic that the film, for that one British release in 2021, was limited edition only, with the wears and tears of preservation, as whilst Viy is the adaptation that has become legendary, A Holy Place in its deviations and expansions on the Gogol tale is actually superior in other areas to those Viy succeed in. It is not horror in the sense it is meant to scare, but its macabre narrative does entice. Moments which never appear again, like the fact the father is haunted by his late wife, whose painting will vanish from the frame, have an impact as a result.

Those which linger as even more striking. The young woman Katarina as a figure becomes significantly darker as you learn more of her. I did not expect this review to lead to the following, but she literally castrates men, by stomping on their crotches repeated, which can almost be feminist were it not for the fact, trying to seduce one of the older maids, she is a sadist in general to anyone. The ending of A Holy Place is not dissimilar to Viy's, baring that it excludes the fully monstrous in favour of a matter-of-fact bleak ending, or that this does not end with two random priests abruptly undercutting the narrative with black humour. A Holy Place, if you can see it, is definitely of reward.

William, the New Judo Master (2016)

 

Directors: Omar Guzmán and Ricardo Silva

Screenplay: Omar Guzmán and Ricardo Silva

Cast: Arak Bernal, William Clauson, Edward Coward, Pako Houston and Hoze Meléndez

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Beginning with a prologue, of a body of a being split in two after defeat, one half landing into the seas and the other to the earth below, the Mexican avant-garde film William, the New Judo Master to be frank does not go the direction you would presume, but for myself also becomes disjointed. The prologue sets up an immortal being who moves forwards in their existence in a world of continual death, and we can definitely establish the Devil is here too, with his head completely covered with black fur, with horns and glowing red eyes, watching on in his beige suit at the world around him.

Among the many tangents is of Swedish-American singer William Clauson, one of the first people to introduce the song La Bamba outside of Mexico in the fifties, here playing himself an old man who lives in exile in Mexico, eventually moving to a place of care whilst his home is completely ransacked by removal people, a mysterious safe becoming their obsession as they cannot open it. Among such tangents includes an older musical impersonator of Clauson, who has hired three male sex workers to love him, who get the most prominent scenes but is one of a few. In the middle of all this are various different pieces. We see the oldest tree in existence, at 95550 years old, the voice over from the immortal being (also playing a fictionalised version of the real Clauson), almost becoming the lament of the tree itself as it contemplates 9,550 years of existence and what transpired since then. We see a ship being sunk deliberately and shots of nature among many.

A lot of the film does evoke the many films of this ilk from the 2010s, many from the film festival and especially becoming much more easier to witness on the likes of the MUBI streaming platform, the many prolific films which defy a real categorisation that are a series of vignettes and aspects, blurring documentary with other factors. Some succeed, but there are many and they can seem completely disjointed in context. The theme that William... is grasping at, for me personally, is very simplistic. Quite nihilistic, as we vary between an older man who talks of removing his ten dollar bill from a collection plate at a church when it is passed among the church congregation a second time, to the immortal being lamenting over tombstones everyone they know being dead. It does, frankly, come off as sycophantic as a lot of films and media from the time it comes from have this same mentality, losing profoundness as a result.

There are also many scenes which never seem to connect. What is the connection, with a startling sequence, of a military boat being deliberately sunk, with the cameras inside allowing us to see its first person sinking into the ocean, to the older Clauson impersonator, whose life seems mainly to drift among bars at night and has a couple of musical numbers, one breaking from the static still camera shots with a gliding camera around his performance? Or the scenes of quad and motocross bikes on roads at night, soaked in orange-yellow street lights, and even involve a quad bike dragging a casket behind itself, again another vivid image? It evokes Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), a work of seemingly separate fragments which yet connected together with profoundness in his chronology mostly based in Japanese culture of the early nineteen eighties, but the vividness of that essay film was stronger whilst here, with its scenes involving cuts to microbes under a microscope in monochrome and tangents with fishermen swatting off squid, the images fascinate, but they do not fully connect. Even Clauson's story feels like it could have been expanded further, as his narrative intertwines Mexico and Sweden alongside the United States, including the fact he opened a Mexican restaurant in Stockholm later in his life, after a career with popularity and even some film roles, and that William... briefly goes to Sweden itself to a sanatorium that has long been abandoned he went to.

The structure of the film itself was what failed me on this, with disparate pieces that, separate, would be compelling by themselves stretched out. As they are, a lot of them do feel lacking for everyone which does stand out. Some, especially the man with his three rented lovers, especially could have been more fleshed out and compelling, only reduced to fragments including a scene involving violent use of a plastic bag. Even the striking nature of the film, in capturing distinct visuals, does suffer from the sense of the film not fully connecting. The film, neither quite documentary nor fiction, does fascinating but also frustrates at the same time.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Contemplative

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

Black Night (2005)

 

a.k.a. Nuit noire

Director: Olivier Smolders

Screenplay: Olivier Smolders

Cast: Fabrice Rodriguez as Oscar; Yves-Marie Gnahoua as La femme africaine; Philippe Corbisier as Oscar enfant; Iris De Busschere as Le petite fille; Raffa Chillah as Le petite fille; Raymond Pradel a sLe taxidermiste; Marie Lecomte as Marie Neige; Luc David as Le médecin

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

“I was afraid to sleep, the night seemed so peopled with ghosts. My fear and my desire to see them caused events which I recognized very well without really understanding them.”

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Set in a world which is permanently dark, where the sun only shines for fifteen seconds a day, Black Night is firmly among the vein of surreal films which exist in their own logic. Immediately we are in the position where everything is subjective when we are introduced to protagonist Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez). In the middle of a therapy session with his doctor, examining his thoughts for himself, we see a back-story of a happy childhood with his sister which was cut short by a shape shifter who ripped her limbs off, only with the factor that it was with his own hands (and scissors) she died afterwards. The therapist dismisses all this, the dream in a subjective image set in a theatre, with two creepy identical old men loom over the top as puppet masters. Reality for Oscar in an already abstract world is distorted for him.

An entomologist, one who specialises in filming insects, his days are greatly subverted when a woman (Yves-Marie Gnahoua) is found one day in his bed, pregnant and ill, his perspective of reality drastically under suspicion in what happens. Whilst shot in digital, Olivier Smolders' film is steeped in an atmosphere that is distinct, feeling at times likes the work of an installation filmmaker. His world even in the digital camera lens (and a CGI moon) is approaching chiaroscuro in its use of darkness and shadow. Set in a time in the past, it certainly looks of an old world, befitting its content. Animals will play a part, but especially with the real insects interspersed throughout. Some moments, like one pinned on a board, will upset but you get to the many, from stag beetles to insects, which in intercutting to will build the strange mood of the film with vibrancy. Magnificent creatures, they themselves are not creepy for me at all, though there are scenes of actors with them crawling on them, but their prescience are living objects alien to reality, such as those whose look like living dried leaves among examples, creatures a sense of they are the occupants of a dream the viewer has watching this film that actually from the reality of nature.

One aspect which does need to be addressed, as it is far more complicated, is that heavily layered aesthetic of African culture which could boarder on pure exoticism, including that a huge part of the film being that the woman in Oscar's bed is African, part of a narrative turn where his true childhood is exposed by a film he is provided, not like the one he fetishises in a shrine to his sister. Just a decade later to the 2000s the use of other cultures became more of an issue and Black Night's use of an aesthetic of an imaginary Africa could likely have become a problematic appropriate in another film. One immediate thing of note however is that Olivier Smolders was born in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, a city and country that would no longer exist only a few years after his birth, and are now known as Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively. Only declaring independence in 1960, this becomes a more troubling subject in how, under King Leopold II, the Belgium colonisation of the Congo is steeped in a horrifying and bloody history, but at the same time I do not suspect Smolders came to this film's content ignorant of any of this, or that even merely evoking this past is not without meaning in not even hiding its existence.

In fact, learning this detail adds an even ominous edge to the film, one that I highly suspect is intended when, for Oscar's place of work at a Natural History Museum, Smolders is clearly filming in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Erected by Leopard II, and naturally as much a source of controversy in the decades that past as his statues erected of him from after his 1909 death, it is naturally an institution stepped in a moral crisis in that it was originally a museum to colonialism, which it has had to deal with in its own renovations over the dexades. Whilst there is a danger in Olivier Smolders having his film play out with a lens of an imagined Africa as a European film, or that he never addresses the violent colonial past, this context adds a great deal especially as the film's dreamlike narrative disrupts itself. A huge plot point reveals the woman in his bed as his sister, evoked from his father's past in the African continent, and for all the potential issues of its fetishism, the film's nightmarish qualities push for Oscar being a man with layers to him. None so much as an unhealthy fascination with his sister, specifically a perceived image he had of a sister beforehand, a white girl, who even haunts his real sister briefly and may have likely shot her in the head in one scene.

Black Night pushes further into the surreal when, faced with the body of his sister, Oscar decides to create a human cocoon. This does lead to another moment depending on how one interprets the narrative where Black Night could be problematic - as the black sister turns into a white woman leaving the cocoon - but even how this moves on in itself is significantly more complicated. The other actress, with striking eyes and visibly cast both for her willingness to do nudity and to look completely alien even to this world, plays a figure who is both is Oscar's fantasy but also meant to be his sister, the perverseness of the narrative turn address in one casting choice. His obsession with his sister is inherently held as a fixation, one where the versions (his idealised child one, the real one and this cocoon one) blur at one point.

Said cocoon sister also has a stinger to impale men, so Black Night is as much stoking in horror as much as its own form, particularly as among its other aesthetic aspects including is taxidermy, one of Oscar's colleagues in his own world of preserving animals and letting this woman see his mural of preserved frogs set to drinking absence in a bar which is, with real ones, as macabre as that suggests. The fact that Oscar tries to turn his real sister into his idealised one is itself political as it is psycho dramatic - if you were to consider that even evoking Belgium's colonial past is itself a metaphor for the European subconscious with its own past, something Belgium has still had to struggle with and is something many countries have had to, be it after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 or times of questioning the representation of that past, Oscar rejecting his own life is problematic with the act in a literal sense, only for it to be impossible to erase the real life. That this is also psychodramatic, that his psychosis and the obsession with the idealised sister are there, complicates things. That his new cocoon sister, baring a leopard print coat, more of a cloak of fur, is eroticised and naked, with her striking red hair, adds a further layer of complexity in this character's mind, a representation or a character or both.

Certainly, even if the themes this film have become more sensitive to the Belgian based director's country of living, which is had to still deal with and for some may have not even properly addressed, the context means that this film cannot be dismissed and now gains new complications in its favour to mean something. Black Night is hallucinatory and meant to keep one as a viewer off guard, with a world where Oscar is haunted. A strange man is haunting a man in a leopard pelt in the park, a white man who is a child killer, the same one evoked in Oscar's idealised childhood who mutilated his sister, and when the sun comes out for longer and purges the world in light, not only does the museum come in disarray due to film no longer being possible to shot, least to one of his colleagues, wild animals suddenly roam the streets. Real ones, be it a zebra in a back alley, a leopard and even an elephant. The ending becomes entirely in Oscar's mind as reality, and even when it comes to one key aspect I have wrangled with, the director himself has described in an interview that this past he refers to "in spite of historians’ efforts, stems from a kind of fantasy-ridden delirium sometimes actually quite far removed from the real Belgian Congo"¹, he himself aware of the fantasy that this world evokes, including an awareness of its fiction. The tensions of the film, entirely in dream logic, are found everywhere, even in a scene of a schoolgirl, visiting a museum and played by an actress, randomly coming into Oscar's room and seducing him, only for it to merely scratch him and for her to disappear. A sense of this film having an unreality that forces the viewer out of their comfort, even in the mid-2000s digital sheen, is completely successful, and even if there are questions to still ask in terms of the subjects Black Night evokes in its images, it is a compelling film that will unpack more layers and interpretations when seen over and over.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Mindbender/Ominous

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

 

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1) The full interview can be read HERE.