The Jackhammer Massacre (2004)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Daniel Benton and Joe Castro

Cast: Aaron Gaffey as Jack Magnus; Kyle Yaskin as Mike Fletcher; Nadia Angelini as Sam; Trudy Kofahl as Tori Magnus; Jill Moore as Bobbie; Bart Burson as Zach; Evan Owen as Brian; Desi O'Brian Wilson as Nelson; Christopher Michaels as Roger; John Sarley as Darren; Joe Haggerty as Borris; Scott St. James as Taylor; Staas Yudenko as Vic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #156

 

If you don't understand, you need help!

The Jackhammer Massacre exists in an unfortunate time period - that, whilst films from the early 2000s have been restored by the likes of Arrow Video for Blu Ray, it is late enough that, whilst so many films from the eighties have been restored regardless of public consensus, this and so many from the early days of straight to video are in obscurity still and do not have the aura of their era¹. In Joe Castro's career, this is a shame as this is arguably his most cohesive film, flaws and all, if you ever wanted a micro budget and equally bleaker take on Abel Ferrera's The Driller Killer (1979), at least for the first half, combined with a slasher film. Even if it is still with boilerplate plotting and restrictions due to his budget, I have to admire Castro and co-writer Daniel Benton, the later who I criticised for Near Death (2004), for a film that is interesting even if you feel dirty watching it.

And bleak is the right term as, set up to start at the middle of the tale only to go backwards to the beginning of his downfall, the film follows Jack Magnus (Aaron Gaffey), a newly successful businessman who is also unfortunately into drugs. Never was there an appropriate anti-drug horror film, as his friend ODs on a new narcotic at the dealer's, before Jack himself loses everything and becomes a vagrant, working as a dishevelled night time guard to a storage building. And here, the budget and aesthetic really help as, shot in Los Angeles, nothing looks glamorous in the slightest, casting unknowns as meth addicts and ordinary environments without any heightened glamour to them appropriately bleak. The result is far danker than its grim tone even initially suggests. Even when two female actresses, one of them adult star Rachel Rotten, are willing to act entirely topless in their small roles, everything is so seedy to the point even the casual nudity is uncomfortable.

Joe Castro has always had a greater visible affinity for more nihilistic tones, his practical effects realistic and grotesque, so having this premise is actually to his advantage. Daniel Benton, who only worked with Castro here and on Near Death, wrote one off episodes for television like Dynasty in the earlier part of his career, so a melodramatic tale where Jack is paranoid, in debt for his addiction, and eventually seeing the ghost of his friend telling him to kill people is just an exaggeration of plots Benton likely has worked with. It can be unbearably grim, hence The Driller Killer comparison is apt, only becoming absurd when a drug dealer shots him up with a concoction of PCP, heroin and meth to kill him, only to push him over the edge and grab a jackhammer. It is not dismissible to Ferrera, playing the central lead in him film, acquiring a drill powered by a backpack battery and assaulting the homeless as part of his own bleak film.

Alongside getting a forearm so swelled and malformed, due to how many needles have pierced the veins, that he has a gaping elbow with enough room to store things in, Jack also hallucinates about beings with needle faces and the D.E.A being after him, part of Castro's growing interest in computer effects alongside slowing down footage to show drug effects or have his best friend, as a hallucination, be transparent talking to him. When Jack decides to go on a rampage and kill anyone who enters the tool shop, his best friend informs him that his paranoia is right, leading to him fully going off the deep end....

....which leads The Jackhammer Massacre turning silly when it ends as a slasher film, where a removal team (a group of men and one woman) come to catalogue the contents of the storage building, but it is strangely charming. After all the darkness of before, and that this has been a slasher film which has actually built up its villain with for more detail than most films in this genre, it actually feels successful for the last thirty minutes to indulge with this genre shift. To have characters, even at work let alone with someone being missing, to suddenly make out, or the clear excuses for many shirtless muscular men onscreen, is still silly, but for once a slash plot is not padded out for ninety minutes and feels a nice change of pace.

Certainly in context this is far from a great film, but truth be told, this was a pleasant surprise from Joe Castro. That is in mind that two-thirds are as bleak as hell, but the sucker punch of what felt like a grim horror drama, only to spring out as a slasher film where the serial killer has been build out in depth, actually is interesting and applaudable. Aaron Gaffey's performance, as everyone else's, is shaky but the film does manage to go from a dishevelled drug addict stumbling over to a drinking fountain for water, than later this same character becoming a jackhammer welding manic ranting to a victim that he knows where the hidden cameras are, whilst making it all make sense. The premise, because drugs are a real concern, can be seen as tasteless, this film having a tightrope to walk, but it manages to succeed. Unlike the many contrived ways Freddy Krueger managed to come back, this at least had a (PCP laced) logic of some form.

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1) We got David DeCoteau's Final Stab (2001), his take on Scream (1996), on Blu Ray from Massacre Video, so anything could happen. 

Summer's End: The Legend of Samhain (2002)

Director: Timothy Whitfield

Screenplay: Timothy Whitfield

Cast: Spring Hill as Jill; Sandra Goff as Sue; Sarah Elizabeth Vernon as Tiffany; Mike DeFrancesco as Det. Morris; Jillian Swanson as Valerie Morris; Timothy Whitfield as Jack / Proff. Richardson; Barry P. Cook as Det, Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #155

[Major Plot Spoilers Ahead]

 

You're a big dumb male, and I don't like you anymore.

I realise now I am willing to watch any horror film as long as I can at least gain something of note. This is why I am watching certain horror films now more for looking at the locations set in time, then for any of the kill scenes or plot. Even in higher budget examples, it is actually the Blumhouse films which I am wary of, let alone the many bad horror films made by Hollywood studios, because they seem colourless. A film like Summer's End, a micro budget slasher, is indefensible. It is clearly concerned to have a semblance of a story but is more interested in a body count and titillation. Perversely however I have found myself more intrigued by the world of car parks and woodland, that the corridors and rooms being used are more than likely those of people in the production or someone they know.

The pre-credit prologue exemplifies this. Baring a flashback, using turn-of-the-Millennium grain effects in monochrome to look like a double murder taking place in 1957, the main sequence is another in the (then) present day. It is entirely an excuse because the actress cast in the scene was one of two in the film willing to do actual nudity on camera. That sounds crass, but as will be gotten into later in the review, you realise the absurdity of this need in cinema to titillate especially on a micro budget. Especially in micro budget cinema there is also a strangeness to this act for a film's saleability, a weird ritual made more striking especially as you may have limited access to who you can hire, and actresses may not for understandable reason be comfortable in being naked onscreen at said budget. The scene stands out, especially when it is definitely a person's house they are using. Not a set, but someone's homes, including the fact two actors are simulating sex in an outdoor hot tub by the side. It looks like a hot tub some of you, my dear readers, may have bought and may have recreated a similar scene with your significantly other in.

In my own headspace, as a hulking behemoth in an orange Jack O'Lantern mask and the long black hair of a pro wrestler ruins the night by stalking the two, my focus is more on the curious documentary realism finding itself in a genre film due to budgetary restrictions. It is in the little details, that the front door is rigged to chime with bird tweets when opened, or the Cookie Monster jar on top of the fridge. If you have no idea the "Cookie Monster" is from the show Sesame Street, imagine a blue monster jar, sticking out due to its colour in a muted kitchen and an object you might find at an American thrift store. Many horror fans would probably not care or notice; in my position, these little details are now more fascinating then the plot mechanics of a slasher boiled down to their minimum.

This is the case here - the grim Americana that, when serial killers become a concept, then slasher killers could be multiple and ongoing to the day, even when the slasher booms of the eighties and late nineties lost interest, due to the fact you can shot these stories on any budget, even cheaper than a zombie film as you do not even need to try to create the makeup. The only note for the plot is that, even if the killer is from 1957, the plot twist comes from a forties or thirties tale about black magic being used to revenge a petty slight.

What plays out is the template of such films, and thus this review comes as a reminder that cinema is constantly churned out, this an early DVD era production still released on video tape when the mediums once where still co-existent. The basis of a slasher is repeated as in many films before - long scenes of getting to know the cast¹, setting up a party on Halloween night, then the murders - only with resource limitations. One can just ignore a film like this and just cover the classics of the horror canon, but these productions in context are just as fascinating. That, with the final taking place at one building, another person's own home, you do get to see Middle America in 2002 here, how car parks and woodlands are the same but due to the cameras used, and VHS fuzz, everything is lost in time. I find myself now tracking cafes in these films just out of curious amusement, such as a "Cactus Grill", a cafe with stereotypical Hispanic culture murals on the walls, imagining being able to go to the place in real life outside of cinema.

The dialogue is interspliced between another quick murder, and men and women waiting for a drug deal that never has connection to the main plot. Beyond this, the structure is than crude to the best of times, always having been an issue with higher budgeted slasher films let alone one at this budget. Like pornography, you can hit the required beats for your targeted audience, and make a film like this in your back garden. The problem arises is that it is so easy to be mechanical as a result, repeating over and over lacking inspiration. The slashers that have won me over were never for their kills or bared breasts, but for their quirks and personality.

Summer's End has the kills - a far more lurid take on the shower scene from Psycho (1960), which it name checks earlier in dialogue, and a decapitation by window. As for the titillation, never does something like a micro budget reveal the dichotomy between reality (that people change clothes and bathe) and the surplus requirement for female eroticism for a heterosexual male audience. It is not even the two actresses who do commit to full nudity that raises this, but when the production still wants to do so but with the actresses who clearly declined to. It feels so much more prurient when there is a scene of an actress here in merely her underwear for a long period of time, or a shower scene that is unnecessary, which has to cut to the camera at a height close to not show anything under the shoulders.  These actresses are in their right to decline nudity, and you instead ask why the production kept the scenes in, as the only notable thing for me in one vary striking costume choice, of the garish but boldest sort, of a deep orange top with a flower embroidered in the breast bone, matched by skimpy golden briefs as an abrupt colour choice for the moment.

Why diehard slasher fans would despise someone like me is because I am far more distracted by a Cookie Monster jar or this, I find this more compelling. Likewise, I have to wonder about a male writer writing the dialogue for a mostly female cast in a film like this more than a serious drama. I speak of this not from the "woke" attitude of feminism, but from the logic that, if one works in genre cinema and has to write a diverse cast, you would think one should fully engage with depicting someone totally unlike oneself, only to also realise that, considering how much cinema is churned out especially films like this by the digital camera era, this thought has probably not been considered as much.

Here these characters could have been worse, though no one is memorable. To paraphrase one character too, the male characters are "horny little bastards", leading to another odd touch to slasher films in how the male characters are usually depicted, which is a curious gendered aspect to these slasher films not talked about more. They act like goofballs jumping their girlfriends in the dark wearing masks to scare them or adolescent boys obsessed with sex, as is the case here. The only beefcake is one guy in his boxers scratching his nuts, about to have children's cereal, and I have to ask one question. Are these men meant to be likable or to be mocked? What does it say about the slasher genre, which has been criticised for its male gaze, until audiences including queer and feminist readings stepped in, that the stand-ins for the original target male audiences, back in the eighties when the boom first kicked off, were like this too, a lot of mildly cretinous male figures among the idealised female cast?

These are the many things that come to mind with watching films like this. Quality and whether a film like Summer's End being good in the traditional sense no longer appeals to me to write and think about. Instead, it is looking at details like this. To the film's credit, it takes a risk by having the villains win, ending moodily in a wintery backyard after a massacre has transpired. But this curiosity of micro-budgeted cinema does more as it exposed the slasher's inherent absurdity and quirks that continue all over them over the years. These things fascinate me so much.

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1) The version I saw was a beat up copy with sound through one headset, so sadly dialogue was difficult to catch.

Antfarm Dickhole (2011)

Director: Bill Zebub

Cast: Mike Nastri as Ant-Drew; Jessica Mazo as Ant-Drea; Bill Zebub as Ant-Thony; Miss Lyss as News Achorwoman; Rachel Bulisky as Ant-Marie; Lindsey Jones Winter as Mary-Ant; Erin Anne MacDonald as an Antomologist

Abstract List Candidate

 

[Major Spoilers Throughout. Also this talks about a lot of tasteless content so just be aware]

 

We shouldn't even call this a park, we should call this a stolen.

Yes, that title speaks so much about what to expect. This is not surprisingly however since Bill Zebub is a micro budget filmmaker who since 2002 has made over sixty films up to the 2020s at least, with a tendency to make at least four films a year from the start of his career onwards. Figures like Zebub, who has titled films with for more offensive names or ones like Dickshark (2016)¹, thrive on what is meant to be shocking, offensive, or funny in the sense of being tasteless and ironic, something which has become more difficult to accept as a defensive force field entirely out of his hands, but has not stopped him from continuing on as he is still making films and clearly able to sustain enough funds to do so.

To those who think this is just going to be another review saying why the film is bad, there are those who have gone out of their way to watch this film and those who have not, even if they have major issues with this type of content.  Also, Bill Zebub would hopefully be amused this review exists next to those for Straub-Huillet art films I have also covered, and that I watched Antfarm Dickhole whilst drunk as probably intended to be. And even if it was not an issue here, Antfarm really never gets around to actually following that premise to its fullest either.

Shooting fishes in a barrel would be pointless, but for a film which begins with a man named Ant-Drew (Mike Nastri) being beaten up by a bully in the woods, and getting fighter ants colonise his "pee-pee", Zebub was clearly more interested in other things. Coming from a heavy metal background, as a writer and radio host on extreme metal, he clearly from metal's world of deliberate provocation. He also really loves puns, as every character for the most part has a name he can add "Ant" to the beginning of. In fact, the amount of ant related puns, whether they actually work or not, could fill a book for children.

Antfarm Dickhole is actually tamer than it appears, in context to the extremity of cinema I have never really something gross or mind bending. Yes, do bare in mine I am a rare case as a few of us are as, if you told a work colleague you watched a film like this, and they have no previous history of weird cinema, that title alone would get a reaction from them. This film promised to be weirder than it appears, an intro montage of ants and avian life scored to female voices layered over each other, talking about colours in repetition. No, it's not Einstein on the Beach, actually a film whilst very adult in content instead having a very juvenile air, from the leads Ant-Drew and Ant-Thony (Bill Zebub himself) acting like boys, talking about their "pee-pees" and trying to make pun jokes about everything. The film is also not very interested in actually being a horror film or actually a film most of the time, even if it has a premise most would be fascinated to see play out about a man armed with literal ants in his pants.

That Ant-Drew, already with problems with premature ejaculation even when he masturbates, accidentally kills his girlfriend when, oral sex, the ants reduce her to a prop skelton, this in another person's hands could have been a really perverse but inspired take on the petty male ego, as he decides to go on a rampage against the bullies who have tormented him but targets their girlfriends, and eventually loses his mind when both the ants leave and a firecracker in the (fake) penis makes him impotent. But beyond that, from Bill Zebub instead, this is definitely an extreme in how micro-budget and outsider cinema allows for non-narrative tangents to be indulged in.

Zebub was more interested in writing jokes, even if they never have anything remotely connected to a plot, such as a problematic sweetener named "Butt-partame", just to have the pun, or having a woman in a bikini reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion for reasons never connected to anything, possibly just to show his approval to atheism, but even that is making a rash judgement call to the intent of the scene.

I am definitely able, one hundred percent, to predict that his call to have all his female cast, maybe except a couple, wearing bikinis even if does not make sense to comes from the same reason why Antfarm Dickhole has an insane amount of female nudity throughout. Even if it leads to irrational moments like a female reporter in the woods, claiming you can sunbathe under the trees and the leaves will block out UV rays, it is clearly for titillation. The nudity is surprising to consider as, for a micro budget film, you might not be able to pay for actresses willing to do nude scenes. If anything it leaves me with a respect for the female cast in this film willing to, especially as, when I mean nudity, I mean willing to bare all to the extent, to be polite, a very private body piercing is actually visible, whilst another actresses, when it is considered to fight (fire) ants with (fire) ants, has to produce a vile of them naked, and it is very explicit and real where it is produced from.

It is prurient, and it is the only really strong detail to the film as, as the horror is merely some blood and many prop skeletons, this is not extreme. Even the dickhole is a fake prosthetic, closer to the pegs you use in the modern version of the Game of Life board game, those you add to your plastic automobile, in shape with pound store plastic ants sticking out of a hole carved into its top. Beyond this, Zebub's interest in jokes, even breaking the fourth wall by leaving in the scene where his own chair breaks under him unintentionally, is so more a concern that this being consistent, leading to the results becoming a random grab-bag of vignettes. The only time this film ever considers its premise, in its full tasteless yet perversely intriguing idea, is when Ant-Drew humps a car tailpipe to get his legion of killer ants into a locked car where a bully's girlfriend is, or when the colony try to drag a whole banana back into their new nest. There are also scenes, in their ineptness, which are accidental surrealism, such as the plot point about acquiring an anteater leading to just a) a rucksack claimed to have one inside, and b) a cut out image of an anteater superimposed into one shot.

A lot actually happens, but it is never with anything truly happening, like the pieces of random puzzles. A detective chasing the trail of the murders never has any point to his journey. A female scientist, and love interest to Zebub's character, called Ant-Drea (Jessica Mazo) becomes a major character, but even all her and Ant-Thony's attempts to rid the ants, including insecticide being confused for moonshine, come off as pointless. There are many pointless scenes with that aforementioned news reporter in the woods, also claiming murders do not happen near trees. Many scenes in the woods happen in general, the free zone which micro budget films thrive upon using. Also, there are scenes, even with a fake penis, of the lead actor looking like he is exposing himself, causing one to wonder how no one got into trouble as there are shots in parkland where, not that far away, there are bystanders with their children in the background clearly oblivious to a film being shot in the far foreground.

The term "fag" is used a lot, and there is a lot of gay humour which is the one unpleasant detail of the film. Antfarm Dickhole does bring up the question of political correctness and its place within culture does as, whilst I have as much concern about PC culture cancelling debate rather than tackling tough questions on language and representation for progressive ideals, advocates for the politically incorrect into the mid-2010s onwards have chosen some ill-advised hills to die on, worse as it became a political factor at that time from alt-right wing groups. You do not even have to factor in the people who just want to be derogatory to minorities and hide behind the term "free speech", but people who like to deliberate tread over the line for provocation, who seem more childish in the modern day.

Zebub is not from the political area with this film, clearly meant to be funny and just so, something however which whether it is acceptable to or not, is in itself a hill you may regret planting a flag on if that landmark becomes lame to the culture the decade it had just be occupied in². It is strange to as, to give him credit, Zebub actually as a performer has a charming charisma, a big teddy bear of a man, yet it feels so out of place even by 2011 to have jokes about Ant-Drew panicking that Ant-Thony is gay, all because his friend is secretly trying to dispose of the ants out of Ant-Drew's pee-pee. Oh, and "pee-pee" and such euphemisms for the penis are used a lot, a lot of childish language between the male characters used.

The sense of the film's tone can just be found in the music, where for all the heavy metal tracks used, including death metal over sensual stripping scenes for some reason, there are also out-and-out comedic songs too. Antfarm, as I deliberately did, is clearly meant to be watched with a few drinks in you inebriated. Bill Zebub is someone in the position that, able to work on so little, he can make the films he wants to a fanbase, to this idea and for his own amusement. Unfortunately, that also means that he is perilously in the area of self indulgence, both in the tasteless humour but also not following sensible routes. Such as ending this film not on the punch line of where the ants next go, but the film as a tale told within another story. That of an anti-bullying lecture which somehow leads to a nude woman being raped by a spider, an actress under a fake giant spider in a corridor as a bored cat cameos, and the introduction of their progeny, a young man who is half man and half spider. The film actually ends setting up for a future Bill Zebub film called "Manspider" which never came about.

Yeah....that concisely shows the problem with Antfarm Dickhole. It is not even weird, just very random, not likely to be for many, offensive in a few ways but also quite inert. None of this is a slight to Bill Zebub because, quite frankly, he is still making films, probably will not see this review, and will not care even if he does. Or he will use the argument that it is intentionally meant to be random, but again, one should never presume a creator's intent. The man goes to horror conventions, sells t-shirts as merchandise for his films, and has even published a book of poems and short stories, so a negative review is about as effective as those rival ants against the antfarm dickhole. What watching the film and reviewing does instead, from the outsider's perspective, is show the likely template of his entire career and that this is likely to be encountered with everything else you could cover in his career.

 Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Random/Tasteless

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

 

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1) One, Loving a Vegetable (2015), is sadly from its premise of a woman being permanently disabled into a vegetable state, suggests a really crass film. That title however offers a far more pleasant and surreal tale of a romance with a carrot or that episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) I did actually like of one of the male doctors falling in love with a female patient slowly turning into alien broccoli. Zebub could have had a career as a title creator just by itself.

2) It evokes heavy metal's history of deliberately being provocative even for a joke, a great example being the late Peter Steele, lead singer for Carnivore and one of my favourite bands, Type O Negative, where the question of what is just meant to be ironic offensiveness and what is not is a big issue to deal with. This is not a random example to pluck out of the ether either, as for a film Bill Zebub made also in 2011, called Rap Sucks, the DVD release includes an extensive interview with Steele.

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999)

Director: Gough Lewis

Writer: Kelly A. Morris

Cast: Annabel Chong, John T. Bone, Ed Powers, Walter Williams, Charles Conn, Dick James, Monica Moran, Steve Austin, Jim South, Al Goldstein, Ron Jeremy, Lanisha Shanthi Easter, Mr. Quek, Mrs. Quek, Allenina W.

Ephemeral Waves

 

If Armageddon's going to hit the world, it's going to be in L.A.

This documentary is one I knew of for a long time, back in the early era of DVD when it became popular in the United Kingdom as a film storage medium. Ironically, likely the first time I learnt of said film was a DVD review section of a Playstation 2 magazine, one for the newly released console in a time, talking of its launch titles, when both pieces of tech were brand new. This trivial ancedote is useful to keep in as, whilst that was of the early 2000s in my youth, a time long ago, likewise this 1999 documentary is a time capsule.

Set around a porn actress' most infamous production in 1995, this is a snapshot of the nineties passing us by. The film starts with another standard bearer of nineties culture, beginning with a segment of the Jerry Springer Show. The woman being interviewed, who has had 251 men have sex with her within one day's shooting in ten hours, is Annabel Chong, an Asian porn actress with her perfectly cub bob of black hair and makeup playing up to a glamorous, hyper sexualised image, all whilst she talks of this act, The World's Biggest Gangbang, with complete pride. The pride will still be there, but the hair is a wig, hiding very short dyed red hair, the makeup will be wiped away, and Annabel Chong peels away to show Grace Quek a gender studies student at the University of Southern California, born of a Protestant Singaporean Chinese family and also a gender studies student at the University of Southern California. Why she came to also be a porn actress varies per the testimonies of her fellow students, but Quek proves a much more complex and interesting figure than the film will allow.

Tragically this documentary, which I was optimistic to return to, is one she would disown publically with good reason, leaving a fascinating woman without a good chronicle of her life. But the little we get points nonetheless to a picture of note, or else this opinion would not be found either. Certainly it shows that, for the entire conflict adult cinema has had to struggle through in representation, including clearly using that term over pornography for respectability, it is also still a banal day job with as much cheese as there is sleaziness. With the film structured around the filming of The World's Biggest Gangbang, you see the banality of porn filmmaking. This era, the production in the mid-nineties, is the VHS era. Quek, as Chong with two other Asian actresses, are seen in cheerleader outfits in one clip, about to act out a sex scene together, in a small locker room for a film called I Can't Believe I Did the Whole Team (1994). The head of her fan club is a modest balding man appropriately named Dick James, head of the Annabel Chong Fan Club, even if he is the more sympathetic male in the entire documentary. The film, in one of its good moments, has the absurd image in the midst of a shoot with Chong and another actress pegging a male actor, as female prison wardens punishing a rapist, stood around as a trio. They are all naked, baring strap-ons daggling off the actresses' waists, drinking from disposable cups and smoking, all whilst the other actress talks to the male actor about certain sex positions which are painful for them as female performers. Adult cinema, porn, has to fight both the moral image but also whether it can be artistic, and whilst scenes like this one are humbling in a positive way, such scenes also show the absurdity of the work too.

In the middle of this, you have Grace Quek herself. From a country, Singapore, established in the film of immense religious conservatism and conformity, you see her rebellious nature as well as the fact she is a very intelligent woman. She was already open-minded about sexuality before her career, talking to a teacher of the ancient customs of "temple prostitution" with admiration for the shrine maidens. On The Girlie Show in the United Kingdom, which definitely evokes the nineties, she is seen wearing glasses and a bob hair cut arguing her gangbang has her skewer the image of men being studs, believing they could bed many women at once, whilst she herself has managed to be more of a stud, physically able to actually bed many men at once. Considering how that fantasy from the male perspective is always with a problematic view depending on the context, whether it is from the desire to please the female participants equally or from a desire to dominate, the entire question of endurance and whether it would be physically possible also comes to mind here, something which makes Quek's act more subversive than it already is still.

The shoot itself does look tacky, jarring to witness and looking like the lobby of a casino with its ancient Roman pillars. Many naked men have been herded along like cattle, occasionally stroking themselves, many of which are members of the public offered to come participate, all on a set which also reminds me of a low rent version of the Bob Guccione production of Caligula (1979) if hosted by Ron Jeremy. The film avoids actual shots of real sexual penetration on camera but is still showing the work Grace Quek had to do as Annabel Chong physically, sandwiched in the middle of many men at once in performance, reinforcing that question of whether men would have the endurance to do what she had filmed over ten hours, as well as underlying the complacency of how much the actresses in this industry have to be the faces and do the heavy lifting. It can be problematic as an image, again, depending on the perspective of the images of Quek, as this character, having real sex with many men at once, but there should still be admiration for the women willingly able to bend themselves and act out real sex acts like this, when it is someone like her who is even in this documentary still a person proud of her sexuality and participating as a driving force.

Far more problematically for this production as well, and worthy of thinking about as is continually brought up, is the issues of trying to shot a production with un-trained male participants. Not only does the shoot have to end due to someone's long fingernails scratching her internally, even though they were warned ahead of time, there is a far more serious concern of whether the men were properly tested for sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV and AIDs. Considering how much the adult industry rigorously tests its participants, and that a decade before in the eighties AIDs and HIV were phantoms which scared society and tragically killed many people, that this is still something not thought about carefully in the mid-nineties is a really inexcusable blunder for Quek and many others involved.

Quek throughout this is utterly sympathetic. Her sexual desires and view to be proud of them are sincere. It is also clear she has been alienated by her background, embracing her desires when she came to the United States and even having grown from originally being uncomfortable with her own body, changing over time this opinion including after a stint of nude modelling for art classes. Without the facade, she is a tomboy who is awkward at times, at times emotionally affected by the world around, but also proud. The real Grace Quek, seen waking up and doing what every other man and woman does, including going to the bathroom, is a real person, someone has had male and female relationships, is for more stronger and charismatic away from the archetype of her Annabel Chong character. Especially when you meet Andy, a trans/gay male friend who does his interview in woman's clothes and a long haired wig like a champion, you see even her friends outside the porn we briefly see are more memorable characters, completely comfortable in his own skin as well as in the scene where Andy and Grace dress in drag just for fun.

In contrast, whilst it never really comes up, Annabel Chong is very much the stereotype of the exotic Asian woman. Slightly simple, and one unfortunate moment (for the promo video asking for men to join the gangbang) calling herself the "newest fortune cookie". The men around her, all men, are usually much older or sway with cocky bravado. The banal truth, that porn is still work that has to take place in offices and be negotiated over phones, is contrasted by the creepy weirdness of interviews where she is asked to peel clothes off at a whim. John T. Bone, the British born director of The World's Biggest Gangbang, comes off as well spoken but the film says he never paid Quek her fee for the film, whilst his choices of words makes him also a hypocrite.

Beyond this, not a lot is actually told to the viewer. The documentary is under ninety minutes which leaves a lot on the table. We get some responses from other adult actors like Ona Zee and Michael J. Cox who are scathing about Chong making their work look bad, but not a lot of whether Chong was actually a big figure at all in this area. Her parents do not know about her career, and whilst this leads to the very real and uncomfortable moment when her mother does find out, this is merely a fragment. Few in her family or old teachers in Singapore do know of her career, and those who do hide the fact, and again that is merely a little fragment. There is however much of this undiscovered or elaborated upon - there is a lot that is left about a cultural divide, between the United States and Singapore, the later with very negative views of pornography and having ideas of "saving face". There is also the entire fact her record would be broken by Jasmine St. Clair a year later. Looking completely alien to St. Clair, with insane amounts of enhancement and visually more exaggerated, St. Clair is barely dealt with either. This is of note as, in contrast to the simple figure here, St. Claire including her weird and constant connection to professional wrestling is a lot more fascinating than what we are provided with here when her shoot is tackled.

There is a suspicion of the film in structure when a phone call between a porn producer and Quek has intercut scenes between both, as unless you could have two cameras at two locations, it would be entirely or partially constructed. Then the film, when dealing with the darkness of the business, crosses a line. Around the time of Jasmine St. Claire taking her record, the film abruptly skips t a scene of Quek cutting herself in a lounge, the act of self harm (to the arm). It is without context, expect as shorthand to show her depression, but as someone (without discussing personal details) who has seen this and depression from a personal place, I question filming this material, especially with the abruptness it is depicted with and how casually it is never brought up again. Just as one morally problematic moment happens, as if to enforce this, the film in its trip to London abruptly tackles how she was sexually assaulted by multiple men one night during an incident. Never tactfully talked of, but with footage of her at the location, with the subtitle "Rape Site Revisited" actually used, and never elaborated on in a meaningful way.

In fact, when you dig a little deeply into the film's background, Quek's own disownment of the documentary includes the details that she and the director Gough Lewis were in a relationship at the time. On one hand, it explains some of the intimate sequences, of her in the bath at her parents' home or dressed down by herself, but it rises some uncomfortable issues of what Lewis intended with the footage, including the fact he creates a work only with the bare essentials from a fascinating figure. Instead, it goes to the generic old hat conclusion of the perils of porn as it ends with Grace Quek going back to work as a depressed ending.  

As a result, everything when you learn of this is tainted. Returning to the film an era later for me, without this context initially Sex was already problematic for how the director paints the same story of porn chewing out actresses without any sense of weight to it. It returns to her donning the wig, the makeup too, out for another shot, but when you consider it, is this just instead redundant. The only detail which success with Sex, now a relic, is the paradox, one what Grace Quek is happens to be an honest-to-God a pro sex feminist, whose act (when you get to the conclusion of the shoot) to have sex with two hundred and fifty one men in one day is still subversive, but is put together by a group of heterosexual older cis-white men, not really thinking subversively at all about the concept let alone any unsavoury details to their business practices.

It is also a relic because Grace Quek's story has a better ending now. That, retiring in 2003, she would kill off the character of Annabel Chong, rarely discussing her career after becoming a web developer of yore baring 251, a 2007 play written by male LGBT writer Ng Yi Sheng and directed by Loretta Chen based upon Quek's story, leading to some communication to the outside world if not a great deal¹. Within recent years, she has thankfully softened her views on her past as a certain quote below from her Twitter attests too...

 

I am digging myself from a deep hole in terms of my ability to be a #hardcore athlete and a software engineer at a high level – I am not there yet. I am working on it. And I will make it because being #hardcore is fun – and I like fun.²

=======

1) HERE.

2) HERE

Casa De Lava (1994)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Inês de Medeiros as Mariana; Isaach De Bankolé as Leão; Edith Scob as Edite; Pedro Hestnes as Edite's Son; Cristiano Andrade Alves as Tano; António Andrade as Kilim; Daniel Andrade as Nhelas; Manuel Andrade as Tcheka; Raul Andrade as Bassoé

Abstract List Candidate

 

It's strange. No one comes back. Every day I see them leave, but they never return.

For his second feature film, Pedro Costa originally wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Likewise however, this is the film when you see the schism unfold from his debut Blood (1989), a good film but one with is very conventionally told, whilst Casa De Lava plants the seeds for his future career, immediately seen as the film progresses. On camera you can see this but even behind it, it was his interactions with the locals of the Cape Verde Islands that would eventually lead him to Fontainhas, the real life location back in Portugal where people he met in Cape Verde passed him gifts to take to the Lisbon based community. It is also in the film itself, as one of the major subplots has male musicians soon travelling to Portugal to become labourers, all in spite of Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) warning them there is no life there. This feels as a result like a prologue, the origin story, of his later films as it was for his career, beginning in the location where these figures originally came from.

Bluntly, Costa would jettison the white outsider character we have here as a protagonist, a nurse named Mariana who comes to the islands with a local Leão (Isaach De Bankolé), left in a deathless coma for two months after a fall at his work at a construction site as a labourer. She is like in so many films the white stand-in in films from the West meant to be our safety net and introduction to other peoples' worlds. This is harsh but a truthful comment to make, especially as Pedro Costa drastically shifted this film from its initial premise as a remake of a Val Lewton production, which was originally meant to have been his genre film with ghosts and the looming volcano the location is built upon. This would begin where his later films like Horse Money (2014) would come from, collaborations with their casts about their actual lives, and with no need for an outsider figure.

Even in Casa De Lava Mariana does not dominate the film though her character is of importance. She comes to the islands from Portugal, and begins to change. It is also explicit how she is an outsider, frankly out of custom to the world she has set herself up in. Her contrast is Edith, played by the legendary actress Edith Scob who has been there to the point she has forgotten Portuguese and only speaks Creole, part of the world fully as a local. Notably as well, whilst we follow the story of Mariana, waiting by Leão's side as he lays still in his bed, this film does not make the same decision to marginalise its local cast in their own story like other productions have, but enfolds their own narratives alongside Mariana's. Again, Costa would drastically change his cinema over a couple of decades, but the DNA of this change can be found here.

What was also clear was how much was distinct to this production. Beginning with grainy footage of a volcano erupting, in this community living under its presence and in places beneath their feet, this world comes off as an idyllic place even if under a still, contemplative eye by cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel, whose work includes Robert Bresson's final film L'Argent (1983). Mainly because, whilst the film shows this world to have many problems, the vibrancy of the community is seen in just how colourful the clothing is, in all the colours of the rainbow, or how mainly set in the day, there is a drastic shift in tone from the future films "chiaroscuro" cinematography with this one's light filled setting. Arguably, it is one of Pedro Costa's most colourful films for how the environment and creative decisions like Mariana's red dress, to aspects naturally of the locations like green painted houses with painted doors.

Likewise, there is more emphasis on brightness to these lives even as the film hints at far more troubling issues along the way. A lot more lightness is to be seen in spite of everything, alongside the greater emphasis on music but having characters being musicians. If darkness is still there, it is deliberately vague. Leão's coma is unexplained, and there are incidents like Mariana being attacked by a young boy on the beach which are startling, warning you not all is what it seems. There are forms hiding in the community, and where people are found injured or in a state of deathless sleep, it slowly burns to a point. That this region was a former Portuguese colony is felt as an undercurrent - Edith has immersed herself in this country as an outsider, conversing with the local women as one of their own and a close friend, secretly stronger than her initial appearance suggests. Her adult son looks out of place and is hostile to the locals like an outsider.

Casa De Lava, whilst not what it was, arguably still has the tension of a horror story, particularly with the tone that is as much a veil over real life human complexity. Something is not right in this place, whilst still more idyllic than the slum community men from this community will move to another country. The environment has layers felt both from that night time attack on the beach and a beloved dog being found dead on the beach. Cape Verde is still a beautiful place but it has problems, where young boys are drinking and there has been a lot of men sleeping around for decades, as many of the women (even as teenagers) can have up to twenty children. Mariana is not exactly the knight here to help either, the film negative to the credulous idea of the white saviour. Built on volcanic land, the geography is itself an apt metaphor for the problems under the surface, that like an actual volcano no one person is able to fix by himself or herself.

As the prologue to the later Fontainhas films, you have a tale explaining why people migrated to Portugal, but then there is not necessarily the tonic to heal oneself either, leading to those future films having a theme of perseverance despite how bleak they can become. Even in terms of this film's plot, the sense of a greater existential pain is felt far before those later films. I mean, played by a young Isaach De Bankolé, we never know Leão ended up in the coma. He fell from a great height at a construction site but never why. As a result, Casa De Lava hides a lot, pretty much signposting the fissure between Costa's debut Blood, which was admirably subtle already in depicting its plot points, to fully rejecting commercial storytelling in the future. The actual ending, whilst with obvious points, is elusive and the only real point learnt is that Mariana finds herself having been manipulated. Edith's son is [Major Spoiler] snatched away, whilst his mother Edith lives in the community happy as ever, bonding with the women in feminist sisterhood. Life has to go on, as the men migrate to find paying work, and we never have any real answers, the horror origins of the production in that whatever force leaves children injured or collapsing in the wilderness in a daze is mysterious. Costa's story, in vast contrast, was clear and growing layers as this great film in his career was a catalyst for a drastic shift in his work too.

Abstract Spectrum: Elusive/Quiet

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

Our Man (2010)

a.k.a. O Nosso Homem

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cannon Fodder

[Cannon Fodder covers work by creators that have had entries on the Abstract List, or of immense worth for myself, to which we delve into this short film from Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa]

A hang out for rats and lizards.

Our Man begins with a mother and an adult son discussing about moving back to Cabo Verde. The mother is wrapped up and sat up in bed, the son with dreadlocks and wearing a red shirt and coat, and they end up on a discussion about a creature, a man who slips a letter into a person's pocket. They have to go with him then, to which he will bore a hole in their head and suck out their blood. This evokes M.R. James' Casting of Runes, an evocative short story from the English author, adapted as Night of the Demon (1957), in which a slip of symbolled paper slipped onto a person's being without them knowing will curse them to being pursued by a horrifying demon. Knowing Costa's love for classic Hollywood cinema, I would not be surprised he knows of the film adaptation at least, directed by Jacques Tourneur who also helmed I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a film he had planned to remake as Casa de Lava (1994) before it became his own creation.  

Suffice to say, jumping to the ending, he turns James' premise to a profound final image, an expulsion letter to leave Portugal, nailed to a pillar with a knife in a striking final shot. If Costa ever felt he could make an actual genre film, which he nearly did with Casa de Lava originally, he would make one now that would deal with the lives of the poverty class and migrant communities from this perspective of a world that acts aliens to them.

Our Man can be seen in itself an epilogue to a trilogy of films set at the Fontainhas quarter, an area in Lisbon slim that Costa came to and has to the modern day held in such respect. The opening, set in a small shack near the city in the distance, eventually cuts to the face of regular cast member Ventura, Costa's key figure here encountering a friend who has been kicked out the house and divorced because he lost his work, and cannot make any money. Desperate enough to bring home an old, wounded dove for dinner, the segment (and most of this short) is Ventura helping this friend, Our Man a snapshot of ordinary lives playing out.

One where there is no major plot, just snippets. Where Suzete, the wife who got her husband to sign a divorce bill without him realising, is lamented over by her ex-husband slumped over a table whilst drunk with Ventura and another male friend who works in a school kitchen, not able to gave them anything else but soup as they only have enough food for the kids. Both stories do cross, as the son, Jose, meets these older men, all whilst witnessing the failed attempt to catch rabbits by hitting bushes with a stick whilst drunk. The banality of life is witnessed, that for these immigrants to Portugal they still have to live, even if anecdotes include being beaten by a group of white men, or being in an open prison when one's father had died, allowed out to help bury the body. Life must still go on regardless.

In fact, befitting the reference to M.R. James, it becomes apparent Ventura has been communicating to a ghost, conversing of not having his gold tooth used to pay for his funeral or joking a passing cat is a rabbit. Costa, as mentioned, has never made a genre film, but he has not either shied away from the unnatural and surreal, even describing the future film Horse Money (2014) as a horror film in its own right, even having Ventura trapped in a lift talking to a living statue alive with countless voices challenging him like a Legion demon.

Our Man offers in itself a fragment of Pedro Costa, these short films in danger of being marginalised in a creator's career but, especially in this case, as worthy to witness as this feels like a piece that interconnects to the others. Whilst not as evocative aesthetically, and with the surprise of how bright open environments stand out in his cinema from his usual nocturnal locations, this does show how Costa was moving in style. The film before this was Colossal Youth (2006), the first for the director with cinematographer Leonardo Simões.  The pair, alongside actors like Ventura who contribute to these films as much, would follow up with two films in the 2010s (Horse Money and Vitalina Varela (2019)) which took this film's empathetic worldview but also include an even greater sense of nocturnal atmosphere. Our Man as a result is able to exist as a chapter in this vast book known as Pedro Costa's entire filmography, as well as be the building blocks from a pre-existing veteran to work from for his new stage of work.

Trash Talking (2006)

Director: Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci and Ben Jones (as Paper Rad)

Screenplay: Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci and Ben Jones (as Paper Rad)

Cast: Screenplay: Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci and Ben Jones (as Paper Rad)

Abstract List Candidate

 

Your fourth dimensional shadow is crying 

If you want to access a time period accurately, you look at the pop culture, but there are factors worthy of consideration. That 1) you should consider that the most popular examples are not always the best representations, as they can obfuscate the technology and aesthetic of the era. There is also 2 there being cases which can confuse this idea, particularly when a) technology and aesthetics for a production can be behind the newest trends, and b) that nostalgia when it had became more prevalent drastically shifted how we contemplate this material, now you have to factor in works that deliberately replicate older eras with their resources.

Trash Talking is definitely of its period, just from the use of the software used to draw some of the characters, but you have to wade past the eighties references, from troll dolls and American cartoons from that time, and the fact some of the micro budgeted aesthetic, in its awkwardness, might have been as much intentional as it was what the production could access. What should be noted is that its "director", Paper Rad, was an art collective from between 2000 and 2008 which were multiple people, worked in multiple art formats, and even worked on music videos for the likes of The Gossip and Beck. With its main members being siblings Jacob and Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones, Trash Talking was originally a DVD release for the experimental music label Load Records.

With that in mind, it in itself comes in a fascinating moment just after YouTube appears in 2005, where art (that covered in magazines like Juxtapoz) was absorbing the post-postmodern pop culture influences, and DVD was still strong as a format. All the references to Garfield immediately evokes that Lasagna Cat, a famous web parody, was just about to arrive in 2007. This also immediately evokes the likes of Everything Is Terrible!, who started in 2000 but set up a website in 2007, who dig through the obscurities especially of VHS era pop culture for weird non-sequiturs. This project, a one hour or so audio-visual compilation, even evokes EiT in their use of licensed footage in peculiar ways, like the wedding between two mice puppets. In fact, the obsession with puppets in American culture in general is something to ponder as it is a reoccurring aspect of Trash Talking.

It is a home brewed compilation, a syringe of day-glo to the eyes whilst deliberately referencing pound (or dollar) store toys aesthetics right down to a montage of colouring book content. Made at home, I would not be surprise Paper Rad even used an old version of Microsoft Paint from this era on purpose, considering the collage of flash animation art to the rapid success of block colour backgrounds reminiscent to actual doodles I used to do on Microsoft Paint to kill time. Whether it was deliberate or not, in-between the psyche out montages there are two story based segments, ones where you can audibly hear the voice actors feel unconfident in their line readings, stumble or even (deliberately?) use "ums" and awkward phrase words, emphasising this sense of the creative process of Trash Talking. It also, frankly, means that your tastes will have to be prepared for this presentation. For myself, for disclosure, I initially came to this production out of curiosity, and I will be the first to admit it is far from great, and also is very indulgent, but with always a sympathy for these micro-budgeted productions, there is a bit of interest.

The work also has a clear sense of the absurd and awkwardness to its humour. This can be summed up in multiple segments, one built as "the one you have been waiting for", a build up only to show a CGI cat's backside as it defecates, or at the beginning when the mascot of a nineties Windows CD-Rom finds himself talking directly to at the camera to a viewer he eventually loses his temper at in curse filled annoyance. Much of the work is just entirely fixated with American pop culture from the eighties, which is quite frankly bizarre when witnessed here. The tangent in one plot segment alone gets weirder the more I think about it, which turns into a parody of the Muppet Babies with the characters added which abruptly appears, has baby Kermit the Frog learn what a rave is, only to abruptly end in a new scene in an entirely different context. As someone born in 1989, I saw the swash of eighties culture in my upbringing, but when I could develop solidified memories, the nineties culture and entertainment for children was what I was entrenched with, making the obsession with eighties culture and how long the nostalgia for it lasted into the 2010s really perplexing.

Trash Talking's structure as a result is difficult to detail as it is unpredictable and erratic, between a live action scene of two men playing a very atonal version of Alice in Chains' Man in a Box to Garfield watching Garfield. You can argue it is indulgent without point, a production which I would view as having times when it is both funny and also drags on with unintentional messiness. The main segment extrapolates this in its tale involving three flatmates, two humans and who looks like the humanoid older brother of Elmo from Sesame Street (red fur and no clothes). In a scenario that never really ends, it begins where a nuclear war has broken out, or the character of Alfie presumes is taking place, and the biggest concern is that they have run out of "sauce enablers" in the fridge. With the voice acting being shaking and the low budget animation feeling crude, the segment does feel like a nod to the type of YouTube animation that would appear and also evolve quickly into spectacular content. Yet...honestly, I found this segment, having seen Trash Talking charming for all this whilst admitting the issues at hand.

Some of the language I have used may come off harsh, but beyond this, we have a production that can be accused of indulgence and flaws but is at least around an hour long, and never ever drags a scene out for too long. Some of the jokes could have been ran with further, such as an obsession with troll dolls into a reference to a "Great Troll fire" in 1984, whilst others like an exact recreation of the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange (1971)  seem random. Some of the montages are unnecessary, but there are so many that they never become a struggle to sit through, whilst one even becomes existential and weird as two pig-like humanoids (with subtitled text onscreen) talk of existential things of life.

The entire tone of nostalgia and pop culture is the blatant theme of the project, as whilst Trash Talking is deliberately placating to its generations' obsessions, it is also toying with them. The other dramatic segment about Mr. Maggiccaall is entirely about this subject. Done almost in video game sprite graphics, at least before the 16-bit era, it is about various groups searching for the next pop culture of the future. The jokes have dated - the two predictions are "Black Adam Sandler" and "Da Da Vinci Code", but it manages to have some dynamic weight as, between scanning all of Adam Sandler's back catalogue and converting it through into a "Russian Nintendo bootleg file", the comments on details like being too old to understand what kids are into now or ending up with a U2 iPod show that the creators were pondering through this ridiculous scenario about nostalgia. That it ends with people arguing, accidentally damaging the iPod, and a robot's heart running away devastated and sad pretty much sums up their conclusion on this idea. They never reach a conclusion, but in real life, many don not reach a conclusion too and they usually argue as well, thus leading to no ideas coming about or being discovered.

Definitely, the term "acquired taste" is needed to sum up Trash Talking, and it is not abstract, closer to deliberately weird and burning one's eyes with the colour palette. As an obscure cultural item it is definitely fascinating, in the sense that whilst I have raised issues, I admire this production's homemade qualities and the clear sense, when you realise its creators were an art group, of them effectively creating what could have been a video installation but providing it for the public to access if they found that original DVD release. The border between trying to be weird on purpose or a sincere eccentricity is blurred in this case, but particularly with some of the dialogue that transpires and the pace, Trash Talking has been winning me over with the kind of curious and entertaining ponderances of this culture.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Gaudy

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