The Happening (2008)

 

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore; Zooey Deschanel as Alma Moore; John Leguizamo as Julian; Ashlyn Sanchez as Jess; Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones; Spencer Breslin as Josh; Robert Bailey Jr. As Jared

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #223

 

We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rep. They gotta cool shape, they got protein.

Spoilers Throughout

As time has passed, his career has been a rollercoaster of other films in his career that have both harmed his reputation and have raised him back in praise to cinema patrons, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is still in hindsight the film where he had shot himself in the foot. Films before were divisive - with the huge buzz from The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan was pigeonholed for all his films having plot twists, whilst Lady in the Water (2006) was not well received. The Happening however was a film which became notorious, though the irony is that its premise, where plants decide to get their revenge on humanity, is a disturbing one rife in potential. As set up, suddenly waves of people in natural areas like parks are affected by an unknown force. Stopping, becoming disorientated, and leading to mass self-inflicted suicide. The scene, as Shyamalan restrains from showing a great deal barring an occasional shock, where construction workers are suddenly walking off the edge of a tall building they are working on, like how lemmings (fictionally) were meant to, is a legitimately creepy one that in itself sets up a compelling work.

Then, however, Mark Wahlberg is introduced as a science teacher, talking about the bees disappearing and being very heavy handed about environmental issues to his class, and the issue with The Happening and why it became infamous is entirely for me revealed to be the presentation. Yes, some will immediately get annoyed when his character talks about the unknowable science of nature, which would piss material rationalists off, but weaving the supernatural and religion into his work like Signs (2002), Shyamalan was always going to take on the wide eyed mysteries of the world. The issue with the film is that it clearly wanted to juggle a lot, including a knowing sense of humour as Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, the later playing his estranged wife, are meant to the wide eyed ordinary Americans trying to rationalise this grim scenario where mass death happens in the most abrupt of places. The tone misfires, with choices made, that lead the film to its infamy.

The premise itself stretches credibility, even as someone liberal in logic for his storytelling, in that once it is revealed plants are using a pheromone which blocks the human brain function of self preservation, an issue arises where it requires some very elaborate ways for people to kill themselves. It leads to another moment, one of the few perfect ones, of a cop's handgun being passed along in a street between people affected by the happening, but it does stretch into the absurd how abruptly people act, into actual comedy when the elaborate nature of the pheromones' effect include a man starting a drivable lawnmower, laying down and waiting for it to run him over. The story could have just been changed in one way, that the plants admittedly a hallucinogenic that caused chaos, and the premise would be helped. Imagining nature itself attacking humanity is a common theme, and whilst a plant might seem absurd on the surface beyond The Day of the Triffids as a threat, the notion of an entity which covers large amounts of the Earth, and can eventually grow over even manmade structures, is a striking one. Environmental issues are still sadly with us; a film like this, in the era of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), would be perceived as heavy handed, but the concerns this plays with are relevant with the idea of Mother Nature wiping the human species away one we return to in storytelling.

The infamy of the film is that, with the tone a mess, you also have so many misfires. It does want to juggle humour and being serious, which is perfectly possible, but The Happening is a step behind in the pace it needs to succeed in this, where a man having his arms eaten off by lions (as seen in a web video a character watches) is nasty but in position comes off as ridiculous. The dialogue is one of the biggest kneecappings for the film. The speech about the underrated nature of hot dogs, abruptly appearing, is ridiculous. The subplot that, with their marriage in a crucial point, Deschanel's character is hiding the fact she went for dessert with a co-worker, is closer to the awkward humour of a mumblecore comedy, with the rebuttal by Wahlberg about buying cough syrup just to talk to a female stranger being probably the most misfiring, illogical piece of the film. These moments of dialogue are worse knowing it is meant to be humorous and, in cases like the cough syrup, they are meant to build characters teasing each other and moments of levity.

Having characters running away from the wind, which pushes the pheromone, is also inevitably going to look silly, as even the scene of Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant is meant to be playful on purpose, in another rewarding scene of a model house for a building estate full of plastic goods. Confused looking actors running around in a field is inevitably going to look absurd. The worst aspect of this is that, upon reflection, aspects within The Happening itself have aged with some scary resonance, lost within the awash of its misguided aspects. With the attacks only place in one region of the United States, references to conspiracy theories come up in dialogue including the disbelief for some that it was anything else but the government responsible for this. More unfortunately relevant is that, for a sight joke of two older women in ye old gas masks, you also have people arming themselves with guns which leads to probably the most shocking moment (two young children being shot) that really has grown darker over time.

That the film, instead, has visibly slipped trying to juggle so many variables instead maims the film, which eventually does deviate into a pointless conclusion with a strange older woman with huge psychological issues, closer to a prelude to The Visit (2015) by the director. The abruptness of the conclusion, where the events end, fits in the sense of a profoundness of it merely ending, and that it can transpire in another country with ease, but by that point you have a film which is memorable yet for many bad reasons. It is compelling, truthfully, to revisit and a fascinating title which has good and the bad, but I am not surprised that this really did not help its creator with hindsight at all.

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

 

Director: Jim Hosking

Screenplay: Jim Hosking and David Wike

Cast: Aubrey Plaza as Lulu Danger; Emile Hirsch as Shane Danger; Jemaine Clement as Colin Keith Threadener; Matt Berry as Rodney von Donkensteiger; Craig Robinson as Beverly Luff Linn; Zachary Cherry as Tyrone Paris; Sky Elobar as Carl Ronk; Jacob Wysocki as Lawrence Doggi; Sam Dissanayake as Adjay Willis

An Abstract List Candidate

It was a pleasure to bring you tampons.

Following on from The Greasy Strangler (2016), director-writer Jim Hosking's transgressive horror-comedy with grotesque humour and large quantities of grease, how do you follow up an idiosyncratic debut feature? This is where the "second album syndrome" issue arises, a concept found in music (hence my choice in term) and other art in how, after your first work catches public attention, having to follow it up and with far less time for the project to digest can lead to disappointment from the audience. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is as strange and idiosyncratic, but there is no male penises, no gore or very explicit sex (baring one scene), and especially no grease. What it is instead is a perverse take on a romantic comedy starring recognisable actors. Something which fits and already paints a unique world Hoskins has created for himself, assisted by co-writer David Wike, but of a different mood.

Lulu (Aubrey Plaza) is the tired wife of Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch), manager of a coffee shop who fires her when upper management demands he cuts a staff member. Left, as a result, by herself watching television at home, she witnesses an advertisement for "a magical night" with Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson), a figure from her past with clear endearment for. Taking advantage of Shane's decision to rob her brother Adjay Willis (Sam Dissanayake), at his vegan food store, of a large sum of money, she takes the money and the man Colin (Jemaine Clement) meant to retrive it back, taking them both to the hotel where Beverly Luff Linn's show will be at. Luff Lin is as weird as The Greasy Strangler, but much more reliant on the dialogue and tone, becoming stranger in a more subdued way. Jim Hoskins' style is fully unique, a minimalistic tone of awkward long takes and crassness which is yet precise.

Not as many people here wander around in just Speedos or nude, though Clement does get to exhibit his manly hair covered form for compensation. However most of what came before in the previous film is here, a contrast between the modernity of real life and it being twisted into a curious form, a lush if gauche aesthetic dominating a film almost entirely set in timeless middle urban America, mostly set at the hotel where the narrative is a boiling pot of emotions and eccentric characters bashing into each other or throwing out insults. Among such figures is Beverly Luff Linn, who is possibly dead or at least in a strange limbo form where his manager and potential lover Rodney von Donkensteiger (Matt Berry) has to least lace his Earl Grey tea with a drug and delay the magical evening's performance due to health issues. That Lulu's presence is affecting Beverly is adding greater tensions for von Donkensteiger which will lead to conflict, especially as her husband with his employees, in wigs, will be looming around the hotel when they know where the money and she went.

A lot of the humour is exaggerating the oddness of human behaviour, with some grossness though toned down from the previous film also with the same tone adding sympathetic light hearted in the midst of this. The only mean thing about Beverly Luff Linn, for all its swearing, is the cast constantly calling each other fat, which might be held as body shaming were it not for Hosking being a director with a much more open minded and thoughtful habit of casting actors of all shapes and sizes, everyone distinct even if as much part of the joke in their absurdness, the result of which causing the use of being fat as an insult taking on the strangeness as childish school ground insults from adults. Hosking's logic as a result can make a joke of Lulu asking Colin to go for tampons for a "heavy flow" come off not as a cheap gross joke but something odder in the punch line, and it says a great deal that the film could jettison the grease and transgression of the previous film, and retain its strangeness.

It is a film that will be more difficult for many to appreciate, truly the difficult second project as it does not have the instant saleability, paradoxically enough, of being so shocking you have to see it. It instead has a different form of weirdness in how the little details are meant to be jokes even if a curious ha-ha form, like the coffee shop selling a mid-winter blend. As well, the fact the director Hoskins is British, using American iconography, also means that a lot of the film and the previous is likely drawing from a very quaint absurdity part of our humour. That and, for a film set in the middle of middle America, the punch line being the magical night involving Scottish songs lamenting becoming a football referee becomes funnier in its co-production context, stranger in hindsight the longer I think of the film, weirder than its post-relevant disco music or the main receptionist at the hotel having a long hair that gets him mocked as looking like a dog. The cast including recognisable figures also does emphases the genesis of this film's humour - case in point, if you recognise Matt Berry's voice, think of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) and how people who use subtext are cowards - whilst emphasising that, for all its droll and oddly paced humour, the film's melodrama is never merely ironic, but actually sincere in its perverse way. As a result, whilst The Greasy Strangler was a compelling piece, the sophomore production is the one that won me over to Jim Hosking entirely.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Vulgar/Weird

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

A Day in the Country (1936)

 

a.k.a. Partie De Campagne

Director: Jean Renoir

Screenplay: Jean Renoir

Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant

Cast: Sylvia Bataille as Henriette; Georges D'Arnoux as Henri; Jane Marken as Madame Dufour; André Gabriello as Monsieur Dufour; Jacques B. Brunius as Rodolphe; Paul Temps as Anatole; Gabrielle Fontan as the Grandmother; Jean Renoir as Uncle Poulain; Marguerite Renoir as Waitress

Canon Fodder

 

A family of a Parisian shop-owner - including wife, daughter, mother-in-law and the daughter's fiancée - go for a day in the country. The daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) falls in love with a man, one of two at the inn they go to, and thus begins one of the many pieces of the career of Jean Renoir, a legendary French auteur but also someone who may come off as unexpected to be covered by myself. My taste in idiosyncratic cinema could be stereotypically paint brushed for more stranger fare, but his however is a distinct worldview I admire, a great humane figure in his love for humanity.  His idiosyncrasies are also visible, including the result of his real life, a figure who had to leave in exile from his homeland of France after the Nazi occupation of the country in World War II, eventually returning to there in cinema in 1955 and in-between having gone through the likes of Hollywood and even filming in India for The River (1951).

Before that history, however, came his attempted adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's short story. It was never completed initial during its shooting in 1936, but in 1946, the remaining footage was completed into this short piece. For myself, any work is that is considered "unfinished" is paradoxically that but also not unfinished, simply in mind to the fact that, if released into public access in any form, what is unfinished is only the gaps and holes in the crafted art rather than the finished product you have to adapt to. A Day in the Country itself also feels fully formed, a miraculous fact it had enough footage from its production to tell a succinct story to stand on its own two feet too.

The final result including that, per one of his greatest trademarks, Renoir fully humanised his stories. The narrative for a modern audience does have a plot aspect which may discomfort - two young men wish to go "fishing", to woo the daughter and mother of the Parisian family for a one-off romance, the one who comes off the most lecherous, even if he keeps a finely trimmed moustache he has to mould using a special mask, especially an off-putting figure in the current day. Thankfully, he is reduced to clowning around with the mother, turning into a Pan-like satyr, whilst a romance that will never become complete between Henri (Georges D'Arnoux with his deep brooding eyes) and Henriette will be kindled in the countryside. Said tale, aptly a short story in cinematic form, is told fully and feels its weight. Even in mind to content which may be problematic - where the moment passion strikes, in the middle of the woodland canopies, invokes the action of Henriette resisting Henri at first only to succumb to his passions - you have a the story in itself feels a fully formed and complex. One of a love connecting unexpectedly from a playful seduction, that sequence (or actually, gesture in acting) only an issue because such iconography has been used in cinema in a way that is inherently problematic, whilst everything else in how it begins and where it ends is a real bitter sweet romance. Where the entire scene and the story of Henriette with Henri turns into one of two adults falling in love by accident, with the weight of it Renoir provides more powerful than merely a choice in depiction which has aged.

Everything else is striking, even in mind that a lot of the film is very light in tone, as much to its virtue as well for emotional impact. Renoir's greatest favour is how everything is relaxed and even playfully humorous in his work, in contrast to when he has to be serious and makes those films and scenes powerful. Even an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (his TV movie project The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959)) is light in tone but still takes the material serious in its drama, an obscure title in his career showing his skills in both sides of the emotional coin. A Day in the Country has a perfect title which describes its atmosphere, one in mind to the source material Renoir fleshed out to be sympathetic to his entire cast of characters. Even the father and the husband-to-be, a portly man and a thin fishing obsessed guy who legitimately look to Stan Laurel and Laurel Hardy, are likeably oafs accidentally fishing up boots from the river, with the sense of Renoir caring for them even if playing to a comedy of the pair of goofs. Everyone even if they can be broad is a character to care for in such little time, where eventually the sadness, in the epilogue, means more when Henriette is going to be stuck with the younger man as her husband when Henri and she suddenly have a spark of love that is real.

Contrasting this is how vibrant the film is. Even if Renoir, once he transitioned to it, would embrace colour in all its passionate energy, the use of the natural environment the story is set in is exceptional. It opens up fully, in a brilliant use of deep composition of a scene with fore and background content, when a window is open and we see the countryside in its fullest the first time seeing Henriette and her mother on swings. Nature in the film, the wildlife and the landscape, becomes a magical place which is yet real and accessible, adding to the narrative that, by pure accident, a game of lust between the two male suitors, to trick the men away for them to go boating with the women and seduce them, is stripped away to a real romance between Henriette and Henri as much because the woodland they get to by boat is a place of pure aesthetic beauty. Even if the landscape was as much a cause of the film's production problems, where it rained continuously during shooting¹, it is in itself a character as well as would be the case in later films. It actually evokes Picnic on the Grass (1959), a very odd little film later in his career, a comedy with a satirical edge of a scientist and political figure pushing forth artificial insemination who instead finds love, and emotion, when he meets a peasant girl. It is a film with quirks that you have to adapt to, from a time period dealing with modernity to tradition, but in colour Renoir again dealing with the natural landscape having an incredible power and God-like form which can heighten emotions like love. (Even, in mind to one character playing up as a satyr in A Day in the Country, this is escalated in the later film in having a subplot of an old pagan landmass and unnatural winks which cause stuck up rationalist people to suddenly become freer and loose, all for the better in a sudden mass Dionysian possession).

The success of A Day in the Country, in mind to the inherently fascination with "unfinished" work, is both the luck of having enough substance to be a fully formed narrative, the rain which plagued the original production becoming the change where, cutting forwards in time, the romance briefly found once before cannot be gained back but will be remembered forever. The other aspect is Renoir himself whose talents made sure said story was complete and worthy even if it never properly concludes.

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1) Referred to HERE.

Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road (2002)

 

Director: Bob Gale

Screenplay: Bob Gale

Cast: James Marsden as Neal Oliver; Gary Oldman as O.W. Grant; Amy Smart as Lynn Linden; Christopher Lloyd as Ray; Chris Cooper as Bob Cody; Kurt Russell as Captain Ives; Michael J. Fox as Mr. Baker; Ann-Margret as Mrs. James; Amy Jo Johnson as Laura

An Abstract Film Candidate

Are you saying Phil will be cleaning toilets...and have no sex drive...?

Digging into the corners and crevices of cinema, you find yourself discovering the likes of this. A film from the co-writer of Back to the Future (1985) in his directorial debut, Bob Gale, a whimsical magical realist road movie which on the surface is a family friendly romp, in which a young man named Neal (James Marsden) after his twenty second birthday wishes to find answers, only for Gary Oldman as a magical wish fulfiller, the son of a leprechaun emigrating to the Americas from Ireland and a Cheyenne Indian, to push him onwards to a road journey across an interstate not on the map. It is, on paper, as much an Alice in Wonderland scenario as well as a surreal journey, between a museum of art forgeries to the town of lawyers, which is full of litigation as you can imagine, among the sights witnessed. It proves, despite its sheen and whimsy, to be odder than that.

It is also written for adults only, which is one detail among many which cause Interstate 60 to become a cultural oddity in cinema, in between cursing in the script to the fact that Oldman's immortal prankster O.W. Grant laments at one point having had his penis was cut off in a weird accident at nine. Oddly un-commercial Hollywood films are rare, especially rarer from the 2000s onward, so there is something compelling about this one even if it is an acquired taste you groan at as much as find merit in. Marsden's Neal is at the centre, the son of a lawyer of a well off family, wishing to become an artist, at a crossroads in his life and being railroaded by his father into law school and his life, even buying him for his birthday the red car he himself would want. To the viewer, a character like Neal, a stereotypical white middle class young guy, is going to be off-putting because such figures are gauche as protagonists, especially as his journey, when kicked off by Christopher Lloyd assigning him to deliver a package across Interstate 60, is a cliché. One with the added cliché of the chance of meeting the woman of his dreams, played by Amy Smart, a figure mostly seen on billboards only Neal can see, guiding him in their messages.

The result is, blatantly, a metaphor for Neal's personal grown, with his father's preferred red convertible (not his own choice) transporting him on this odyssey, Gale uses it to have characters Neal meets spin conservative, homespun advice on life, not attempting remotely to hide his design to spin meanings in his whimsical journey. The journey, as someone obsessed with surreal Wonderland/journey narratives in art, was always going to be compelling for me as, even here, they are idiosyncratic. It is for the most quite creative and even funny - particularly as the lawyer town, where everyone who is not a local gets slapped with a lawsuit for running over the mayor's dog which does not exist, and that lawyers sulk the streets on mass asking for clients - and whilst heavy handed, many of the eccentrics Neal encounters and the places he find are interesting.

Right from a stop sign, on his way to "Danver", Neal is already encountering a man who wished to be able to eat all the time, eventually stuck in a monkey's paw scenario of having a gut like a black hole, to a town called Banton (with Kurt Russell as the police chief) where drugs are legalised, creating one named Euphoria legal only in its region for anyone over thirteen, warned of in its addictive properties constantly but left for anyone who wishes to get high to take, the addicts cheap labour to pay for their now permanently addiction. Even if the film is heavy handed, even heavy handed surreal and metaphorical worlds are interesting for me, particularly as this film decides to go for a scenario of directions Neal could take in his life and see how ill advised they are for him. The only one of the encounters which is not well thought out, or just one of the times the more adult humour is in poor taste can be, is the personification of lust, a female hitchhiker played by Power Rangers alumni Amy Jo Johnson, looking surprisingly like Natalie Portman, playing a young woman searching for the Perfect 10 in bed, a scene which could be read as sexist depending on your mood and does not work as well as it could have.

Gale as a director is not as idiosyncratic as his script, at least in the sense that his visual and directorial ambitions are solid but they are propped up by the imagination onscreen. The film is given the advantage that it is a well made film with large production value, adding to the weirdness of this film's entire existence. Plotted as a road movie, but also an absurd journey, it is helped every scenario is heightened. It is a world of Americana - diners, giant bill boards - and runs with them to good effect, such as the idea, based on bizarre roadside attractions, of the museum of Art Forgeries, which is revealed to actually have real works of art with copies sent to real art galleries. The film is peculiar, as all of this film is felt with a whimsy apt for the co-writer of Back to the Future, but all these odd and subject to being tonally off too at moments, such as the tangent (never brought back again) of the main wish giving character having no penis, or the ouroboros weirdness surrounding a killer on the loose which leads to doppelgangers, almost something David Lynch if the tone has fully committed to a darker work. The film belies being a vehicle for James Marsden, who would stand out in this period playing Cyclops in the X-Men (2000), the first major superhero film of the Millennium, as the happy-go-lucky lead with a magic 8-ball guiding him going on this journey for self discovery.

It is also odd seeing Gary Oldman, a serious actor, having a lark with dyed red hair, but around this time was also Tiptoes (2003), a film in the career of screenwriter/director Matthew Bright where Oldman played Matthew McConaughey's brother born with dwarfism, which in a film which cast actors with dwarfism you had Oldman on his knees off-camera with co-stars, something to remind myself that Oldman also has a penchant for weirdness. Christopher Lloyd is not necessarily stretching himself, among this strangeness, but he has always been a charismatic actor, and in a film from the screenwriter of Back to the Future, it is not a surprise he is here, as is a brief cameo by Michael J. Fox as a businessman only to be run over by a trunk in a monkey's paw scenario. Also worthy of mention is Chris Cooper, playing a former advertising creator with terminal lung cancer who, alongside demanding truth in everything, has also strapped a belt of explosives around his waist set to a timer. Whether that joke can still be funny nowadays, it is nonetheless Cooper as an interesting character actor shining in his scenes, a straight man in this peculiar production. The only person in the cast who feels left out of place is tragically Amy Smart, as the sole woman of great plot important in what is frankly a white male Americana tale, not an insult to Interstate 60 but blatantly obvious in its DNA. Even if they make a comment of her not being the romanticised ideal of a woman, through a curiously used fart gag, Smart is still stuck with a bland figure, mostly seen as billboards that can change and guide Neal around, but never standing out.

Interstate 60 is definitely a curiosity, and in truth these forgotten obscurities for myself are far more compelling to experience over masterpieces at times, especially as this feels like a more honest snapshot just to peek in Bob Gale's brain. Parts of Interstate 60 are cringe worthy. Some of the jokes have not aged well, such as Smart suddenly talking in a way that would make, as Neal states, Mike Tyson seem eloquent just for a joke (and even referencing that in this sentence feels uncomfortable to have done readers). Some of it is clichéd yearnings of what life should mean, all of which feel like Bob Gale is lecturing his viewers. Yet it is all aptly personal, also aptly part of the Americana the film is touching at, the absurdities and men with cartoon dynamite strapped around their waists as part of their culture as the diners and the red convertibles are, even the magic 8-ball and a man eating beyond his weight in food in a bet and the strange museums part of this mass of culture.

It is a film that was never going to be a success because it is unmistakably weird. I have to admire its idiosyncratic take on the type of American comedy however, even in mind to what does not work, where this goes on a road journey to find humility even if absurd. It even still finds some apt and surprisingly salient aspects along the way, in spite of being antiquated, such as Cooper's character evoking historian Frederick Turner, expressing the idea that the frontier was a place for the malcontent to escape to and that, far from a gateway, the internet would not help replace it when there was no more physical frontier. Definitely in terms of unconventional American films of any budget, I would find virtue in the likes of this, even in mind to its failures, always more fascinating than many of the more successful productions due to their idiosyncrasies to genres and tropes. Even if the film, for all its early 2000s sheen and soundtrack, feels like a film from an older man out of touch to the world, it fascinates as much as causes one to roll your eyes at.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

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

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)

 

Director: Stewart Raffill

Screenplay: Stewart Raffill and Gary Brockette

Cast: Denise Richards as Tammy; Theo Forsett as Byron Black; George Pilgrim as Billy; Paul Walker as Michael Brock; Ellen Dubin as Helga; Terry Kiser as Dr. Gunther Wachenstein; Buck Flower as Norville; Ken Carpenter as Neville; Sean Whalen as Weasel; J. Jay Saunders as Sheriff Black; John Edmondson as Karl; John Franklin as Bobby

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

There is something naturally, perfectly, fitting that this film, from the director of Mac and Me (1988) and Standing Ovation (2010), originates when a man approached director Stewart Raffill with the fact that he had a large scale animatronic T-Rex and wished to make a film with it¹. Knowing as well the fuller context, including Raffill having to write the script in a week and improvising whatever he felt could get a reaction, suddenly I find myself with the British born filmmaker, infamous for a E.T. rip-off by McDonalds, more sympathetic for a man who went from working as an animal trainer for films to a strange career of movies hesitantly put together and in this case, gunning for the weirdness for the sake of weirdness genre but not making something contrived.

What you get was a film lost in time which is strange. As in, already this comes from the baking pot of hastily putting together a film post-Jurassic Park (1993) where Paul Walker, long before his career in the Fast and the Furious films, is romancing a young Denise Richards only to accidentally get the wrong side of her domineering ex. Said ex dumps Walker's Michael in the middle of a big cat park at night, where he is mauled by a lion, and becomes an experiment for Dr. Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), who transplants his brain into a robot full sized T-Rex. Admittedly, this is not the first strange idea of putting a brain into something else - Boris Karloff was obsessed with transplanting brains between man and dog in House of Frankenstein (1944), and likewise Tammy... was made as a comedy. The narrative gets weirder, in real life as much as the movie's own, when the original film was meant as an R-rated movie. And when I write R-rated, that means that it was originally released cut of its content for a more family friendly form by in its premiere, and that when it was resurrected in the later 2010s by Joe Rubin, co founder of the distributor Vinegar Syndrome, with its fully uncut form, it was revelled to have a jaw dropping level of gore to go along with its bizarre tone.

Yes, Tammy... is a silly film but it does catch one off-guard with ease. It is made in the nineties, yet we open with Denise Richards in the middle of an aerobics scene with other women set to a glam metal score about walking around like a dinosaur. In complete honesty, the film with its cheese and winking tone, alongside some of its adult humour really being tactless, would have in any other context had put me off. I realise that, with a lot of cult eighties horror films especially, their cheesy tones really do not work for me. Here however you have a film where, when it comes to Paul Walker having his brain transplanted into a robot dinosaur, you have in the fully uncut version a full blown splatter moment Herschell Gordon Lewis would have been proud of, with the brain being exposed and eventually being removed. Gore is not something nowadays I take with interest as well, but there is something incredibly jarring and striking in this film, with its early nineties colours and comedic tone, where a tyrannosaurus rex foot crushes a man and it has blood split, or heads being bit off. Whilst it is not a definition of greatness in a film, there is something striking when genre and tone catch one off guard.

This is definitely the case for a film, in truth, which is goofy. In mind to its circumstances, including that the director filmed most of the film not far from his own house¹, there is a charm to the film but it cannot be denied either that it is ridiculous to consider. It is helped considerably by its cast. There is an unfortunate and bittersweet nature to Paul Walker, who tragically died too young when he developed a popular status in the Fast and the Furious franchise, a series about cars and action which moved away from its origins, of the boom in interest for street racing, into a long lasting series that gained more fans unlike other franchises after five films onwards. He is charismatic in the scenes he gets on screen, bearing in mind he is literally replaced with an animatronic dinosaur, thankfully one which does have enough as a great piece of mechanical creation that, even if they have to awkwardly animate scenes in with him afar moving, is an interesting co-star to work with as a machine. Denise Richards is the same here, a charismatic figure who thankfully went on to have a prolific career in television. Whether one film or not can be argued for why her cinema career never went as far, when there was a period in the late nineties when she would be very visible in films like Wild Things (1998), it was probably not helped by the notoriety of casting her as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones in a James Bond film, The World is Not Enough (1999), probably the biggest profile film from that time and an albatross around her neck for how her role was not highly looked upon.

A shame as, actually the figure that has to carry the film, she is sincere in this utterly silly film having to act against an animatronic dinosaur. With Theo Forsett, playing her friend Byron Black, having to play the leads in this absurd premise, there is a lot to have to work around in its adult humour and absurdities, such as an entire scene in a morgue, trying to find a new body for her boyfriend, which alongside a T-Rex outside giving thumbs up and downs in response outside in a truck, also has the consideration of whether to have a woman's body instead which some temptation from the dino to go in that direction. If anything, the film willingly going to the edge in terms of stretching itself is where Tammy... gains worth, a movie that knows how ridiculous it is to have an animatronic dinosaur have a scene using a payphone. It does stumble in its willingness to go for an unexpected - some of the jokes have not aged well, and Forsett's broad stereotype of a gay character will cause some to roll their eyes, but it is really the couple of jokes at his expense that are more an issue, whilst by accident character is given to him as the son to the town sheriff whose relationship is awkward as father and son.

Other times however this attitude proved a virtue to the film, where even the gore is a strange and unexpected exclamation which keeps the film, where a young woman's love for her boyfriend even overcomes him sudden brain transfer in a dinosaur, interesting. That it will have, for the scene of Michael being mauled, an actual stunt man or animal trainer play acting being attacked by an actual lion is something which stands out, as is the fact that for all the jokes, the gore and even attempted grave robbing just after a funeral, it is still sincere as a love story is credit for the film in terms of positives. Definitely the experience has softened me to Stewart Raffill as a figure, least who in his career as a filmmaker and then later an author is as eccentric as his output. Unlike a future film like Standing Ovation, a film always meant for kids which did get predictable, this in contrast was not surprisingly a film to screen when it was rediscovered and made available for midnight movie crowds in its original cut. It is, again, ridiculous, but I have to admire the film being weird too.

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1) Which can be read about, along the director's career, HERE.

Gushing Prayer (1971)

 

a.k.a. Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute

Director: Masao Adachi (with Haruhiko Arai)

Screenplay: Masao Adachi

Cast: Aki Sasaki as Yasuko; Hiroshi Saitô as Kôichi; Makiko Kim as Yôko; Yûji Aoki as Bill; Shigenori Noda as Arai

An Abstract Candidate

 

The best way to describe Gushing Prayer would be to attempt to explain the film to someone who isn't a cineaste, with a lot of explanation having to be made first. First, you have to explain that, whilst an erotic film usually evokes softcore titillation or in some cases a drama, one exception to that rule was the Japanese "pink" movement where, for every film which was made up into the current day entirely for the sake of titillation, there were exceptions. Especially in the late sixties and seventies, as long as you kept under the low budgets and still had sex, you could make a film about any subject and structure. Adding to this tale would be to talk of Masao Adachi, a screenwriter and filmmaker who, working within the pinku genre with inherently political and unconventional structure, would eventually stop making films just at the time Gushing Prayer was created, joining the communist militant group the Japanese Red Army, and reside in Lebanon for decades until being arrested for passport violations in the 2000s. That this tale ends with Adachi being released from jail, making another film in 2007 (Prisoner / Terrorist) and working onwards, really emphasises both the idiosyncratic context to the film beyond sex and that Gushing Prayer itself is going to be as unconventional.

With George Bataille quoted before coitus and echoes added to voices in certain scenes to add a disconnected mood, this is pinku but with very different aims. Do not come to Gushing Prayer for sex but late sixties into the seventies political avant-garde or you will be sorely disappointed. This comes to sex as a subject for its characters to have to grapple with, four lost teenagers (two boys and two girls) trying to "beat sex", trying to escape their bodies and their sexualities to become something more when the lead among them, fifteen year old schoolgirl Yasuko (Aki Sasaki) has had sex beforehand with her middle age teacher and is expecting child. What this leads to is the quartet trying to overcome sensuality, effectively guilting Yasuko into being a paid prostitute for feeling something with her teacher.

With tanks on parade in the street, the film feels of a tense political time in Japan, the film the penultimate one in the filmmaker's career in his first arch, before The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), an overtly political piece before his complete separation from the art form for decades. Most porn films, to be blunt, do not have echoing voiceovers on a street taking of being unable to beat sex, and from its female voiceover of various ways an 18-19 year old girl committed suicide to the acoustic guitar score, Gushing Prayer does contrast the genre it is in, even in mind to said genre for the films meant to be erotic having a history of unpredictable and inventive productions. Even its habit, as a monochrome film, to switch to colour is used in provocative ways even if the film has a lot of nudity and sex emphasised by it too. When a son shows his friends his mother having sex in the bedroom to ask whether it is real, even if it is evoking titillation in the sharp turn to warm (reddish) colour, it does provoke a great deal in the context this is happening within when it's a character, quite an unlikable figure but one clearly trapped in a youthful despair, to show his mother in front of his friends having sex and all the baggage that involves. That the film is as well about teenagers rather than adults, despite a history as well in Western cinema of adults playing teenage character who are seen naked and eroticised in even comedies, adds an uncomfortable weight potentially for viewers too.

Honestly, the film itself feels alien in the modern day, an unknowable aspect to its tone and attitude which I can appreciate but in this case as well is in clear danger, despite being only under eighty minutes, of missing a point at all for a viewer, neither the pinku film about eroticism, and feeling of its time in terms of a rebellious avant-garde film, one which is severely limited in its choice of subject and may have lost meaning. Whether a good thing or one Masao Adachi was right to make, this is a film now you have to view with a generation where the idea of youths being this hopeless politically but wishing effectively for either permanently chastity or total mastery on a transcendental level, in a film grounded in its bleak Japanese urban streets, contrasts a world where many forms of eroticisms even merely imagined or faked are prolific, and do not even need other people involved.

What grasps to me however, and will still connect to any viewer, is Yasuko, a figure who you are clearly sympathetic to. Her misanthropic peers, who wish to overcome sex and did not like the fact she broke their rule, are still alienated teenagers trying to grasp at something, refusing a basic part of their world and finding themselves unable to escape it. As the figure in among them who is the centre, Yasuko is a figure who resonates still decades later as a lost figure, able to briefly have a moment of joy, the colour footage returning for her to briefly play in her own daydreams naked as a nymph in an apartment, but the coldness of the world around her eventually crunches down. Deciding to turn the gas on in an oven is the sole option, and the colour comes back to haunt the viewer with blood in a toilet bowl.

It is a difficult film, all whilst never presenting a difficult aesthetic style, but still being a stark and confrontation piece in its tone and presentation. Merely that, with its mind on such a bleak tone and alienating in its genre tropes, Gushing Prayer is difficult to work with. Still with reward, but also a curiosity as a result in its genre and the avant-garde films made at the time. Knowing Masao Adachi was following on, as much as a screenwriter for the likes of Kôji Wakamatsu, on similar pinku films which challenged and rattled against their own genres, not films held as erotic but difficult avant-garde films, make this an interesting glance at them all.

Abstract Spectrum: Philosophical/Stark

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

Winter Vacation (2010)

 

Director: Hongqi Li

Screenplay: Hongqi Li

Cast: Jinfeng Bai, Lei Bao, Hui Wang, Ying Xie, Naqi Zhang

Ephemeral Waves

Sorry comrade, we're illiterate.

Introducing us to the setting, a northern Chinese industrial town, three male teenagers meet up in the middle of the cold winter streets, debating whether to go to the vegetable stand to see a female grocer outside selling cabbages, all because they were informed she was pretty. One of them points out that the only reason this has been raised is only as she is an outsider to the small industrial town, all deciding against this. In the background, a mantra is being repeated from an unknown source whilst they wander off the school. Thus begins a film with the driest of dry humour begins from filmmaker Li Hongqi, which does not set up a comedy of the usual sort but is so deadpan it hits the bottom of a still metaphorical lake of its own creation.

Winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2010 Locano Film Festival, sadly Winter Vacation has become an obscure title, belaying that for its slow still scenes usually shot in establishing shots with the cast, this is the bleakest of comedies. Set in a town in Inner Mongolia to be precise, during Spring Festival, even the cabbages on the vegetable market look bleak in the eyes of poet/novelist/filmmaker Hongqi, also working as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym and stretching scenes to an extreme, all to the point they could cause anxiety for a viewer if they do not find it funny, or frustrates. More so as Hongqi deliberately strips all the character out of the environment, where the only thing left is rundown industrial environments and white walled rooms and the prolonged takes. The only distinctions are really some of the clothing, mostly the teenagers' as between purple and lack striped Bonad Fashion Jeans hoodie and a couple of other items, the adults wear nothing particularly to stand out either. Even the music, baring the Boredoms-esque end credit track, which consists of a hummed female voice contrasted by a male one, hesitates and is seemingly confused, asking in wordlessness with wariness to the male one. If you are not patient with this, Winter Vacation becomes a nightmare but, if used to this tone or prepared, you can be in my shoes where it made the film funnier the longer the scenes lasted.

Even in mind of the humour being mean and misanthropic - with many people slapping each other, the youngest son (a toddler) being constantly threatened with his uncle "kicking his butt", and a female toddler already having lived a long life already with insomnia to go with it during nap times - the humour prevents this film being too bleak. Instead, the bleakest of humour here is universal in its sense of the doldrums of reality, whilst also being political without being blatant about this. This presents not an idealised world, mainland China seen by itself in grandeur and outside by many with controversy, but instead as a place of individual towns and places where life has to drag on. The location, one I have rarely seen in Chinese cinema at the time I finally saw this film, belies the idealised image and is closer to what Jia Zhangke has filmed in terms of his cinema, belying and defying genre too as he went on, in showing the real grounded reality of his country. Within this story, one young male child wishes to become an orphan when he grows up, and another couple formally go for a divorce without any drama to it in a blank looking government office. In among this the teenagers, in-between school, drift around. Some bully others for money by just slapping them repeatedly. One girl shows affection for one boy by making him a green knitted woollen hat, which beyond the prolonged digression of a group looking over it returns back with an unfortunate punch line. Even a "your mother" joke appears, even if significantly less cruder than done in the West.

Another considers that teenage love may affect her studies - probably leading to the best if crudest dialogue among the likes of "I've basically become her menstrual pad" or the entire life goal of wanting to continue on an endless cycle of fruit from someone's loins, when the boy saying this is too young and clearly naive to know what an adult relationship will be like - and another considers a way to help his country, taking the mantel of wanting to be a good comrade but considering school a useless direction instead of alternatives. You could argue it goes for the obvious - in which the finale involves a male teacher (having forgotten to take his medicine) giving an improvised lecture to a class about the pointlessness of human progression, instead of the intended one on apomictic molluscs, only to be informed he is in the wrong classroom - but Winter Vacation became too glacially witty to be pointlessly nihilistic.

A joy is to be had in how dour the film is in the right mindset, and profoundness is to be found for a grandfather watching on TV scenes, from one of the director's own films, of the same stillness only to have both someone slapping another person, and then a scene of two people with walking sticks on a street antagonising each other. When the film is willing even to be crude, it does stand out against the rigid filmmaking style. Anything that is remotely political in the obvious sense, jokes on couches and chairs set out in the snow about wanting to do much for the country between teenagers, is there to deflate the image of mainland China with probably as much power than anything overtly critical in another filmmaker's work. Personally, Winter Vacation even without the decade of build to see, as I first heard of the film in fleeting coverage of the 2010 Locarno Film Festival in Sight & Sound magazine, was a thing to delight in with my own perverse joy.