North (1994)

 

Director: Rob Reiner

Screenplay: Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman

Based on a novel by Alan Zweibel

Cast: Elijah Wood as North, Jon Lovitz as Arthur Belt, Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander as North's Father, Alan Arkin as Judge Buckle, Dan Aykroyd as Pa Tex, Kathy Bates as Alaskan Mother, Robert Costanzo as Al, Faith Ford as Donna Nelson, Graham Greene as Alaskan Father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as North's Mother, Matthew McCurley as Winchell, Reba McEntire as Ma Tex, John Ritter as Ward Nelson, Lauren Tom as Mrs. Ho, Abe Vigoda as Alaskan Grandfather, Keone Young as Governor Ho, Alexander Godunov as Amish Father, Kelly McGillis as Amish Mother, Scarlett Johansson as Laura Nelson

Ephemeral Waves

 

Before North, a film whose reputation likely exists more than as a film people have seen, director Rob Reiner had a streak of films so highly regarded it would be seen as a golden run - This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Misery (1990), and the film before North which was a huge box office success, A Few Good Men (1992). After North, his career still continues, but it is with much obscurer films, with North considered a film so notorious its negativity was spoken in shudders when I first heard of it.

The vivid toys of our titular lead's room, played by Elijah Wood, nods to the strange and whimsical story ahead, an adaptation of a novel by Alan Zweibel, co-writer and co-producer for the adaptation, an intentionally strange children's tale with the high concept you would expect for that audience. North is stressed out, and whilst he could be seen as an egotist, who is so good in school and life other children's parents use him as the guilt inducing symbol for asking their children why they do not floss their teeth like North does, it is clearly meant to be an exaggeration for a gag. Whether it works or not, at least Wood himself, before going on legendarily with the Lord of the Rings adaptations, showed his charisma here as a child actor, which is needed for this quirky premise. His story is still a universal one, that fear any child has where they feel their parents ignore them in their busy lives, even the smartest and most talented here finding himself so distant from them it even starts to knock his talents off course badly. He crosses path with Bruce Willis dressed as a pink Easter Bunny, and whilst it is explained he is an employee at an Easter holiday special at a local toy store, the strangeness of the meeting is certainly a set up for the whimsical tale where, when trying to let North know he should accept his parents as they are, Bruce accidentally plants the idea in the kid's head instead to divorce his parents and get new ones.

The film's reputation for being bad is overdone, with all its issues I have seen in comedies and family films, the saccharine touches and jokes not landed universal among them. The one true negative we sadly will have to get to, the stereotypes and jokes which have aged horrifically as time as past, are that bad with time passing, but most of the film is not beyond these scenes as pointless as I had always presumed it to be. This is not that hair pulling nightmare I had been told it was, and blasphemously, I would go to say the most infamous opinion, that of acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert, was melodrama with hindsight. His reaction was clearly sincere, justified in his legendary comment on North that "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."¹. The review itself however is still spoken from a critic famous due to his published but also television film review opinions, so a person who would have made snappy one-liners to sell or dissuade his viewers and readers over films without taking too long to dissect the thing he hated hated hated. In truth, the sins of North are ones we did not dog pile as harshly as other films, and beyond those stereotypes which are awful and cannot be defended, the rest of this comes off with the earnestness of a whimsical tale.

It is telling, to spoil the plot entirely, this is all a dream of North's, that old and sometimes despised cliché in cinema, but the set up if like a milder form of Alice in Wonderland sets up that the exaggeration of a feverish mind in at hand here, naive and viewing the world with the peculiar gags as envisioned by adult men in the co-writer and director's seats, imagining the circumstances when he goes about separating himself from his parents. His father literally works testing trousers in a variety of ways, even with a rabbi in one booth bowing to see if the seams tear in a variety of different scenarios the product could be worn within, setting up this sense of colourful absurdity from the mind of a child, and thus in this world, it is set up this is not a serious or realistic take on child divorce in the slightest, but the perception of what a child would presume would be possible. S child divorce is far easier to pull off then it should be when Jon Lovitz as a sleazy lawyer suddenly drives up to him in a car out of nowhere and can get all the ticks marked for the trial to be a success, quickly as North comes up with the plan. It comes with a hitch though - North has until Labour Day to choose his parents (or go back to his biological ones) to avoid going to an orphanage, and whilst he goes off into the world to find them, Lovitz and the bright but evil kid in charge of the school newspaper take advantage of this. As the children of North's town start rebelling against their own parents in response, this pair decide that even if getting rid of North has to be done, the power they now have with Lovitz potentially up to becoming the US president is too important for North to realise he always loved his biological father and mother. The obvious cliché that North will realise he loves his parents is something we find in so many family films in structure, so I cannot dismiss this as a hoary cliché either.

The premise, as the kids back home start to mutiny against their parents for their right to freedom, definitely is based on a fun sounding young teen/children's novel, and unfortunately where the problems I have with the film begin and end are the stereotypes that make up the meat of the film, the absurd takes on all the families that make themselves known to North they would take him as their adopted son. At first, there is more a playful absurdity to Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire being so Texan as a potential new family, their limoscene is longer than some trains, and includes an abrupt musical number about everything being big in Texas to the Rawhide theme. There is definitely a children's film dream logic at play here to, welcomed, more so as, following its final punch line of North waking up and how Bruce Willis both sets this up and is the narrator, he constantly re-appears seemingly as different people with the same face in every location North ends up at trying to find new parents. It is one of the aspects which works, and sets up someone thing if as fluffy and quick to consume as candy floss, which is not a bad thing, especially if the jokes about the parents North chooses between could play to the jokes of stereotypical nuclear family dynamics.

Where the problem lies comes with the idea that, in a grimmer work, you could touch on the uncomfortable subject of how stereotypes are ingrained in kids and thus their imaginations are imbued on them, a theme that could have been tackled with sensitivity if this had been not a straightforward children's film, but a grim comedy. That is not the case however, as these are played as straight forward jokes that you are supposed to enjoy; it is the moment I do agree with Gene Siskel, who brings this up in his review with Roger Ebert on the Siskel and Ebert review, where he said the "ethnic stereotyping is appalling"², and they have aged like a fine murder. Parents from Hawaii leads to typical Hawaii imagery for a governor and wife unable to have children, if getting into the weird joke about the new promotional sign including North's butt crack being expose by an octopus for an uncomfortable gag. Worse however comes in Alaska and an Inuit couple, not called that, which involves Kathy Bates and others in brown face, which is absolutely cringe inducing when the joke could have worked. Beyond the grim one of sending grandpa out to freeze to death, which does continue into the stereotyping, there is a playful joke here of imaginary Inuit suburbia, where one needs to mow the icy lawn and the dog sledge goes into the garage of the stereotypical igloo suburban house, a production design joke I think is not offensive if it was mocking the stereotypical image of Inuit culture from their side positively. Sadly, that is clearly not the case, and more of these jokes get worse. By that point, then you get the African tribe joke about the women being topless, which fall into this type of terrible humour that we sadly still got into films decades after and other films should be found guilty of, especially as they are lazy as they are dreadful. China is reduced into the least expected reference to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1988), and even the joke about the French wearing berets and Jerry Lewis films appearing on every TV channel just emphasise the lazy, toe curling tone of a film made for kids but clearly absorbing its adult creator's worse tendencies. That is the side of North which is as bad as it sounds, and is just bad comedy in general, especially as the obvious joke about an Amish family North considers just reminded me why "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody song Amish Paradise was actually funny.

This is all a shame as, whilst syrupy in the truest sense, a weird and sometimes sick humoured fantasy exists in this premise, literally the fevered dream of a young boy, which could have worked. Ebert's anger of how the film glibly plays with the idea of a child could with ease dispose of his parents¹ does ignore that the point of the film, whether it succeeds or shoots itself in the foot by not hitting the tone successfully, that this is meant as a perverse fantasy from the perspective of a nine year old. He is angry at his parents, concocts the idea, plays it out and it is as ill-conceived as you would expect from a child still yet to fully mature, and develop through his teenage and adult years the weight of the ties to his parents. The narrative arch, whilst gleefully enjoying the idea, when North's divorce succeeds, of parents kowtowing to their children's every needs in role reversal fears, is about why North's divorce is not a good idea at all, conservative as a conclusion in its final but with that obvious, saccharine realisation the thing most of us, even the cynics, would admit is the right ending. Some may argue for a more twisted conclusion, but as a family comedy, the point is the humour from its weird journey until North realises his mistake.

When his parents are shocked by his actions and end up frozen in place, positioned behind glass at the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit for the momentous event they were part of, you see how none of this is anchored in conventional reality, but a picture book for the more quirkier of humour. Tellingly, the original author and co-writer Alan Zweibel was also a writer on Saturday Night Live from when it originally began, and a consulting producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm among his long career, so the more bizarre and more adult moments of humour fit the sense this is a stranger concoction of these earnest themes of loving your parents with the eyebrow lifts at the more twisted jokes.

The production design when allowed to play with this kid's logic in the real world, exaggerating the locations, works when allowed to be, even if one moment is a pop, in the evil corporate headquarters where the evil kid and Jon Lovitz are scheming, just because you get to see then-1992/4 arcade videogame cabinets all in a row to show their true decadence, including a bizarre (but great) animated cartoon tie-in from Konami called Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992). Bruce Willis, who did come from comedy originally and was once viewed as a weird choice for Die Hard (1988), fits as a phantom shape shifter who appears everywhere, as a beach comber to being a chain-smoking stand-up comedian hired for a smoke alarm manufacture's convention, one of the strangest jokes but in hindsight working for that reason it shouldn't. The Clarence Odbody/Guardian Angel role to push North to the obvious message at the heart of the film works, and when the North film itself plays to this whimsical tone, I think its reputation is not as deserved. Even when it gets really twisted, North ending up in New York City with a hit man hired to try to murder a child, the tonal shift fits as part of this era of mainstream nineties cinema which had these tonal shifts and sense of playful weirdness at their heart.

All my problems is that, at its centre, you have to suffer through jokes which are dreadful, but we can also look to films which were not failures and loved at the time, like the Ace Venture Pet Detective films I grew up with as a kid with Jim Carrey, and see that problematic and offensive jokes were everywhere. I deliberately choose an example with jokes far worse than those in North to point that out, even if I will not defend North's either. This feels like, for the most part, when a director in Rob Reiner managed to create so many films now considered iconic and beloved, and in a variety of genres in a row, eventually when made the one which falters, it gets a shock reaction from viewers who loved everything before. Were it not for the jokes which are problematic, the sin of North is that it is ill thought-out, the best version of this never coming to be when I find moments which work beautifully, but all from an idea that needed to be properly fleshed out. Maybe it needed to even offend Roger Ebert more by playing with the idea of a child gladly divorcing his parents, startling a target child audience and their parents with the fantasy even in a kid film friendly tone, before reaching that warming ending, like a perverse fantasy comedy take on when It's a Wonderful Life (1946) got to the Potter's Field version of its central town. The nineties, even in children's TV animation I grew up with, relished the more overtly adult and cynical sense of humour, and whilst North was clearly made with the theme of loving one's parents, the joke of children rebelling against their parents, and the wackier production design choices, should have been lent on.

North instead is a film we never got a DVD release of in the United Kingdom, let alone Blu Ray, a lost Rob Reiner film which was not a box office success at all even without the negative reviews, so thus quietly buried like a few of the more notorious films from the nineties which, due to coming from the VHS era, you cannot find a second hand DVD copy unlike the 2000s and 2010s equivalents of notorious pictures from major studios. Naturally it is a film tied to the Golden Raspberry Award, a contentious award ceremony for "bad films" in the sense they come from a more ironic time before, starting in the 1980 when Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards was also published, but somewhat lost to how in the internet era now you can not only dig up much more "bad" cinema, but you get weirdoes like myself on blogs defending a couple of them as actually things we enjoyed. Hilariously another Bruce Willis film stole the Golden Raspberry Award from North at the 15th event in March 26th 1995. That would be the erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), which will not be elaborated upon as it would be inappropriate to in a review of a film targeted to a family audience, and because that film needs its own review to unpack.

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1) Roger Ebert's review of North, published July 22, 1994

2) Siskel and Ebert, Season 8 Episode 44, The Client/Lassie/It Could Happen to You/North/Barcelona, aired July 23rd 1994.

Games of the Abstract: Bangai-O (1999)

 

Developer: Treasure

Publisher: Entertainment Software Publishing [Japan]/Swing! Entertainment Media [Europe]/Conspiracy Entertainment [North America]

One Player

Originally for: Nintendo 64 [But Sega Dreamcast Version Covered]

 

It delights me that Bangai-O originates from Treasure programmer Mitsuru “Yaiman” Yaida, inspired by an old shooter which surprised him for the amount of bullets he saw onscreen, wanting to see with the then-current state of technology how he could get as many bullets as he could onscreen without compromising the processor for a game¹.  This little experiment got the go ahead, in the midst of 3D games being the biggest sellers, from their president with a small development team¹, and thus the result is one of the obscurer Treasure games nowadays, despite being one which got a European and North American release, and two sequels later on. This is a shame as it is refreshing take on the shooter genre. One for its unique take on the twin stick shooter template, and for how Yaiman’s initial experiment became a gleefully strange and funny take on the mechanics alongside how easy to get into the mechanics it is, and interesting to master.

This review is focused on the Dreamcast version, but Bangai-O started as a Japanese only Nintendo 64 release, with changes taking place in-between the versions alongside new aesthetic additions. The fruit for starters, literally coming from Yaiman evoking older games by just wanting the player character to pick up oranges¹, was not just for points originally but charged your shots, and you had access to a shop which was taken out for the Dreamcast version, accessed even by hitting all 100 shots with missiles for a destructive wormhole. All this was jettisoned by the Dreamcast version which revamped the presentation, and was the version which got the global release. The premise is simple, a parody of a yakuza revenge tale taking place on the planet 男星(dansei), literally “male planet” with the female planet jettisoned by Map Editor/Graphic Designer Koichi “Kafuichi” Kimura as an idea in production¹. The space yakuza on this planet hurt your father and as revenge, the young son with a robot stolen from them goes to do good but with his kid sister tagging along. Thankfully she is as integral to the story as he is, as this follows a mechanical idea Treasure has played with a lot, with dual attack functions in their games. Silhouette Mirage (1997) literally made your heroine two faced, split in half into two different colours to match the opposite ones needed to attack enemies of a different colour, arguably a more complicated game play loop for a run and gun then others by them. Ikaruga (2001), whilst a very hard scrolling shooter game, simplified this idea perfectly with the same colour of enemy bullets absorbing them with damage and being able to even charge a power shot with them.

Bangai-O’s take is that the male lead fires homing missiles from the mecha, whilst his sister is linked to energy beams which ricochet off walls and objects, with both fire power types needed and with limited bomb versions. To paraphrase a Samuel L. Jackson quote from Jackie Brown (1997), when you absolutely, positively got to kill every melonfarmer in the room, accept no substitutes but the missiles, and as I will get into there are the rare literal watermelon or two to collect for big points, so they will be useful to use. In the cramped areas as the levels, two dimensional dioramas, can also involve mazes or places deliberately limited in directions to force enemy chokeholds into your way, the energy beams are far more special especially as you can bounce the beams around corners with good aiming when there are a lot of killer robots ahead or laser beam barriers blocking the way. The levels themselves, only until the end when the death traps and laser filled gauntlets start to be labyrinths let alone the bosses who appear at the end of them, are deliberately short, allowing you to experiment with the mechanics of these two fire powers, and find tactics with them and the movement you have. Even the lengthening of the last levels is because the tiny areas are so hazardous and with simple puzzles to figure out that you have to get your wits about it. The puzzle aspect shows the designers playing with the structure, such as the level where you need to get through obstacles, setting off an initial explosion and a few others, quickly to avoid being trapped and having to restart the level, or relish the chaos in the level where you need to clear through all the hazards above, including the generators which spawn robots from above on mass (or even brick blocks in one line), through all the layers to reach the boss.

It emphasizes Treasure’s treasures, forgive the pun, and uses each stage to stretch a part of its simple idea and few objects in new directions, where the time limit of the levels is not a game over if it reaches zero, but that you get all your points confiscated even if you manage to complete that level and now access the new one. Only the sense the last levels punish you with harder gauntlets and then bosses, especially the last, and that you may end up going through them over and over is a sense of a real difficulty curve, as everything is developing over time. Alongside the fact you have infinite continues and ease of access for the time, the game is more accessible to its credit to the point that has to be praised as a huge virtue in its own way. It feels like, and I say this as a compliment, an indie Steam game in design from a time of a well established company was making the game instead, developing for the likes of Nintendo and Sega, but also put a math challenge abruptly in the middle of Mischief Makers (1997) for a gag and could be freewheeling in experimental arcade throwbacks like this one later on.

That simplicity is found in a lot of their games, never overcomplicating their idiosyncratic ideas or their arcade-like game play loops, like Gunstar Heroes (1993) emphasizing the boss rushes alongside the levels, or Mischief Makers being short sharp levels based around a heroine who grabs and shakes objects. The result is a forty plus level game with mostly simple but diverse challenges with its physics and few items. Some barriers are one-way, some refuse to open until you get requirements blown up, and there are things like explosives to breakable blocks which block the way or are for points. (Cars hilariously take longer to blow up, despite having nothing to them expect to mine points, than some earlier bosses if you know what to do). There is also the fact the bomb mechanic has its own tactics, as the risk of being in the middle of a sea of bullets and missiles after you is what you want, as the risk of being blown up can be turned against everyone when the bomb is set off. Over a certain number, you get your bomb meter increased again, as with blowing up enemies and objects, as well as health pickups. If you have over a hundred plus after you, you can live out Mitsuru “Yaiman” Yaida’s original intention for this project, as all those hazards are turned into hundreds of homing missiles or a full radius laser beam of death that decimates everything nearby in a comically cacophony of explosions and noises. All there is left behind after this is the fruit to collect, leading to the oranges as the most common becoming even pears or the elusive watermelons if the bullet number you turned was comically high. It taps into a lizard brain mentality in a good way, especially as with the exception of the final boss who spams two out of spite and reads your moves, bosses who try to pull off the evil waves of bullets in all directions can be kicked in the nuts instantly if you set off the bomb at the right time and decimate their health bar.

Treasure could be serious – Ikaruga is a beautifully somber take on the scrolling sci-fi shooter – but they are also great when they are proudly silly, adding such a personality like here in Bangai-O. The information guide at the start of the earlier levels, who starts teaching you the techniques, eventually has to be found within levels and is there as only an ongoing conversation with a tree woman, a literal tree person who is a mother. She briefly gets ill and even has her ghost daughter take over for a while, just to emphasis this absurdity. Some bosses each level, alongside the ones who are dangerous but can be goofballs in the pre-fight conversations, are merely defenseless power hubs, one or two cats, but others the depressed consciousness of a hub for sick humour. Your revenge is undercut when your father eventually betrays you, fighting him a few times, and marries into the yakuza family you are trying to destroy, and all of this is a wonderful orange slice on the cake here, perfectly contrasting the kinetic joy of the game play and why I admire Treasure as I do. Sequels did come to the game - Bangai-O Spirits (2008) for the Nintendo DS, and later Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury (2011) for Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade – I hope for the day this title like Radiant Silvergun (1998) get a lot more interest and rereleased, as this is a strong game deserving to be preserved. At least it deserves praise from originating from that initial experiment, accomplishing that experiment more so as, unlike the Nintendo 64 version, the Dreamcast release managed to have even more bullets on screen and thus more explosions.

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1) Bangai-O – 1999 Developer Interview, originally published in the Japanese Dreamcast Magazine, translated into English and published on shmuplations.

Fruits of Passion (1981)

 

Director: Shūji Terayama

Screenplay: Shūji Terayama and Rio Kishida

Based on Retour à Roissy by Anne Desclos

Cast: Isabelle Illiers as O, Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen, Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie, Peter as Madame, Keiko Niitaka as Aisen, Sayoko Yamaguchi as Sakuya, Hitomi Takahashi as Byakuran, Miyuki Ono as Kasen, Kenichi Nakamura as Le jeune homme, Ogaku, Akiro Suetsugu as Obana, Renji Ishibashi as Kato, Takeshi Wakamatsu as Le gardien de la maison, Georges Wilson as Le narrateur

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fruits of Passion feels caught between an unfortunate schism, a compromise between two sides which fits the legacy of a sequel novel by Anne Desclos, the original novel itself caught between the schism of being criticized by feminists for a tale of a woman becoming the ultimate submissive to men, yet also was a work by a woman who, even if hiding under a pseudonym until she finally revealed her authorship, was intelligent and as much writing the book as a challenge to the person she held the dearest, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française literary magazine, in his belief no woman could write an erotic novel¹. In general the erotic films of the past, specifically the ones this is linked to from the seventies, are always going to be challenging in terms of whether their ideas and tone can be defended or not, but this one is also matched by a director in Shūji Terayama, with his collaborators, who was unsung and interesting as he found himself her stuck trying to escape the cage of the genre as the lead herself symbolically wishes to. The film’s central premise of transgressive is questioned by the film itself, as it becomes a pretext which clearly sold the film, with its nudity and sex, but as the most un-erotic of erotic films and more concerned with its tale of Western imperialism on the East, gender and the denizens of a brothel we find ourselves with.

Terayama’s films have been generally difficult to actually see officially, which has made them a Holy Grail for me as a fan of surrealistic cinema, with Fruits of Passion one of the few more readily available as a French-Japanese co-production with a wider reach, one of a couple from a time where Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) was another Argos Film production they funded and the most notorious. Its presentation as a generic sounding erotic film with the potential for problematic content would have not necessarily been a promising introduction to this figure, in which the notorious actor Klaus Kinski, as Englishman Sir Simon, takes a young woman O (Isabelle Illiers) to 1920s Shanghai to become a willing/unwilling brothel sex worker for his fantasies. It is a subject that may prove a concern, but is shot through the eye of a director with a complete lack of interest in eroticizing this, and even in mind to the film feeling like a compromise, shows his voice in a distinct direction, as he brought with him his cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki and composer J.A. Seazer to drastically undercut the direction of the premise. Also important is the co-writer, Rio Kishida, a female playwright and collaborator with Shūji Terayama who wrote plays explicitly dealing with the lives of women, such as the play Thread Hell about women working in a silk thread factory in 1939. That she wrote among multiple films Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (1988), Akio Jissôji's sexually explicit erotic drama set in the 1920s and based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, she had no qualms about dealing with transgressive sexuality as much as feminist ideas.

This is felt with a sense of a film which is running away from its central premise as soon as possible. As much of this comes from O’s story itself as, barring some moments, it is not of real interest for either screenwriter. Shūji Terayama does evoke moments, like a childhood memory of her father abandoning her symbolized by a chalk outline as a child she cannot escape from, which show more to her psyche, but she feels like an outsider to the material as well as with Isabelle Illiers really feeling uncomfortable onscreen having to be continually nude, so much so a client of O’s comments about it and asks if she ever gets cold. Ultimate her plot barring its symbolic template is more rewarding than her dramatic arch, as it is visibly clear the brothel as a whole, and Shanghai under the influence of corrupt Westerners like Sir Simon, is the greater concern. Whilst a curious concoction of a Chinese setting, French co-production credits with French or English dubbing on the cast, and a Japanese production team behind the camera and Japanese actors onscreen with European figures like Illiers and Kinski, you also get a cast of idiosyncratic faces. Legendary model and Steely Dan album cover figure Sayoko Yamaguchi is one of the women working in the brothel, and whilst the brothel mistress is played, whilst dubbed, by Peter, the actor from the seminal LGBTQ film Parade of Roses (1969), and would later appear in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), looking as glorious as you can get whilst also emphasized as a more complex figure in the little he gets. Whilst initially presenting a strict punishment regime including punishing prayer, the mistress is revealed to actually be a caring woman in charge of a family of women and some male assistants who are just trying to survive.

The complete disinterest in being sexy feels on point, in contrast to the aesthetic beauties that are Terayama’s trademarks, such as the use of colour lighting, the surrealistic and melancholic sequences in-between, and the general lush aesthetic style, both attempting to be realistic to the time period but due to the curious co-production history showing its artifice at times. Attempts at a more distinct plot – as a young man who works at a cheap restaurant just by the brothel becomes smitten with O – are interesting, but it’s a fragment of an entire eighty minute film which in that short running time does show potential evidence that the film was compromised on its way to being completed. It feels like it was not given the potential to expand with the grace Terayama’s other films, even a piece explicitly about sexual desire, the mini-feature Grass Labyrinth (1979), could show.

The most compelling fragments from what survived come from the side characters and the context, which in its use of exotic aesthetic, whether defendable or not, evokes the works of Josef von Sternberg; the set up without the explicit sexual content in the thirties would have been a film Marlene Dietrich could have been the star of. The little of the historical plot is the most dynamic in how, with his desire to corrupt O, whilst also having a mistress on the side named Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle), Sir Simon is a terrible person. Kinski’s real life is one I do not want to touch with a barge pole, but he was a compelling figure especially in his antagonism with Werner Herzog. Even dubbed, the twisted aura he always had whilst too uncomfortable at times in certain places fits here, apt for the corrupt figure who thinks he can play games with the Chinese locals, even on a whim funding the Coolie Rebellion, trying to liberate the country from Western influence, and finding himself on a knife’s edge due to this. Even here the erotic set up makes sense as, being a voyeur wanting to see O degrade herself, the romance with the young man in the restaurant and his precarious gambling with life, literalized in metaphor in a casino, is his downfall spiritually and physically when money cannot get what he wants.

Alongside the humour which crops up, like a soldier being spanked for stealing the fictional underwear of his metaphorical mother in a BDSM mistress-client fantasy, or the weirdness of the swan rocker, briefly seen as a combination of a rocking horse and a sex bench, which cuffs a person in it belly first with its rib cage-like mechanics, allowing them to flap their arms like a swan, you see the side of this film which is Terayama’s, and it stands out. Alongside undercutting the illusion of its premise, like J.A. Seizer long before his work in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) indulging in some time inappropriate but awesome prog rock, there are plenty of times this is undercutting the expectations. It has a lot of bird metaphors in their freedom symbolically, from cutting to a dead one filmed floating down the river, or the dream sequence of Illiers naked and chained on a bed, on the roof outside with birds tied to it flapping about, or really poignant scenes not involving O, such as the life of the former actress who is one of the sex worker. She has the most interesting route, from the humour of her role plays in imaginary films with clients, with male staff playing the director with a fake camera, or the tragic “adieu le cinema” that finished her story, which has the set up of a grand piano being talked of in the river pay off in a beautifully haunting moment when it rises out of the nearby water with a corpse being lifted on top of it.

This definitely counts as a flawed gem, especially as it has very little time to fully dissect the complex gender politics it had clearly in mind, something out of the ordinary in this especially when a few years later, you get the likes of Bolero (1984) with Bo Derek held as infamously bad, and erotic cinema would drastically change against especially into the nineties. It feels like the weakest of Shūji Terayama‘s films I have seen entirely because it feels compromised by its production history, working with material to the best he could, and that we were able to get makes this still rewarding. Only the fact most of his career is difficult to officially see, unlike this film, feels the sour aspect to all of this.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike

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

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1) The Story of the Story of O, written by Carmela Ciuraru for Guernica, and published June 15th 2011.

Games of the Abstract: VR Agent (2023)

 

Developer: 3MindWave

Publisher: Sega

One to Two Players

Originally for: Arcade

 

VR Agent, to my surprise as they are not visible on the arcade machine itself, is a Sega distributed work¹, which caught me off guard. The game itself was actually created by 3MindWave, a Hong Kong based developer, though the connection to Sega is there, as Shinichi Ogasawara, who worked in Sega’s AM3 department and worked on machines like the lightgun game The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), is in a Senior Game Designer position at 3MindWave². VR Agent itself is made in an era where you still thankfully get lightgun games but, in an era of new technology, which means that as gimmicked arcade are a timeless part tradition, you have new technology for this to work with. Unlike the curious re-adaptation of Taito's Elevator Action franchise, Elevator Action Invasion (2021), whose entire gimmick was a pair of mechanised elevators doors on the arcade machine, 3MindWave commit to bringing virtual reality to the arcades of nowadays without requiring the full head visor. Released in a time when the likes of the Oculus have been easily available for the home, virtual reality not the dominant format for video games but much more practical than in the nineties, 3MindWave wanted to take this further in a time of full scale VR rides being found in local British sea sides by removing the headset itself whilst retaining the full virtual reality.

The immediate concern is not even the game itself, but how the company even brought this about. You do not have a full VR head set, but attached to the gun itself, which descends down on cables when you start the game by itself, is a pair of goggles attached to the machine. Unlike the Simpsons joke where they do nothing, these work fully in this machine but with the practical issues of VR headsets in general, such as the fact I myself as others wear glasses, or the disorientation if you are not used to them. The former is not that bad thankfully, but would depend on your personal eyewear of choice, the later thankfully just not being used to these machines, and having gone through the entire game’s length, with no concern of nausea or anything of legitimate concern. These one have the additional issue, practically, that the rubber that completely goes around the eyes can be accidentally moved when using them which can distract you from the game in readjusting this, but this is just the practicalities of not having the full headset. The start button is even designed to recalibrate the gun back into focus if you accidentally have lost this, and even without the goggles on, the game plays onscreen too with the full virtual environment onscreen as you move the gun around.

The virtual reality is an achievement, as whilst the practicalities of these machines exists in the home let alone the arcade, this manages to bring it to more simpler equipment and also bring something unique to the light gun game in its simple mechanics, even if it is something as simple as having the proper ability to turn your head around a corner or look upwards diagonally to pick off goons. It does not emphasise the idea of full body motion, such as modern VR or in this genre the experiment by Konami with Police 24/7 (2000) with full body motion cameras, merely focusing on the advantage of turning your head around even behind you. No one tries to shoot you in the back, which is due to the practicalities of an arcade machine not sold as a full VR machine, and as this requires someone to keep an eye on your bag, does means we do not have a full 360 degree game field to play with even though the game encompasses little details behind you. There is enough within what it could practically do, so I found myself looking around the corner in a nice turn for the genre.

Where the game does suffer for me is a lack of personality, so much so a feature to make the game more family friendly actually appeals to me more than the full bloodied version. In the original version, there are grunts you are against and even blood, but the alternative I played turns them into robots, which is odder as they still have the same bodies but only the heads are replaced. With some of these characters wearing suits, it is a game with some of the most dapper robots I have encountered, and that sets up the issue of my personal taste that, with a lot of the modern 2020s games I find in arcades, I appreciate their aesthetic but they are lacking something memorable to run with their aesthetics and new technology. I do not even mind how the levels are generic realistic as that in itself has an almost liminal space nature in context to the virtual reality – barring its final level being a boss battle that is only unlocked when everything else is finished, the game is structured by a series of stages by difficulty between liminal space locations like a hotel to a warehouse that can be played in any order. The issue is that lack of sparkle that a Sega developed lightgun game might have add, and the sense that, for a game with complete emphasis on the virtual reality gimmick, there is no story whatsoever for this, and thus no cut scenes or anything even unintentionally adding a sense of spark to this.  

This is one of my issues I have found going to certain games, which they have all the advancements now in tech, but a complete lack of interest in more than the basic game play as an amusement ride. Yes, the games of the past can be comical in their voice acting and over-the-top mannerisms, trying to bolt simple plots on these lightgun games, but that has actually become one of my favourite things about them, so much so I am looking with regret on my more negative view of some other games in this area. Something like thing like Razing Storm (2008), effectively a Gears of War inspired lightgun game with Five Finger Death Punch music on the soundtrack, and an unintentionally melodramatic dude bro tone for a Japanese game clearly wanting to sell to the West at the time, is now a game I look to with great affection nowadays. There is a sense of personality, where a lot of the lightgun games of the past even when cheesy having mirth to them beyond perfunctory shooting gallery structures. VR Agent has no power ups or health pickups, and gun changing only happens for you in specific level selections, but you have dynamics I appreciated in its core gimmick which could be expanded upon. There is a sense of fun to this, robot headed goons jumping off from large heights with axes directly into the gun sight, or having to search for enemies on high warehouse structures or in driver seats of parked cars, but this feels like a mere template for something grander, making this less interesting to actually ever go back to. 

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1) VR Agent's page on Sega Arcade.

2) Interview: Shinichi Ogasawara and Pang Shy on Sega Amusements, Apex Rebels & 3MindWave, written for Arcade Hero and published on May 9th 2024.

Double Team (1997)

 

Director: Tsui Hark

Screenplay: Don Jakoby and Paul Mones

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme as Jack Paul Quinn, Dennis Rodman as Yaz, Mickey Rourke as Stavros, Natacha Lindinger as Kathryn "Kath" Quinn

Ephemeral Waves

 

With this, I can shoot the dick off a hummingbird.

Double Team is one of those "guilty pleasure" films from the past, a phrase which does not work for me because I feel no guilt for this enjoyment of Double Team, but is sadly the only one I know of in the English language to best describe a film which is not successful in terms of portraying a fully immersive world to engage with, whether for the action genre or not, but wins me over for the fact the film even inexplicably exists. There was a time this was deemed a bankable prospect, teaming Belgium action actor Jean-Claude Van Damme with then basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman in a film that takes its entire premise serious without irony, as nineties as you can get.

Double Team is late in Van Damme's blockbuster era, nearing the end, which stands out for how this is a big budget film in context with its production value, even with shots at a real architectural location, a real place of historical value, to represent the Roman Colosseum, alongside stunt work and some budget for something whose scene by scene synopsis is ridiculous. Van Damme is Jack Paul Quinn, a retired "hunter" for spies, with wife and an expected child, brought back in the game by the promise to finally catch the terrorist Stavros, played by Mickey Rourke in his wilderness years. Rodman, whilst it is only halfway through when he fully joins into the plot, is Yaz the arms dealer and inventor, living up to Rodman's reputation for unconventional dress sense on court and off it whilst living in Antwerp, Belgium in the district where everyone wears rubber, divers in fish tanks replace erotic dancers, and drum n bass music scores the streets if you stop to listen. The actual film beyond this is as mad as a box of frogs, but you can also see the talent of director Tsui Hark, who is the third noticeable figure here. This was when he briefly went to American, as a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers and actors did, due to the 1997 Hong Kong transfer to China, bringing his stylistic touches even when paying tribute to John Woo's Hard Boiled (1992) in a hospital shootout with babies when Stravos loses his own son and wife during a botched attempt to catch him alive at a carnival.

The tone takes everything seriously, but from Don Jakoby and Paul Mones' script, it gets increasingly more absurd as events escalate for Quinn, and the best comparison is actually a certain type of Japanese manga, and the anime adaptations you were more likely to get in the West at the time Double Team was released, which takes its story entirely seriously but has plot escalation serves which when scrutinised individually, or shown in a live action film as here, are ridiculous. In terms of structure, this is as basic a film as you can get, where the lead is merely a name for Van Damme, and that the stakes is the generic ideal of the beautiful wife, a cipher for a fully fleshed out person rather than the person, played Natacha Lindinger. Next to a film like The Blade (1995), one of Tsui Hark's last films before he left for this brief two part Van Damme period in the United States, which is a fully fleshed out remake of The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) that emphasises telling the story in its visual style, Double Team is paltry in comparison. Instead what we get here is a heightened fever dream, as over-the-top as you can get where my pleasure comes from what it was stringing together in its content, something which starts fully when Quinn is made officially "dead" after the botched Stravos mission, ending up in what feels like a tribute to The Prisoner (1967).

Evoking the legendary British TV series about actor Patrick McGoohan being stuck in a secret colony, here Van Damme ends up in a colony for covert operatives deemed too important to let back into society, Quinn stuck imprisoned on an island with other spies and agents who were too valuable to kill. It is a premise for a high concept film by itself, as they have to act as inspectors on high tech computers, analysing terror incidents around the world with timed watches to punish those who try to escape, but like those manga, this will casually have an elaborate set piece to ditch it, including a real stunt of someone hanging off a cargo plane. This has a surreal randomness like some of the best of the action genre, excepting their artificiality, and that eventually we will get more inexplicably details like the cyber team of Italian Catholic monks, in a gothic location with the skulls of their ancestors on display underground, who are a surveillance ring of Rome with advanced computer knowledge. For a film that is surprisingly marked for eighteen year olds only to see in Britain, despite being tame for the age rating, this is the broad stereotypical cartoon of the era, which gets more delirious as it goes along despite the structure and pace being conventional next to its peers.

Van Damme found himself in this world of films, as Hark's Knock Off (1998), where things always had an absurdity, some intentionally humoured and some not, with the likes of the 1994 adaption of the Street Fighter video game franchise, which became G.I.  Joe with one liners. Van Damme is being steered along in a film like this, even when he ends up wearing a wig and shades at a point, at a no-nonsense hero in a time which was incredibly chaotic for him and would eventually drift away from the mainstream. Rodman does feel stiff in performance including all the jarring basketball references in his conversations, which is a shame as I can see the charisma is struggling to get onscreen. He is not helped by the moments where he is the butt of jokes, including having a really tall man in a very tiny Italian car, details which can be raised as problematic as you have made the star of the show, specially an African American sports star, into a comedic side character despite the fact he would have been a huge selling point, his notoriety even leading to himself in World Championship Wrestling in 1997 at the same time. When this is not the case, you can see where the charisma is, even if he would have never been a huge film star unless he drastically became more comfortable with line readings. When he is allowed to be a living manga character, his stuff gets to be interesting in terms of a celebrity becoming a cinematic one. Insanely tall, towering over everyone else with his suits and face piercings, and with disregard for logic for the better as Yaz not only has constant costume changes per scene but different hair dye jobs too, Rodman was the selling point to the film even if times the movie wants to make him entirely a side kick, even appearing in vocal cameo for the end credit song, Just a Freak by Crystal Waters to emphasis this fact.

The story itself for Double Team is conventional, merely a pretext for the scenarios, which is the ultimate critique for a film like this were it not for the sense I really do not care. Hark's flair is visually here when it can be, such as precise use of slow motion in the baroquely staged carnival shoot out. Even something which is banal and cannot be defended, the prominent Coca Cola placement, is used with such a ridiculous extent it eventually is subverted by accident, one cola vending machine explicitly in the Roman Colosseum used as a defensive shield strong enough to withstand a bomb that decimates a major landmark. There is enough of a severity, with complete late of irony, to help the film along with an earnest nature, where even its goofy humour are less mocking itself but a wackiness from films from the nineties including Van Damme's own. If this had shown any irony whatsoever, rather than be so back accident in have comedic moments, I might have despised this, where if there is an illusion of caring for these archetypes in an absurd film, the film makers not even giving the decency to care for their fate, as sadly happens in others, would have made this unbearable. The sense of serious is found in allowing characters to goof off but not mock the film as flimsy, whilst Mickey Rourke, , in a period before Sin City (2005) brought him back into mainstream attention, helps with this whether he was acting his emotionally scarred terrorist Starvos with sincerity or pure professionalism.

This is film, in mind to this, that would need all the commitment you could get, and it pays off for myself in terms of how it has the most over-the-top ending you could find, ridiculous but what I have hoped others from the likes of Steven Seagal but never got. The finale takes place at the Colosseum, with a newly born baby in peril, landmines planted in the ground, Rodzilla entering on a dirt bike, and a real tiger with animal trainers involved in the production, because landmines and one-on-one combat were not enough to kill Quinn in what is. For a higher budget production, it is in context, a mad experience to witness, more so as this is not a low budget made with CGI production of decades later, where irony sadly becomes a more occuring trend in multiple genres, but with the aforementioned real tiger, a real motorbike stunt and real pyrotechnics alongside nineties era computer effects. And that is why, whilst I realise how cheesy the production is, I love the film in spite of itself because of this sincere batshit logic matched with the production values and cast. Even when they struggle, to make something more than a half arsed production with a sense of deliberately sabotaging itself in irony is appreciated. There is a pleasure, even if irrational, for managing to sincerely play with the strange set of selling points this did even if I admit this is a strange non-sequitur for those involved including Tsui Hark, who continued this with the equally weird Knock Off, before going back to Hong Kong cinema with a sense none of this happened.

Satan Place: A Soap Opera from Hell (1988)

Directors: Scott Aschbrenner and Alfred Ramirez

Screenplay: Scott Aschbrenner, Melanie Johnson, Jeff Stogner and Alfred Ramirez

Cast: Warren Andrews as Edward Dayton / Human Hormoan (segment "Disposable Love"); Nora Miller as Doris Dayton (segment "Disposable Love"), Mark Rackstraw as Gordon Lighthand (segment "Disposable Love") / Dick Slasher / Thug #2 (segment "Too Much TV"), Sonja Etzel as Mother (segment "Too Much TV"), Hollis Wood as Johnnie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Marsha Malone as Suzie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Lisa Hatter as Sophie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie") / Daughter (segment "Too Much TV"), Jme Mestel as Jonathan (segment "Sally Satan")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Missouri Mop Massacre. He can't stop them, and he doesn't do windows.

A woman with Bonnie Tylor hair, blasting shot-on-video budget rock riffs from her car stereo, asks for directions from a male chauvinist, she the interlinking figure herself between all the segments from this anthology horror film.

The first half focuses on the theme of chauvinist men stuck trying to dispose of corpses, the first story following said guy in the introduction, Eddie, in a grumpy mood and not interested in his wife Doris' lamp chops. She fantasies about shooting him in the head in a cowboy pastiche, and he only cares for watching TV and forcing his wife to get him beers, accidentally killing her with one punch over a warm can of brew. Whilst that may dangerous sound like trivialising domestic abuse, in context the film has him both as a terrible person, and within a film where (even if moments have not aged well) the tone is played with a sick comedic humour, with the moment playing as an abrupt moment of fake blood splatter and he stuck in a predicament which will doom him. Like a few SOV anthologies I have seen, they have minimal stories, here Eddie having to dispose of Doris' body, a farce as he considers placing her piece by piece in the trash, but going the weird direction of cooking her in the stove first beforehand. It is obvious where this goes, as he is able to live comfortably, watching porn in the lounge, only to be haunted by her ghost. Not even taking a bath is safe, for the bathwater turns into blood, nor going to the fridge as she tries to force feed him her own intestines' when he is there. It is also a reminder for me too how the trash disposal unit in kitchen sinks, a concept we never really had in my home country of Britain, was a trope for horror films and made me wonder as a result how they were considered safe.

It is pretty obvious, and we are not even dealing with the more elaborate tales you might get from Amicus in the golden age of horror anthologies of the sixties and seventies. The Bonnie Tylor woman has to deal with another sexist pig, kneeing him, who becomes another folly of these kind of men we follow, driving drunk listening to country music, calling his ex a bitch, and running over an old man whilst desperately calling a Mary-Lou at the steering wheel who is about to leave his life. He gets the old man to hospital, but claims the guy jumped out at his car as the old man dies in the hospital. It is obvious too where this is going, thought it has to be established Satan's Place, alongside really liking abrupt twist endings even if they do not make sense as for this story, is more interesting as an SOV production with the tropes they have. Openly a lot of my enjoyment of this one, as many others, is more the template, the atmosphere, of a homemade horror film even when the plots are abrupt and/or slight.

For a lower budget film, the production tries its best more than others in this field, including extensive use of various locations, and is scored to moody late eighties synth. As the film goes, a lot of its personality, including its humour, comes from the surprising amount of pastiche moments, additional original music, and TV/film parodies shot and shown in televisions in scenes that would have taken a lot of time to accomplish. For the second story, they even when out of their way, for a production with multiple collaborators in multiple roles, to use off-screen sprinkles for a rain effect, as our morally dubious Southern stereotype lead thinks he has ran over the old man again when he has just gotten over it, despite the old man being already dead.

Our Bonnie Tylor lead returns in a segment called Too Much TV, about the titular channel hosted by Dick Slasher, and changing the pace as it is about the landlady who Bonnie Tylor crosses who becomes the lead, angry her adult daughter spends all her time watching too much TV and not dating men to her ideal of Elvis Presley. This is the segment more explicitly about the pastiches and side jokes even if aspects of Satan's Palace's tone and humour have not aged well. It is not just that even between women the frequent use of the term "bitch" is used, but some of the explicit pastiches themselves, such as the questionable gay prison movie pastiche Bathroom Bullies with its dropping the soap moment, even if its depiction in feet shuffling back and forth and mouth popping noises in slapstick is absurd, to the first episode having Eddie watch a wrestling match between a transgender dwarf (not the language used) versus a wrestling with his hand puppet friends on both fists. The latter wrestler though is a funny joke which does show the better side of this film, the more overt sillier side which this does provide in spades. Too Much TV is the most scattershot of the anthology segments, as the daughter is watching horror movies like Don't Go into the Kitchen, or good jokes like the Hard Boy, the advertisement for disposable dildos for women. It is definitely the kind of anthology segment you only get from shot-on-video films which drift off in logic, even when it tries to pull a course ahead as Dick the TV host starts to talk deliberately to the daughter about offing her mother. With clearly a higher production, such as all the TV segments shown on television with the horror parodies, you manage to go from a Psycho parody in a bathtub or the mother being gunned down by random 1920s gangsters with typewriter machine guns in a fantasy, all of which including the segment's own abrupt ending, feeling like something you normally do not get outside this world of cinema.

Sally Satan ends the anthology, Bonnie Tylor finally getting her own story, with a suitor named Jonathan visiting and perturbed by the cobwebs around the wine bottles, what looks like a bloody head being cooked in the microwave for dinner, and newspaper clippings about a murder found in the coffee table book for guests to page through whilst waiting. Clearly, the title Sally Satan is an indicator of something Satanic involved, as he lays on her bed in briefs, shirt and socks, all black, reading poetry at one point oblivious to this whilst the score of a NES fantasy RPG is repeating sweetly in the background. He will make the ill advised decision to be willingly tied up, and not even ask for a condom before Satan is announced to be coming.

Like the others, another abrupt twist ending out of nowhere happens, and as mentioned, Satan's Place: A Soap Opera from Hell is not really scary, more eccentric than humorous, and was yet my jam for this pure dose of homemade filmmaking with its own tangents. It also only goes over sixty seven minutes long, which is a huge help to prevent anything from being a miserable slog. Those few jokes which did not age well neither feel like they are truly cruel either, just reminders of this being an older film from the eighties, a long time ago. It becomes clearly, with its end credits, notwithstanding Hubert the Cat in a cameo of the mog licking a corpse kept in the bathroom, too an absolute collaborate effort which I have to admire, with a female co-writer Melanie Johnson as a producer, and one of the director/co-writers Scott Aschbrenner composing the music with another person named Jon Kay, which means even the brief Elvis Presley pastiche you get just for a single scene mention of him, and would have taken time to record, was a work of love from a figure who also helped direct and write the film around the scene. That again really emphasises the amount of hard work put into this film, the only one for the directors. It is an obscure Shot-on-Video title, and sadly might be a difficult one still to locate a proper release of, but for fans of the genre like myself,  you watch them even if imperfect for that sense of hard work.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

 

Director: Ciro Ippolito (and Biagio Proietti)

Screenplay: Ciro Ippolito

Cast: Belinda Mayne as Thelma Joyce; Mark Bodin as Roy; Benedetta Fantoli as Maureen; Michele Soavi as Burt; Valeria Perilli as Jill; Danilo Micheli as Bill

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It took seven years to get from Alien (1979) to Aliens (1986). Italy got there with an unofficial sequel a year later and likely with mind the Ridley Scott film would still be in cinemas around the world and people would believe this was an actual sequel, they could follow it with this without anything but pure carnival hucksterism. This is funnier as, with the actual Alien franchise, we never got Xenomorphs on Earth until Aliens vs. Predator in 2001 but this got there one year later too.

Set around astronauts on a space mission, we follow a group of cave explorers predating The Descent (2005), exploring a cave to their peril in the midst of an abrupt alien invasion. Immediately you see that the production wanted to make caving the exciting new thing, helped by the fact as the predominant set location for this lower budget film, actual caves, are impressive locations regardless of price of filming, legitimately beautiful locations and perfect for a horror film. More idiosyncratic is the obsession with bowling, which is Italian producers trying to figure out what is hip to American audiences and that they had access to a bowling alley too. Joking aside, it's a simple monster film, where Thelma (Belinda Mayne) as our lead is among this caving group, who also just happens to be psychic and has grim concerns about what is happening in general around her. That is a plot detail which is abrupt but means she is the one person with a bad feeling as, likely due to the astronauts' mission, there are festering alien blobs on the beach among the sand castles let alone in the caves.

Obviously, like Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980), these Italian films wanted to have the face huggers from Alien, one of its most iconic images from the pulsating eggs let alone the horrifying critters inside, but could not for copyright reasons. The iconic eggs even if their biology is weird, meant to be the selling point for both but having to figure out something new even if unconventional, here blue rocks which pulsate and become face eating entities. They do one better than the face huggers, whose children burst out of chests, by gestating and bursting directly out the face of their victims, but it is one of the touches you see where this was made to follow a major film globally. Like Contamination's, which were more biological bombs which made everyone explode, there is no logic like the Xenomorphs to how these alien "eggs" work, only the fear of unknown objects being played to in a film like this which, in content, cause gory results or leads here to mostly vague rubber entities which have red Twiglet tendrils.

This film has a style, even if it is as much an Italian production shooting in America trying to be American, even if it unfortunately leads to a dubbing of one black cast member, a bowling alley staff member, which director Eli Roth once bluntly called "Amos & Andy" dubbing, clearly an Italian man in a voice over he openly admits crosses a line into being racist¹. It is a languid film in fact, taking half an hour to get to the caves themselves, soaking in the American locations, and as a monster film pacing itself quietly with its cast, it is a distinct change of pace even from other genre films from Italy at the time even if might put some off expecting the purely over-the-top and lurid nature of others from this era. The music is one of the strongest aspects, composer Oliver Onions, alongside the memorable name, also happens to be a pseudonym for Guido De Angelis and Maurizio De Angelis, the legendary composers behind films like Street Law (1974), acclaimed in the Italian genre field and earning their pay check for a great score here.

For the moments you can pick holes in this film, I have seen it enough times now they even have a charm. It makes no sense to see future director Michele Soavi, before directing Cemetery Man (1994), writing on a typewriter in a cave using lit candles, a habit his character has despite the newly elected Pope in Italy meaning the candles have become more expensive to buy, but it is a cool (and funny) image) alongside moments which work intentionally. One, in a prolonged camera pan after a victim against complete black, exemplifying the moment their face explodes from a recent host, is actually good enough to have become an iconic moment in a more acclaimed film. In terms of whether this is actually scary or good horror, that is entirely subjective. Honestly the more interesting thing about this era of Alien rip offs, which are different to even the ones for Aliens  which took a different tone as an official sequel, is how they reflect tropes from a popular film in their own way for better and for worse, like Peter Walker's Inseminoid (1981) for one closer to this Englishman's home. They are reflections of the industry of cinema, where everyone is eyeing everyone's success and sometimes blatantly cashing in on what worked, which can be ironic for entertainment for some viewers, but still counts as entertaining. This one at least, to the film's credit, has the creepy idea of being inspired by tape worms in terms of the alien tendrils, even if I made a joke about them earlier in the review, taking inspiration from something which is real and can be found in a human being's guts, which is creepy. The egg symbology from Alien as mentioned is scrambled, a pretence to sell the film, but when this is about cavern walls with tendrils coming out of them, and the aliens themselves being vague entities we never truly see the full sight of, even if to cover the practicalities of the effects, it is still effective.

Also this commits to an appropriately nihilistic ending, taking advantage of when you can shoot at the right time, and you can depict a metropolis in carefully chosen shots completely without people, offering a gut punch that makes up for this lower budget with an obsession for bowling. Ciro Ippolito, the credited director, is an outlier as none of his other films fit the template of genre cinema at the time, more of a producer/writer for titles like the romantic film Vanilla and Chocolate (2004). This is the same for the un-credited co-director Biagio Proietti, though he has a co-writer credit on Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (1981). A lot of the history of Italian genre cinema factors in key figures, not just directors but also screenwriters and producers, who continued even if into other genres within this now-cult sphere of genre filmmaking. This makes these two fascinating alongside the film as a one-and-done in that said history. Literally they came to take advantage of the popularity of Alien, did not get sued or have their films pulled as infamously others did, like Enzo G. Castellari for the Jaws inspired Great White (1981). Whilst Alien 2: On Earth was once an obscure title, likely because it did not have a known or infamous name in the director's chair, it was salvaged and rediscovered, allowing its mischief with a known franchise, and that it managed to get away with it, to sparkle with ghoulishness.  

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1) Taken from the featurette Franchised Terrorist: An Interview with Eli Roth, as was available on the British Blu Ray release by 88 Films.