Cutter’s Way (1981)

aka Cutter and Bone

The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate USA. We follow a trio of characters who seem too weary and exhausted by the last decade to have anything like hopes or aspirations anymore. A couple of years later, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) would probably aspire to the horrors of yuppiedom (if ever there ever has been a better sign of desperation, I don’t know about it), but as it stands, he’s working at a Santa Barbara yacht club and making a little money on the side via some low-rent gigolo-ing, in his own, generally passive, way. Bone’s most active desire appears to be his pining for Mo Cutter (Lisa Eichhorn). Mo also happens to be the wife of Bone’s closest friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard). Alex came home from Vietnam damaged in mind and body, having traded in an eye, a leg and an arm for a hankering for self-destruction, some casual cruelty, and a big case of alcoholism.

From time to time, there are flashes of the man Cutter must have been, and it is these pieces of him Mo seems still to cling to, loving a man who most probably doesn’t deserve it anymore, and slowly destroying herself in the process. To make matters more complicated, she reciprocates Bone’s feelings for her, at least in part, which closes the circle of these three like a trap.

Instead of continuing to slowly tumble along towards nothing, an outward force is going to push these characters to their extremes and their doom. Bone witnesses how a killer dumps the body of a young woman in a dumpster; the shadow he sees may or may not belong to local rich man J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Given who he is, in the USA in 1981 (or in 2024), this might not even matter.

Once Cutter hears of this, he gets it into his head to take some for of vengeance on Cord as a stand-in for everything he’s bitter about (and perhaps the murdered woman), or blackmail him for money, or both, and he pulls his friends with him, unwilling or not.

Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is what one might call an inconspicuous masterpiece, a film so carefully constructed, one might miss just how great it is exactly for its kind of greatness.

There’s a logic and congruity to the way the plot develops out of the deep flaws of the characters one might miss in its brutal perfection; a precise ugly beauty in Jordan Cronenweth’s photography one might confuse with naturalism; a painful honesty about flawed people in a desperate time – times are always desperate - in Jeffrey Alan FIskin’s script one might not want to face. But the closer you look at Cutter’s Way, the more you see all of these things, how it uses them to embody the quiet desperation of its time and place. It’s no wonder a country would embrace the immoral, anti-human horrors of Reaganism after years of this – at least that way it could pretend to be alive again.

Other elements of the film have grown in importance over the years: the film’s treatment of the unassailability of Power (with a capital letter for sure), of relationships between men and women poisoned by the wounds inflicted in the name of said Power as well as the lies some men have been taught to tell themselves about women (and about themselves), and a sense of anger so strong, acts coming from it will only lead to futile acts of violence bound not to change very much at all.

There’s a deep, painful sense of humanity in here as well, a willingness to show the three protagonists as flawed and broken and often downright shitty (embodied in absolutely perfect performances – especially Eichhorn is a bit of a revelation of complicated nuance) yet still insist on compassion and understanding for them. Well, J.J. Cord never gets that, but then, it is rather the point of Cutter’s Way he’s standing above us mere humans, like the crappy, capitalist godhood we deserve.

Longlegs (2024)

After demonstrating what may or may not be some ESP abilities, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is drafted into the hunt for a peculiar serial killer. The killer, let’s call him Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), doesn’t actually appear to lay hands on his victims, but somehow gets them to kill each other, following his own ritualistic specifics.

There may or may not be black magic or Satanism involved; in any case, Lee is going to find herself drawn into proceedings rather more personally than a member of any police force would hope to.

If anyone expected me to be part of the backlash against Oz Perkins’s newest film, a rather wonderful example of weird and highly individual genre cinema also making a surprising amount of money and pleasing many a critic, they probably don’t know me. This thing was made with someone with my tastes as its ideal audience, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise.

While this was certainly very consciously schooled on the aesthetics of Silence of the Lamb and what follows (though Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s wonderful Cure is probably more important here), Longlegs makes clear very early on that it isn’t trying to be even a dramatized “realistic” police procedural or serial killer thriller. It is rather a film that uses elements and tropes of these genres to lure an audience into something stranger and a little more subversive, a world and a headspace built on the kind of nightmare logic that nearly appears to make sense but tends to shift and get blurry around its edges in the moments when you’re not exactly thinking or looking.

Which, really, is pretty much what I expect of Perkins by now. Particularly the way in which the film’s metaphors are well-built to suggest certain interpretations (here about alienation and family), and the plot could nearly neatly resolve but then doesn’t quite is very much in keeping with the director’s modus operandi in his earlier films. This isn’t Perkins being unable to make a movie that is soluble like a crossword puzzle, but him aggressively rejecting the kind of naively rationalist world view that can still believe in such a thing as an expression of reality. Instead of neat resolutions and explanations, this is a film about slowly building dread, the horrors of facing one’s nightmares and still not ending them, and those very bad moments in the middle of the night when you can’t quite discern if there’s a difference between nightmare and waking life.

Needless to say, there are certain, sometimes innocuous, shots in here that I still can’t shake days after having seen the film.

That Longlegs manages to hold up this mood for the whole of its runtime is a little, dark, wonder; that it does so while also offering a perfect, naturalistic performance by Monroe at its core is particularly clever; and that rather a lot of viewers can’t or won’t go where Perkins leads with this one, I won’t blame them for.

I, on the other hand, cannot imagine watching another film this year that’s quite so much me and for me.

Three Films Make A Post: "This is the story of the world's secret that only she and I know."

Weathering with You aka Tenki no ko (2019): This is certainly one of Makoto Shinkai’s lesser films. There’s always a fine line between being emotional and being emotionally manipulative when you like to go for heightened emotional stakes like Shinkai’s anime tend to do, and here, he’s sometimes stepping over that line into obvious attempts at pushing audience buttons. Particularly the last act is simply too melodramatic, so much so its emotional loudness hinders the emotional impact it could possess if it were only holding back a little.

That doesn’t mean this is a bad film. There are certainly quite a few moments of great beauty here, as well as some insight into the teenage psyche – it’s just that the film as a whole doesn’t come together as well as those Shinkai movies that surround it, a great director sometimes being his own worst enemy.

Hell Hole (2024): Whereas this shot in Serbia body horror monster comedy by the Adams Family (minus Zelda Adams) is a downright disappointment. Gone is nearly all of the personality of the family’s other films, the idiosyncratic yet/and awesome decisions to use the weirder approach whenever possible. Instead, we get what once would have been a middling SyFy Original, full of obvious jokes, lots of feet-dragging disguised as dialogue sequences, and very little else beyond the basic competence filmmakers in the lowest budget end acquire over time when they don’t give up.

I wouldn’t be complaining if this were actually a good traditional body horror monster movie with a bit of bite to it. Alas, it feels as if the filmmakers were just ticking boxes on a list of monster movie tropes.

Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019): At times, Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet’s documentary about the great special effects artist Phil Tippett (whose creations certainly made my childhood as much more interesting as Ray Harryhausen’s did for Tippett) also feels a bit like the directors are ticking boxes on how to structure a biography-driven documentary. But then, you get to the next bit of interview with Tippett or one of his peers, and you are struck by the sheer single-minded love these people have for Tippett and the art of hand-made special effects, and can’t help but mirror that feeling right back at them.

The film never manages to acquire an actual thesis about Tippett or his world. Thus, it never turns into the kind of documentary you’d recommend even to people who aren’t terribly interested in their subjects. There is, however, quite a bit to say for the film’s willingness to let Tippett and his peers simply speak about their lives and times, and work.

The Third Man (1949)

Pulp western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to a post-war Vienna that’s all Dutch angles, high shadows and people of dubious trustworthiness. His childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has lured him there with a vague job offer, and where Harry calls, Holly goes, vagueness or not. Alas, when Holly actually arrives, his friend is not in a fit state for providing a job, for he is about to be buried. Apparently, Harry Lime died in an automobile accident, not the kind of death you’d expect for a larger than life personage like him.

Apart from Holly, Harry Lime leaves behind an actress lover with a secret (Alida Valli) and British and Russian military policemen so happy about his death, they’re not going to actually investigate it. As Holly soon learns, his friend was apparently involved in large scale black market operations.

Holly really can’t believe that of his roguish but not evil childhood buddy and sets out to find a bit more about the Harry Lime situation than the police is ready to tell him. While Holly is doing that, he stumbles upon the fact that a mysterious third man appears to have been part of the accident that killed Harry. His friend’s death might very well have been murder. Together with Harry’s lover Anna Schmidt, Holly goes further and further done a proper rabbit hole of an investigation, while of course falling for the lady.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is an indelible classic, situated somewhere where noir and Hitchcockian thriller meet. I’d argue that its portrayal of individuals trapped in the aftermath of a political conflagration, in the hand of secretive powers they can’t fully comprehend, is an important milestone on the road to the kind of pessimism the 70s conspiracy thriller would deal in. This version of Vienna is the incubation point of many things that would go wrong and grow worse in the coming two decades, as well as the way the movies would look at them.

Stylistically, I find The Third Man particularly fascinating as an example on how to use real locations (among some choice sets) and make them look unreal and threatening, how to see and shoot them as places where the shadows outside do indeed mirror the shadows inside the hearts of the characters. The abundance of Dutch angles portray an off-kilter world, the huge, often more than simply thick, shadows are bringing to the surface the undercurrents of reality in ways only a movie can.

As a German, I’m always surprised by the film’s use of actual Austrian actors for the minor roles, who, unlike what you encounter in most Hollywood films, speak actual idiomatic German, and whose dialogue feels utterly probable for the time and place. This adds a further layer of reality only accessibly to an audience who understands what these actors are saying.

There’s a very specific quality to The Third Man that suggests a film where everything comes together just right: the obvious visual artistry, the interest in getting details right, the interplay between heightened style and naturalism, the acting (Welles leaving a deep impression of a very complex character in only a couple of scenes, Cotton and Valli probably giving the performances of their lives without looking as if they are trying), the curious decisions that turn out to be just right (that zither score is such a strange idea, when you think about it). At the same time, it is one of those highly constructed films that never feels as if it were trying all that hard – it just is.

The Primevals (2023)

After Sherpa kill a rampaging yeti in Tibet, a tiny, not quite official expedition, lead by Dr Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), goes on the look-out for more of them. Apart from Collier, the group consists of retired big game hunter – as well as owner of one of the best names imaginable – Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), long-time yeti-believer and male lead Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), anthropology student Kathy (Walker Brandt) and yeti hater (and local guide) Siku (Tai Thai).

There’s more than a curious yeti rampage or two going on, though, and soon, the expedition lands in the middle of (Edgar Rice)Burroughs country.

Apparently mostly shot in 1994, this labour of love directed by special effects expert David Allen (who died in 1999), was left unfinished on the shelves of Full Moon pictures. Years after a crowd-funding campaign to finish the film, it has finally been released.

And it is very much a film made with someone exactly like me as its ideal audience in mind. There’s an immense sense of love on screen for a lot of the best things in life: Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, pulp adventure in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doug McClure adventures, the 80s adventure movie boom, the Shaver Mystery (or similar fun Fortean matter), and Nigel Kneale read as pulp.

All of these things come to life again on screen here in a way that’s obviously pretty nostalgic, but also realized with the kind of enthusiasm and craft that transcends mere nostalgia to turn this not into a copy of the tradition but a genuine, breathing part of it.

Sure, one could nit-pick that the film’s portrayal of non-Western cultures isn’t great, the acting doesn’t always hit the mark completely – though Mills in the scientist role typically reserved for a man is great, as is Leon Russom talking about the eyes of dying giraffes – and that there’s a little too much monster-less slack between the incredible Sherpa vs yeti start of the movie. However, all of this is counteracted by the sheer joyfulness of the project, its lack of self-conscious irony and all the love and care that has been put into every second on screen. Not bad for a movie that nearly wouldn’t have existed in finished form at all.

The Delinquents (2023)

Original title: Los delincuentes

Aging bank employee Morán (Daniel Elías) steals a very particular amount of money from his bank. It’s more or less exactly double the sum he would earn by working for them to retirement age. His idea is this: hide the money, get arrested, and spend three and a half years in prison instead of twenty as a bank employee. The money he gives to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) who only learns of the plan after the money is already stolen, for safe-keeping until Morán gets out. Afterwards, Román will get half of the money and be free from doing a crap job for the rest of his life as well.

If he doesn’t take the money, Morán will name him as an accomplice, so Román doesn’t feel he has much of a choice in the matter, though his conscience doesn’t always let him rest easily.

The rest of the film concerns Morán’s adventures on the run and in prison, Román’s suffering under the bank’s intensely passive aggressive reaction to the theft, and various matters of freedom, love and sudden influxes of quiet beauty.

Slow Cinema is an interesting thing to me: about half of the films from the not-genre I know, I find insufferably pompous exactly because they’re so fixated on not being pompous but merely ponderous. The other half, I tend to be rather in love with, though these films often aren’t obviously different from the ones I can’t stand at all. It is, alas, a matter of mood, vibes, feeling, or however one might want to call it, something that’s even less quantifiable than most things concerning art (popular or un).

For its first third, I wasn’t really sure if I was on board with The Delinquents’ apparent project of turning heist movie tropes quotidian and drawing them out endlessly. Yet slowly (sorry) but surely, the film did work its particular kind of magic by digressing into directions that have little to do with deconstructing or slowing down heist movie tropes, or making them more “realistic” by making them less dramatic.

Instead, director Rodrigo Moreno starts from the idea of the heist movie as a dream of freedom – freedom  from the shackles of the capitalist project, from the emptiness of the daily drudge – and follows that idea to the many places it leads: love, nature, poetry and sudden bursts – perhaps too dramatic a term for a film that ever hardly is that – of an intense visual beauty achieved through patience and care, a deep interest in the small gestures that make up daily lives as much as in the way small changes of light, a poem read through years and years or hair turning grey and thin can be beautiful.

I’m not sure there’s actually that much intellectual substance to the film’s philosophy, or even depth to its characters, but the longer the film goes on, the less these concrete things turn out to be the point here. Rather, it is moods, feelings and hopes this seems to be about in the end, and that moment when a series of shots in a film overwhelms you not because of any technical accomplishment (though there is a lot of technical accomplishment here if you are into that sort of thing) but because the ineffable way it touches you.

The Delinquents is often very funny as well, in a weird and sideways manner that’ll not be for everyone as much as everything else about this won’t be.

Paranormal Surveillance Camera 3-7 (2013-2014)

Given the general thinness of these things, it makes sense to write about the entries in this Japanese POV horror series in bulk. They’re interesting – and typically fun to watch for the hour most of these run – but they’re not exactly deep.

Formally, the series increasingly leaves behind the “Where’s Waldo?” (or should that be “Where’s Sadako”?) one camera angle pieces in favour of a surveillance camera bit followed by a POV horror style investigation by the fake crew of the show, during which they interview witnesses – only seldom with blurred-out faces –, pop in with their occult consultant, the witch/warlock/wizard (depending on the subtitle of any given entry) KATOR – always in all caps – and poke around in dark places. On one hand, this shift into the method every other Japanese POV horror fake documentary series operates by is a bit of a shame, on the other, there’s only so much you can do with a single, nailed-on camera view, so it’s probably for the better.

The series gains another unique selling point, however, in that it turns increasingly comedic from about part 5 on, with a weird off-beat humour you’ll either loather or love. So suddenly, there’s a pretty bizarre sequence where the intrepid crew plays catch with an invisible man but has problems following simple left and right instructions; another one about a man suffering from “spiritual allergies” that make him incredibly easily possessed by ghosts and ghoulies, protecting himself by covering his whole body in nylon stockings; the curious tale of the dude who catches ghosts in garbage bags and collects them just like any other nerd would, while his mum looks on sighing yet indulgingly. Not to speak of part 7’s high point/low point, the tale of a chicken that lays wish-granting eggs and is accidentally hounded to death by our reporters.

It’s not quite as mad and wonderful as what Koji Shiraishi gets up to on any given day, but it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, if you like your cheapo POV horror with a dollop humour.