The usual summer break

because the skin of eldritch abominations tends to dry out in the heat. What I laughingly call normal service around here will resume on August, 9th.

Possession (1981)

The marriage of Mark (Sam Neill) – vaguely involved in the kind of espionage business one expects in a film set in Cold War era Berlin – is on the skids.

While Mark has played the usually absent dad and husband, his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has started an affair with macho new age weirdo Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). She sure as shit didn’t learn any yoga from the guy though, for she and Mark proceed to work through their crisis through shouting, writhing and a bit of self-mutilation or spousal abuse when the mood strikes.

And that’s before Anna births a tentacled thing in the subway she’s starting to feed with human blood.

So much has been written about Andrzej Zulawski’s much-beloved arthouse psychodrama horror masterpiece by some of the more insightful critics, there’s certainly very little new I can add to the corpus. But from time to time, just jotting down personal impressions can be a bit of fun – at least for this writer; my imaginary readers are long-suffering anyway.

I find it rather interesting how closely related Possession is to a kind of arthouse movie I can’t stand at all, the type where everyone communicates in pseudo-philosophic portentous sentences that aren’t as deep as the writers appear to think they are. Really, the dialogue here is mostly exactly this, but is heightened in effect and meaning through the brutally physical performances – particularly by Adjani, who sometimes appears to drag Neill bodily into the mind space of insane intensity and actual madness the film takes place in – and direction that goes all out in every aspect.

Zulawski working though his own demons by way of European 70s horror influences as much as the more classy stuff he imbibed is a sight to behold, or actually, feels like a director conjuring up aspects of himself any sane person would hardly want to acknowledge, certainly not show to an audience in a form feeling this raw. This is not the work of an edge lord flirting with the dangerous life by acting like an asshole child – this is much darker, much more genuine, and, perhaps, actually dangerous. At the same time, this is also a movie featuring a scene where Isabelle Adjani fucks a tentacle monster, and Sam Neill drowns a guy in a toilet, so Zulawski is certainly not afraid to let his genre arthouse movie actually be a genre movie, not too far from the traditions established in Italy and other parts of Western Europe.

Three Films Make A Post: In 1987, Oakland was hella freaky.

Freaky Tales (2024): I’m not sure where I caught the case of optimism, but I expected an anthology movie with this particular title to contain tales somewhat freakier than the one about the punks who are attacked by Nazis, decide to fight back the next time, and then fight back the next time, or the one about two young women who are invited to a rap battle, take part in the rap battle, and win the rap battle. This is more Tales of the Bleeding Obvious material.

Apparently, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are big fans of classic exploitation movies, but their modern version of them is bland, antiseptic, and just too nice to truly get the spirit. That the blood and gore is all CGI is absolutely telling in this regard. Doing a proper left-wing style exploitation movie seems like a fine goal to me, but this surely isn’t it.

Clown in a Cornfield (2025): As far as modern retro-slasher comedies go, Eli Craig’s Clown is a perfectly decent time – it’s certainly well-made, has a couple of jokes that actually hit, and a fine final girl in Katie Douglas. It’s also less sadistically minded than rather a lot of modern slashers at the moment, and doesn’t feature endless, boring, torture sequences; it falls in the opposite direction a little, so the violence is a bit too weightless and too cartoonish to ever produce much suspense, proving that you really can’t satisfy me in this regard.

But really, it’s the kind of perfectly decent film, most probably made by perfectly decent filmmakers there’s very little to say about.

Eclipse (1977): This film about a very awkward Christmas dinner with the alcoholic wife of a deceased twin and his neurotic brother, close after the accidental (or was it?) death, was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of its male lead Tom Conti.

It’s an interesting film, building a mood of tension out of occasional flashbacks, awkward and tense social interaction and a pretty fantastic synth score.

In its general tone the film is a sibling to some of the weirder and more abstract regional films from the US (this is a Scottish film), particularly in its insistence on getting by on a mood of tension and dread alone – there are no revelations coming you didn’t expect, and there’s a slightness to these particular sets of neuroses that sometimes gets in the film’s way.

But unlike the other two films in this entry made fifty years later, Eclipse really strains for something unique, and gains a certain power from it even if it doesn’t quite succeed.

A True Story of the Ginza Private Police (1973)

Original title: 実録・私設銀座警察

1946, Ginza shortly after the end of World War II. A group of traumatized and incredibly violent soldiers realize – as much as these guys have the self-consciousness for it – their shared nihilism. Thus enabled to embrace their worst selves, they begin taking over the district’s organized crime business through rape, murder and all kinds of blunt-force trauma.

After a time, when Japan starts to stabilize a little, and hunger and desperation become less of a valid factor (or excuse) for vile deeds, the comparatively less insane Iketani (Noboru Ando) strikes out on his own to build a somewhat more civilized criminal empire based on blackmail and rather more controlled violence. Something a group whose main killer is a drug-addicted soldier (Tsunehiko Watase) who murdered a baby and beat his wife to death in the film’s opening scene cannot offer.

I’m not often going around calling films “nihilistic”, but Junya Sato’s early entry in the cycle of ripped from the headlines, “realistic” jitsuroku yakuza cycle is absolutely that. From that still shocking beginning you really have to see to believe to an ending where everybody loses in the most brutal manner and the world clearly doesn’t care whatsoever, this is feel bad cinema of the highest (lowest?) calibre. The characters are all pieces of shit – whose lack of humanity is explained but never excused by their war trauma – doing horrible things to innocent and guilty alike for the whole of the film’s running time with a complete lack of remorse, moving through a society too tired and bitter to even react to them with the proper outrage or willingness to defend itself against what they embody.

The fruits of their crimes are the most basic creature comforts, and the greatest plan anybody of them can imagine is to grab more and more power he’ll perhaps sometimes use to finance an underling marrying his mistress – and even that will cost a lot of people their lives.

Sato portrays post-War Ginza as an utter hellhole without human kindness or even the good old beauty growing from the gutter – there is nothing here to strive for, no happiness, no future, and a past that’s just going to make the characters more angry at the world and themselves.

Visually, this is an absolute assault on the senses with a blaring free jazz score and later some freeform noise ascribed to Masanobu Higurashi over jittery handheld camera and barely a scene that isn’t drenched in mud, blood, or screams. The film is so intense, the violence still so direct, it borders on an actual assault on the audience. True Story is absolutely relentless, daring its viewers to look.

It’s a masterpiece of its kind, though perhaps not the kind of film to watch when you’re already on a low point of your opinion on humanity.

Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

Another Three Shaw Brothers Movies Make A Post

The Deadly Knives aka Fists of Vengeance aka 落葉飛刀 (1972): This is a very standard tale of dastardly Japanese and traitorous Chinese getting vengeanced by a virtuous stand-up Chinese guy. Director Jang Il-Ho doesn’t add much to the Shaw house style, and often stands in the way of getting to the good parts of the material or even in the way of framing those good parts as effectively as he could.

Not that the choreography is that great: like a lot of work that Yuen Woo-Ping did for the Shaw Brothers, this may not be standard Shaw choreography, but it’s not that great at actually being different – quite the contrast to what he would get up to only a few years later. On the plus side, this features Ching Li (though a lot of actually good Shaw movies do as well, so…).

Duel for Gold aka 火併 (1971): This is Chor Yuen’s first film made for the studio, and this wuxia version already shows some of the hallmarks of my favourite director of the studio’s wuxia output – the less heroic view of the martial world that still leaves space for acts of traditional heroism, the love for multi-way climactic fights with shifting allegiances, the strong hand for characterization even in movies that take place in a pretty damn weird world, the re-emphasis on women as important players in the martial world, and the ability to get the best from his cast – here featuring Ivy Ling Po, Wang Ping, Lo Lieh and others.

Visually, this wuxia version of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre with greater gender parity doesn’t quite feel like a Chor Yuen wuxia yet but keeps closer to the Shaw standard of 1971. Fortunately, that standard’s so high, the film’s still great.

Shadow Girl aka 隱身女俠 (1971): Come for the ultra-traditional tale of clashing martial arts families and stay for the practical effects shenanigans of an invisible Lily Li Li-Li - invisible by day, visible by night thanks to experiments conducted by her crazy grandma, no less.

Taiwanese director Hsin Chi’s film is generally good fun – the practical effects alone should warm the coldest of hearts – but a little uneven with a somewhat slow middle and a few more characters hanging around than is good for it. On the other hand, this also features a floating evil legless hermit and his just as evil brother, whose martial arts powers are based on the magic of jump cuts, so there’s no way for me not to have fun with it.

Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.

Three Films Make A Post: What We Fear We Create

Fight or Flight (2024): I really enjoyed Bullet Train, and apparently, so did James Madigan. In fact, he enjoyed the film so much, he made his own version of it, with the brilliant twist of making everything in it a little – or a lot – worse. So we get an airplane instead of a train, Josh Hartnett instead of Brad Pitt, crappier hallucinations, less absurdly fun characters and inferior action choreography.

The result is one of the more puzzling films I’ve seen this week – I really can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Project MKHEXE (2025): Whereas Gerald Robert Waddell conspiracist POV horror that turns into cosmic horror clearly exists as a labour of love. It’s a film full of genuinely good ideas, well realized. It includes some moments of genuine eeriness, and shows a willingness to end on a downer note that’s deserved instead of cliché.

I particularly enjoyed all the little bits and pieces taken from different styles of POV horror that make up much of the film’s middle part – this solves the problem of the genre’s tendency to have boring middles quite nicely and provides the film with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the scope of what’s going on in it without breaking the bank.

As to weaknesses – well, the acting’s not always quite up the ambition – particularly when it comes to the grief horror parts of the film – and the film’s ten minutes or so longer than it exactly needs to be. For this kind of indie project, these are hardly problems worth mentioning, however.

Stranger (1991): The early days of Toei’s V-Cinema subdivision really were an anything goes time, apparently, so between classic exploitation, yakuza comedy, insane low budget action, or 70s heist revival, there was also space for this suspense thriller by Shunichi Nagasaki about a loner female taxi driver (Yuko Natori) finding herself stalked by what turns out to be a killer. There are a couple of obvious influences – Spielberg’s Duel for the rather wonderful car action parts and the usual suspense suspects – but Nagasaki’s film is such a great portrayal of loneliness as well as of a woman under threat protecting herself, these influences begin to pale behind the tight, focussed, filmmaking and the general intelligence of the film.