Every year in these strange aeons

I take a time out to go back to the old spawning grounds down in R'lyeh. Since that sort of thing does take up a lot of an eldritch abominations time, I'll take a little break from blogging.
Normal service will return on January, 3rd 2018 - perhaps ringing in a better year than whatever this one thought it was doing.

In any case, for those who want them, have the appropriate seasonal greetings! See you in the future!

Oh, and have a song while you're making your way out:

Night Angel (1990)

Turns out the biblical Lilith (future German soap opera actress Isa Jank) is still working regularly. During a lunar eclipse, she incarnates on Earth, planning, apparently, to claim the soul of a man in love. After seducing, killing, and driving mad quite a few other men and women (this film is nothing if not inclusive), that is.

Lilith’s other big goal seems to be to get on the cover of fashion magazine “Siren”; to spread her evil influence, we are told. Obviously, the magazine is quickly hit by a series of mysterious deaths and hilarious, I mean horrible, sexual hysteria. Only art director Craig (the void known as Linden Ashby), his very fresh new jewellery designer girlfriend Kirstie (Debra Feuer), and taxi-driving elderly black woman Sadie (Helen Martin) – who has a past with Lilith - stand between the world and a lot of people getting their hearts ripped out during sex.

Erotic horror, as I might have said before, is difficult to realize without making it a bit ridiculous or outright hilarious. I’d wager there’s perhaps half a dozen directors working at any given time who could pull something off in the sub-genre, and hundreds of others who are at least clever enough not to try. Night Angel’s director Dominique Othenin-Girard clearly didn’t belong to either of these groups, so we get this courageous and pretty bad effort.

The film’s problems are manifold. Start with a lead actress who is certainly not unattractive but utterly lacks the very particular kind of presence as well as the acting chops needed to pull off the role of an undying demon all men and women want to screw – even if she only wants them to die for them. There’s a “sexy”, “heated” dance sequence early on that had me in stitches, a scene that completely destroys any hope of anyone watching being able to take our villainess seriously during the rest of the movie. The death scene coming right after is not much of an improvement, for that matter. It doesn’t exactly help here that the film’s idea of sexual obsession – as well as that of sex, eroticism and love as a whole -  seems exclusively schooled on the way people present arousal in softcore porn movies. Othenin-Girard’s main instruction for his actors seems to have been something along the lines of “go big!”. These are not words you say to Karen Black and Doug Jones (who are both in this thing, too), unless you’re making a comedy. On the positive side, the film is pretty funny for most of its running time, though the kind of laughter it causes is strictly on the laughing at not the laughing with side of the equation.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, for Othenin-Girard does show some promise in his treatment of the most important colours of late 80s/early 90s horror – blue and red – and certainly knows how to keep his film moving, if usually in the wrong directions. The special effects involve Howard Berger’s and Steven Johnson’s respective workshops, and are – apart from the crappy looking final version of Lilith that could have found a place in Troll 2 – up to the typical high standards of the two gentlemen. It’s just that a film doesn’t live on a couple of good effects and a bizarre nightclub in hell sequence alone.

A few thoughts about The Lost City of Z (2016)

Unlike a lot of critics, I find little to enjoy about James Gray’s adaptation of David Grann’s excellent book about Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett. In part, my intense dislike of the film is certainly caused by the simplistic way Gray’s script turns the rather complicated Fawcett into a simplistic type we know and hate from a lot of bio pics: the guy who is right about stuff even though most of the world disagrees. The film’s approach to Fawcett’s actual ideas manages to turn a man trapped between progressive (for his time) ideas that came to him through practical experience, typical reactionary thought of his time of the dying British Empire, and romantic craziness into your typical anti-racist 2017 era liberal, which is certainly easier for a (stupid) audience to identify with but is also neither believable, nor does it get at the internal inconsistencies that make Fawcett so interesting and his story – apart from all fantastic adventurous thought and obsession and tragedy – so human.

The film’s Fawcett – as rather indifferently performed by Charlie Hunnam - is a cardboard character, and his ideas are cardboard character ideas without nuance, doubt, and the thing we all as humans share (yes, I mean myself, and you, and so on): being wrong.

All this, I still could accept, if the bad adaptation of a good book would at least work as a decent adventure movie. For that, unfortunately, the film’s pacing is way too leaden and there are too many scenes of Fawcett debating the theories that only vaguely resemble those he actually held, full of the sort of “intelligent people are talking” dialogue screenwriters get up to when they don’t trust their audience’s intelligence to actually understand or be interested in the ideas discussed. I’m not a friend of the phrase “dumbing it down”, but that’s exactly what Gray’s film does to Grann’s book; and it doesn’t even do it well or with charm.


In this context, it will come as no surprise that the dangers Fawcett faces in the rainforest are rather more appetizing than a lot of those the actual Fawcett’s expeditions suffered from. The real life body horror element isn’t completely absent in the movie, but the film’s still pretty squeamish when it comes to the icky details and really rather prefers dangers out of traditional adventure movies – it’s not terribly adequate at making these exciting either, though.

Music Monday: Seasonal

Sleight (2016)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Without parents, any visible family, or a decent system of social care – particularly for poor and black people like them - available, young Bo (Jacob Latimore) has to take care of his sister Tina (Storm Reid) all by himself. So he works as a street magician by day, and sells drugs for the seemingly personable – as far as it goes in this business - drug lord Angelo (Dulé Hill) by night. Bo has secrets, though. For one, he does what amounts to actual magic with the help of a home made electromagnet device he has implanted in his arm, like a low key junior gadgeteer superhero. Secondly, and much worse, he is skimming off Angelo’s drugs in an attempt to scratch together to take Tina and leave Los Angeles for somewhere where they can live the life of normal people. That’s particularly unfortunate since Angelo would really rather pull Bo deeper into the Life, doing his best to involve him in more than just dealing, and so has a rather more careful eye on him.

So, at about the same time as Bo’s life changes for the better when he meets and falls in – reciprocated – love with Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), a young woman who we will later learn to have a high tolerance for pretty shitty secrets in her boyfriend, thanks to the difficulties in her own life, things with Angelo start to unravel. Soon, Tina’s and Holly’s lives are threatened, and Bo’s only way out might be to turn his invention for letting coins float into a weapon.

So yes, and obviously, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight can very easily be read as a low key superhero origin story, just one that concentrates on the kinds of people contemporary big budget superhero films still tend to ignore or short-change. This is a film about black, poor people who feel forced to do some pretty shitty things to survive; indeed, some viewers might find Bo “unsympathetic”. He sure as hell does a lot of morally inexcusable things, but like any good film about someone seeking some form of (in this case non-mystical) transcendence, Sleight needs to show what their protagonist has to transcend. And that he does indeed manage to transcend a situation resonant with the way many people actually have to live in one way or the other rather seems to be the film’s core concern to me, a very classical use of the fantastic as a means as well as a symbol for the wish to change and to escape.

As for me, I can’t say I actually ever found Bo unlikeable or unrelatable, but then, there but for the grace of mere chance go I, or really, everyone, so who am I to judge? It does of course help that Latimore’s performance is as warm as it is conflicted, portraying Bo as a guy who thinks he does the best he can in his situation, and who is in the end willing to risk himself for others, and achieving actual change for others and himself in the end.


Formally, Sleight as an entry into the growing number of US films of the fantastic by black directors is very much a contemporary indie (the sort with a budget, but not riches) movie. It is carefully staged, deliberately paced, with a sometimes carefully hidden sense of poetry next to a much more obvious idea of realism, demonstrating a willingness to work with genre elements in ways that’ll annoy some viewers because it makes so little of a thing of them, but which delight me because their use feels so personal and individual and through this, actually meaningful.

Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).

Past Misdeeds: Garo: Red Requiem (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Makai Knight Kouga (Ryosei Konishi) is still protecting his part of Japan from the incursions of extra-dimensional evil beings known as Horrors. This time around, our hero has left his home city for some other unnamed Japanese city to hunt the particularly loathsome "Lord" (who just happens to quite clearly be a Lady) Karma (Saori Hara voiced by Kouga's TV show love interest Mika Hijii, for some reason). Karma resides inside of a mirror which can only be entered by others under very specific circumstances, and uses her victims' hidden desires (and a couple of freakish henchpeople owning a goth club) to lure them in.

The city in which Kouga is seeking Karma has its own protectors already: the experienced Makai Priest Akaza (Yosuke Saito) and his assistant Shiguto (Masahiro Kuranuki). For once,  both residents seem pretty okay with letting Kouga do his heroic loner thing. That's not the reaction of another Makai Priest, Rekka (Mary Matsuyama), who arrives just when Kouga does, with a chip on her shoulder and obvious hatred towards Karma in her heart. Rekka wants to kill Karma herself, the fact that she isn't bonded to a magical armour (it's not allowed for girls, you know, I suspect because of girl cooties) notwithstanding, and really, given that we'll later learn that Karma ate Rekka's father, it's a reasonable wish.

Obviously, Kouga and Rekka will come to blows, and it will take a series of cheesy speeches to convince the priestess that it's the job of all female characters in tokusatsu to cast spells (or - as in this case - play magic flute) at the main baddie from the side-lines while a rude, arrogant man with a very large sword does the main fighting, even when she has been shown to be quite good - though not so good as to embarrass the main character - at kicking peoples' asses.

Anyway, Karma is powerful enough for Kouga he actually needs the magical help, so it is a good thing that he's upgraded his interpersonal skills from "insufferable" to "just not a people person".

Despite my problems with its use of its female lead character, the (3D, but who cares?) theatrical feature following the "mature" (and pretty damn great) tokusatsu show Garo is an at times very entertaining piece of work, at least if you're willing to go with it.

Now, when you hear "theatrical feature", don't imagine the film's budget to be visibly higher than that of the TV show. The rather humble number of locations, the shooting style and the quality of the special effects should make the low budget nature of the endeavour quite obvious.

Fortunately, Red Requiem is still as much Keita Amemiya's baby as the original show was, and Amemiya is a director and creature designer with a great talent for milking low budgets for all the spectacle they are worth. After all, he's the guy who once used re-jigged cuckoo clocks as gigantic war machines in a movie, and it kinda-sorta worked.

Whether you thinks the quality of the CG effects helps or hinders Amemiya in his creative efforts will depend on your tolerance for extremely cheap looking CG.

I have made my peace with unnatural looking digital effects by now, as long as I like the concepts and ideas that are being put on screen with their help. Given my predilections, it would be pretty difficult for me to dislike the aesthetic the digital tech is trying to bring to life in Red Requiem's case. It's a strange, sometimes silly, sometimes cheesy, always very Japanese visual world, where classically Japanese style meets Western kitsch, mock-Gothic trappings, hack and slash videogame choreography and the free-form bizarre, until it becomes pretty difficult to decide on the appropriate reaction to it all. One could of course be an art snob and snort derisively, but it's just as fair a reaction to be charmed by the combination of the childlike and naive, the exploitative and the imaginative on display. (And yeah, there are some of Amemiya's trademark mime-alike monsters and someone with white wings, too).

Most of the not-so-digital action and the wire fu is quite good too. Konishi and Matsuyama are convincing at striking the appropriate poses, and Amemiya is still a friend of staging action sequences so that the audience is actually able to see what's going on. There are two or three moments of too obvious stuntman substitution, but I take a scene that's so clearly staged I can identify someone as a stuntman over one where I don't see what's supposed to be going on at all any time.

The acting's about like you would expect from a project like this. Konishi still doesn't move a facial muscle to do anything but scowl, but he is pretty fantastic at scowling by now, and everybody else plays his or her role a bit broader than contemporary Western tastes in acting styles would suggest (though Konishi would fit right in). However, the characters the actors are playing are pretty broad archetypes too, so I can't help but find these performances fitting. Certain characters are not meant to be portrayed naturalistically.

On the writing side, Red Requiem is clearly a step back from the comparative thematic richness of the show that spawned it, back into the safer territories of overlong speeches about heroism that take turns with emotional cheese. Still, I can't say I found myself getting too annoyed by it all, because there's nothing cynical about this aspect of the film, never a feeling that Red Requiem is going through the motions when it sprouts its not very clever philosophy. It's all honest heart-on-its-sleeve goodliness that takes itself terribly seriously, and while it seems proper to giggle about that, I won't blame it for being good-natured, silly and a bit dumb. See also, "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding".


So, while I would have loved to watch a Garo movie that kept closer to the clever (or the exceedingly strange) parts of the show it came from, I had my fun with what Red Requiem has to offer, especially in its final third, when Amemiya seems to pull out all the stops and begins to bring anything on screen he could imagine and somehow squeeze in.

In short: Wonder Woman (2017)

Given the way DC’s movie universe has developed, I wasn’t as hopeful concerning Wonder Woman as some parts of the internet were. It is wonderful to finally have a superhero movie concentrating on a woman, but a female-lead film can of course be just as terrible as one featuring a man. However, only a fool would think a movie’s automatically terrible because it features a woman.

The first twenty to thirty minutes of the film are certainly not promising. They are slow going, with reams of exposition broken up by short action sequences and then even more exposition, with a bunch of fine actresses having basically nothing of interest to do – poor, awesome Robin Wright could as well have been replaced by a computer animation, for all the film does with her. The worst about this: much of the exposition is absolutely pointless, going into needless detail about things the audience could easily learn on the go later on. Most of the important stuff could have been condensed into five minutes.

However, once exposition time is finally over – when the main characters arrive in London, to be precise – Wonder Woman transforms from something deeply mediocre in the typically over explaining way today’s Hollywood is so fond of into a fantastic film that will from now on hardly do anything wrong (apart from some way too naive and on the nose dialogue during the final fight that says out loud what the film already told us in other ways and the random design of the Big Bad). Gal Gadot turns out to be a wonder, not just looking the part but much more importantly projecting it right, not just wearing the costume but embodying what (this interpretation of) the character is actually about - arguably the most important thing for superhero cinema. Compare with Ben Affleck’s Batman who never feels like anything but an overpaid actor in a silly costume striking poses, and you’ll feel the difference. The film’s feminism hits the spot where it is consistently part of the film’s meaning but never feels preachy – this one’s not telling us, it’s showing us, which is always more convincing. In general, the film’s politics are an organic part of it, and indeed of the story it tells.

The action is a wonderful cross of old pulp/serial style high adventure and modern cinematic superhero action, comparable to the first Captain America movie (which I still hold to be absolutely fantastic, sorry Inga) in all the best ways.

Apart from mostly doing a bang-up job with the action sequences, director Patty Jenkins is also great at evoking a sense of place and time. Now, obviously, this is not meant to be a realistic depiction of the Great War but the film’s version of it seems like a place its characters belong in (you could argue Chris Pine’s character would probably have been a lot more sexist in the real world, but then, who wants to see a contemporary version of Wonder Woman going through that sort of shit for the sake of “realism”?) and not just a series of CGI creations.


It’s rather a great film.

Shiri (1999)

Original title: 쉬리

Yu Jong-won (Han Seok-Kyu) and his partner and best friend Park Mu-young (Choi Min-sik when he was rather sleek and well groomed) are working for the South Korean security services, fighting the dastardly plans of Northern spies, mostly successfully. Some years ago, though, a female assassin named Lee Bang-hee managed to paint quite the trail of blood through various officials, ending her series of murders once things got to hot with a goodbye note written on the corpse of spy colleague of Jong-won and Mu-young. Needless to say, this thing still smarts, particularly the more melodramatically inclined Jong-won.

Now, just when Jong-won is planning the wedding date with his fiancée Lee Mying-hyun (Kim Yoon-jin), Bang-hee is becoming active again. Her murders have apparently something to do with the North’s attempts to acquire a basically magical new liquid explosive, though that will turn out to only be the first step in a much bigger and deadlier project.

Formally and stylistically, Kang Je-gyu’s brilliant South Korean action film Shiri is a big sloppy kiss for Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed genre, so it’ll come as no surprise that the film is as much interested in portraying the melodramatically elevated emotional states of its characters through its action as it is in showing fun explosions. For the first forty minutes or so, the film’s attempts in this direction don’t feel to work out quite well enough. The action is certainly kinetic and fast, but its emotional underpinnings don’t quite seem to hit the mark. However, this curious feeling of tepidness isn’t the film failing to hold up to its role models as one might expect, but director Kang Je-gyu playing a longer game, slowly (for the genre, this is still a fast mover in anyone’s book) and expertly revealing greater dramatic and emotional complexity so that it can hit the audience all the better over the head with it. And before a viewer can think “hey, that’s a rather cleverly thought up and well realized way to use these old tropes”, suddenly, personal and emotional stakes have become as big as the action – which is pretty damn big.

Kang doesn’t stop there, though: there’s also the way main protagonist and antagonist are paralleling one another, both also consciously mirroring the separation between the North and South of Korea; and how an at first pretty jingoistic seeming action movie turns into a film that very consciously uses the spectacular shoot-outs and the tears (oh, the tears!) to also talk about the psychological toll the state of affairs between the two Koreas has on the people trying to live their lives there. The film shows a heart-on-its-sleeve sort of pain about the relationship between the Koreas, hiding things South Korean cinema usually tries to avoid even looking at under cover of its awesome spectacle. In other words, unlike a lot of films inspired by the Heroic Bloodshed genre, Shiri doesn’t just take the genre’s cool surface elements (though there’s nothing wrong with that, of course) but actually looks closely at its techniques to then apply them to themes and ideas close to the heart of its director.


This slowly developing depth and complexity is of course only half of the reason why Shiri is quite as wonderful an example of action cinema as it is. There’s also the action itself: it’s kinetic, fast, and varied, but also keeps in mind the importance of some standards of its genre. Glass needs to be broken, cars explode, partners need to die heroically, and happy ends aren’t really in the cards in a world where nobody can survive while being only one person instead of fragmented parts (again mirroring the Koreas).

In short: Blood Money (2017)

The new film by Lucky McKee finds three horrible people who aren’t actually friends (but whatever, one imagines the script writers to think) and who don’t seem to have a single redeeming quality between them stumbling over a whole lot of money during a camping trip, which they at once proceed to steal.

Faster than you can think “Gee, what assholes!”, they begin trying to fuck each other over in varying combinations, with little success. The criminal whose money these tools have stolen turns out to be a very tired and cranky looking John Cusack, dressed in the weird rags he’s started wearing in nearly all of his roles ever since he has come down to movies like this one, plus a bandana to make the outfit even more absurd. He then proceeds to go after the vile idiots, somehow managing to keep up with the relatively fit looking trio despite looking like Cusack looks in 2017.

What could be a nice combination of a survivalist chase thriller and Treasure of the Sierra Madre style existentialism breaks down thanks to the seeming unwillingness of everyone involved to actually apply themselves. McKee has made one to four (depending on one’s tastes) good to brilliant movies, but this one could have been directed by anybody: there’s no sense of place, no dramatic rhythm, and the photography is only excellent at making a patch of theoretically attractive semi-wilderness look as bland and nondescript as possible. The action sequences lack in focus and a sense of physicality. One hesitates to even call this “direction”, it feels more like the product of someone just showing up and going through the motions.

Which is more than can be said of Cusack’s performance here. He seems to try and beat Ben Kingsley at his game of showing up in low budget fare, cashing his cheque and doing nothing at all a guy randomly grabbed from the street couldn’t have done cheaper. It’s pretty sad to witness, really, for when he bothers, he still can be a focused, charismatic actor.


The rest of the cast is decent enough, I guess, but they can’t really do much about a script that confuses exploring the dark sides of supposedly normal people with giving us a trio of characters who are so horrible in every single interaction I’m honestly confused why I should care about anything that happens to them. This is not a story of people who show their darkest, deepest secrets when confronted with temptation but one of assholes that are assholes throughout, doing asshole things being hunted by another asshole; and not even interesting assholes at that.

Music Monday: Spinning Coin Edition

The Execution Game (1979)

Original title: 処刑遊戯 (Shokei yugi)

With the help of a Woman who doesn’t even move her mouth in the proper moments when singing playback in a bar, a mysterious group lures everyone’s favourite asshole professional killer Shohei Narumi (Yusaku Matsuda) into a trap. They knock him out, kidnap him and them torture him a bit. Afterwards, they stage a fake escape, apparently to test his murder skills in practice, for what these guys truly want from Narumi is to hire him for a hit. Why you’d first torture him and finish the fake escape opportunity with shooting his gun hand is beyond me, but I am after all not a member of this highly professional and mysterious group.

The choice of target doesn’t seem promising either: it’s an old pro in the professional killing business, and the former favourite killer of the group, not something that should seem to be terribly promising for Narumi’s own future. Later, we will also discover that the old killer was seduced into working for the group by the same woman who pulled in Narumi. Eventually, Narumi agrees to the hit, but of course, the old hitman is not going to be the only one our protagonist will murder.

I’ve decided not to write up The Killing Game, the second film of Toru Murakawa’s second film in his “Game” trilogy about the bloody adventures of professional killer – and perhaps professional asshole too – Shohei Narumi, because what I wrote about the first film in the series, The Most Dangerous Game, also applies to film number two, just that the later movie adds some pretty horrible comic relief and doubles down on the misogynism of the first film.

The third, and for my taste by far the best, entry in the series cuts most of these elements down completely. There’s no comedy at all anymore in the film, we never see Narumi taking on his off-day lazy guy persona, and while the film’s portrayal of its two female characters isn’t exactly progressive, they are much closer to actual people than in the first two films, and given how pared down the characterisation has become here, that’s just as close as the men. In fact, the Woman isn’t quite your standard femme fatale. She certainly works for very violent men and is responsible for luring others into their hands, but she’s also clearly trapped in a world she never chose for herself, looking for outs – be it fleeing with the old killer or begging Narumi to kill her too after she has set the older killer up for his death – she knows won’t save her.

Narumi’s relationship to women has changed too. While nothing of this is ever spoken aloud – as a matter of fact, the film’s characters speak about everything not related to killing only in vague allusions and ellipses – Matsuda’s posture and some of Narumi’s actions make clear that this time around, he isn’t dominating a woman with his “awesome” (actually really unpleasant, of course) masculinity, but can actually fall in love like a real human being. His other contact is a young watch repairwoman who clearly takes a shine to him, and whom he will in the end reject, telling her not to put her trust in strangers too fast; one never knows how dangerous they could be. This might also be the most moral, perhaps kindest, act, Narumi commits in the whole of the series.

Ironically, this increasing depth of the protagonist’s emotional life happens in a film that strips down all clear emotional expression not happening through violence even further than the first two did, Narumi hiding what might be going on in his head behind a stoic pose and under his perpetual sun glasses. However, Matsuda manages to embody greater emotional depth by doing less obvious acting here; while his Narumi still acts cool and likes to pose with his gun in front of a mirror, the coolness does seem very much like armour this time around, Matsuda suggesting with small gestures and changes in his body language quite a few of the things neither his character not the film would ever outright state.

In this context, it is pretty clear that the Woman (whose name I never noticed if the film ever actually uses it) isn’t the only one trapped in a violent world she isn’t allowed to leave here; despite all his capabilities and his talent for violence, this time around Narumi seems just as trapped in his world as she is, his macho coolness a shield that seems the more cracked the less he lets the cracks show.

On the directing side, Murakawa is doing an inspired instead of a routine job for once. Here, every shot seems absolutely focussed on creating a very specific mood of alienation, the framing often trapping characters in their surroundings or keeping them separate and far from each other. From time to time, the film’s generally naturalistic (in a 70s grimy sense) style and colour scheme is replaced by splotches of intense tones of blue or red, suggesting a wrongness to some of the film’s most violent moments in the series typical scenes of Narumi systematically gunning down a whole gang of enemies. In general, The Execution Game’s action tends more to the systematic than the loudly spectacular, an approach that fits Narumi’s profession as it does the film’s more complex context.


So, quite unexpectedly, I found myself riveted by the final film in the “Game” trilogy, fascinated by its cold aesthetic, interested by the way it frames its tale of alienation, as well as surprised by the clear evidence that Matsuda is a much better actor than I had given him credit for. That’s a pretty fantastic way to end a little franchise.

Three Films Make A Post: For Ruth, the last straw was a spoon.

The Hunter (2011): Daniel Nettheim’s Tasmania set eco thriller is not at all what I’d have expected from a director whose work otherwise is centred on dependable TV jobs (which I’m not going to knock, for there’s nothing at all wrong with craftsmanship under tight restrictions). It’s a slow, thoughtful film whose direction lacks all vanity and pretention in the best way, focusing instead on the landscape and quite wonderful acting by Willem Dafoe and Frances O’Connor, and specifically their interaction (with a bit of Sam Neill and two good child actors thrown in the mix, too). The film turns out to be a rather complicated redemption film that in the end sees our protagonist do something that is at once very, very right and very, very wrong – and unlike quite a lot of films about violent men finding redemption, The Hunter is quite conscious of this ambivalence.

The Sandman (1995): The thing with me and the films of (US indie horror pioneer) J.R. Bookwalter is that I like the man’s films and respect what he’s going for with them, but that I generally wouldn’t recommend them to many people. It’s not just the roughness that comes with making films with little money and not exactly a horde of experienced crew members involved that makes his films difficult to recommend - the ambition that makes Bookwalter’s films so interesting to me is what will kill them for a lot of viewers. If one is willing and able to look past the cheap costumes, the often amateurish acting, and so on and so forth and see the ideas they are supposed to stand in for rather than their inevitably imperfect reality, then one can be charmed and delighted by Bookwalters films; if one can’t, then one will only see something cheap and amateurish - though usually somewhat better shot and edited than one would expect. I’m not saying one of these ways to look at Bookwalter’s work – or that of filmmakers like him - is wrong, or right; I just happen to enjoy them, and this variation on the “dream demon” concept in particular.


Two Lovers and a Bear (2016): Not at all like a J.R. Bookwalter film is Kim Nguyen’s magical realist tale about, well, two lovers and a bear, or rather the imperfect and doomed (or not doomed, depending on one’s perspective) attempt of two lovers to overcome the pasts that defined and broke them. I found the film captivating, interesting, and infuriating to about the same degree. There’s gorgeous (and meaningful) photography of the Great White North (which is the sort of thing that’ll half sell me on any movie), fine performances by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany, and quite a lot of passion in the way Nguyen treats his characters; but I also found the way the ending seems to treat the characters’ brokenness as something that can’t be mended (or relieved) by anything but death unconvincing – quite literally in the sense that the film didn’t convince me of it, leading to an ending that to me felt as hollow and conventional as a classic Hollywood happy end.

Past Misdeeds: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims' bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw. As you do.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) - oh, the hilarity! - of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I'm sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with another secret all her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton's secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it's difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner's attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace's name and the often very fine titles of the man's books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his Wallace Junior cycle. After having co-produced Argento's Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner's second version of Wallace's Death Packs A Suitcase.

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco's more personal films - at least when we're talking about his work of the 60s and 70s - to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as "the death-avenger of Soho", and no, the word "Todesrächer" does exist in German as little as "death-avenger" does in English - it's just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco's films. It's probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge in his erotic obsessions as heavily as his fans are used to - well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway - but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side of course combined with the man's usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn't work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn't even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower's motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it's a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he's working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself, apparently) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriately), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that's much easier to appreciate for the amateur than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love the director, I usually do not use the word "exciting" to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.


German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show's complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as one of the core writers of Rialto Film's Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker's attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I'd care - or rather not care - to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call "wooden", for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert's part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film's cop character with effortless charisma. It's quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

In short: Hounds of Love (2016)

Quite a few people who are probably much cleverer than I am and whose opinions I respect have written rather highly of Ben Young’s Australian horror film about a couple (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth) who kidnap and torture a mildly wayward teenager (Ashleigh Cummings). The film certainly has a lot going for it: the acting is bordering on the brilliant, the writing manages to go into theoretically highly exploitative places without ever feeling exploitative while also avoiding an impression of harmlessness, and the direction is mostly stylish and clearly knows what it wants.

Well, Young does have a tendency to overuse slow-motion montages, which is certainly effective the first two times, but by the next four or five (I lost count) uses I found myself raising my eyebrows (yes, both) at the movie. I – and I’m saying this as not a particular fan of the police as an organization - also wasn’t terribly fond of the ridiculous way the film portrays the police. Now, I understand that the plot wouldn’t work if these guys would even vaguely be interested in doing their job of at least starting to look for a disappeared white teenage middle case girl (which generally is a race, class and gender combination to get the police all hot and bothered) when the parents and boyfriend of the girl poke a piece of paper into their faces that tells them where to look, but I’ve grown a bit tired of this particular cliché, particularly when there are a myriad better ways to write oneself out of this sort of situation.


I’ve also grown a bit tired of the whole kidnapping and torturing sub-genre, I have to admit, and I think it is this more than the film’s relatively minor failings that resulted in my feeling exactly nothing about or for the characters in it, and therefore not feeling much tension, excitement or interest for what was going on.

Walking Tall (1973)

To get away from a business where he’s always told what to do, to please his wife Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman), and to provide a steadier home for their children, the delightfully named Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) retires from wrestling to the small Southern town where he grew up in and that parts of his family still call home.

The place has changed, though, and not necessarily for the better. It has grown its own little vice district, and while the things going on there look pretty damn harmless to my eyes, Buford seems rather shocked on his first encounter. When he makes a fuss about the local casino cheating one of his old buddies – who clearly isn’t the most intelligent or mentally healthy to boot – the owners of the place react absurdly violent, not just beating Buford to an inch of his life, but also cutting him up with knives and leaving him somewhere by the side of the road to die. Our hero’s made from stern stuff, though, and survives his ordeal. Afterwards he doesn’t just learn the bastards also stole his station wagon but that the local sheriff’s not willing to do a damn thing about the people who nearly murdered him. Consequently, once he has recovered, he makes himself a very big stick and goes out for some vigilante justice, combining brutally beating up his would-be killers with having them pay an invoice for his damages. Him, the Sheriff does arrest, but the ensuing trial sees Buford giving a rousing speech and getting of scot free.

Next step in his project to clean up town is to run for Sheriff himself. Clearly, there’s a demand for an honest man in the role, even if he’s an amateur like Buford. Before and after he becomes Sheriff, Buford has to cope with various attacks on his life, family troubles, and the general corruption of parts of the charming little town.

Walking Tall is the first of the two films at the end of his career veteran director Phil Karlson made with Joe Don Baker, and it is generally considered to be the slightly superior one. Personally, in a cinch, I’d probably go with Framed as the slightly superior film, but that has more to do with that film’s shorter running time, tighter structure and more controlled sentimentality than with anything Walking Tall does terribly wrong. This is just a differently shaped film, telling a story of a greater scope in time and vaguely basing itself on actual events concerning the real Buford Pusser. To which degree, I don’t know, and frankly, I’m not sure I want to.

In theory, this could be one of those films whose too loud love for vigilante justice and dislike for stuff like the actual rule of law or the separation of power between judicative and executive could sour me on it too much to have fun with it. In practice, the film does use these latter bits also to portray the degree of Pusser’s naivety when it comes to the things needed beside a moral compass to do his new job properly.

In other regards, this is just a simple joy to watch: Joe Don does the Joe Don Baker swagger, inhabiting his role in a way which makes questions of “acting” seem pointless, Karlson uses his direct but effective style to the best, and most entertaining effect, and the whole thing has a wonderful sense of place. Of course, that place is a made-up sort of South made of idealisations, clichés and truth in probably equal parts but it feels alive and real on film.

Speaking of the US South, I do find it interesting to point out that both of the Baker/Karlson films feature one major black character as a friend of Joe Don’s respective character who isn’t a caricature, with actual things to do in the plot, and positioned in a way to give the film some opportunity to talk about racism in its specific Southern variety, in scenes that suggest someone involved in the production had some practical experience with these matters beyond the burning crosses and knew how this sort of thing played out in real life in smaller – but not less painful – ways at this time and place. It’s also just pretty cool to have a film showing a guy like Joe Don actively trying not being a racist prick, and even apologizing when parts of his socialisation make him act like a prick.


If you don’t care about that sort of thing and only come to see Joe Don Baker smite evildoers with his big stick, you’re well provided by Walking Tall, too.

The 39 Steps (1935)

Canadian in London Richard Hannay’s (Robert Donat) life is quickly becoming very interesting. When the mysterious Miss Smith (Lucie Mannheim) picks him up in a music hall and asks to go home with him, he soon finds himself involved as an amateur in the spy business. For Miss Smith, as she explains, is a freelance agent, at the moment working against a foreign government (boo, hiss) whose spies have got their hands on some sort of secret concerning British Air Defence, and plan to get it out of the country soon. Miss Smith would rather sell their secret back to the British. Unfortunately, the enemy spies are onto her, and her little visit with Hannay is an attempt to beat them through the power of sheer randomness.

As it stands, she’s soon knifed in the back by someone. Hannay is of course framed as her murderer. Trying to save the secret from the foreign power himself seems the only way of proving his innocence. Alas, our protagonist’s only clues are the name of a village in Scotland and the phrase “The 39 Steps”. Soon he’s chased by the police, the enemy agents, and god knows who else; not exactly the situation an amateur whose main skill seems to be flirting wants to find himself in.

Even in 1935, when he was still working in the UK, Alfred Hitchcock was riding his hobby horses hard, so it’s not a surprise to realize this John Buchan adaptation is a film about a supposed everyman (who just happens to look and sound like a movie star) hunted by incompetent and untrustworthy authorities, shadowy figures, and untrustworthy shadowy authority figures while chasing after a McGuffin. I’m not complaining, of course, for this set-up plays to many of the directors strength, delivering the perfect scaffold to hang episodes with highly memorable side characters (personal favourite: the crofter and his too young, romantic wife who both suggest a whole movie of their own Hannay’s just an episodic encounter in), the typically cleverly constructed suspense sequences, and a bit of quick banter on. Even only ten years into his long career as a director, Hitchcock was fantastic at this sort of thing, providing the film with an exciting sense of flow, and demonstrating an unwillingness to ever be stagey that was still not par for the course at this stage in the development of cinema. To modern eyes, some of the directors efforts may look a bit commonplace now, but that’s not so much Hitchcock doing much of anything wrong, it’s an effect of the immense influence his films had on more than one genre.

The film does also contain in embryonic form another Hitchcock standard trope, the cool blonde woman who is “tamed” (shudder) by his protagonist by treating her pretty rudely at best. In this case, the victim’s Madeleine Carroll, but The 39 Steps doesn’t drive this particular element terribly far – neither to be annoying or to be interesting - and stays closer to the “bickering means love” cliché beloved of popular culture even in the 30s.


The most important thing about The 39 Steps, though, is this: it is just a great, at its core straightforward - though Hitchcock obfuscates there quite a bit - story told in a way so accomplished it is still exciting and fun to watch more than eighty years after it was made – and not just for viewers specialized in films from the 30s and 40s.

Music Monday: Pigeonfeet Edition

Colossal (2016)

Warning: I’m not going to spoil everything about the film, but some spoilage is inevitable in this case!

Writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has hit rock bottom in New York, suffering from an alcohol problem, a feeling of alienation, a bad relationship to a tool (Dan Stevens) and an aimlessness that is rather difficult not to confuse with self-destructiveness.

When she’s losing her job too, she moves back into the empty house in the small town where she grew up, which is sure to help with her depression. There, she reconnects with some of the guys – Gloria’s clearly not a woman with much time for other women – who never left, especially Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), now the owner of the local drinking dive.

All seems set for a very typical romantic comedy plot but things take a rather different turn when a giant monster appears in Seoul for a bit of city smashing. After some time, Gloria realizes something bizarre: the monster only appears when she is at the local playground at a very specific time in the morning, and it seems to mirror whatever she does there.

I am honestly confused by the very mixed reception Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal receives, because for me this is one of the best, most touching and most clever films of the last ten years – and that’s not just because there are giant monsters in it, though that certainly never hurt a film in my appreciation. Rather, I admire the way Vigalondo starts from this extremely typical romantic comedy set-up (including the casting of Anne Hathaway who becomes pretty damn impressive once the film stops pretending to be a romantic comedy) and goes in a very different direction.

In this context, the darkness the film reveals in a certain character works for me on many levels: there’s the simple shock thanks to Vigalondo’s execution of the twist, even mirroring the moments of denial Gloria goes through, the critique on the romantic comedy way of looking at characters, where everything potentially dark in a person is at best treated as a minor quirk, and the sense of betrayal of trust and violation that comes with all this for Gloria. The film also manages to not go too far in this regard; there might have been a temptation to go full on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the audience, but the amount of violence we get to see is perfectly measured to be just as effective and feels deeply disquieting in its context.

I also love how the fantastical and the quotidian intersect in the film, both containing an element of the horrific (Gloria’s monstrous projection really does kill people, after all) but both also grounded in the world as we know it. This isn’t a pure case of the fantastical as metaphor either, in fact, metaphor and the (fictionally) real mix in a way that can’t just be solved like an equation. That’s apparently not the sort of the solution the film is interested in. Instead, Vigalondo uses the fantastical as a way not just to get Gloria into trouble but also to get her out of it. The fantastical becomes a way towards empowerment once Gloria starts taking a degree of responsibility bordering on the heroic. Which, obviously, is very much a feminist turn on core values of the superhero narrative where with great power has to come…well, you know.

Yet the film is at the same time as it talks about rather serious elements of the (shittiest side of) the female experience and a half-metaphorical way to cope with it also just oh so very fun. I love the monster sequences, specifically because they are small-scale and personal, seen on television and heard through stompy monster effects put on scenes of Hathaway on a playground, suggesting another way for some giant monster movies to go.


Sometimes, you just gotta love a movie, and that’s how it is with Colossal and me.

Three Films Make A Post: Campfire Stories Can Be Deadly

Downhill (2016): Director Patricio Valladares’s film about bikers (the non-motorized kind) getting into rather big trouble in Chile is a bit of a mixed bag. In fact, it is one in more than one sense. For one, it’s an uneven film: acting, direction, the quality of the dialogue and the effects are all over the place. One minute, it’s a really neat and enthusiastic if crude little bit of indie horror, the next it’s bro horror at its most annoying, only to turn interesting again a scene later – and so on and so forth. The thing is, the good moments are really good, certainly good enough to make the film memorable. Sub-genre wise, one might get whiplash, seeing as this features the already mentioned bro horror, cabin in the woods style shenanigans, a cult, an infection angle played as outright body horror, something like Satanism, some survivalist business, and what can only be described (approvingly) as weird shit. The film never really manages to pull all these different threads together too well, but it is certainly never boring to see where it is going next.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999): Anthony Minghella’s version of the Patricia Highsmith novel turns quite a bit of what was still – though clearly identifiable – subtext in the novel’s text into text, producing a psychological thriller about repressed (homo)sexuality and class, and their intersections. It’s very well acted by everyone involved – if we ignore Jude Law’s and Gwyneth Paltrow’s dubious American accents which I just do – with Matt Damon giving one of the best performances of his career until now. Minghella’s direction is typically glossy and pretty, with a penchant for the needlessly sumptuous but here all these characteristics that drag some of his other films in the direction of the vapid yet ponderous type of film beloved by the Academy Awards are actually very much part of the meaning of a film all about the things hidden under these (too) pretty surfaces.


The Hatter’s Ghost aka Les fantômes du chapelier (1982): This sometimes darkly funny thriller by Claude Chabrol is just as interested in the things hidden under orderly surfaces, though he’s obviously not exploring them via excessive gloss and a dozen of stars. Rather, Chabrol’s film feels intimate and personal, never leaving the audience in doubt about what’s going on with its murderous and utterly mad hatter (Michel Serrault in a tour de force performance that finds the horrifying and the pitiable in the histrionic as well as the subtle, usually both in a single scene). This being Chabrol, the film does of course skewer the idea of the so-called “respectable citizen” and his ostentatious “normality”. Something or someone not being, acting, or looking normal – like the film’s poor, sad, grasping for “normality” until he dies of it, immigrant tailor Kachoudas (Charles Aznavour) and his crime of not being born in France – is of course still a major obsession of every stratum of many of the good citizens of many countries.

Past Misdeeds: Una Iena In Cassaforte (1968)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Eleven months after their deed, a group of intrepid robbers and their backers come together in the villa of one of their own, Boris, to divide up the diamonds they stole out of a Swiss vault. The diamonds are hidden away in a safe that in its turn is hidden in a pool of water, only to be lifted by some sort of hydraulic device, and not openable through explosives because it's somehow built with uranium inside™. Said safe  can only be opened with six keys, one of which should be in the possession of each robber.

Of the original robbers, only Steve (Dimitri Nabokov), Klaus (Otto Tinard?) and Albert (Alex Morrison) are left, though. Boris has died (and is entombed in his own backyard) and is represented by his wife Anna (Maria Luisa Geisberger) whose frightening fashion stylings will delight and/or horrify the audience for the rest of the movie, while another of the original robbers has lost his key gambling to a certain Juan (Ben Salvador). The final robber is hiding from the police and has sent his girlfriend Carina from Algiers (Karina Kar). Because two women aren't enough, Albert has brought his fiancée Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni, doing her best Brigitte Bardot impression) to the party.

Alas, things are not going as smoothly as everyone present had hoped. Just when the group is about to open the safe, Albert realizes he has lost his key. The others don't believe his story and begin first to try and find the key on Jeanine's body and then - after that doesn't lead to anything but a woman at once sticking out her décolleté and cupping her breasts - decide to torture Albert for a night by not giving him his favourite drug and puttering about on a piano.

Once that is over, leading nowhere, somebody shoves Albert down a balcony. Obviously, this won't be the last murder in the villa, because soon enough, everyone is at each other's throats, and everyone's trying to get the diamonds for his or herself.

Una Iena In Cassaforte belongs to that school of the giallo that doesn't see its own lack of a budget as an excuse for not being a mad and stylish concoction of luridly glowing pop particles. As giallos go, this one's most definitely far on the mindless pop and pulp side of the equation, and not at all interested in (even pop-)psychology, social commentary or depth. Instead Una Iena is a film working hard to keep its audience entertained by throwing as much exciting and crazy shit at it as the money allows, in a style closer to the weirder eurospy films than most other giallos.

The whole story is presented with all the sensibility and subtlety of a fumetti (I'd be very surprised if "make it look like a comic" wasn't scrawled on the first page of the script), with caricatures instead of characterization, but delights through weird flourishes like the "uranium in the safe" business, and is dominated by a mood of overexcited playfulness that seems to have infected every part of the movie.

The actors (most of them having only this and one or two other films in their filmographies) are inhabiting their one-note roles with great enthusiasm, as if they were born into them (and I'm not too sure they weren't), and - when the situation affords it - can go from comparatively normal acting to wild scenery chewing at the drop of a hat. Especially Geisberger and Gaioni are fantastic that way. As a special bonus, the former actress does all her freak-outs wearing clothes and make-up that many of the more exalted drag queens would reject as a bit too tacky and bizarre, as if the guy responsible for her wardrobe were a Martian visitor trying to get his three brains around the concept of a "vamp", at once failing and succeeding incredibly well.

There's something wildly inventive (always bordering on hysteria, but only succumbing to it from time to time) about Cesare Canevari's direction too. Canevari seems to have gone into the film with the determination to do something visually interesting or outright bizarre with every single shot (possibly to distract from the small number of locations). Sure, some of his ideas of the bizarre and the interesting are quite clearly part of the generic visual language of the pop cinema mainstream of his time, but Canevari manages to build a beautiful little freak out of these more generic parts and his own ideas. Plus, the generic of 1968's pop cinema is pretty damn colourful to today’s blue and yellow haunted eyes.


Una Iena In Cassaforte (yes, as far as I understand, the film's title really translates as "An Hyena in the Safe") is not only an extremely fascinating and fun film to watch, it' also one which can make for an instructive hour and a half of "guess the influences". Elements like the water death trap garage seem to point either at the Bond movies, the eurospy film, or Rialto's Edgar Wallace krimis as sources and influences for the film at hand, but it's neither impossible, nor unlikely that these influences did run in more than one direction, and this small and unassuming film influenced later films of the respective series right back. We are talking about pop cinema after all, and one of pop cinema's most noble activities is to go through an endless cycle of films borrowing ideas other films took from somewhere else, that will in turn be borrowed again by other films, and then by other films again, until it becomes difficult, possibly even absurd, to find an original source, or anything amounting to a state of authenticity.