Three Films Make A Post: Some mysteries should not be unlocked

Not of This Earth (1988): This Roger Corman-produced remake of a Corman joint is directed by the dread Jim Wynorski pretty early in his career of tits and boredom, so it is indeed full of female nudity (though not quite as much as in later Wynorski epics, you gotta decide for yourself if that’s for better or worse) and a metric crapton of boredom (just as much as in later stage Wynorski).

The film’s main feature is the copious amount of footage taken from a load of other Corman productions, usually used for no good reason but to get the film up to length, of course, a far cry from the clever secondary usage in something from Corman’s glory days like Targets, but comparing Bogdanovich and Wynorski is really rather unfair of me. Otherwise, poor Traci Lords seems to be the only person on screen even vaguely conscious of that thing known as “acting”, little happens, horrible jokes of a sort that makes Scary Movie look funny are made, and my eyes are getting heavy just thinking about this one again.

The Body Tree (2017): Following a Wynorski film that doesn’t even seem to have the ambition to entertain, this Russian-Spanish-US coproduction directed by Thomas Dunn about a group of young horror movie characters travelling to Siberia to take part in a ritual meant to calm the spirit of a murdered friend but alas provoking a demon feels like pure cinematic gold. At least, it clearly has ambitions to be a bit more than the spam in a cabin movie you’d expect from the set-up.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts at psychological depth come up against writing that’s just not sharp and insightful enough to sustain many, many scenes of characters arguing, and arguing, and then arguing some more, performances that mostly can’t cope with these attempts at psychological depth, and the plain fact that about half of these characters are such unpleasant assholes I just didn’t want to hear them shouting at one another for what felt like hours. But at least The Body Tree fails while actually trying.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003): Let’s finish this on a high note, though, with Andrew Douglas’s attempt at capturing something like the heart of the weird, white American South in a sort of road trip following singer-songwriter and, ahem, “eccentric” Jim White through poverty, bars, various examples of what looks like horrifying religious mania to my atheist eyes, and sometimes awkwardly staged encounters with various alt.Country musicians from David Eugene Edwards, over Lee Sexton, over the Handsome Family, to Johnny Dowd (ironically, about half of these musicians were probably better known here in Germany than in the US at the time the film was made). The great writer Harry Crews pops in for a bit too.


I’m not terribly sure anyone will understand this South any better after watching the film, but it surely should convince one to try.