In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

Music Monday: Stories Up High Edition

Maroc 7 (1967)

Jewel thief Simon Grant (Gene Barry) finds out that fashion impresaria Louise Henderson (Cyd Charisse) uses all the jetting around the world to do fashion shoots that come with her occupation as a cover for her activities as head of a high stakes thieving operation. She’s got a photographer (Leslie Phillips) with a rap sheet as her man for the rough stuff, and one of her models, Claudia (Elsa Martinelli), as walking, talking, distraction and gopher. If things go as Simon wants them to, she’ll also acquire an aging jewel thief as a partner for her big photo shoot in Morocco, where she’s pairing grave robbing with her more typical thievery shtick, looking to steal a medallion from a hidden tomb. He’s not planning to give her a choice, obviously.

Simon has several problems to cope with: firstly, Louise doesn’t react too well to a guy muscling in on her through blackmail. Secondly, she’s as ruthless as any hardened gang boss, and not afraid to frame blackmailers for murders she and her henchman commit in the course of her operations. Thirdly, Claudia is apparently really into older men like him. And lastly, nobody can be trusted. In fact, not even Simon himself is what he pretends to be: rather, he is a police agent gone undercover to break up Louise’s operation in strenuous cooperation with the local police under one Inspector Barrada (Denholm “The Frenchman” Elliott). Clearly, bouts of violence and a fistful of double crosses can be expected.

Despite on paper belonging to a somewhat different genre, Gerry O’Hara’s Maroc 7 is very much a film in the same vein as most Eurospy movies. As the spy movies of its time do, it puts a manly-man protagonist with dubious ideas about personal space when he encounters women and an inflated idea of his own irresistibility through a series of action and suspense set pieces in front of “exotic” (that is to say, non-Western) locations.

Not being an Italian movie but a British one, this never gets quite as crazy as the more out there continental movies of the style, really less crazy than the later Connery Bond movies (not to speak of Roger Moore, as we prefer it around here anyway). I wouldn’t exactly call anything happening “realistic”, but this certainly isn’t a film to wallow in the bizarre, the outlandish or the just plain weird. At the same time it’s never attempting to be a “serious” crime thriller. There are certainly elements here that suggest a thematical closeness to more noirish fare – what with the amount of double crosses and the inclusion of three femme fatales (at least if you stretch the definition a little) – but the film never treats these betrayals as emotionally heavy or morally interesting and prefers to handle them as parts of a fun genre romp.

“Fun romp” is certainly the tone the filmmakers have decided on, and they stick to it throughout the film, letting Barry’s character take betrayals, attempts at his life and romancing a beautiful young woman he doesn’t trust completely in stride, with little suggestion he’s ever in much actual physical or emotional danger. This isn’t really a criticism, mind you: Maroc 7 simply isn’t a film that aims for anything more, and it does hit what it is actually aiming for competently enough, if, perhaps, not quite with the amount of style one would ideally hope for.

O’Hara certainly is a somewhat too unassuming director. He tends to shoot things by the book – straightforward and mostly effective but never with particular flair. Which is perfectly fine for the film this wants to be, always keeping things exciting enough to make for a diverting time, but never quite as exciting as you’d wish them to be. Though, to be fair, the Moroccan locations are rather nicer to look at than “just fine”. On the acting side, most of the cast seems satisfied with aiming for the same satisfying but not too satisfying level as well. Only Martinelli aims a little higher than only being very beautiful and perhaps also very treacherous, but Barry, Charisse and Elliott pretty much level out at the same upper middle of enthusiasm as the rest of the film.

That’s not meant as too much of a criticism against Maroc 7. Being a fun, traditional bit of entertainment is nothing to sneeze at.

Three Films Make A Post: Meet The Gayest Lady Who Ever Went To Town!

Theodora Goes Wild (1936): This screwball comedy by Richard Boleslawski with the great Irene Dunne (and Melvyn Douglas, though he’s not really Dunne’s equal here) is still a joy to watch. Of course, the joyless puritanism and churlish conservatism it argues against does tend to get in style again and again – and too many progressives can get as badly infected by it as the reactionaries do – so it felt unexpectedly topical from time to time. The film also puts a nice bit of emphasis that enjoying one’s life as much as one can and being a good person towards others are not in opposition. Still news to some today.

This being a great bit of screwball, it does not use its message to bury the fun; instead the film’s an absolutely joyous mixture of the slightly frivolous, the just plain silly, and the sort of absurd set-pieces the genre is well known for.

Choose or Die (2022): I found this very low budget Netflix horror effort by Toby Meakins rather frustrating. There are several really cool set-pieces here – particularly the diner scene is excellently disturbing – but there’s also a clear ambition to do more than just set-pieces. And it’s here where the film falters for me: while it is pretty clear what it is trying to achieve thematically, namely talk about matters of race and class, of the lack of hope you get when you’re black and poor and how it buries one, it does so in a manner that’s so blunt and flat, and has so little to do with how most of the horror scenes play out, the whole film falls flat on its face, even before the godawful ending.

Infinite Storm (2022): At times, this survival movie with Naomi Watts in a fine acting mood, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, about a grieving woman saving a suicidal young man (Billy Howl) by literally dragging him down a mountain in terrible conditions, is surehandedly, quietly human, using the usual and typical tropes of this kind of wilderness survival affair to explore the fine lines between grief and hope, will to live and will to die. It is sparse (the right kind) and rather beautifully shot, as well. This good impression is regularly marred by moments where the film suddenly seems to lose trust in its own – and Watts’s – ability to express what it is trying to say, and suddenly swerves towards the cheese of badly used licensed music and badly written monologues that are meant to explain what the film is already expressing, but only turn it banal.

In short: Countdown (2019)

Saintly Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail) has just passed her nurse exam when she makes the mistake of downloading a mobile app called “Countdown”. It’s supposed to very exactly predict the moment when its user dies, with a red-numbered countdown doing its memento mori thing. Which would probably be good for a laugh for our heroine, if the thing wouldn’t actually work. It’s even doing more than just this, it also treats any evasion of its predicted moment of death as a breach of its terms and conditions, and supernaturally murders you itself. Quinn, it turns out, has only three days to live, and has to look forward to a couple of days of jump scary apparitions, the usual threatened family member (in this case: little sister) – you know the drill.

Because this is 2019, and our heroine doesn’t have troubles enough, there’s also a doctor (Peter Facinelli) heavily into sexual misconduct involved in the plot.

Of course, this guy will turn out to be rather practical for the movie’s finale, for what’s a script as lazy as the one for writer/director Justin Dec’s Countdown to do when its heroine needs to pass on a curse for the grand finale? Get her into an actual moral quandary? That would need a degree of thought and care that’s clearly beyond this one.

Adding to this kind of eye-rolling nonsense are lazy handwaving writing moves of the expected – of course the curse’s rules will not be used consistently throughout the movie – as well as the unexpected – pure chance is apparently the best way to introduce any character the script needs to Quinn’s life so it uses that move more than once – sort. Characterization is broad and without flair, trauma is a trope everybody suffers from, and the plotting just lazily makes check marks on the “Hollywood for Dummies” plot beat list. Acting and effects are just barely decent, while the direction is never outright bad.

Obviously – or bizarrely – I had a pretty great time watching this one. I’m not liking it ironically, and wasn’t loudly poking fun at it while watching (sitting alone in my living room) or anything terrible like that. Rather, I found myself genuinely enjoying Countdown’s complete disinterest in putting any thought whatsoever into anything it does, functioning as a cinematic dispenser for unflavoured tropes and cheap jump scares.

In short: UFO: Secret Video (1986)

Journalist Jeff (Jeff Hutchinson) has a hot scoop concerning a desert UFO sighting! Well, in theory, he does, for he doesn’t really have any footage that proves his encounter, so he’s mostly running on hot air. Still, two hilariously awkward Men in Black (here definitely of the government type) are on his tail.

So our hero goes on the run with his soon to be ex-girlfriend Suzy (Suzanne Solari), to have shouting matches with various people. We witness all this through material shot on Suzy’s very own camera.

Who knew that the same year he made his first post-apocalyptic roller blade movie (called Roller Blade, obviously), ultra-indie genre filmmaker Donald G. Jackson also made an early example of the POV SF genre? And really, given how it looks and sounds, it’s also a proto-mumblecore movie.

To wit: an early scene has Jeff and Suzy absorbed in a long, long, oh so very long shouting match about the state of their relationship (it’s bad), while Suzy’s parrot screeches and chatters so enthusiastically, he not only wins the prize of the best actor in the movie, but also makes at least half of the circular argument absolutely unparsable. The camera is usually just randomly dumped in the corner of a room and left to its own devices, so actors (and director) can ignore sensible positioning in the frame all the better.

The supposed thriller plot devolves in a series of annoying shouting matches between characters. Witness Jeff shout at Suzy and Suzy shout at Jeff! Jeff’s boss – whose newspaper is apparently made in a single cellar room as if it were 2020 – needs a good shouting and even an exciting bit of grappling, as well! Be screeched at, Jeff’s former photographer friend! And so it goes, until everything ends in a moment of perfectly embarrassing non-action you gotta (not) see to believe!

It’s quite the thing.

In short: Murder Is My Beat (1955)

Tough yet competent cop Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) is tasked with clearing up the murder of a man found with his face burned off and  a bullet in his heart in the apartment of a somewhat dubious operator. Everyone assumes the dead man is said dubious operator. After a short investigation, Ray is convinced the guy’s girlfriend, Eden Lane (Barbara Payton) is the guilty party, mostly because she’s gone on the lam. The cop is competent enough to track her down to a snow-covered mountain cabin. He’s clearly rather smitten with her, but takes Eden in regardless, even though she insists on only having hit the dead guy in the head, and certainly not having murdered him.

Even after she is convicted of murder, she keeps to her story. Ray starts harbouring doubts himself; how much of that is on account of his libido and how much a case of him taking his job seriously is anybody’s guess. He’s getting so bad, he even sits in with Eden’s transport to a woman’s penitentiary, clearly fighting with himself. When Eden insists seeing her supposed victim very much alive at a train station they are passing, Ray is convinced enough to flee with her and start on a romance/investigation double header in the town they passed.

I don’t think this final stint of director Edgar G. Ulmer in the crime/mystery/noir space is a terribly memorable movie, and its main claim to fame seems to be as the final film starring Barbara Payton (her story of “golden age” Hollywood horror can be read elsewhere).

It’s a nice way to hone one’s own definition what a noir is on, as well. Visually, there’s a lack of the deep shadows and oppressive camera angles of the genres to note, though Ulmer squeezes some moments of fine filmmaking out of his Poverty Row budget, like in the scenes where a way too thinly dressed Ray is pushing through the snow towards Eden’s cabin, or when Ray comes to his decision in the tensely edited train sequence. Other parts of the movie are competently made at best; particularly the investigative scenes in the second half drag rather a lot. The problem is that the film’s central mystery is neither terribly engaging nor engagingly told, either. It’s inoffensive enough, but lacks in interest.

To fall under my interpretation of what a noir is, Murder Is lacks the nastiness, the existential dread, the nihilism (or at least the war-induced bitterness) or even just the true ambiguity of what to me is the core of the genre-after-the-fact. Even when it uses typical noir tropes, Murder opts for the most pedestrian and nice way to do it; so much so that the not uncommon tacked on happy end feels like the proper fit here.

Music Monday: Photograph Edition

Poison Ivy (1953)

Original title: La môme vert de gris

Casablanca, Morocco, still under French colonial occupation. A young lowlife is lethally hit with a bottle in a nightclub under somewhat woozy circumstances. Before he conks in an ambulance, he utters last words that suggest curiously intimate knowledge of the details of a US gold transport. The flics ask the FBI for help.

The FBI send their finest agent, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). Arriving undercover as some Texan weirdo, Caution tries to find out what the hell is going on, but his contacts tend to end up dead before they can, well, contact him, and the movie’s actual plot is as unclear to him as it is to the audience. At least he quickly realizes that the sister of the deceased lowlife, sexy femme fatale-ish nightclub singer Carlotta de la Rue (Dominique Wilms) and her associate Rudy Saltierra (Howard Vernon) are clearly involved in whatever there is to be involved in. So Lemmy aggressively flirts with women in a way that would get him cancelled right quick today (though I’d say a kick or three in the nether regions would be the better solution here), punches a lot of guys, shoots a couple or three, and eventually somehow finds out why he’s even in the country. Thwarting any evil plans really only needs the application of fists, bullets, and dubious smart remarks thereafter.

When last I wrote about a movie featuring France’s favourite American silver screen pulp hero Eddie Constantine, I was still a little confused by the man’s popularity in France. Having now hereby seen his first movie, and also the first one in which he plays Lemmy Caution, a character he is mostly going on to play even in movies that nominally don’t feature him, I’m not confused about that at all anymore. While Constantine certainly wasn’t a great thespian, he was a great Lemmy Caution, embodying the thuggish type of hard-boiled pulpy crime protagonist in the vein of Spillane’s Mike Hammer perfectly. Constantine really has the right dead glare in his eyes before Lemmy starts beating or shooting someone, suggesting a man who genuinely enjoys the violence and the mayhem that follows him, while thinking himself rather righteous. Constantine is also quite good shifting gears between the thuggish hardman facial expression and the supposedly charming smiles when he flirts. His eyes stay just as dead there, of course, which seems only correct for the type. Add to this ability to embody a certain type the actor’s willingness to throw himself into the physical elements of his chosen genre, and it’s no wonder at all anymore he became big in France.

Apart from Constantine’s fine performance as a pretty unpleasant yet very entertaining to watch man, Poison Ivy has more things to recommend it. Bernard Borderie’s direction may tend to the direct and the unsubtle, but he has a strong sense for movement and pacing, often utilizing cramped spaces (a budgetary thing, I presume) in moments of violence that make punch-outs feel a bit rawer and more intense than typical for this era. Borderie is also able to present spaces as actual spaces, an ability that’s a perfect fit for any kind of action sequence for it always makes things more dynamic. It also tends to lead to effective and meaningful framing and blocking. Just take the short scene in which Lemmy sits in a taxi and realizes he is being tailed. Unlike the typical rear-view mirror set-up, Borderie shoots through the windscreen of Lemmy’s taxi, positioning the characters so that we can see the tailing car through the back window of the taxi. It’s aggressively un-boring filmmaking.

This is of particular import in the world of pulpy hard-boiled crime, where ratiocination always happens via fist and gun. As Borderie films it, this special sort of ratiocination is a lot of fun, which goes for the whole of Poison Ivy.

Three Films Make A Post: Where Will You be When Disaster Strikes?

Benedetta (2021): This much lauded bit of middling nunsploitation just goes to remind me how little I think of most of the films of Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I’ll always have time for Flesh & Blood, The 4th Man and Robocop, but the rest of the director’s career is the progressive version of edgelord crap. This one is mired in the sort of conscious camp that just makes me want to punch something, mostly working its spleen on Christian iconography for the easy Christian baiting points, and showing no actual heart or imagination whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong, Verhoeven does have humungous technical chops – he’s just never using them for anything beyond being the guy at parties who is sneering at everything without ever having come by his cynicism the hard way, by actually understanding the things and people he hates. Why critics continue to lap this stuff up is beyond me.

Tenet (2020): On the other hand, I do think this – one of Christopher Nolan’s lesser reviewed films – is pretty damn great, taking a crazy idea, throwing a bunch of money at it and pretending to make a perfectly straightforward super spy blockbuster. Just that it’s one where the film’s basic tenet leads to fight and action choreography that runs counter to all the rules and regulations of the genre while at the same time trying its utmost to look as if all of this were perfectly par for the course. Which becomes particularly disorienting the more movies of this type you’ve seen and enjoyed.

The plot structure is just as palindromic as the film’s title, equally grounded in the film’s science fictional set-up, and enabling more of the philosophical and formal ambiguities most of Nolan’s films have, if you only care to look at them from the right angle.

That the film also works as a pretty fine super spy movie, if one with a rather confusing plot on first look, just adds to the particular delight I got from this movie.

The Bubble (2022): This mix of Hollywood blockbuster production satire with an ensemble including Karen Gillan and David Duchovny, and Corona pandemic comedy is apparently a rather devise movie. By all rights, I should hate this thing, what with it indulging in my least favourite genre, the film about filmmaking, and being directed by Judd Apatow, whose body of work usually makes me nearly as cranky as that of Verhoeven.

The problem is, I’m rather defenceless against a film which is in turns very funny not just as a Hollywood satire but also as one on modern times and mores, and just plain weird in a peculiarly personal way, and that’s populated by a cast who surf between modes and tones perfectly.

If I were in a nit-picky mood, I’d probably say the film could use to lose twenty minutes or so of its two hours plus running time, but then, even that feels like part of one of the film’s jokes.

Short Film Friday: The Thing That Ate the Birds

In short: The Hunter (1980)

Ralph “Papa” Thorson is a modern day bounty hunter. While he apparently always gets his man – women don’t seem to get onto his list – and likes to talk about good guys and bad guys, he also has bit of a soft streak, taking in orphans and strays. These strays can come in the form of cops like his buddy Pete (Richard Venture) or robbers like one of his latest bounties, young Tommy Price (LeVar Burton). There’s a permanent party/poker game with these guys in Papa’s living room, and neither he nor his very pregnant long-time girlfriend Dotty (Kathryn Harrold) seem to mind.

It’s not all sunshine in Papa’s world, though, for he is suffering from a bad case of fear of commitment, despite eight years of live-in relationship, the most patient woman imaginable as his girlfriend, and that baby on the way.

As some added relationship spice, a crazy person (Tracey Walter) with a lust for vengeance sneaks around Dotty rather loudly; though apparently nobody tells Papa, for some reason.

Which pretty much sums up the main problem this final film starring Steve McQueen, as directed by Buzz Kulik, suffers from: a script that brings up plotline after plotline that it then never appears to care enough about to develop it. I’m not demanding depth, exactly, but a proper crime/action movie like this does need an actual through line leading its hero from one action scene to the next. Whereas The Hunter sets up potential through lines only to then ignore them, and instead provide the series of action sequences with no connective tissue whatsoever apart from McQueen’s presence, as if this were the highlight reel of a TV show instead of an actual movie.

That’s rather a shame, too, for the film has a couple of decent and two pretty great action sequences, staged with enough verve and imagination to make the film still worth watching, and featuring a couple of pretty hair-raising stunts. If only anyone involved had bothered to connect the set pieces emotionally or even on the most basic plot level. Again, I’m not asking for depth or cleverness, I’m asking for the film to do the basic minimum for a viewer to connect to it.

Not surprisingly, the film has three endings as well, pretending all its underdeveloped plots are resolved satisfactorily this way.

Vampire Moth (1956)

Original title: Kyuketsuga

Fashion designer Asaji Fumiyo (Asami Kuji) and her stable of in-house models come under dire threat. A shadowy man with a badly disfigured face and a very characteristic set of teeth whom the film will call the “wolf man” (with a good understanding of the European conception of the werewolf as interpreted by Hollywood) because of these strange and creepy biters blackmails Fumiyo for something. He’s also not at all against committing a peculiar murder or two, especially when it means he gets to play with the legs of models. He’s apparently only interested in the legs, too, for the rest of the body of his first victim is returned to sender in a packing crate, with a big moth positioned over one nipple. And hey, he’s also sending moth-themed cake, so he can’t be all bad, right?

Given the moth-obsession, one might suggest our wolf man could somehow be connected with an elderly moth specialist who has the habit of visiting fashion shows to glare at the models and sneer at the fashion. That guy even lives in a moth-themed creepy mansion. For the first half of the film, a fashion company man (the film seems to dislike actually using character names, so your guess is as good as mine) and model Yumi (Kyoko Anzai) are trying to understand what the heck is going on the amateur detective way. Pretty much at the movie’s halfway mark, their job is taken over by legendary consulting detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ryo Ikebe). He’s obviously got his work cut out for him.

About half the sources on the English language net I’ve seen seem to mix up this adaptation of one of Seishi Yokomizo’s Kozuke Kindaichi detective novels with The Ghost Man, a different 50s Kindaichi movie. It’s an easy mistake to make when you can only go by secondary sources, for the plots of both films do have rather similar set-ups. As with The Ghost Man, I can’t say if the different tone and style of the film to the Kindaichi books which have been translated into English is actually coming from the adaption or Yokomizo’s source. I can at least say that I find the film’s suave version of Kindaichi a bit bland compared to later movie versions of the character as well as the books in the series I have been able to read.

While they start out somewhat similarly, Vampire Moth does become increasingly different from the other movie. While they share a pulpiness in plotting and their approach to the mystery genre, the film at hand does contain no relevant nudity apart from a couple not quite bared breasts, and director Noboru Nakagawa downplays the proto ero guro elements he could have used.

Instead, Nakagawa – well-known for some brilliant kaidan movies in those parts of the West who care about old Japanese horror films – does dial up the spookiness whenever possible, using all the tricks of the creepy trade that stand him so well in his ghost movies. As usually, these are very much of a kin with the techniques of gothic horror used in Italian black and white movies of the same era, while also keeping to the slick visual standards of Japanese studio films of this and later times. There’s an absolutely incredible sequence where we follow our amateur detectives and the moth fan’s servant through a series of creaking doors through a mansion that’s all shadows and moth-fixated art, as if we were walking through a mind that becomes increasingly decrepit and weird, until our protagonists and we find another corpse. There are also fine macabre set-pieces concerning a pair of dancing legs, as well as a highly improbable and confusing plot to enjoy, where counting the number of villains and their actual identities can become too much for the armchair detective in front of the screen, and so adds to the strangeness of the film as well.

The Japanese gothic is only half of the film, however, for it seems highly interested in contrasts between the gothic and the high fashion modern (quite clearly following a parallel development to the giallo in another of these regular parallels between Japanese and Italian genre film). To my eyes, Nakagawa’s style often suggests the gothic, the macabre and the strange as the repressed underside of the glitter and the light, embodying all the ugly, unpleasant and nasty things the high modern won’t admit into their world. Until the repressed violently drags them into its world, of course.

Which isn’t at all a bad impression to achieve for a pulpy pot boiler of a macabre mystery movie that’s twenty years older than the guy watching it.

In short: Scream Dream (1989)

In a curious turn of events, her manager fires heavy metal star Michelle Shock (Carol Carr) from her own act and replaces her with some random blonde chick (Melissa Moore). There are rumours, you see, that Michelle is a Satanic witch who not just hides EVIL MESSAGES in her incredibly lame music, a peculiarly large number of her fans simply disappear without a trace after one of her shows.

Of course, that’s because the rumours are true, and Michelle is sacrificing a fan or two a night to Satan and her rubbery little zombie dog rat thing familiar. Given this state of affairs, firing Michelle turns out to do very little but piss her off. Turns out, not even getting killed in self-defence by her guitarist does the trick, and she soon takes over said guitarist’s dreams (and kinda-sorta his sex life), as well as the body of her replacement.

Having gone all “this is basically arthouse” on Donald Farmer’s probable debut Demon Queen, I just had to continue on to this next film – as usually, shot on video for the video market – in the man’s output. This is rather a lot more typical of what I know of the one-man-movie factory’s later output. Most of the surreal and dream-like elements of the earlier film have been replaced by “that’s the best we can do”-style cheap-o filmmaking, where a darkened room has to stand in for a sold-out concert, definitely false and really rather crap metal is supposed to be scandalous as well as a hit, and sleepy gyrating stands in for a sexy stage performance.

The film plods from one rubbery, fake and actually rather likeable gore gag to the next, stumbles upon total ignorance of how the real world works in any aspect – human relations, the music biz, fashion, walking, talking, you name it – and just runs with it. It’s pretty much what you can expect from your typical SOV horror affair, not quite crazy enough to be truly interesting – you can only show scenes of a woman rubbing some organ she’s just ripped out of someone over her naked torso so many times before it starts to feel a bit naff – yet just off enough in its view of the world – and its camera angles – to be not completely devoid of interest.

Music Monday: Idea Edition

Gold (2022)

In some near, post-economic/post-ecological collapse future, a forever nameless Man (Zac Efron), is on his way from what’s left of a city to a supposedly golden opportunity for work in a camp somewhere in the deepest desert that once was the countryside. He’s got a kind of rideshare arrangement with another man without a name, let’s call him Man Two (Anthony Hayes), for in the grim future of 2040 (or thereabout, I presume), everybody’s too tired and cranky to have a name. Also, as every film school student will tell you, not giving your characters names means they are stand-ins for the human condition; therefore. existentialism can ensue.

On their ride through the big nowhere, the men (or would that be Men?) stumble upon a humungous chunk of gold. So huge is it, they’ll need heavier machinery to dig it out and cart it away than a nearly broken-down car. Man Two thinks he can provide; Man Two talks Man into staying with the chunk while he gets said heavy machinery in by using the old con-man reverse psychology style of “I don’t think you can stand staying here”. So Man stays to protect their find, in case some roaming heavy machinery operator drives through the middle of nowhere.

Turns out he’s really not the ideal candidate for spending time with barely enough resources to survive in the desert. He’s got a particular talent for wasting water. It certainly doesn’t help there that Man Two – who at least left a satellite phone – takes much longer for his job than expected, so that Man’s water and food rations are shrinking rapidly even without him not being a great survivalist.

Add to this natural dangers like sandstorms, wild dogs that seem to be rather better at desert survival than our Man, and an encounter with a strange but rude wanderer (Susie Porter), and things don’t look great for Man, neither physically, nor mentally, nor, as it turns out, ethically. Why, it’s as if he has been set up. Not surprisingly, the credits feature Nick Cave’s version of “People Ain’t No Good”.

Which is the first and only joke Anthony Hayes’s Gold makes, and it is a rather good one, particularly after ninety minutes of people being horrible to each other, nature not being much nicer, and everyone being doomed by a script that writes them so.

Which isn’t a criticism of the film’s tone, mind you, for it clearly wants to argue for the human condition as being an incessant, pointless drag from cradle to grave, exacerbated by the global and local results of our own greed and stupidity, and that everyone is a total shit – human and animal alike. In this world view and movie, our slightly less horrible Man is quite obviously doubly doomed; and not just doomed to die but first to suffer, then suffer, then suffer some more, become as morally corrupt as the rest of the world, suffer some more, and then die horribly. So, cheery stuff, really. It’s just not quite as convincing as it should be because the script does so obviously strain to get the character into his predicament and keep him there you might come to the conclusion everything’s quite as bad as it is not because of nature (human and otherwise) but because the writers want it to be thusly.

Hayes stages this with some flair, using the desert location as yet another way to strengthen the plot’s nihilistically oppressive mood, dwarfing Efron’s character through sheer emptiness. The further Efron’s basically sympathetic character falls into suffering and despondency, the more hallucinatory things become, but never so much as to suggest any actual spiritual element or the possibility of any transcendence – or even just development - through suffering. The only thing suffering gets you in this one is getting ripped apart by a pack of wild dogs, while some asshole watches and chuckles.

Three Films Make A Post: Some movies stay with you forever…and ever…and ever.

Room 237 (2012): Because I didn’t get along with Rodney Ascher’s sleep paralysis doc The Nightmare, I never did get around to this much-praised earlier documentary about a handful of rather intense, sometimes obsessive interpretations of Kubrick’s The Shining. The thing is, Ascher’s neutral and somewhat sensationalizing approach works rather better when used on art than on a medical phenomenon, because there’s no objective truth that could be buried under reams of bullshit, only people and their ideas and emotions when confronted with art that clearly touches something in them deeply. I also prefer the director’s use of archival footage from many a movie to visualise what his interviewees see in The Shining to the bad horror movie re-stagings of the later film.

Of course, now living in a world where QAnon is a thing that has sucked all joy out of conspiracy theories as folklore and turned them into weapons, I do wish the film wouldn’t have included the ravings of that moon landing conspiracy guy, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen to the best of films.

Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit (2014) aka Gakkou no kaidan: Noroi no kotodama: There’s quite a bit of fun to be had with Masayuki Ochiai’s tale of a haunted school experienced through the eyes of three different groups of people whose temporal and spatial connection will only become clear late in the film. The plot is not without interest, and quite a few of the spooky sequences film around the lack of a decent effects budget rather well – this is the sort of film that can do something surprisingly effective with the set-up of a corridor, a mirror, and a soft drink can.

On the negative side, there are a couple more larger speaking roles in the ensemble cast than decently capable actors available – noticeable even if you don’t speak Japanese. Ochiai also has a bit of a tendency to stay way too long in certain scenes late in the movie, apparently assuming that every explanation needs to be iterated at least three times to get into a viewer’s thick skull.

Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka 鬼打鬼 aka Close Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka Spooky Encounters (1980): Inexplicably, I had never seen Sammo Hung’s utterly wonderful pioneering martial arts/ghost movie before this week. It’s my own loss, obviously, for its mixture of incredible kung fu choreography, slapstick, and general weirdness is just as irresistible as one would hope for. Sammo’s in great form in all of his jobs here – actor, director, and choreographer –, jokes are funny (that’s not a given, particularly with the language barrier between the film and this viewer), the martial arts inventive and often funny and brutal at once, and the script about the travails of our protagonist fighting off hopping vampires, black magic and an evil rich guy is zippy, clever, and has a pretty great shock ending as well, leaving this as a perfect example of its genres.

Short Film Friday: The Eldritch Dreams

In short: The Falcon in San Francisco (1945)

Gentleman detective Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), also known as The Falcon (please do not expect wings, or Redwing), and his suddenly re-added to the series comic relief sidekick “Goldie” Locke (Edward Brophy and his very absent locks) are on their way to San Francisco for a nice relaxing vacation. Also, Goldie plans on talking some random woman into marriage, so he can lower his income tax payments. But while they are still on the train to San Francisco, our heroes stumble upon a new case. Since it involves an adorable little girl (Sharyn Moffett) and her adorable doggie who may or may not be held prisoner in their own home, as well as murder, Lawrence just can’t help himself and gets ever more deeply involved, vacations be damned.

Also appearing will be pretty women sinister (Fay Helm) and – hopefully - goodly (Rita Corday), and the wages of a rum smuggling past.

The mystery plot truly becomes astonishingly complicated in this little programmer directed by the often great Joseph H. Lewis. I’m still not sure if it actually makes any sense, but then, this is not supposed to be a rigidly structured fair play mystery. Rather, this is classic one damn thing after another storytelling where the entertainment value of any given incident is of much greater import than its logic. Which works out very well indeed for the film at hand, with nary a scene going by where Conway doesn’t have opportunity to turn on the charm or get punched, and much joyful energy is expended in coming up with the next complication for out heroes.

Lewis, while not quite in the hired gun auteur mode of his best films, lets things zip along as merrily as this sort of fun material needs, providing enough space for the – one supposes crowd-pleasing – cute little girl with cute little dog business but also moving on before the eye-rolls become too exhausting for the modern viewer. He’s pacing things so well, even some of the Goldie-based comic relief becomes actually funny. But then, when has seeing a guy going after women for all the wrong reasons getting put down by them ever not be funny?

That Conway in his eighth Falcon outing knows how to turn on the charm as well as a semi-boiled kind of toughness is rather a given.

Add to this some genuine location shots (soon to be economized out of the series by RKO), and it’s very easy to still have quite a bit of fun with this merry little mystery today.

The Demon Rat (1992)

Original title: Mutantes del año 2000

aka La rata maldita

In the near future, humanity’s epic struggle for the destruction of our planet is nearly won! To wit: staying outside without wearing huge filter masks is so unhealthy, even the dumbest parts of society are apparently wearing them. Many animal species, apart from insects, reptiles and everything else many people don’t like, have died out, too.

The local situation in Mexico is certainly not improved by evil industrialist Roberto Cervantes (Gerardo Albarrán) who proceeds to dump radioactive waste and whatever else godawful stuff his factories produce wherever he damn well pleases. Cheap horror movie or documentary?

Ironically, Roberto’s company isn’t quite his, but was actually owned by the father of his wife Irina (Rossana San Juan). Since the beautiful Spanish teacher has copped to quite how vile her still-husband is, she’s living separated from him. For once in a movie, a husband actually wants a divorce, but our heroine refuses because that would leave him in complete control of the company she already has no control over. In the future, law and logic work differently.

Still, Irina does have vague plans to stick it to Roberto somehow, plans that will take actual shape thanks to her new flame, beautiful biology teacher and ecologist Axel (Miguel Ángel Rodríguez), a guy who may have a doctorate, but doesn’t know what the buttons on his shirt are for, and believes string vests are the sort of thing you wear on a teaching job. Again, the future, ladies and gentlemen!

Things are further complicated by the fact that Irina’s house has become infested with rats. Or rather, as it turns out, mutated humanoid giant rats represented by guys in godawful costumes that look not at all similar to rats – or look like anything but crappy costumes.

Which isn’t to say there’s nothing to love about Rubén Galindo Jr.’s Demon Rat unless you are a lover of particularly embarrassing monster suits. In fact, I found myself rather smitten with it in many regards. At the very least, it’s a film that’s bound to teach a viewer how much certain preposterous low budget movie tropes about evil industrialists, ecological destruction and the unwillingness of the powers that be to actually make needed changes even when people have to run around with gas masks on their heads have become more than just a little plausible. Though guys like the misogynist evil industrialist shit in this particular film do still have one leg up on the real versions when it comes to actually lending a physical hand in the execution of their own evil plans.

Obviously, if you’re coming to this looking for believable character psychology or other bizarre nonsense like it, the film does not have you covered. Roberto is vile and pretty dumb and clearly fated for either ending up in the fangs of a mutated rat or a vengeful Axel, Irina is hot, hot-blooded and well-meaning but also pretty ineffectual, and Axel is a studly macho with a heart of gold, a two-fisted teacher who most certainly will not treat Irina just as badly as Roberto does now a couple of years and a lot of six-packs later. I’m not complaining, mind you, for the film presents its characters and their travails with complete earnestness. Which is also the way the actors are playing it, and probably the only way they know how to do it. Half of their time, they’re wearing masks and sun glasses while doing this. Again, I’m not complaining.

Galindo Jr. is often a rather competent director for his budget and script (of course also written by him) bracket, making effective use of the handful of locations and effects he can afford, simulating the foggy outside with dry ice and chutzpah, while also making good use of the bits and pieces of proper production design he could cobble together. So the internal air filtration systems and the masks are all used well in the film’s suspense sequences. One can certainly not blame the filmmaker for not having put any effort in.

Rata’s biggest problem, apart from the monster suits and the monkey-ish (certainly not rat-like) arm waving the actors inside them get up to, is that would should be its final act, when everyone is trapped in Irina’s roomy home – practically devoid of furniture because Roberto took that, apparently – is simply too long. I do like a good scene or four of people and monster suits fighting inside of a house, but even my patience grows a bit thin once they spend half of the damn movie doing it.

Still, while I can’t help and see this tiny structural problem, I find myself looking at La Rata Maldita rather positively as the sort of film that has taken on such curious elements of topicality and turned them into the lowest (and therefor the best) kind of art, it becomes easy to ignore a bit of a structural boo-boo.

In short: Charly, Days of Blood (1990)

Original title: Charly, días de sangre

Because his son Charly (Fabián Gianola) is introverted, doesn’t date and is just plain weird – at least that’s his opinion - Inspector Santos (Norman Briski) convinces Charly’s best bud Daniel (Martín Guerrero) to take Charly and some friends to the Inspector’s big ass house in the country. Daniel is also to bring a girl for Charly to have sex with, a suggestion the guy takes in his stride, I gotta say.

He also – alas, off-screen - manages to find a proper candidate for the project. The first day of Daniel, Charly, friends and girlfriends at the house does run to what must be Inspector Dad’s satisfaction, but the night brings more than Charly’s sexual hang-ups (if you want to call having performance problems in the house where your older brother burned to his death right in front of you a hang-up), for someone is stalking and spying on the friends.

The next morning starts with a dead cat, and the rest of the weekend away devolves into a whole salad of murder and hysteria.

For the first twenty minutes or so, this Argentinian SOV slasher is one of those perfectly weird movies you can only encounter in this part of the movie world (I mean SOV horror, not Argentina). The – long – scene in which Inspector Dad explains what’s what to Daniel is absolutely incredible, the young man keeping an improbably straight face to the fidgety scenery chewing and bizarre demands of the older man – line delivery and the lines themselves are incredibly bizarre. The scene is capped with a fountain of exposition delivered while the old man is taking a piss. The audience at least is somewhat prepared for this at that stage, for we witnessed an introductory scene in which the good Inspector tells a bewildered colleague - whose “what!” reaction is the most naturalistic bit of acting in the whole movie – that he “loves evil” but “hates evil-doers”.

The mix of fidgeting and improbable non-sequitur dialogue continues for a bit, until the film alas calms down to become a straightforward if slow and competently shot slasher with quite a bit of female nudity (one could argue more than is good for it) that is entertaining enough if you lack taste like I do.

Fortunately, the film takes a turn back to the weirder for the final act, when the killer turns out to be what I can only describe as a were-burn victim, and some pretty good gore gags ensue. This is also the rare slasher lacking a final girl; though I wouldn’t exactly call this a plus. We also get a cop who just shrugs when he sees his boss suffering a heart attack, as well as a downer ending as if this were made in the 70s. By the standards of SOV slashers, that’s rather a lot.

Music Monday: Shampoo Edition

Iron Monkey (1993)

aka Iron Monkey: The Young Wong Fei Hung

Original title: 少年黃飛鴻之鐵馬騮

A provincial town in Northern China is hard-pressed by the shenanigans of corrupt officials – turns out nine concubines get costly on a governor’s salary – whose corruption does of course trickle down to potentially okay but weak men like the local captain of the guard Master Fox (Yuen Shun-Yi). As the film tells it, corruption is absolutely endemic in China at this point, too, so there’s no higher authority to apply to for recourse.

A masked kung fu master calling himself the Iron Monkey (Yu Rong-Guang) is doing his best with a bad business, and spends his nights stealing from the corrupt – and therefore rich – and giving to those in need in a thoughtful and effective manner that avoids what British highwayman/philosopher Dennis Moore would call the “lupine problem”. By day, Iron Monkey is actually local doctor Yang, who applies the same principles in his medical work, assisted by his kung fu disciple, nurse and friend, the former prostitute Miss Orchid (Jean Wang Ching-Ying). Things become rather more difficult for our hero when a former shaolin disciple and doctor arrives in town. Wong Kei-Ying (Donnie Yen) does of course come with his son – and martial arts disciple – Wong Fei-Hung (Angie Tsang Sze-Man, who is a little wonder here, in one of their only two movies), and finds himself pressed into service against Iron Monkey, with his son taken as a hostage.

Further complicating things is the arrival of a group of royal investigators. These charming people are even more vile and corrupt than our cartoon evil governor (James Wong Jim), for they are parts of the traitors responsible for the burning of the shaolin temple, and therefore corrupt, murdering rapists who also happen to be really great at kung fu.

Even though it may sound like it, Yuen Woo-Ping’s Iron Monkey is not a plot-heavy film. As it befits one of the comparatively small number of films (though some of those films were rather important for the development of the genre) directed by one of the greatest and most influential martial arts choreographers, every bit as important as his compatriots Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan for the post-Shaw Brothers style of kung fu movie, this is a film very much all about the martial arts fights. There’s some humour and character work outside of these scenes, because Yuen clearly understands you need some of that to give your fights emotional resonance beyond the “that’s awesome!”, and it’s more than enough to hang a film on.

Or at least it is when you belong to Iron Monkey’s assumed audience and understand much of the characters’ backgrounds and motivations through other stories about them, other movies, martial arts folklore and popular history. When the burning of the Shaolin temple only leaves you to shrug helplessly and when seeing a young Wong Fei-Hung relate with his Dad and kicking ass leaves you cold and a little confused, this might not be the film for you. Rather, Yuen made this one with everyone knowledgeable or better steeped in this part of Chinese popular and folk culture in mind. As someone who isn’t an expert but has at least seen his share of martial arts and wuxia films taking place around and featuring some of these characters and these settings, the film gains a lot of emotional resonance, rather like a Marvel movie of the here and now does when you’ve seen everything else belonging to the universe.

That the martial arts sequences are absolutely fantastic, so fantastic I would even have been rather happy with the film without its resonance with other parts of martial arts culture, needs barely to be mentioned, I believe. Yuen drives his highly capable – in fights and in tear-jerking – cast through every type of martial arts fight imaginable, with quite a bit of the physical humour you’ve come to expect from this line of martial arts cinema and the also very typical imaginative use of props and gimmicks. The fights start out light and increase in bloodiness and brutality once the evil monks arrive. There’s little repetition of moves and staging, instead what feels like a never-ending dance of utmost elegance and precision filmed with a mind on keeping as much as possible of it visible to the audience while still keeping the camera part of the scene. It’s a joy and a wonder.

Three Films Make A Post: Willie and Kris? You better duck!

Songwriter (1984): Given the very self-serious nature of much of the following body of work of Alan Rudolph, it’s easy to forget he was perfectly able to make this kind of loose music-based comedy – with genuinely effective moments of drama – with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson playing fictionalized version of themselves who are sticking it to the music industry, while also making up for past mistakes and becoming better persons in the process. If you like Willie and Kris – and if you don’t, you might think about your movie watching choices – this is a pretty joyous affair, simply based on watching guys doing (and singing) what they do (and sing) best; and even one that’s not completely uncritical of the way soft machos like these two tend to treat women.

There’s also a pretty damn great outing by Lesley Ann Warren as possibly up and coming country star - who already has the mandatory alcohol problem – Gilda that’ll end in a very, very Nashville kind of way.

Madelines (2022): The final third of Jason Richard Miller’s indie time travel movie with a lot of murder (or is it suicide?), written by lead Brea Grant and Miller is a pretty great example of lo-tech weirdness, reminding me of nothing so much as weird fiction great Jeffrey Ford’s trips into science fiction – which is a rather big compliment. Alas, to get to the brilliant and effective part of the movie, you have to move through a script so full of holes, even I got annoyed by them. Essentially, to get where it wants to go, the film needs its characters to act and react like no human being ever actually would to basically everything that happens to them; it needs to pretend this married garage science couple knows nobody in the whole damn world but their financier; and so on and so forth.

I only made it through the early parts of the movie at all thanks to the typically charming performances by Grant, Perry Shen and Richard Riehle – which is a bit of a shame given how wonderful the final act is.

Perrier’s Bounty (2009): In Ian Fitzgibbon’s very dark Irish crime comedy, a series of unfortunate events (including a bit of self-defence killing) leads to an unlucky guy (Cillian Murphy), his neighbour, friend and crush (Jodie Whittaker), and the guy’s dead beat dad (Jim Broadbent) having to go on the run from a gangster (Brendan Gleeson), his cronies and various other ne'er-do-wells. This being an Irish comedy, there’s much violence, more drinking, a lot of existentialist philosophy (that’s much funnier than the French version of existentialism), and an ironic sense of the tragic. Most of it is very funny indeed, always interesting, and at times even quite moving. And it’s very difficult to find fault in a movie whose main villain finds his demise because he broke the rule of how to handle dogs as a movie character. Hint: you don’t shoot them, unless they are zombie dogs.

Short Film Friday: The Lookout

In short: Demon Queen (1987)

In a chance encounter, vampire Lucinda (Mary Fanaro) saves a low-level dealer (Dennis Stewart?) from some rather incensed colleagues of his. He’s clearly fascinated by her, and is all too willing to let her cohabit with himself and his girlfriend in their crappy apartment when she asks for a place to stay.

Random sex and murder ensues, while our dealer friend has dreams/visions/encounters with Lucinda in which he is very willingly sexually dominated by her. So it’s a vampire romance, right?

I’ve never written about any of the many, many films made by Donald Farmer, mostly because Farmer’s the kind of SOV schlockmeister whose films usually lack the style and madness I enjoy about these movies, and for the most part – as far as I have experienced - do tend to the “crappily shot gore and tits delivery service” side of the ultra-cheap local SOV horror equation. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I certainly admire the man for still making movies today in a very different low budget world. The films are just usually not my thing.

This first or second (depending on who you ask) full-length – if you can call a film with a duration of less than an hour full length – outing by the man is rather different. Sure, it does include copious amounts of nudity and gore, but there’s a moody quality to the film that can not just be accounted for by the extra fuzzy visual quality of the version of the film I watched. There’s no plot whatsoever, but a heavy insistence on creating mood by any means available. And most means available are strange: so expect moments here that seem more influenced by experimental film than the bread and butter straightforward (if awkward) style of your typical Farmer joint, editing that’s not exactly good but always interesting, and a general feel to the film that reminded me more of Rollin and Franco than Farmer as I knew him before. That doesn’t mean the film’s ever as well-made or successful as the movies of those two filmmakers were – even at their worst – but it’s genuinely as interesting and feels like the product of an actual personal vision. Which is probably a weird thing to say about a film with more than one scene in which a woman rips open the body of a guy she just had sex with and starts to rub very anatomically incorrect innards over her breasts.

But then, this is also a film where our protagonists first dream encounter with Lucinda features long, long half-profile shots dominated mostly by his right eye, so I just may be onto something here.

Victim (1999)

Original title: 目露凶光

Warning: you can’t talk about this one without spoiling large parts of the plot!

Manson Man (Lau Ching-Wan), a businessman fallen on hard times thanks to the financial crisis is suddenly kidnapped by gangsters. It’s a bit of strange case – Man’s girlfriend Amy (Amy Kwok Oi-Ming) clearly doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. There’s after all no money at all to be had from them. The police, particularly Detective Pit Kwan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), are rather sceptical about the whole affair, even more so when they discover that Man had gotten heavily in debt with some gangsters. Though, as Amy tells it, they managed to pay it all off, so there shouldn’t be any reason coming from that side either.

Man is set free after a while, without any money having flown, but there’s something really strange about the situation: he’s left for the pick-up in a house supposedly haunted. During the police rescue, enough very peculiar things happen to suggest to Detective Kwan as well as to Amy that there may be something supernatural going on.

Particularly since Man acts very strangely after his release, in ways not terribly typical of someone who has gone through a traumatic event. It is more as if he were another person completely. Why, one might think he’s possessed by a spirit.

Though, and here come the spoilers, if the central character of Ringo Lam’s Victim is possessed by a malevolent force, it’s the spirit of capitalism rather than anything supernatural. As it will eventually turn out, Man’s not possessed, he has just turned into a very human monster. As portrayed with expected and perfectly appropriate intensity by the great Lau Ching-Wan, Man was clearly a true believer in the promises of a highly capitalist society, and suddenly had to learn that you can play by the rules you’ve been taught are the right ones all of your life, and still lose everything for no fault of your own. Which simply breaks him, and makes him willing to do absolutely anything to become rich again, leaving scruples, Amy’s love for him and basically everything that makes him human behind to plan a rather impressive crime and double-cross that needs to involve quite the bloodbath. Even before bad luck and bad partners turn parts of the plan even more bloody than Man must have thought they needed to be.

There’s really no other reading for the film than this strong and angry kind of capitalism criticism as delivered through a pretty singular mixture of horror and crime movie. This desperate scrabbling for loot of course is a thematic angle than ran through many a crime movie from Hongkong during the 80s and the 90s, when making lots of money to escape the City as long as it was still British seems to have been a central goal in the place’s culture at large. Only the body count by gun shot wounds is dramatized.

Lam in his mode of brutal realism – he can do operatic as well, but often chooses not to – is the perfect filmmaker to tackle this kind of material. He provides the film with an angry energy that from time to time explodes outwards in short and brutal shoot-outs and beatings. In these moments, the film is as kinetic as Lam’s older, classic movies in the genre, but there’s a desperate quality here the film shares with Man.

Victim’s realist approach also works well when it pretends to be a supernatural horror movie instead of a moral one. At that point in the movie Manson’s seeming possession and irrational behaviour are provided with extra heft by how grounded his surroundings feel, as well as by how much stock the clearly reasonable Kwan as well as Amy, who believes she knows Man much better than she actually does, put in it as an explanation. In the end, and rather ironically, a supernatural force driving Man to his deeds would have been the friendlier and less desperate explanation. In the Hongkong of Victim, evil ghosts are just too friendly an explanation to be real.

In short: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

Lonely and isolate teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) starts on an online challenge known as the “World’s Fair Challenge”. Apparently, after a couple of repetitions of “I want to go to the World’s Fair” and the spilling of a couple of drops of blood, one can expect changes in one’s life. Which, obviously, are documented on the internet (with up to fifty viewers, in Casey’s case). A late middle-aged man going by the handle of JLB (Michael J Rogers) begins contacting Casey, purporting to be very concerned by her experiences and by videos that become increasingly intense and self-destructive.

There’s little of an actual plot to Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair but that’s not at all to the detriment of the film at all. In fact, a straightforward plot wouldn’t at all fit a film that is as much concerned with the ambiguity of human relations in our part of the internet age as this one is. The film never makes anything explicitly clear, and leaves everything open to interpretation: how much of Casey’s experiences are just her making stuff up, how much is her play-acting through a psychodrama version of her emotional struggles, how much is a “simple” genuine breakdown, how much is the Weird slithering into her life? Is JLB a man with paedophile urges, a lonely man looking for any kind of genuine human connection he doesn’t get out of the rest of his life, or both, or neither? There’s never a clear and easy answer to any of these questions, yet the film never feels vague. In fact, its representation of what is happening between and inside the characters is very clear, using internet videos, naturalistic shots of – mostly – Casey in her daily life without any human contact. It’s only that their meaning is not so clear, as it is filtered through all kinds of questions about authenticity, truthfulness, the liminality of the digital picture, and all of the interpretative baggage any viewer will bring to their interpretation of human behaviour and its meaning.

That World’s Fair at the same time manages to also be genuinely emotionally affecting is the little wonder that turns it into more than an interesting experiment about authenticity in the internet age. Cobb’s performance – as well as Rogers’s supporting part – is so powerful, the question of her character’s genuineness never gets in the way of an emotional connection, which does, of course, make We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’s meditation on mediated connections and loneliness even more powerful.

Music Monday: Axiolite Edition

The Stranger Within (1974)

Ann (Barbara Eden) and David Collins (George Grizzard) have a rather long, loving and happy marriage, atypical not only in the white upper class that likes to call itself middle-class circles they are moving in.

Because it would otherwise result in a pretty boring movie, for a private utopia does not for great storytelling make as you probably know, marital troubles rear their ugly head. Ann becomes pregnant; which, given the couple’s closeness, would usually be a reason for happiness. However, David had undergone a vasectomy some years ago after Ann nearly died during a miscarriage, and can’t be the father.

Despite the medical impossibility, Ann is adamant nobody else can have fathered the kid; David clearly doesn’t know what to believe. He would prefer her to have an abortion. Not necessarily because he doesn’t believe her (though there’s certainly something of this floating around in his subconscious), but because she’s at a very high risk of simply not surviving giving birth. Ann’s rather less sure about this, but then, further developments suggest she might not be quite in control of her faculties anymore even at this point. Attempts to drive her to an abortion clinic only end in her suffering from horrible pains that make it impossible to go through with it.

But there’s something much stranger going on than possible psychosomatics: what looks at first like typical if extreme pregnancy cravings is probably better described as a dependency on coffee; Ann begins needing ridiculously low temperatures; she, apparently never much of a reader before, begins reading everything she can get her hands on about every theme imaginable with an impossible speed. Further into the pregnancy, Ann does indeed appear to be reading by stroking the outside of books suggestively. Not surprisingly under these circumstances, her character and temperament begin to change as well, as if she weren’t quite herself anymore, and the baby would increasingly take her over.

For my tastes, this piece of SF horror directed by Lee Philips for the ABC Movie of the Week, based on a script by the great Richard Matheson in a particularly good mood, is one of the crown jewels of US made-for-TV horror.

It’s a film that’s practically flawless, full of telling incidental detail about the relationship between Ann and David (as well as with their friends) that would have added twenty minutes of exposition in lesser hands, creating a believable world for Matheson’s increasingly bizarre version of alien abduction tropes to take place in.

Matheson being Matheson, he also uses the plot to explore the breaking points of a solid and loving relationship when confronted with the Weird entering their lives, which can metaphorically obviously stand in for all kinds of existential problems a couple might encounter in life. Whereas other parts of the film are quite obviously also expressing fears about the physical dangers of pregnancy, and the very real changes it brings to a relationship and a couple’s personal lives.

Philips’ direction is quite sensitive to his script’s demands here, as well, and creates something closer to kitchen-sink (if your sink is in a really big house) realism than soap operatics when it comes to showing the strains on our couple’s relationships. Which seems to have been something Philips was genuinely good at, going by some of the other TV movies he directed I’ve seen. Having worked as an actor himself, he’s also willing and able to open up more space for Eden’s and Grizzard’s work than other TV directors might have been able to.

Particularly Eden thanks him with a performance that’s much more human than her more typical routine TV star turns (which is not a mode to be sneezed at when done well, either), making the increasing strangeness and intensity of Ann’s behaviour much more believable as well as creepy. She also does some great scenery-chewing when the time comes for it.

Rooting the increasing weirdness as well in a somewhat relatable (even though these guys are stinking rich) personal reality as the film does is one of its major strengths, making the more absurd turns of Matheson’s script all the more believable by the simple virtue of taking place in the world Philips has created.

And things really get weird in the final act, even as apocalyptical as they can get on a TV budget. All of which works because everyone involved has prepared the way towards the strange and the extremes so very well. When given the right material, as he is here, Philips turns out to be a genuinely great director of TV horror, using every cheap and not so cheap trick in the book to create a mood of dread and of the uncanny creeping into very normal lives.