Wolf (1981)

Original title: Srigala

Ill-mannered Caroko (S. Parya) and his hired hand divers Tommy (an alas very underused Barry Prima) and Johan (Rudy Salam) have come to a lake somewhere in the jungles of Indonesia to dive for treasure.

The operation is all hush-hush – and one supposes not perfectly legal – so Caroko gets particularly cranky when a trio of, ahem, teenagers appear to have some fun by the lake. Good girl Nina (Lydia Kandou) and less good girl Hesty (Siska Widowati) are accompanied by their much-hated friend and odious comic relief Pono (Dorman Borisman) for some reason.

The girls do like a bit of a good flirt, and the two divers are “hunks”, so Caroko’s ever shorter patience is further tested by his employees’ ensuing extracurricular activities.

Someone else is sneaking around the lake – as well as the obligatory dilapidated lake cabins – as well, clearly planning evil and getting up to the occasional speed-boat duel. Things finally come to a head when the divers find a coffin containing a rotting corpse in the lake, and soon, slashing commences.

I do love quite a few of the films of Indonesian exploitation movie maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra, so getting my hands on a sexy newish restoration of what is generally called an Indonesian Friday the 13th rip-off did get me as excited as normal people are by a long lost reel of Citizen Kane.

As it goes with these things, the film turns out to be a minor disappointment, with the Friday rip-off relegated to the final third. Before Gautama Putra can prove he’s a much better director than Sean S. Cunningham – which indeed he was – there’s a lot of other stuff to get through, not much of it terribly well connected.

Rather, much of the film feels like an attempt to loosely stitch together scenes the filmmakers believe will entertain the audience, but filling the parts in between with simple feet-dragging instead of excitement. So the space between a wonderfully over-the-top speed boat duel (the Voorheeses never got up to that) and the obligatory exploitation movie catfight turning into a much more entertaining out of nowhere exploitation movie martial arts catfight is filled with annoying comic relief, some coy sexy times and lots of pointless bickering.

All of this does look pretty great, at least, and once the film turns into a full-on Friday imitations, it also becomes an undoubtedly fun time, so it’s not as if this were a total write-off. Sisworo Gautama Putra just did so much better in other films.

The Sect (1991)

Original title: La setta

After a prologue taking place a couple of decades earlier in the USA introduces us to a rather nasty cult leader (Tomas Arana) with the habit of cutting off faces in a rather occult-scientific way and threatens a decades-long plan, we fast forward into the future of the early 1990s, to a small town near Frankfurt.

After orphan turned teacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) invites a rather smelly looking old gentleman – who will turn out to have the delightful name of Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom) - into her house because she nearly ran him over with her car, her life turns into a living nightmare, of course involving that face-cutting cult and the endgame of their plan.

In between an actual labyrinth hidden in her house’s cellar that contains a well connected to hell or a comparably unpleasant place, a nasty bug that may or may not lay an egg in her brain, a really creepy weirdo as her love interest, and the eventual realization that her whole life is a lie, the face cutting bit might actually appear rather harmless to our protagonist.

Before Michele Soavi became a work for hire director for Italian TV, and after working as an assistant director for Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, he directed a quartet of incredible horror movies, so wonderfully Italian in all the best ways, it is hard to believe they were made at the tail end of successful genre filmmaking in the country when most of his peers couldn’t get a good movie financed to save their lives.

The Sect is usually the least appreciated of these films. I’m not terribly surprised about that fact, for where the nightmarish mood of the other three films – Stage Fright, The Church and even that of Dellamorte dellamore - is rooted in as much proper narrative as you get with this arm of Italian horror (which isn’t much by the boring standards of the here and now), the film at hand goes as far in the direction of free-floating, macabre strangeness as possible while still being recognizable as a genre narrative. In this sense, as in its extreme – if different – stylishness this reminds me most of my favourite Argento movie Inferno. There as here, narrative concerns and real world logic matter little when compared to creating moods, feelings and impressions through a distinctive visual style.

Which rather seems to be the point of the whole project of the cinema of the fantastic as a whole when seen through the lens of these films, and most certainly the point of The Sect. The irrational and the supernatural by their very nature are meant to defy logic and explanation, and from this perspective, their only proper treatment would be through a film becoming illogical and outright weird.

In Miriam’s specific case, all of her ideas about her identity and the reasons underlying the way she leads her life are completely undermined (rather as if she had a labyrinth where most people have a cellar), and she finds herself the pawn of a ritual the cultists being involved in don’t actually appear to be able to grasp beyond a belief they are involved in a variation of Rosemary’s Baby.

Clearly, unlike the cultists, Soavi (who co-wrote with Argento and Gianni Romoli) was not terribly impressed with the ending of that film, so he writes a better one for Miriam than Rosemary got, an ending that mixes about five surprisingly feminist minutes with a further dollop of utter irrational weirdness only proper in this particular movie.

Needless to say, this is even less a film for everyone than most other movies are; though if it sings to you, as it does to me, it’s going to truly sing.

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes, No Tagline’s Forthcoming

Death Occurred Last Night aka La morte risale a ieri sera (1970): The mentally disabled daughter of a single parent father (Raf Vallone), disappears without much of a trace. An increasingly invested cop (Frank Wolff) takes on the case to find some rather nasty business concerning a prostitution racket and personal betrayal.

Even though it is often strikingly shot and edited with as mix of inventiveness and intelligence, and features fine performances by the always great Vallone and Wolff, I never quite managed to connect with this police procedural (whoever pretends this to be a giallo as the genre is typically understood is simply lying). Perhaps the reason is Duccio Tessari’s unwillingness to ever show as much of the sordidness this tale is built upon as would be actually necessary? The overwhelming sense of watching a film that really wants to make it clear that it is socially conscious and rather important?

Never Give Up aka Yasei no shomei (1978): Junya Sato’s often somewhat too slow and vague narrative style – the film is nearly two and a half hours long! – never quite manages to disguise quite how strange of a genre mixture this Ken Takakura vehicle is: it’s a melodrama about a man of violence trying to do penance for past sins, a 70s conspiracy thriller about a female journalist stumbling upon a small town conspiracy that is at the same time apparently nation-wide, a movie about a psychic kid, an action movie that prefigures some beats of the final act of First Blood. There’s just a lot going on here, and for at least the film’s first third, it is not exactly easy to parse how all these disparate elements connect.

However, once they do – or if you enjoy figuring out vague narratives – Never Give Up becomes more than just a little compelling. Needless to say, the acting is pretty wonderful, and there’s a very 70s fearlessness on display when it comes to the death of central characters and downer endings.

Mars Express (2023): I don’t understand the high praise this French piece of science fiction animation is getting all around the net. To these eyes, Jérémie Périn’s film is about as generic as science fiction action gets, and neither its animation nor its design is much to write home about – unless you’re deeply into things looking as if they were done with strict professional competence. The narrative is as been there, done that as it gets, and the worldbuilding nothing that hasn’t been done in science fiction again and again to better effect.

It doesn’t improve my appreciation that the film shunts its only compelling ideas into its final fifteen minutes.

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

Original title: Shiryo no wana

Struggling late night TV presenter Nami (Miyuki Ono), whose original selling point of producing her show with an all-female crew seems to be losing its lustre for her audience, receives an interesting tape from a member of said audience.

It looks rather a lot like an actual snuff tape of a woman being brutally murdered. Like any sensible person, Nami calls the police. No, wait, she decides to pack her crew – and one male add-on – into a car and follow some decidedly obvious clues to the location where the murder was committed. So obvious are the clues, one might even think there’s a trap waiting for her.

The location where the tape was shot turns out to be an abandoned military base pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Also, someone’s or something’s private murder labyrinth, so Nami and her crew soon find themselves fighting for their lives.

Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap is a pretty astonishing film, still. It is a project that marries varied influences in ways that seem to then have influenced just as varied future horror films. This never is the Evil Dead spin-off you’d expect – apart from some extra chaotic Evil Force point of view shots that will be explained in the end – but rather mixes the grimiest and most “real” feeling traditions of horror – think the idea of Texas Chainsaw Massacre married to the grain of Basket Case - with the most stylized ones. The camera work and lighting appear heavily influenced by Bava and Argento.

This leads to a film whose nightmare-scape qualities are born as much from the things cinema pretends are most real – those grainy shots and the killer’s love for video – as from those that look most consciously artificial and constructed. This, and some narrative elements I feel no need to spoil, makes Evil Dead Trap a predecessor to the Saw style of conscious ugliness, as well as POV horror but also seems to have left heavy traces in everything stylized that followed it.

At the same time, this never just succeeds as a film that marries traditions as some kind of transitional piece before things become more interesting in the future, but as a very energetic, often decidedly crazy, sometimes deeply unpleasant and always exciting example of how to turn influences into one’s own style, brilliantly.

Litan (1982)

Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare that may very well be a vision of the future in which her boyfriend, two-fisted – and very appropriately named - geologist Jock (director/co-writer/auteur Jean-Pierre Mocky), appears to die – among other, less straightforward things. This sends her racing for Jock through the streets of the curious little town of Litan, where they are temporarily living so he can do some rather explosive geological work.

Today is a particularly strange day in the already strange little town, for it is the festival of Litan’s Day, when its occupants roam the – often fog-shrouded – streets in masks, a (masked) brass band plays wherever and whenever, and everyone acts extra weird. I’d call it the Lesser Festival of Masks.

Apart from the already rather strange festival, there’s something stranger still coming, and soon, peculiar behaviour will turn obsessive or violent, the dead seemingly taking possession of the bodies of most of the living in town.

Sometimes, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s piece of fantastic (in the French sense of the “Fantastique”, so heighten your brows with me) cinema Litan can become a little too self-consciously weird for being surrealist’s sake for my tastes, channelling the misguided arthouse energy that brought us things like Fellini’s beloved parades.

Fortunately, that’s only happening in a couple of scenes, and for much of its running time, this is a wonderful exercise in dream moods and dream logic, taking place in a location where reality just doesn’t seem frayed at the edges but already half dissolved at the beginning of the film. Which would explain Nora’s actually prophetic dream rather well, if you want to apply some kind of story logic to a film that thrives as much on that of dream and metaphor as this one does.

Mocky creates the peculiar world of the film in often striking images that turn a very real location – most of the film was shot in an actual small town in the Auvergne that must be strikingly beautiful in its way – into a disorienting labyrinth where metaphors and symbols crash into elements of pulpy genre cinema in a way I have only ever encountered in French cinema. There is certainly a kinship to Jean Rollin here, while parts of the film play out as an outsider’s pick of elements of horror cinema from Romero’s Crazies – whose knitting lady would have felt right at home in Litan – to folk horror like The Wickerman, and the mad science and masks of Eyes without a Face. It’s just all filtered through a very individual, singular eye, as it should be.

Because this is a French movie, it is also rather discursive, so Mocky is certainly never hiding his ambition of speaking about capital letter concepts in capital letters. Love and Death, are the director’s main interests here, specifically, as well as the rather more complicated than we typically assume borders between Life and Death. The results of this discourse are rather ambiguous, but then, that is rather the point of film like Litan (possibly of life).

The Phantom Killer (1981)

Original title: 粉骷髏

Siu Fong (Wai Pak) is a bit of a local hero in a Chinese town ever since he fought off the bandits once lording it over the place. Because he’s also as pretty as he is boring, every single one of the town’s single ladies is swooning after him. Siu, however, has only eyes for the equally boring Sin Sin (Lee Yuen-Wa).

While Siu Fong’s gallivanting around the country probably doing something heroic, boringly, a series of murders of young women strikes our town. Curiously enough, all the victims were particular fans of Siu Fong; even more curiously, once he is back in town, the victims seem to be killed shortly after having cornered him to flirt with him.

At first, the chief of the local guard, Captain Chiu (Eddy Ko Hung), suspects Siu Fong. But various plot developments soon dissuade him from that theory. Why, perhaps the killer might be a woman trying to get rid of her rivals for that perfect man’s attentions, perhaps even a crazed Sin Sin?

I do have a place in my heart for films that mix wuxia and tales of detection, even more so when they, as Stanley Fung Sui-Fan’s The Phantom Killer does, add pleasant flourishes of the macabre to proceedings. The titular killer dresses up like a skeletal monk to commit their crimes – and their true nature is even more beautifully improbable – and there’s a whole line of inquiry about a corpse deposited in a statue, a worker in clay who sleeps in a coffin, and other elements of that nature.

Unfortunately, the macabre elements, as well as the mystery plot, suffer from the same syndrome as the film’s protagonist – they sound a lot more interesting than they turn out to be in practice.

Siu Fong’s just too bland to be interesting, and while he’s certainly physically attractive, Wai Pak projects all the personality of a freshly whitened wall. This even continues on into his kung fu style, that’s also technically flawless yet also – in a bizarre turn of events for one of the Venoms (Brother Snake) – lacking in any personality.

The macabre elements aren’t quite as struck with mediocrity as the protagonist – you can only make a skeletal monk piloted by a SPOILER so uninteresting – but director Fung certainly doesn’t use them as well as they deserve. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the direction – it just lacks personality to a nearly improbable degree.

All of this does not mean The Phantom Killer is unwatchable, it’s just wasting some great ideas on boring competence.

The Girl in a Swing (1988)

Alan Dresland (Rupert Frazer), a dealer in antique ceramics, leads a somewhat boring, placid life. Stuck up in a very British kind of way, he doesn’t really seem to have much of an actual life beyond working upper class “responsibilities”. That changes when he travels to Denmark on business, and finds himself in need of some clerical help fluent in Danish, English and German.

A business friend lends Alan one of his secretaries. Karin Foster (Meg Tilly, with an accent so painful, it actually adds to the inherent weirdness of the character she’s playing) is very beautiful, somewhat reticent, impulsive and exactly the kind of woman Alan is bound to fall in love with, what with her tendency to quote German Romantic poetry and swoon at classical music in a most spellbinding manner while looking like, well, Meg Tilly.

For reasons only known to herself, Karin genuinely reciprocates Alan’s feelings, and after a two week courtship, he proposes marriage, despite the fact that Karin is clearly keeping secrets, telling him nothing of her past. She insists on getting married in England, so she need not produce her friends nor family. She also does not want to get married in a church.

Still, the couple’s early married life is full of fine, if a bit weird, companionship and sex that reaches from good to transcendental, and Karin charms friends and family as much as she did Alan.

From time to time, the shadow of Karin’s undisclosed past rears its ugly head – there’s a recurring motif of drownings, as well as the metaphorical shade of a child.

That latter part will become increasingly intense until it turns into a proper haunting.

There’s a languid quality to Gordon Hessler’s darkly fantastic The Girl in a Swing that isn’t exactly conducive to a solidly paced narrative. But then, I don’t think a solidly paced narrative is something this adaptation of a novel by Richard Adams actually aims for. Rather, much of the film is about creating a specific, allusive as well as elusive, mood, influenced by the (early, despite the Heine quotations) German Romantics, the Greek myths, and a very Greek idea of tragedy. In fact, there’s a properly pagan heart hidden in rather a lot of scenes here that Hessler puts in dialogue with his film’s more Christian elements (again, very much in a way the German Romantics would have understood).

All of this does sound rather fantastic, and is certainly a mood and idea space fantasy/fantastic cinema doesn’t explore all too often, or at all. However, in practice, Hessler isn’t quite good enough of a director – or scriptwriter – to turn a concept into a movie in a consistently effective manner. The languid eroticism can feel pompous and overloaded with symbols in a way I find deeply bourgeois (or really, the German version of bourgeois, bürgerlich), aiming for a depth and complexity of feeling it doesn’t quite manage to reach. As beautiful as all the beautiful shots of Meg Tilly’s (beautiful) face are – and as much effort as she clearly puts into embodying a character that’s purposefully difficult to grasp – that isn’t quite enough to realize the greater ideas about sexuality and repression, guilt and forgiveness, and so on Hessler is aiming for.

Despite these failings, I can’t help but admire the film (and not only Tilly) for trying for this heightened tone, for the classical and Romantic allusions, even for the callousness with which it treats the reveal of the reasons for Karin’s feelings of guilt, for an attempt at resonance with cultural lines movies in 1988 just weren’t thinking along at all.

Titan A.E. (2000)

For reasons that are never really becoming all that clear or important to the movie, the alien Dredge destroy Earth. The surviving humans become the galaxy’s black people; there will be no actual black people in the movie.

During the flight from Earth, Cale’s (Matt Damon) father left him for some humanity-saving business that apparently didn’t work out too well. Now, fifteen years later, Cale is part of the galactic underclass, doing a crap scavenging job while talking big. He’s a bit of a prick, really, but it turns out a genetically encoded ring his father gave him contains a map leading to the Titan, a spaceship Cale Senior developed that could save the dredges of humanity, somehow, so he is a prick with something useful to offer.

Corso (Bill Pullman), a former associate of his father, drags Cale into the hunt for the Titan; also interested are the Dredge, who haven’t grown any fonder of humanity in the intervening years and want to destroy the Titan and kill Cale. So off into space Cale goes with Corso and his band of misfits. He’s going to fall in love, learn valuable lessons and grow into the hero his father would be proud of.

Because despite this thing having five people listed with story and screenwriting credits – among them genuinely talented ones like Ben Edlund and Joss Whedon – Titan A.E.’s script is about as well-developed as any one-writer first draft screenplay. It’s full of elements that stay completely unexplored, pointless digressions, and a gaping hole where Cale’s actual character development is supposed to be.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the film, but it lacks the energy a good one damn thing after another narrative needs.

The film has a lot of action set pieces, no question, and they are typically decently realized, but they never feel like anything but set pieces inserted into certain places in the plot because that’s where a set piece belongs.

On the animation side, this final direction credit for the great Don Bluth – co-directing with Gary Goldman – is an attempt at marrying digital and hand-drawn animation styles. As is typical of this era, in practice this means that two completely different art styles repeatedly bash into one another, like halves of two different movies colliding, badly. You can often see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but the execution is distractingly awkward. In general, while there are some fine designs on screen, the animation is choppy and a bit disjointed. lacking the flow it needed to make those action set pieces sing.

Daimajin (1966)

Nasty ronin turned respected retainer Samanosuke (Ryutaro Gomi) murders his liege lord Hanabusa (Ryuzo Shimada) to take control of his castle and lands. Thanks to the help of loyal samurai Kogenta (Jun Fujimaki), Hanabusa’s daughter Kozasa and son Tadafumi escape. The trio hide away in the mountains, close to a giant stone statue that is supposed to protect the lands surrounding it from “Majin”, an evil, buried thing the local peasant population fears and tries to keep away with rituals and spells.

Ten years go by. Samanosuke has established himself as a bit of a warlord power player and has enslaved the peasantry as a workforce to improve his castle in preparation for further conquest. Dissent is dealt with harshly even for the tastes of medieval Japan. Of course, Samanosuke has also abolished the folk rituals; and going by his character, probably also singing, dancing, and smiling.

When Tadafumi (Yoshihiko Aoyama), clearly having been taught good guy morals and swordplay by Kogenta, realizes how badly the people suffer under Samanosuke’s rule, he decides to do something about it, even though he has neither men nor allies apart from Kogenta and his non-combatant sister (Miwa Takada).

Samanosuke is still holding some of Lord Hanabusa’s surviving men prisoner – the guy clearly can’t resist an opportunity for prolonged torture – but an attempt to free them goes badly for our heroes.

Fortunately, Kozasa, pure and virginal, is exactly the kind of person whose prayers for help giant stone statues might listen to.

I’ve always liked Kimiyoshi’s Yasuda’s first Daimajin film, but I never realized what the film is actually doing until a recent re-watch. This isn’t really a kaiju movie that attempts to mix up genres with a morally very black and white jidaigeki/chanbara film, but rather a film that aims for a folkloric tone.

In that context, the extreme pure-heartedness of the protagonists and the even more extreme vileness of the antagonist make a lot more sense – these aren’t supposed to be characters but archetypes – as does the very idyllic idea of good and bad noble rule.

Stylistically, Yasuda does a lot to situate his tale in the proper, dark, folkloric place – the use of fog, artificial light and Dutch angles particularly in the mountains, where a hidden God of terrible wrath dwells, is striking (and yet I never really noticed it before, embarrassingly), lending proceedings in turns qualities of the fairy-tale and the Gothic – or properly, the world of the kaidan.

The film’s slow progression from suggestions of the fantastic surrounding the characters to the full-on rampage of Daimajin in the climax is realized perfectly – human evil growing so heavy, the supernatural world’s anger awakens.

These final scenes of carnage are pretty incredible – stylish, surprisingly brutal and realized with special effects that look as good as anything in a contemporary Toho movie. There’s a sense of actual dread surrounding Daimajin’s awakening, and a palpable sense of terror, awe, and inhuman anger oozing off it that’s incredible coming from a well-filmed guy in a suit and some clever editing.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

Couple of five years Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) spend a night in a cosy, remote cabin next to a town full of mildly creepy movie hicks. The home invaders known from the earlier Strangers films start on a campaign of low effort terror – though its an earlier effort at the whole thing, because this is a prequel.

It isn’t usually a productive question to ask “why was this made” when it comes to pop and commercial cinema, because the answer is usually “to make someone money”, but sometimes, you stumble upon product so needlessly dire, you really can’t help yourself.

In the case of the first of three (an additional why for that one) prequels to the The Strangers films, a movie that in no way fulfils any of the functions a prequel is supposed to, I couldn’t help ask it, for there’s really not a single moment on screen that suggests anyone involved in the movie even wanted to make it. This begins with the casting – Petsch and Gutierrez sure are pretty but have not the tiniest bit of onscreen chemistry – continues through production design and locations – if I’ve ever seen a cozy horror movie cabin quite so bland before, I can’t remember it – certainly does not stop at the script – there’s not only the expected lack of ideas and cribbing of the tiredest old clichés in the horror book but also a complete lack of enthusiasm in their execution – and ends with direction by Renny Harlin that’s so lacking in character and personality calling it bland would be an exaggeration to suggest greater excitement than this thing could ever deliver.

And that’s really all the attention this particular movie deserves. Perhaps The Strangers: Chapters 2 & 3 will surprise me by having a point beyond being a movie that sort of exists?

Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.